NormalizeHEADmain

8 files changed, 17 insertions, 29694 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d7b82bc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+*.txt text eol=lf
+*.htm text eol=lf
+*.html text eol=lf
+*.md text eol=lf
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b1813e9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #54992 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54992)
diff --git a/old/54992-0.txt b/old/54992-0.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 4811190..0000000
--- a/old/54992-0.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,14439 +0,0 @@
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's
-Philosophy, by William Wallace and G. W. F. Hegel
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy
-       and Especially of his Logic
-
-Author: William Wallace
-        G. W. F. Hegel
-
-Release Date: June 27, 2017 [EBook #54992]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROLEGOMENA--STUDY OF HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Produced and Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature
-(online soon in an extended version, also linking to free
-sources for education worldwide ... MOOC's, educational
-materials,...) Images generously made available by the
-Internet Archive.
-
-
-
-
-
-PROLEGOMENA
-
-TO THE STUDY OF
-
-HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY
-
-AND
-
-_ESPECIALLY OF HIS LOGIC_
-
-BY
-
-WILLIAM WALLACE, M.A., LL.D.
-
-FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE
-
-AND WHYTE'S PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
-
-SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND AUGMENTED
-
-OXFORD
-
-AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
-
-1894
-
-
-
-
-IN REMEMBRANCE OF
-
-B. JOWETT
-
-LATE REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK
-
-AND
-
-MASTER OF BALLIOL COLLEGE
-
-OXFORD
-
-
-
-
-PREFACE
-
-
-The present volume of Prolegomena completes the second edition of my
-LOGIC OF HEGEL which originally appeared in 1874. The translation,
-which was issued as a separate volume in the autumn of 1892, had been
-subjected to revision throughout: such faults as I could detect had
-been amended, and many changes made in the form of expression with the
-hope of rendering the interpretation clearer and more adequate. But,
-with a subject so abstruse and complicated as Hegel's Logic, and a
-style so abrupt and condensed as that adopted in his _Encyclopaedia_,
-a satisfactory translation can hardly fall within the range of
-possibilities. Only the enthusiasm of youth could have thrown itself
-upon such an enterprise; and later years have but to do what they may
-to fulfil the obligations of a task whose difficulties have come to
-seem nearly insuperable. The translation volume was introduced by a
-sketch of the growth of the _Encyclopaedia_ through the three editions
-published in its author's lifetime: and an appendix of notes supplied
-some literary and historical elucidations of the text, with quotations
-bearing on the philosophical development between Kant and Hegel.
-
-The Prolegomena, which have grown to more than twice their original
-extent, are two-thirds of them new matter. The lapse of twenty years
-could not but involve a change in the writer's attitude, at least in
-details, towards both facts and problems. The general purpose of the
-work, however, still remains the same, to supply an introduction to the
-study of Hegel, especially his _Logic,_ and to philosophy in general.
-But, in the work of altering and inserting, I can hardly imagine that
-I have succeeded in adjusting the additions to the older work with
-that artful juncture which would simulate the continuity of organic
-growth. To perform that feat would require a master who surveyed from
-an imperial outlook the whole system of Hegelianism in its history
-and meaning; and I at least do not profess such a mastery. Probably
-therefore a critical review will discern inequalities in the ground,
-and even discrepancies in the statement, of the several chapters. To
-remove these strains of inconsistency would in any case have been a
-work of time and trouble: and, after all, mere differences in depth
-or breadth of view may have their uses. The writer cannot always
-compel the reader to understand him, as he himself has not always
-the same faculty to penetrate and comprehend the problems he deals
-with. In these arduous paths of research it may well happen that the
-clearest and truest perceptions are not always those which communicate
-themselves with fullest persuasion and gift of insight. Schopenhauer
-has somewhere compared the structure of his philosophical work to the
-hundred-gated Thebes: so many, he says, are the points of access it
-offers for the pilgrims after truth to reach its central dogma. So--if
-one may parallel little things with his adventurous quest--even the
-less speculative chapters, and the less consecutive discourse, of
-these Prolegomena may prove helpful to some individual mood or phase
-of mind. If--as I suspect--the Second Book should elicit the complaint
-that the reader has been kept wandering too long and too deviously in
-the _Porches of Philosophy_, I will hope that sometimes in the course
-of these rovings he may come across a wicket-gate where he can enter,
-and--which is the main thing--gather truth fresh and fruitful for
-himself.
-
-Fourteen chapters, viz. II, XXIV, and the group from VII to XVIII
-inclusive, are in this edition almost entirely new. Three chapters of
-the first edition, numbered XIX, XXII, XXIII, have been dropped. For
-the rest, Chaps. III-VI in the present correspond to Chaps. II-V in
-the first edition: Chap. XIX to parts of VII, VIII: Chaps. XX-XXIII to
-Chaps. IX-XII: Chaps. XXV-XXX to Chaps. XIII-XVIII: and Chaps. XXXI,
-XXXII to Chaps. XX, XXI. But some of those nominally retained have been
-largely rewritten.
-
-The new chapters present, amongst other things, a synopsis of the
-progress of thought in Germany during the half-century which is
-bisected by the year 1800, with some indication of the general
-conditions of the intellectual world, and with some reference to the
-interconnexion of speculation and actuality. Jacobi and Herder, Kant,
-Fichte, and Schelling have been especially brought under succinct
-review. In the first edition I did Kant less than justice. I have now,
-so far as my limits allowed, tried to rectify the impression; and even
-more perhaps, by a clear palinode, to tender my apology for the meagre
-and somewhat inappreciative notice I gave to the great names of Fichte
-and Schelling. For like reasons, and from a growing perception how
-much post-Kantian thought owed to the pre-Kantian thinkers, Spinoza
-and Leibniz have been partly brought within my range. If, furthermore,
-I may seem to have transgressed the due amount of allusions and
-comparisons drawn from Plato and Aristotle, Bacon and Mill, the excuse
-must be sought in that fixture of philosophical horizon which can
-hardly but creep on after a quarter of a century spent in teaching
-philosophy under the customs and ordinances of the Oxford School of
-Classical Philology.
-
-It would be to mistake the scope of this survey to seek in it a
-history of the philosophers of the period I have named. They have
-been presented, not in and for themselves, but as _momenta_ or
-constituent! factors in producing Hegel's conception of the aim and
-method of philosophy. To do this it was necessary to lay stress on
-their inner purport and implications: to treat the individual thinker
-in subordination to the general movement of ideas: to give, as far as
-was possible, a constructive conception of them rather than an analysis
-and chronicle. Yet as the picture had to be done, so to say, with a few
-vigorous touches, and made characteristic rather than descriptive, it
-cannot have that fairness and completeness which only patient study of
-every feature and untiring experiment in reconstruction can enable even
-the artist to produce. I may have seemed to confine the environment
-too exclusively to continental thinkers: but this is not, I think,
-due to any anti-patriotic bias. English (by which term, I may explain
-to my countrymen, I mean English-writing) thought, if it has its own
-intrinsic value, has after all been only an occasional influence,
-of suggestion and modification, in Germany. It is not therefore an
-integral portion of my theme. Even in Kant's case, too much may be made
-of the stimulus he received from Hume.
-
-Even twenty years ago, my translation could hardly be described
-literally as a voice crying in the wilderness. But since that time
-there has been a considerable out-put of history, translation, and
-criticism referring to the great age of German philosophy, and a
-comparatively numerous group of writers, more or less familiar with
-the aims and principles of that period, have treated various parts
-of philosophy with notable independence and originality. To these
-writers it has sometimes been found convenient to give the title
-of Neo-Kantians, or Neo-Hegelians. The prefix suggests that they
-do not in all points reproduce the ideal or the caricature which
-vulgar tradition fancied, and perhaps still fancies, to be implied
-in German 'transcendentalism.' And that for the good reason that the
-springs of the movement lie in the natural and national revulsion of
-English habits of mind. Slowly, but at length, the storms of the great
-European revolution found their way to our intellectual world, and
-shook church and state, society and literature. The homeless spirit
-of the age had to reconsider the task of rebuilding its house of
-life. It may have been that some of the seekers, in the fervour of a
-first impression, spoke unadvisedly, as if salvation could and would
-come to English philosophy only by Kant and Hegel. Yet, there was a
-real foundation for the belief that the insularity--however necessary
-in its season, and however admirable in some of its results--which
-had secluded and narrowed the British mind since the middle of the
-eighteenth century, needed something deeper and stronger than French
-'ideology' to bring it abreast of the requirements of the age. Whatever
-may be the drawbacks of transcendentalism, they are virtues when set
-beside the vulgar ideals of enlightenment by superficialisation. Mill
-has well pointed out how the spirit of Coleridge was for the higher
-intellectual life a needful complement to the spirit of Bentham. Yet
-the spirit of Coleridge had but caught some of the side-lights and
-romantic illuminations: it had not dared to face the central sun either
-in literature or philosophy. The scholar who has given us excellent
-versions of Fichte's lighter works, those who have translated and
-expounded Kant, and the great author who opened German literature
-to the British public, have brought us nearer the higher teaching
-of Germany. In Germany itself it has always been the possession
-only of the few. Even at the height of the classical period there
-were litterateurs who vended thousands of their books for Goethe's
-hundreds, and the great philosophers had ten opponents to one follower
-even amongst the teachers of their day. Yet Goethe and not Kotzebue
-gave the permanent law to literature; Hegel, and not Krug or Fries,
-has influenced philosophy. To have had the resolution to learn in
-this school is the merit of 'Neo-Hegelianism.' It has probably not
-found Kant free from puzzles and contradictions, or Hegel always
-intelligible. But the example of the Germans has served to widen and
-deepen our ideas of philosophy: to make us think more highly of its
-function, and to realise that it is essentially science, and the
-science of supreme reality. And it has at least familiarised many with
-the heresy that dilettantism and occasional fits of speculativeness are
-worth as little in philosophy as elsewhere. To have striven for dignity
-in its scope, and scientific security in its method, is something. If
-the Neo-Hegelian has not given philosophy a settled language, it may
-be urged that a philosophical language cannot be created by the easy
-device of inventing a few Hellenistic-seeming vocables.
-
-I could have wished to make these volumes a worthier contribution
-to the work whereby these and other writers have recently enriched
-our island philosophy. Not least because of the honoured name I have
-ventured to write on the dedication-page. If, as Epicurus said, we
-should above all be grateful to the past, the first meed is from the
-scholar due to the teachers of earlier years, and not least those who
-have now entered into their rest. I do not forget what I, and others,
-owed to T. H. Green, my predecessor in the Chair of Moral Philosophy;
-that example of high-souled devotion to truth, and of earnest and
-intrepid thinking on the deep things of eternity. But at this season
-the memory of my Oxford tutor and friend is naturally most prominent.
-The late Master of Balliol College was more than a mere scholar or
-a mere philosopher. He seemed so idealist and yet so practical: so
-realist and yet so full of high ideals: so delicately kind and yet
-so severely reasonable. You felt he saw life more steadily and saw
-it more whole than others: as one reality in which religion and
-philosophy, art and business, the sciences and theology, were severally
-but elements and aspects. To the amateurs of novelty, to the slaves
-of specialisation, to the devotees of any narrow way, such largeness
-might, with the impatience natural to limited minds, have seemed
-indifference. So must appear those who on higher planes hear all the
-parts in the harmony of humanity, and with the justice of a wise love
-maintain an intellectual _Sôprosyné_. On his pupils this secret power
-of an other-world serenity laid an irresistible spell, and bore in upon
-them the conviction that beyond scholarship and logic there was the
-fuller truth of life and the all-embracing duty of doing their best to
-fulfil the amplest requirements of their place.
-
-In earlier days Jowett had been keenly interested in German philosophy,
-and had made a version (most of which was still extant in 1868) of the
-Logic I have translated. But Greek literature, and above all Plato,
-drew him to more congenial fields. It was on his suggestion,--or shall
-I say injunction--at that date, that the work I had casually begun was
-some years later prosecuted to completion. It was his words, again, two
-years ago, that bade me spare no labour in the work of revision.
-
-OXFORD,
-
-_December_, 1893.
-
-
-
-
-FROM THE PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
-
-
-The 'Logic of Hegel' is a name which may be given to two separate
-books. One of these is the 'Science of Logic' (Wissenschaft der Logik),
-first published in three volumes (1812-1816), while its author was
-schoolmaster at Nüremberg. A second edition was on its way, when Hegel
-was suddenly cut off, after revising the first volume only. In the
-'Secret of Hegel,' the earlier part of this Logic has been translated
-by Dr. Hutchison Stirling, with whose name German philosophy is chiefly
-associated in this country.
-
-The other Logic, of which the present work is a translation, forms the
-First Part in the 'Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences.' The
-first edition of the Encyclopaedia appeared at Heidelberg in 1817; the
-second in 1827; and the third in 1830. It is well to bear in mind that
-these dates take us back forty or fifty years, to a time when modern
-science and Inductive Logic had yet to win their laurels, and when the
-world was in many ways different from what it is now. The earliest
-edition of the Encyclopaedia contained the pith of the system. The
-subsequent editions brought some new materials, mainly intended to
-smooth over and explain the transitions between the various sections,
-and to answer the objections of critics. The work contained a synopsis
-of philosophy in the form of paragraphs, and was to be supplemented by
-the _viva voce_ remarks of the lecturer.
-
-The present volume is translated from the edition of 1843, forming the
-Sixth Volume in Hegel's Collected Works. It consists of two nearly
-equal portions. One halt here printed in more open type, contains
-Hegel's Encyclopaedia, with all the author's own additions. The first
-paragraph under each number marks the earliest and simplest statement
-of the first edition. The other half, here printed in closer type, is
-made up of the notes taken in lecture by the editor (Henning) and by
-Professors Hotho and Michelet. These notes for the most part connect
-the several sections, rather than explain their statements. Their
-genuineness is vouched for by their being almost verbally the same with
-other parts of Hegel's own writings.
-
-The translation has tried to keep as closely as possible to the
-meaning, without always adhering very rigorously to the words of the
-original. It is, however, much more literal in the later and systematic
-part, than in the earlier chapters.
-
-The Prolegomena which precede the translation have not been given in
-the hope or with the intention of expounding the Hegelian system. They
-merely seek to remove certain obstacles, and to render Hegel less
-tantalizingly hard to those who approach him for the first time. How
-far they will accomplish this, remains to be seen.
-
-OXFORD, _September,_ 1873.
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-BOOK I.
-
-OUTLOOKS AND APPROACHES TO HEGEL.
-
-CHAPTER I.
-
-WHY HEGEL IS HARD TO UNDERSTAND 3
-
-CHAPTER II.
-
-WHY TRANSLATE HEGEL? 14
-
-CHAPTER III.
-
-ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY AND HEGEL 21
-
-CHAPTER IV.
-
-HEGEL AND THEOLOGY 30
-
-CHAPTER V.
-
-PSEUDO-IDEALISM: JACOBI 37
-
-CHAPTER VI.
-
-THE SCIENCES AND PHILOSOPHY 57
-
-CHAPTER VII.
-
-ANTICIPATORY SKETCH OF THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY 72
-
-CHAPTER VIII.
-
-THE SCEPTICAL DOUBT: HUME 88
-
-CHAPTER IX.
-
-THE ATTEMPT AT A CRITICAL SOLUTION: KANT 98
-
-CHAPTER X.
-
-THE CRITICAL SOLUTION (_continued_): KANT 112
-
-CHAPTER XI.
-
-SYNTHESIS AND RECONSTRUCTION: FICHTE 124
-
-CHAPTER XII.
-
-THE BEGINNINGS OF SCHELLING 136
-
-CHAPTER XIII.
-
-THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND IDEALISM 147
-
-CHAPTER XIV.
-
-TRANSITION TO HEGEL 163
-
-BOOK II.
-
-IN THE PORCHES OF PHILOSOPHY.
-
-CHAPTER XV.
-
-THE TWO AGES OF REASON 175
-
-CHAPTER XVI.
-
-THE NEW IDEALISM 189
-
-CHAPTER XVII.
-
-METHODS, ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL 202
-
-CHAPTER XVIII.
-
-THE RANGE OF PERSONALITY 230
-
-CHAPTER XIX.
-
-GENESIS IN MENTAL LIFE 261
-
-CHAPTER XX.
-
-GENERAL LAW OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 277
-
-CHAPTER XXI.
-
-ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE: AND THE ORDINARY LOGIC 292
-
-CHAPTER XXII.
-
-FROM SENSE TO THOUGHT 307
-
-CHAPTER XXIII.
-
-FIGURATE OR REPRESENTATIVE THOUGHT 323
-
-CHAPTER XXIV.
-
-FROM SUBSTANCE TO SUBJECT 335
-
-CHAPTER XXV.
-
-REASON AND THE DIALECTIC OF UNDERSTANDING 348
-
-BOOK III.
-
-LOGICAL OUTLINES.
-
-CHAPTER XXVI.
-
-THOUGHT PURE AND ENTIRE 365
-
-CHAPTER XXVII.
-
-ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE: OR THE CATEGORIES 383
-
-CHAPTER XXVIII.
-
-THE THREE PARTS OF LOGIC 394
-
-CHAPTER XXIX.
-
-THE SEARCH FOR A FIRST PRINCIPLE 404
-
-CHAPTER XXX.
-
-THE LOGIC OF DESCRIPTION: NATURAL REALISM: BEING 415
-
-CHAPTER XXXI.
-
-THE LOGIC OF EXPLANATION AND REALISTIC METAPHYSICS:
-
-ESSENCE 440
-
-CHAPTER XXXII.
-
-THE LOGIC OF COMPREHENSION AND IDEALISM: THE NOTION 459
-
-
-
-
-PROLEGOMENA
-
-Book I
-
-_OUTLOOKS AND APPROACHES TO HEGEL_
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER I.
-
-
-WHY HEGEL IS HARD TO UNDERSTAND.
-
-
-'The condemnation,' says Hegel, 'which a great man lays upon the
-world, is to force it to explain him[1].' The greatness of Hegel, if
-it be measured by this standard, must be something far above common.
-Interpreters of his system have contradicted each other, almost as
-variously as the several commentators on the Bible. He is claimed
-as their head by widely different schools of thought, all of which
-appeal to him as the original source of their line of argument. The
-Right wing, and the Left, as well as the Centre, profess to be the
-genuine descendants of the prophet, and to inherit the mantle of his
-inspiration. If we believe one side, Hegel is only to be rightly
-appreciated when we divest his teaching of every shred of religion and
-orthodoxy which it retains. If we believe another class of expositors,
-he was the champion of Christianity.
-
-These contradictory views may be safely left to abolish each other. But
-diversity of opinion on such topics is neither unnatural, nor unusual.
-The meaning and the bearings of a great event, or a great character,
-or a great work of reasoned thought, will be estimated and explained
-in different ways, according to the effect they produce on different
-minds and different levels of life and society. Those effects, perhaps,
-will not present themselves in their true character, until long after
-the original excitement has passed away. To some minds, the chief value
-of the Hegelian system will lie in its vindication of the truths of
-natural and revealed religion, and in the agreement of the elaborate
-reasonings of the philosopher with the simple aspirations of mankind
-towards higher things. To others that system will have most interest
-as a philosophical history of thought,--an exposition of that organic
-development of reason, which underlies and constitutes all the varied
-and complex movement of the world. To a third class, again, it may seem
-at best an instrument or method of investigation, stating the true
-law by which knowledge proceeds in its endeavour to comprehend and
-assimilate existing nature.
-
-While these various meanings may be given to the Hegelian scheme
-of thought, the majority of the world either pronounce Hegel to be
-altogether unintelligible, or banish him to the limbo of _a priori_
-thinkers,--that bourne from which no philosopher returns. To argue with
-those who start from the latter conviction would be an ungrateful,
-and probably a superfluous task. Wisdom is justified, we may be sure,
-of all her children. But it may be possible to admit the existence of
-difficulties, and agree to some extent with those who complain that
-Hegel is impenetrable and hard as adamant. There can be no doubt of
-the forbidding aspect of the most prominent features in his system.
-He is hard in himself, and his readers find him hard. His style is
-not of the best, and to foreign eyes seems unequal. At times he is
-eloquent, stirring, and striking: again his turns are harsh, and his
-clauses tiresome to disentangle: and we are always coming upon that
-childlikeness of literary manner, which English taste fancies it can
-detect in some of the greatest works of German genius; There are faults
-in Hegel, which obscure his meaning: but more obstacles are due to the
-nature of the work, and the pre-occupations of our minds. There is
-something in him which fascinates __ the thinker, and which inspires
-a sympathetic student with the vigour and the hopefulness of the
-spring-time.
-
-Perhaps the main hindrance in the way of a clear vision is the contrast
-which Hegelian philosophy offers to our ordinary habits of mind.
-Generally speaking, we rest contented if we can get tolerably near our
-object, and form a general picture of it to set before ourselves.
-
-It might almost be said that we have never thought of such a thing as
-being in earnest either with our words or with our thoughts. We get
-into a way of speaking with an uncertain latitude of meaning, and leave
-a good deal to the fellow-feeling of our hearers, who are expected to
-mend what is defective in our utterances. For most of us the place of
-exact thought is supplied by metaphors and pictures, by mental images,
-and figures generalised from the senses. And thus it happens that, when
-we come upon a single precise and definite statement, neither exceeding
-nor falling short in its meaning, we are thrown out of our reckoning.
-Our fancy and memory have nothing left for them to do: and, as fancy
-and memory make up the greater part of what we loosely call thinking,
-our powers of thought seem to be brought to a standstill. Those who
-crave for fluent reading, or prefer easy writing, something within
-the pale of our usual mental lines, are more likely to find what they
-seek in the ten partially correct and approximate ways commonly used
-to give expression to a truth, than in the one simple and accurate
-statement of the thought. We prefer a familiar name, and an accustomed
-image, on which our faculties may work. But in the atmosphere of
-Hegelian thought, we feel very much as if we had been lifted into a
-vacuum, where we cannot breathe, and which is a fit habitation for
-unrecognisable ghosts only.
-
-Nor is this all. The traveller, as his train climbs the heights of
-Alps or Apennines, occasionally, after circling in grand curve upon
-the mountain-side, and perhaps after having been dragged mysterious
-distances through the gloom of a tunnel, finds himself as it would seem
-back at the same place as he looked forth from some minutes before; and
-it is only after a brief comparison that he realises he now commands a
-wider view from a point some hundreds of feet higher. So the student
-of Hegel--(and it might be the case with Fichte also) as the machinery
-of the dialectical method, with its thesis, antithesis, and synthesis,
-carries him round and round from term to term of thought--like the
-_Logos_ and the Spirit, which blow us whithersoever they list--begins
-to suffer from dizziness at the apprehension that he has been the
-victim of phantasmagoria and has not really moved at all. It is only
-later--if ever--that he recognises that the scene, though similar,
-is yet not altogether the same. It is only later--if ever--that he
-understands that the path of philosophy is no wandering from land to
-land more remote in search of a lost Absolute, a vanished God; no
-setting forth of new and strange facts, of new Gods, but the revelation
-in fuller and fuller truth of the immanent reality in whom we live, and
-move, and have our being,--the manifestation in more closely-knit unity
-and more amply-detailed significance of that Infinite and Eternal,
-which was always present among us, though we saw but few, perhaps even
-no, traces of its power and glory.
-
-To read Hegel often reminds us of the process we have to go through
-in trying to answer a riddle. The terms of the problem to be solved
-are all given to us: the features of the object are, it may be, fully
-described: and yet somehow we cannot at once tell what it is all about,
-or add up the sum of which we have the several items. We are waiting
-to learn the subject of the proposition, of which all these statements
-may be regarded as the predicates. Something, we feel, has undoubtedly
-been said: but we are at a loss to see what it has been said about.
-Our mind wanders round from one familiar object to another, and tries
-them in succession to see whether any one satisfies the several points
-in the statement and includes them all. We grope here and there for
-something we are acquainted with, in which the bits of the description
-may cohere, and get a unity which they cannot give themselves. When
-once we have hit upon the right object, our troubles are at an end: and
-the empty medium is now peopled with a creature of our imagination. We
-have reached a fixed point in the range of our conception, around which
-the given features may cluster.
-
-All this trouble caused by the Hegelian theory of what philosophy
-involves--viz. really beginning at the beginning, is saved by a device
-well known to the several branches of Science. It is the way with them
-to assume that the student has a rough general image of the objects
-which they examine; and under the guidance, or with the help of this
-generalised image, they go on to explain and describe its outlines more
-completely. They start with an approximate conception, such as anybody
-may be supposed to have; and this they seek to render more definite.
-The geologist, for example, could scarcely teach geology', unless he
-could pre-suppose or produce some acquaintance on the part of his
-pupils with what Hume would have called an 'impression' or an 'idea' of
-the rocks and formations of which he has to treat. The geometer gives
-a short, and, as it were, popular explanation of the sense in which
-angles, circles, triangles, &c. are to be understood : and then by
-the aid of these provisional definitions we come to a more scientific
-notion of the same terms. The third book of Euclid, for example, brings
-before us a clearer notion of what a circle is, than the nominal
-explanation in the list of definitions. By means of these temporary
-aids, or, as we may call them, leading-strings for the intellect, the
-progress of the ordinary scientific student is made tolerably easy.
-But v in philosophy, as it is found in Hegel, there is quite another
-way of working. The helps in question are absent: and until it be seen
-that they are not even needed, the Hegelian theory will remain a sealed
-mystery. For that which the first glance seemed to show as an enigma,
-is only the plain and unambiguous statement of thought. Instead of
-casting around for images and accustomed names, we have only to accept
-the several terms and articles in the development of thought as they
-present themselves. These terms merely require to be apprehended. They
-stand in no immediate need of illustration from our experience. What we
-have to bring to the work, is patience, self-restraint, the sacrifice
-of our cherished habits of mind, the surrender of the natural wish to
-see at once what it all comes to, what it is good for, how it squares
-with other convictions. As Bacon reminded his age, Into the kingdom
-of philosophy, as into the kingdom of heaven, none can enter, _nisi
-sub persona infantis_: i. e. unless he at least steadfastly resolve to
-renounce that world which lieth in the Evil.
-
-Ordinary knowledge consists in referring a new object to a class of
-objects, that is to say, to a generalised image with which we are
-already acquainted. It is not so much cognition as re-cognition.
-'"What is the truth?"' asked Lady Chettam of Mrs. Cadwallader in
-_Middle-march_. "The truth" he is as bad as the wrong physic--nasty to
-take, and sure to disagree." "There could not be anything worse than
-that," said Lady Chettam, with so vivid a conception of the physic
-that she seemed to have learned something exact about Mr. Casaubon's
-'disadvantages.' Once we have referred the new individual to a familiar
-category or a convenient metaphor, once we have given it a name, and
-introduced it into the society of our mental drawing-room, we are
-satisfied. We have put a fresh object in its appropriate drawer in
-the cabinet of our ideas: and hence, with the pride of a collector,
-we can calmly call it our own. But such acquaintance, proceeding from
-a mingling of memory and naming, is not the same thing as knowledge
-in the strict sense of the term.[2] 'What is he?' 'Do you know him?'
-These are our questions: and we are satisfied when we learn his name
-and his calling. We may never have penetrated into the inner nature of
-those objects, with whose _tout ensemble,_ or rough outlines, we are
-so much at home, that we fancy ourselves thoroughly cognisant of them.
-Classifications are only the first steps in science: and we do not
-understand a thought because we can view it under the guise of some of
-its illustrations.
-
-In the case of the English reader of Hegel some peculiar hindrances
-spring from the foreign language. In strong contrast to most of the
-well-known German philosophers, he may be said to write in the popular
-and national dialect of his country. Of course there are tones and
-shades of meaning given to his words by the general context of his
-system. But upon the whole he did what he promised to J. H. Voss--the
-translator of Homer, and the poet of the _Luise,_ in a letter written
-from Jena in 1805. He there says of his projects: 'Luther has made the
-Bible, and you have made Homer speak German. No greater gift than this
-could be given to the nation. So long as a nation is not acquainted
-with a noble work in its own language, it is still barbarian, and does
-not regard the work as its own. Forget these two examples, and I may
-describe my own efforts as an attempt to teach philosophy to speak in
-German.[3]
-
-Yet, in this matter of nationalising or Germanising philosophy, he only
-carried a step further what Wolff and even Kant had begun; just as, on
-the other hand, he falls a long way short of what K. C. F. Krause, his
-contemporary, attempted in the same direction. Such an attempt, by its
-very nature, could never command a popular success. It runs directly
-counter to that tendency already noted, to escape the requirement to
-think and think for ourselves, by taking refuge under the shadow of
-a familiar term, which conceals in its apparent simplicity a great
-complex of ill-apprehended elements. The ordinary mind--and the more
-readily perhaps the more vulgar it is--flees for ease and safety to a
-cosmopolitan term, to the denationalised vocable of learned origin, to
-the language of general European culture. To such an ordinary mind--and
-up at least to a certain extent we all at times come under that
-heading--the effort to remain in the pellucid air of our unadulterated
-mother-tongue is too embarrassing to be long continued. Nor, after all,
-is it more than partially practicable. The well of German undefiled
-is apt to run dry. Hegel himself never shrinks when it is needful to
-appropriate non-Teutonic words, and is in the habit of employing the
-synonymous terms of native and of classical origin with a systematic
-difference of meaning [4]
-
-Hegel is unquestionably par _excellence the_ philosopher of
-Germany,--German through and through. For philosophy, though the
-common birthright of full-grown reason in all ages and countries,
-must like other universal and cosmopolitan interests, such as the
-State, the Arts, or the Church, submit to the limits and peculiarities
-imposed upon it by the natural divisions of race and language. The
-subtler _nuances_, as well as the coarser differences of national
-speech, make themselves vividly felt in the systems of philosophy,
-and defy translation. If Greek philosophy cannot, no more can German
-philosophy be turned into a body of English thought by a stroke of the
-translator's pen. There is a difference in this matter, a difference
-at least in degree, between the special sciences and philosophy. The
-several sciences have a de-nationalised and cosmopolitan character,
-like the trades and industries of various nations; they are pretty much
-the same in one country and another, especially when we consider the
-details, and neglect the general subdivisions. But in the political
-body, in the works of high art, and in the systems of philosophy, the
-whole of the character and temperament of the several peoples finds
-its expression, and stands distinctly marked, in a shape of its own.
-If the form of German polity be not transferable to this side of the
-Channel, no more will German philosophy. Direct utilisation for English
-purposes is out of the question: the circumstances are too different.
-But the study of the great works of foreign thought is not on that
-account useless, any more than the study of the great works of foreign
-statesmanship.
-
-Hegel did good service, at least, by freeing philosophy from that
-aspect of an imported luxury, which it usually had,--as if it were an
-exotic plant removed from the bright air of Greece into the melancholy
-mists of Western Europe. 'We have still,' he says, 'to break down the
-partition between the language of philosophy, and that of ordinary
-consciousness: we have to overcome the reluctance against thinking what
-we are familiar with[5].' Philosophy must be brought face to face with
-ordinary life, so as to draw its strength from the actual and living
-present, and not from the memories or traditions of the past. It has
-to become the organised and completed thinking of what is contained
-blindly and vaguely in the various levels of popular intelligence, as
-these are more or less educated and ordered. It must grow naturally, as
-in ancient Greece, from the necessities of the social situation, and
-not be a product of artificial introduction and nurture: the revelation
-by the mind's own energy of an implicit truth, not the communication
-of a mystery sacramentally received. To suppose that a mere change of
-words can give this grace, would be absurd. Yet where the national life
-pulses strong, as that of Germany in those days did at first in letters
-and then in social reform, the dominant note will make itself felt
-even in the neutral regions of speculation. It was a step on the right
-road to banish a pompous and aristocratic dialect from philosophy, and
-to lead it back to those words and forms of speech, which are at least
-in silent harmony with the national feeling.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Hegel's _Leben_ (Rosenkranz), p. 555.]
-
-[Footnote 2: 'Das Bekannte überhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist,
-nicht erkannt.' _Phenomenologie des Geistes,_ p. 24.]
-
-[Footnote 3: _Vermischte Schriften,_ vol. ii. p. 474.]
-
-[Footnote 4: e. g. _Dasein_ and _Existenz: Wirklichkeit_ and
-_Realität_: _Wesen_ and _Substanz._ It is the same habit of curiously
-pondering over the tones and shades of language which leads him to
-something very like playing on words, and to etymologising, as one may
-call it, on unetymological principles: e. g. the play on _Mein_ and
-_Meinung_ (vol. ii. 32: cf. _Werke_, ii. 75): the literal rendering of
-_Erinnerung_ (_Encycl._ §§ 234 and 450); and the abrupt transitions,
-as it would seem, from literal to figurative use of such a term as
-_Grund._ At the same time it is well not to be prosaically certain
-that a free play of thought does not follow the apparently fortuitous
-assonance of words.]
-
-[Footnote 5: Hegel's _Leben_ (Rosenkranz), p. 553.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER II.
-
-
-WHY TRANSLATE HEGEL?
-
-
-'But,' it is urged, 'though it be well to let the stream of foreign
-thought irrigate some of our philosophical pastures, though we should
-not for ever entrench ourselves in our insularity--why try to introduce
-Hegel, of all philosophers confessedly the most obscure? Why not be
-content with the study and the "exploitation" of Kant, whom Germans
-themselves still think so important as to expound him with endless
-comment and criticism, and who has at length found, after some
-skirmishes, a recognised place in the English philosophical curriculum?
-Why seek for more Teutonic thinking that can be found in Schopenhauer,
-and found there in a clear and noble style, luminous in the highest
-degree, and touching with no merely academic abstruseness the problems
-of life and death? Or--as that song is sweetest to men which is the
-newest to ring in their ears--why not render accessible to English
-readers the numerous and suggestive works of Eduard von Hartmann,
-and of Friedrich Nietzsche--not to mention Robert Hamerling[1]? Or,
-finally, why not give us more and ever more translations of the works
-in logic, ethics, psychology, or metaphysics, of those many admirable
-teachers in the German universities, whom it would be invidious to
-try to single out by name? As for Hegel, his system, in the native
-land of the philosopher, is utterly discredited; its influence is
-extinct; it is dead as a door-nail. It is a pity to waste labour and
-distract attention, and that in English lands, where there are plenty
-of problems of our own to solve, by an attempt, which must perforce be
-futile, to resuscitate these defunctitudes?'
-
-That Hegelianism has been utterly discredited, in certain quarters, is
-no discovery reserved for these later days. But on this matter perhaps
-we may borrow an analogy. If the reader will be at the trouble to take
-up two English newspapers of opposite partisanship and compare the
-reports from their foreign correspondents on some question of home
-politics, he may, if a novice, be surprised to learn that according
-to one, the opinion e. g. of Vienna is wholly adverse to the measure,
-while, according to the other, that opinion entirely approves.
-
-It is no new thing to find Hegelianism in general obloquy. Even in 1830
-the Catholic philosopher and theologian Günther[2]--an admirer, but by
-no means a follower of Hegel--wrote that, 'for some years it had been
-the fashion in learned Germany to look upon philosophy, and above all
-Hegelian philosophy, as a door-mat on which everybody cleaned his muddy
-boots before entering the sanctuary of politics and religion.' What
-is true as regards the alleged surcease of Hegelianism is that in the
-reaction which from various causes turned itself against philosophy in
-the two decennia after 1848, that system, as the most deeply committed
-part of the 'metaphysical' host, suffered most severely. History and
-science seemed to triumph along the whole line. But it may be perhaps
-permissible to remark that Hegelianism had predicted for itself the
-fate that it proved had fallen on all other philosophies. After the
-age of Idealism comes the turn of Realism. The Idea had to die--had to
-sink as a germ in the fields of nature and history before it could bear
-its fruit. Above all it is not to be expected that such a system, so
-ambitious in aim and concentrated in expression, could find immediate
-response and at once disclose all its meaning. His first disciples
-are not the--truest interpreters of any great teacher. What he saw
-in the one comprehensive glance of genius, his successors must often
-be content to gather by the slow accumulation of years, and perhaps
-centuries, of experience. It is not to Theophrastus that we go for
-the truest and fullest conception of Aristotelianism; nor is Plato to
-be measured by what his immediate successors in the Academy managed
-to make out of him. It is now more than a century since Kant gave his
-lesson to the public, and we are still trying to get him focussed in a
-single view: it may be even longer till Hegel comes fully within the
-range of our historians of thought. Aristotelianism too had to wait
-centuries till it fully entered the consciousness even of the thinking
-world.
-
-It is to be said too that without Hegel it would be difficult to
-imagine what even teachers, like Lotze, who were very unlike him, would
-have had to say. It does not need a very wide soul, nor need one be a
-mere dilettantist eclectic, to find much of Schopenhauer's work far
-from incompatible with his great, and as some have said, complementary
-opposite. It is not indeed prudent as yet for a writer in Germany who
-wishes to catch the general ear to affix too openly a profession of
-Hegelian principles, and he will do well to ward off suspicion by some
-disparaging remarks on the fantastic methods, the overfondness for
-system, the contempt for common sense and scientific results which,
-as he declares, vitiate all the speculations of the period from 1794
-to 1830. But under the names of Spinoza and of Leibniz the leaven of
-Hegelian principles has been at work: and if the Philistines solve the
-riddle of the intellectual Samson, it is because they have ploughed
-with his heifer,--because his ideas are part of the modern stock of
-thought,--not from what they literally read in the great thinkers at
-the close of the seventeenth century. Last year saw appear in Germany
-two excellent treatises describable as popular introductions to
-philosophy[3], one by a thinker who has never disguised his obligations
-to Hegel, the other by a teacher in the University of Berlin who may in
-many ways be considered as essentially kindred with our general English
-style of thought. But both treatises are more allied in character to
-the spirit of the Hegelian attempts to comprehend man and God than to
-the formalistic and philological disquisitions which have for some
-years formed the staple of German professorial activity. And, lastly,
-the vigorous thinker, who a quarter of a century ago startled the
-reading public by the portent of a new metaphysic which should be the
-synthesis of Schelling and Schopenhauer, has lately informed us[4] that
-his affinity to Hegel is, taken all in all, greater than his affinity
-to any other philosopher'; and that that affinity extends to all that
-in Hegel has essential and permanent value.
-
-But it is not on Eduard von Hartmann's commendation that we need rest
-our estimate of Hegelianism. We shall rather say that, till more of
-Hegel has been assimilated, he must still block the way. Things have
-altered greatly in the last twenty years, it is true; and ideas of
-more or less Hegelian origin have taken their place in the common
-stock of philosophic commodities. But it will probably be admitted by
-those best qualified to speak on the subject, that the shower has not
-as yet penetrated very deeply into the case-hardened soil, still less
-saturated it in the measure most likely to cause fruitful shoots to
-grow forth. We have to go back to Hegel in the same spirit as we go to
-Kant, and, for that matter, to Plato or Descartes: or, as the moderns
-may go back--to borrow from another sphere--to Dante or Shakespeare.
-We do not want the modern poet to resuscitate the style and matter of
-_King Lear_ or of the _Inferno._ Yet as the Greek tragedian steeped his
-soul in the language and the legend of Homeric epic, as Dante nurtured
-his spirit on the noble melodies of Mantua's poet; so philosophy, if it
-is to go forth strong and effective, must mould into its own substance
-the living thought of former times. It would be as absurd, and as
-impossible to be literally and simply a Hegelian,--if that means one
-for whom Hegel sums up all philosophy and all truth--as it is to be at
-the present day in the literal sense a Platonist or an Aristotelian.
-The world may be slow, the world of opinion and thought may linger: _e
-pur si muove._ We too have our own problems--the same, no doubt, in a
-sense, from age to age, and yet infinitely varying and never in two
-ages alike. New stars have appeared on the spiritual sky; and whether
-they have in them the eternal light or only the flash and glare of a
-passing meteor, they alter the aspects of the night in which we are
-still waiting for the dawn.
-
-A new language, born of new relations of ideas, or of new ideas, is
-perforce for our generation the vehicle of all utterances, and we
-cannot again speak the dialect, however imposing or however quaint, of
-a vanished day.
-
-And for that reason there must always be a new philosophy, couched
-in the language of the age, sympathetic with its hopes and fears,
-conscious of its beliefs, more or less sensible of its problems--as
-indeed we may be confident there always will be. But, perhaps, the
-warrior in that battle against illusion and prejudice, against the
-sloth which takes things as they are and the poorness of spirit
-which is satisfied with first appearances, will not do wisely to
-disdain the past. He will not indeed equip himself with rusty swords
-and clumsy artillery from the old arsenals. But he will not disdain
-the lessons of the past,--its methods and principles of tactics and
-strategy. Recognising perhaps some defects and inequalities in the
-methods and aims of thought most familiar to him and current in his
-vicinity, he may go abroad for other samples, even though they be not
-in all respects worth his adoption. And so without taking Hegel as
-omniscient, or pledging himself to every word of the master, he may
-think from his own experience that there is much in the system that
-will be helpful, when duly estimated and assimilated, to others. There
-is--and few can be so bigoted__ or so positive-minded as to regret
-it--there is unquestionably a growing interest in English-speaking
-countries in what may be roughly called philosophy--the attempt,
-unprejudiced by political, scientific, or ecclesiastical dogma, to
-solve the questions as to what the world really is, and what man's
-place and function is. 'The burthen of the mystery, the heavy and the
-weary weight of all this unintelligible world' is felt--felt widely
-and sometimes felt deeply. To the direct lightening of that burthen
-and that mystery it is the privilege of our profoundest thinkers and
-our far-seeing poets and artists to contribute. To the translator of
-Hegel there falls the humbler task of making accessible, if it may be,
-something of one of the later attempts at a solution of the enigma of
-life and existence,--an attempt which for a time dazzled some of the
-keenest intellects of its age, and which has at least impressed many
-others with the conviction, born of momentary flashes from it of vast
-illuminant power, that--_si sic omnia_--there was here concealed a key
-to many puzzles, and a guard against many illusions likely to beset the
-inquirer after truth.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: A book by V. Knauer published last year (_Hauptprobleme
-der Philosophie_), a series of popular lectures, gives one-sixth of its
-space to the 'Atomistic of Will' by the Austrian poet Hamerling.]
-
-[Footnote 2: Hegel's _Briefe_, ii. 349.]
-
-[Footnote 3: J. Volkelt, _Vorträge zur Einführung in die Philosophie
-der Gegenwart_ (München 1892): F. Paulsen, _Einleitung in die
-Philosophie_ (Berlin 1892).]
-
-[Footnote 4: E. v. Hartmann, _Kritische Wanderungen_, p. 74.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER III.
-
-
-ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY AND HEGEL.
-
-
-Although we need not take too seriously Hegel's remark (vol. ii. p.
-13) on the English conception of philosophy, it may be admitted that,
-by the dominant school of English thought, philosophy, taken in the
-wide sense it has predominantly born abroad, was, not so very long
-ago, all but entirely ignored. Causes of various kinds had turned the
-energy of the English mind into other directions, not less essential to
-the common welfare. Practical needs and an established social system
-helped--to bind down studies to definite and particular objects, and to
-exclude what seemed vague and general investigations with no immediate
-bearing on the business of life. Hence philosophy in England could
-hardly exist except when it was reduced to the level of a special
-branch of science, or when it could be used as a receptacle for the
-principles and methods common to all the sciences. The general term
-was often used to denote the wisdom of this world, or the practical
-exhibition of self-control in life and action. For those researches,
-which are directed to the objects once considered proper to philosophy,
-the more definite and characteristic term came to be Mental and Moral
-Science.
-
-The old name was in certain circles restricted to denote the vague and
-irregular speculations of those thinkers, who either lived before the
-rise of exact science, or who acted in defiance of its precepts and its
-example. One large and influential class of English thinkers inclined
-to sweep philosophy altogether away, as equivalent to metaphysics and
-obsolete forms of error; and upon the empty site thus obtained they
-sought to construct a psychological theory of mind, or they tried to
-arrange and codify those general remarks upon the general procedure
-of the sciences which are known under the name of Inductive Logic. A
-smaller, but not less vigorous, school of philosophy looked upon their
-business as an extension and rounding off of science into a complete
-unification of knowledge. The first is illustrated by the names of J.
-S. Mill and Mr. Bain: the second is the doctrine of Mr. Herbert Spencer.
-
-The encyclopaedic aggregate of biological, psychological, ethical
-and social investigation which Mr. Spencer pursues, under the
-general guidance of the formula of evolution by differentiation
-and integration, still proceeds on its course: but though its
-popularity--as such popularity goes--is vast and more than national,
-it does not and probably cannot find many imitators. Very differently
-stand matters with the movement in psychology and logic. Here
-the initiative has led to divergent and unexpected developments.
-Psychology, which at first was partly an ampler and a more progressive
-logic, a theory of the origin and nature of knowledge, partly a
-propaedeutic to the more technical logic and ethics, and pursued in
-a loosely introspective way, has gravitated more and more towards
-its experimental and physiological side, with occasional velleities
-to assume the abstractly-mathematical character of a psycho-physical
-science. Logic, on the other hand, has also changed its scope. Not
-content to be a mere tool of the sciences or a mere criterion for the
-estimation of evidence, it has in one direction grown into a systematic
-effort to become an epistemology--a system of the first principles of
-knowledge and reality--a metaphysic of science; and in another it has
-sought to realise the meaning of those old forms of inference which
-the logicians of half a century ago were inclined to pooh-pooh as
-obsolete. Most remarkable--and most novel of all--is the vast increase
-of interest and research in the problems of ethics and v of what is
-called the philosophy of religion--subjects which at that date were
-literally burning questions, apt to scorch the fingers of those who
-touched them. In all of this, but especially marked in some leading
-thinkers, the ruling feature is the critical--the sceptical, i. e. the
-eager, watchful, but self-restrained--attitude towards its themes. Ever
-driving on to find a deeper unity than shows on the surface, and to get
-at principles, the modern thinker--and in this we see the permanent
-and almost overwhelming influence of Kant upon him--recoils from the
-dogmatism of system, at the very moment it seems to be within his grasp.
-
-Thus the recent products of English thought have been, as Mr. Spencer
-has taught us to say, partly in the line of differentiation, partly
-of integration. At one moment it seems as if the ancient queen of the
-sciences sat like Hecuba, _exul, inops,_ while her younger daughters
-enjoyed the freedom and progress of specialisation. The wood seems lost
-behind the trees. And at another, again, the centripetal force seems to
-preponderate: every department, logic, ethics, psychology, sociology,
-rapidly carries its students on and up to fundamental questions, if
-not to fundamental principles. Philosophy--the one and undivided
-truth and quest of truths--emerges fresh, vigorous, and as yet rather
-indeterminate, from the mass of detailed investigations. That the
-position is now altered from what it was in times when knowledge had
-fewer departments, is obvious. The task of the 'synoptic' mind--which
-Plato claims for the philosopher--grows increasingly difficult: but
-that is hardly a reason for performing it in a more perfunctory way.
-It seems rather as if in such a crisis one of the great reconstructive
-systems of a preceding age might be in some measure helpful.
-
-If we consult history, it is at once clear that philosophy, or the
-pursuit of ultimate reality and permanent truth, went hand in hand with
-scientific researches into facts and their particular explanations.
-
-In their earlier stages the two tendencies of thought were scarcely
-distinguishable. The philosophers of Ionia and Magna Graecia were also
-the scientific pioneers of their time. Their fragmentary remains remind
-us at times of the modern theories of geology and biology,--at other
-times of the teachings of idealism. The same thing is comparatively
-true of the earlier philosophers of Modern Europe. The seventeenth
-and eighteenth centuries, in spite of Bacon and Newton, endeavoured
-to study the mental and moral life by a method which was a strange
-mixture of empiricism and metaphysics. In words, indeed, the thinkers
-from Descartes to Wolff duly emphasise, perhaps over-emphasise, the
-antithesis between the extended and the intellectual. But in practice
-their course is not so clear. Their mental philosophy is often only a
-preliminary _medicina mentis_ to set the individual mind in good order
-for undertaking the various tasks awaiting a special research. They are
-really eager to get on to business, and only, as it were, with regret
-spend time in this clearance of mental faculty. And when they do deal
-with objects, the material and extended tends to become the dominant
-conception, the basis of reality. The human mind, that _nobilissima
-substantia_, is treated only as an aggregate, or a receptacle, of
-ideas, and the _mens_,--with them all nearly as with Spinoza,--is only
-an _idea corporis,_ and that phrase not taken so highly as Spinoza's
-perhaps should be taken. In the works of these thinkers, as of the
-pre-Socratics, there is one element which may be styled philosophical,
-and another element which maybe styled scientific,--if we use both
-words vaguely. But with Socrates in the ancient, and with Kant in the
-modern epoch of philosophy, an attempt was made to get the boundary
-between the two regions definitively drawn. The distinction was in the
-first place accompanied by something like turning the back upon science
-and popular conceptions. Socrates withdrew thought from disquisitions
-concerning the nature of all things, and fixed it upon man and
-the state of man. Kant left the broad fields of actually-attained
-knowledge, and inquired into the central principle on which the
-acquisition of science, the laws of human life, and the ideals of art
-and religion, were founded.
-
-The change thus begun was not unlike that which Copernicus effected in
-the theory of Astronomy. Human personality, either in the actualised
-forms of the State, or in the abstract shape of the Reason,--that
-intellectual liberty, which is a man's true world,--was, at least by
-implication, made the pivot around which the system of the sciences
-might turn. In the contest, which according to Reid prevails between
-Common Sense and Philosophy, the presumptions of the former have
-been distinctly reversed, and Kant, like Socrates, has shown that it
-is not the several items of fact, but the humanity, the moral law,
-the thought, which underlies these doctrines, which give the real
-resting-point and true centre of movement. But this negative attitude
-of philosophy to the sciences is only the beginning, needed to secure
-a standing-ground. In the ancient world Aristotle, and in the modern
-Hegel (as the inheritor of the labours of Fichte and Schelling),
-exhibit the movement outwards to reconquer the universe, proceeding
-from that principle which Socrates and Kant had emphasised in its
-fundamental worth.
-
-Mr. Mill, in the closing chapter of his Logic, has briefly sketched
-the ideal of a science to which he gives the name of Teleology,
-corresponding in the ethical and practical sphere to a _Philosophia
-Prima_, or Metaphysics, in the theoretical. This ideal and ultimate
-court of appeal is to be valid in Morality, and also in Prudence,
-Policy and Taste. But the conception, although a desirable one, falls
-short of the work which Hegel assigns to philosophy. What he intended
-to accomplish with detail and regular evolution was not a system of
-principles in these departments of action only, but a theory which
-would give its proper place in our total Idea of reality to Art,
-Science, and Religion, to all the consciousness of ordinary life, and
-to the evolution of the physical universe. Philosophy ranges over
-the--whole field of actuality, or existing fact. Abstract principles
-are all very well in their way; but they are not philosophy. If the
-world in its historical and its present life develops into endless
-detail in regular lines, philosophy must equally develop the narrowness
-of its first principles into the plenitude of a System,--into what
-Hegel calls, the Idea. His point of view may be gathered from the
-following remarks in a review of Hamann, an erratic friend and
-fellow-citizen of Kant's.
-
-Hamann would not put himself to the trouble, which in an higher sense
-God undertook. The ancient philosophers have described God under the
-image of a round ball. But if that be His nature, God has unfolded it;
-and in the actual world He has opened the closed shell of truth into a
-system of Nature, into a State-system, a system of Law and Morality,
-into the system of the world's History. The shut fist has become
-an open hand, the fingers of which reach out to lay hold of man's
-mind, and draw it to Himself. Nor is the human mind a self-involved
-intelligence, blindly moving within its own secret recesses. It is no
-mere feeling and groping about in a vacuum, but an intelligent system
-of rational organisation. Of that system Thought is the summit in point
-of form: and Thought maybe described as the capability of going beyond
-the mere surface of God's self-expansion,--or rather as the capability,
-by means of reflection upon it, of entering into it, and then when the
-entrance has been secured, of retracing in thought God's expansion of
-Himself. To take this trouble is the express duty and end of ends set
-before the thinking mind, ever since God laid aside His rolled-up form,
-and revealed Himself[1].'
-
-Enthusiastic admirers have often spoken as if the salvation of the time
-could only come from the Hegelian philosophy. 'Grasp the secret of
-Hegel,' they say, 'and you will find a cure for the delusions of your
-own mind, and the remedy which will set right the wrongs of the world.'
-These high claims to be a panacea were never made by Hegel himself.
-According to him, as according to Aristotle, philosophy _as such_ can
-produce nothing new. Practical statesmen, and theoretical reformers,
-may do their best to correct the inequalities of their time. But the
-very terms in which Bacon scornfully depreciated one great concept of
-philosophy are to be accepted in their literal truth. Like a virgin
-consecrated to God, she bears no fruit[2]. She represents the spirit
-of the world, resting, as it were, when one step in the progress has
-been accomplished, and surveying the advance which has been made.
-Philosophy is not,' says Fichte, 'even a means to _shape_ life: for
-it lies in a totally different world, and what is to have an influence
-upon life must itself have sprung from life. Philosophy is only a means
-to the _knowledge_ of life.' Nor has it the vocation to edify men, and
-take the place of religion on the higher levels of intellect. 'The
-philosopher,' Fichte boldly continues, 'has no God at all and can have
-no God: he has only a concept of the concept or of the Idea of God. It
-is only in life that there is God and religion: but the philosopher as
-such is not the whole complete man, and it is impossible for any one
-to be _only_ a philosopher[3].' Philosophy does not profess to bring
-into being what ought to be, but is not yet. It sets up no mere ideals,
-which must wait for some future day in order to be realised. Enough
-for it if it show what the world _is,_ if it were what it professes
-to be, and what in a way it must be, otherwise it could not be even
-what it is. The subject-matter of philosophy is that which is always
-realising and always realised--the world in its wholeness as it is and
-has been. It seeks to put before us, and embody in permanent outlines,
-the universal law of spiritual life and growth, and not the local,
-temporary, and individual acts of human will.
-
-Those who ask philosophy to construe, or to deduce _a priori_ a
-single blade of grass, or a single act of a man, must not be grieved
-if their request sounds absurd and meets with no answer. The sphere
-of philosophy is the Universal. We may say, if we like, that it is
-retrospective. It is the spectator of all time and all existence: it
-is its duty to view things _sub specie aeternitatis_. To comprehend
-the universe of thought in all its formations and all its features, to
-reduce the solid structures, which mind has created, to fluidity and
-transparency in the pure medium of thought, to set free the fossilised
-intelligence which the great magician who wields the destinies of the
-world has hidden under the mask of Nature, of the Mind of man, of
-the works of Art, of the institutions of the State and the orders of
-Society, and of religious forms and creeds:--such is the complicated
-problem of philosophy. Its special work is to comprehend the world,
-not try to make it better. If it were the purpose of philosophy to
-reform and improve the existing state of things, it comes a little
-too late for such a task. 'As the thought of the world,' says Hegel,
-'it makes its first appearance at a time, when the actual fact has
-consummated its process of formation, and is now fully matured. This is
-the doctrine set forth by the notion of philosophy; but it is also the
-teaching of history. It is only when the actual world has reached its
-full fruition that the ideal rises to confront the reality, and builds
-up, in the shape of an intellectual realm, that same world grasped in
-its substantial being. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, some
-one shape of life has meanwhile grown old: and grey in grey, though
-it brings it into knowledge, cannot make it young again. The owl of
-Minerva does not start upon its flight, until the evening twilight has
-begun to fall[4].'
-
-
-[Footnote 1: _Vermischte Schriften_, vol. ii. p. 87.]
-
-[Footnote 2: _De Augm. Scient._ iii. 5.]
-
-[Footnote 3: The passages occur in some notes (written down by F. in
-reference to the charge of Atheism) published in his _Werke,_ v. pp.
-342, 348.]
-
-[Footnote 4: _Philosophie des Rechts_, p. 20 (_Werke,_ viii).]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IV.
-
-
-HEGEL AND THEOLOGY.
-
-
-Even an incidental glance into Hegel's Logic cannot fail to discover
-the frequent recurrence of the name of God, and the discussion of
-matters not generally touched upon, unless in works bearing upon
-religion. There were two questions which seem to have had a certain
-fascination for Hegel. One of them, a rather unpromising problem,
-referred to the distances between the several planets in the solar
-system, and the law regulating these intervals[1]. The other and more
-intimate problem turned upon the value of the proofs usually offered
-in support of the being of God. That God is the supreme certitude of
-the mind, the basis of all reality and knowledge, is what Hegel no more
-put in question, than did Descartes, Spinoza, or Locke. What he often
-repeated was that the _matter_ in these proofs must be distinguished
-from the imperfect _manner_ in which the arguers presented it.
-Again and again in his Logic, as well as in other discussions more
-especially devoted to it, he examines this problem. His persistence
-in this direction might earn for him that title of 'Knight of the
-Holy Ghost,' by which Heine, in one of the delightful poems of his
-'Reisebilder,' describes himself to the maid of Klausthal in the Harz.
-The poet of Love and of Freedom had undoubted rights to rank among the
-sacred band: but so also had the philosopher. Like the Socrates whom
-Plato describes to us, he seems to feel that he has been commissioned
-to reveal the truth of God, and quicken men by an insight into the
-right wisdom. Nowhere in the modern period of philosophy has higher
-spirit breathed in the utterances of a thinker. The same theme is
-claimed as the common heritage of philosophy and religion. A letter
-to Duboc[2], the father of a modern German novelist, lets us see how
-important this aspect of his system was to Hegel himself. He had been
-asked to give a succinct explanation of his standing-ground: and his
-answer begins by pointing out that philosophy seeks to apprehend in
-reasoned knowledge the same truth which the religious mind has in its
-faith.
-
-Words like these may at first sight suggest the bold soaring of ancient
-speculation in the times of Plato and Aristotle, or even the theories
-of the medieval Schoolmen. They sound as if he proposed to do for the
-modern world, and in the full light of modern knowledge, what the
-Schoolmen tried to accomplish within the somewhat narrow conceptions
-of medieval Christianity and Greek logic. Still there is a difference
-between the two cases. While the Doctors of the Church, in appearance
-at least, derived the form of exposition, and the matter of their
-systems, from two independent and apparently heterogeneous sources,
-the modern Scholastic of Hegel claims to be a harmonious unity, body
-finding soul, and soul giving itself body. And while the Hegelian
-system has the all-embracing and encyclopaedic character by which
-Scholastic science threw its arms around heaven and earth, it has also
-the untrammeled liberty of the Greek thinkers. Hegel, in short, shows
-the union of these two modes of speculation: free as the ancient, and
-comprehensive as the modern. His theory is the explication of God;
-but of God in the actuality and plenitude of the world, and not as a
-transcendent Being, such as an over-reverent philosophy has sometimes
-supposed him, in the solitude of a world beyond.
-
-The greatness of a philosophy is its power of comprehending facts.
-The most characteristic fact of modern times is Christianity. The
-general thought and action of the civilised world has been alternately
-fascinated and repelled, but always influenced, and to a high degree
-permeated, by the Christian theory of life, and still more by the
-faithful vision of that life displayed in the Son of Man. To pass that
-great cloud of witness and leave it on the other side, is to admit that
-your system is no key to the secret of the world,--even if we add, as
-some will prefer, of the world as it is and has been. And therefore
-the Hegelian system, if it is to be a philosophy at all, must be in
-this sense Christian. But it is neither a critic, nor an apologist of
-historical Christianity. The voice of philosophy is as that of the
-Jewish doctor of the Law: 'If this council or this work be of men,
-it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it,
-Philosophy examines what is, and not what, according to some opinions,
-ought to be. Such a point of view requires no discussion of the 'How'
-or the 'Why' of Christianity. It involves no inquiry into historical
-documents, or into the belief in miracles: for to it Christianity
-rests only incidentally on the evidence of history; and miracles, as
-vulgarly explained, can find no reception in a philosophical system.
-For it Christianity is 'absolute religion': religion i. e. which has
-fully become and realised all that religion meant to be. That religion
-has, of course, its historical side: it appeared at a definite epoch
-in the annals of our race: it revealed itself in a unique personality
-in a remarkable nation. And at an early period of his life Hegel had
-tried to gather up in one conception the traits of that august figure,
-in his life and speech and death. But, in the light of philosophy,
-this historical side shrivels up as comparatively unimportant. Not the
-personality, but the 'revelation of reason' through man's spirit: not
-the annals of a life once spent in serving God and men, but the words
-of the 'Eternal Gospel are henceforth the essence of Christianity.
-
-Thus the controlling and central conception of life and actuality,
-which is the final explanation of all that man thinks and does, has
-a twofold aspect. There is, as it were, a double Absolute--for under
-this name philosophy has what in religion corresponds to God. It is
-true that in the final form of his system the Absolute Spirit has three
-phases--each as it were passing on into and incorporated with the
-next--Art working out its implications till it appears as Religion,
-and Religion calling for its perfection in Philosophy. But in the
-_Phenomenology_, his first work, the religion of Art only intervenes
-as a grade from 'natural' religion to religion manifest or revealed;
-and in the first edition of the _Encyclopaedia_ what is subsequently
-called Art is entitled the Religion of Art. It is in entire accordance
-with these indications when in the Lectures on Aesthetics[3] it is
-said 'the true and original position of Art is to be the first-come
-immediate self-satisfaction of Absolute Spirit'; though in our days (it
-is added) 'its form has ceased to be the highest need of the spirit.'
-It is hardly too much then to say that, for Hegel, the Absolute has two
-phases, Religion and Philosophy.
-
-The Hegelian view presents itself most decisively, though perhaps
-with a little lecture-like over-insistance, in the Philosophy of
-Religion[4]. 'The object of religion as of philosophy is the eternal
-truth in its very objectivity,--God and nothing but God,--and the
-"explication" of God. Philosophy is not a wisdom of the world, but
-cognition of the non-worldly: not a cognition of the external mass of
-empirical existence and life, but cognition of what is eternal, what
-is God, and what flows from His nature. For this nature must reveal
-and develop itself. Hence philosophy "explicates" itself only when
-it "explicates" religion; and in explicating itself it explicates
-religion.... Thus religion and philosophy coincide: in fact, philosophy
-is itself a divine service, is a religion: for it is the same
-renunciation of subjective fancies and opinions, and is engaged with
-God alone.'
-
-Again, it may be asked in what sense philosophy has to deal with God
-and with Truth. These two terms are often synonyms in Hegel. All the
-objects of science, all the terms of thought, all the forms of reality,
-lead out of themselves, and seek for a centre and resting-point. They
-are severally inadequate and partial, and they crave adequacy and
-completeness. They tend to organise themselves; to call out more and
-more distinctly the fuller reality which they presuppose,--which must
-have been, otherwise they could not have been: they reduce their first
-appearance of completeness to its due grade of inadequacy and bring out
-their complementary side, so as to constitute a system or universe; and
-in this tendency to a self-correcting unity consists their progress
-to truth. Their untruth lies in isolation and pretended independence
-or finality. This completed unity, in which all things receive their
-entireness and become adequate, is their Truth: and that Truth, as
-known in religious language, is God. Rightly or wrongly, God is thus
-interpreted in the Logic of Hegel.
-
-Such a position must seem very strange to one who is familiar only
-with the sober studies of English philosophy. In whatever else the
-leaders of the several schools in this country disagree, they are
-nearly all at one in banishing God and religion to a world beyond
-the present sublunary sphere, to an inscrutable region beyond the
-scope of scientific inquiry, where statements may be made at will,
-but where we have no power of verifying any statement whatever.
-This is the common doctrine of Spencer and Mansel, of Hamilton and
-Mill. Even those English thinkers, who show some anxiety to support
-what is at present called Theism, generally rest content with
-vindicating for the mind the vague perception of a Being beyond us,
-and differing from us incommensurably. God is to them a residual
-phenomenon, a marginal existence. Outside the realm of experience
-and knowledge there is not-nothing--a something--beyond definite
-circumscription: incalculable, and therefore an object, possibly of
-fear, possibly of hope: the reflection in the utter darkness of a great
-What-may-it-not-be? He is the Unknown Power, felt by what some of
-these writers call intuition, and others call experience. They do not
-however allow to knowledge any capacity of apprehending in detail the
-truths which belong to the kingdom of God. Now the whole teaching of
-Hegel is the overthrow of the limits thus set to religious thought. To
-him all thought, and all actuality when it is grasped by knowledge, is
-from man's side, an exaltation of the mind towards God: while, when
-regarded from the divine standing-point, it is the manifestation by God
-of His own nature in its infinite variety.
-
-It is only when we fix our eyes clearly on these general features in
-his speculation, that we can understand why _he_ places the maturity
-of ancient philosophy in the time of Plotinus and Proclus. Not that
-these Neo-Platonists are, as thinkers, of power equal to their master
-of Athens. But, in the realm of the blind the one-eyed may be king. The
-later thinkers set their vision more distinctly and persistently on the
-land that is eternal--'on the further side of being,' to quote Plato's
-phrase. It is for the same reason Hegel gives so much attention to the
-religious or semi-religious theories of Jacob Böhme and of Jacobi,
-though these men were in many ways so unlike himself.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Hegel's _Leben_, p. 155. It was in his dissertation
-_de Orbitis Planetarum,_ that the notorious contretemps occurred,
-whereby, whilst the philosopher, leaning to a Pythagorean proportion,
-hinted--in a line--that it was unnecessary to expect a planet between
-Mars and Jupiter, astronomers in the same year discovered Ceres, the
-first-detected of the Planetoids. A good deal has been made out of
-this trifle; but it has not yet been shown that the corroboration was
-anything but the _luck_ of the other hypothesis.]
-
-[Footnote 2: _Vermischte Schriften_, vol. ii. p. 520. Duboc was a
-retired hatter, of French origin, who had settled at Hamburg (Hegel's
-_Briefe_, ii. 76 seqq.).]
-
-[Footnote 3: _Werke_, x. I, p. 131.]
-
-[Footnote 4: _Werke,_ xi. p. 21.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER V.
-
-
-PSEUDO-IDEALISM: JACOBI.
-
-
-It is hazardous to try to sum up the net result of a philosophy in
-a few paragraphs. Since Aristotle separated the pure 'energy' of
-philosophy from the activities which leave works made and deeds
-done behind them, it need scarcely be repeated that the result of a
-philosophical system is nothing palpable or tangible,--nothing on which
-you can put your finger, and say definitely: Here it is. The spirit of
-a philosophy always refuses to be incarcerated in a formula, however
-deftly you may try to charm it there. The statement of the principle
-or tendency of a philosophical system tells not what that system is,
-but what it is not. It marks off the position from contiguous points
-of view; and on that account never gets beyond the borderland, which
-separates that system from something else. The method and process of
-reasoning is as essential in knowledge, as the result to which it
-leads: and the method in this case is thoroughly bound up with the
-subject-matter. A mere analysis of the method, therefore, or a mere
-record of the purpose and outcome of the system, would be, the one as
-well as the other, a fruitless labour, and come to nothing but words.
-Thus any attempt to convey a glimpse of the truth in a few sentences
-and in large outlines seems foreclosed. The theory of Hegel has an
-abhorrence of mere generalities, of abstractions with no life in them,
-and no growth out of them. His principle has to prove and verify itself
-to be true and adequate: and that verification fills up the whole
-circle of circles, of which philosophy is said to consist.
-
-It seems as if there were in Hegel two distinct habits of mind which
-the world--the outside observer--rarely sees except in separation.
-On one hand there is a sympathy with mystical and intuitional minds,
-with the upholders of immediate knowledge and of innate ideas, with
-those who find that science and demonstration rather tend to distract
-from the one thing needful--who would 'lie in Abraham's bosom all the
-year,'--those who would fain lay their grasp upon the whole before they
-have gone through the drudgery of details. On the other hand, there
-is within him a strongly 'rationalising' and non-visionary intellect,
-with a practical and realistic bent, and the full scientific spirit.
-Schelling, in an angry mood, could describe him as 'the quintessence
-of all that is prosaic, both outside and in[1].' Yet, seen from other
-points of view, Hegel has been accused of dreaminess, pietism, and
-mystical theology. His merging of the ordinary contrasts of thought
-in a completer truth, and what would popularly be described as his
-mixing up of religious with logical questions, and the general
-unfathomableness of his doctrine,--all seem to support such a charge.
-Yet all this is not inconsistent with a rough and incisive vigour
-of understanding, a plainness of reason, and a certain hardness of
-temperament. This philosopher is in many ways not distinguishable from
-the ordinary citizen, and there are not unfrequent moments when his
-wife hears him groan over the providence that condemned him to be a
-philosopher[2]. He is contemptuous towards all weakly sentimentalism,
-and almost brutal in his emphasis on the reasonableness of the actual
-and on the folly of dreaming the might-have-been; and keeps his
-household accounts as carefully as the average head of a family. And,
-perhaps, this convergence of two tendencies of thought may be noticed
-in the gradual maturing of his ideas. In the period of his 'Lehrjahre,'
-or apprenticeship, from 1793 to 1800, we can see the study of religion
-in the earlier part of that time at Bern succeeded by the study of
-politics and philosophy at Frankfort-on-the-Main.
-
-His purpose on the whole may be termed an attempt to combine breadth
-with depth, the intensity of the mystic who craves for union with
-Truth, with the extended range and explicitness of those who multiply
-knowledge. 'The depth of the mind is only so deep as its courage
-to expand and lose itself in its explication[3]. It must prove its
-profundity by the ordered fullness of the knowledge which it has
-realised. The position and the work of Hegel will not be intelligible
-unless we keep in view both of these antagonistic points.
-
-The purpose of philosophy--as has been pointed out--is, for Hegel--to
-know God, which is to know things in their Truth--to see all things in
-God--to comprehend the world in its eternal significance. Supposing
-the purpose capable of being achieved, what method is open to its
-attainment? There is on one hand the method of ordinary science
-in dealing with its objects. These are _things,_ found as it were
-projected into space before the observer, lying outside one another in
-_prima facie_ independence, though connected (by a further finding)
-with each other by certain 'accidents' called qualities and relations.
-Among the objects of knowledge, there are included, by the somewhat
-naïve intellect that accepts tradition like a physical fact, certain
-'things' of a rather peculiar character. One of these is God: the
-others, which a historical criticism has subjoined, are the Soul and
-the World. And whatever may be said of the thinghood, reality, or
-existence of the World, there is no doubt that God and the Soul figure,
-and figure largely, in the consciousness of the human race as entities,
-differing probably in many respects from other things, but still
-possessed of certain fundamental features in common, and thus playing a
-part as distinct realities amongst other realities.
-
-Given such objects, it is natural for a reflecting mind to attempt
-to make out a science of God and a science of the Soul, just as of
-other 'things.' And to these, a system-loving philosopher might add a
-science of the world (Cosmology)[4]. It was felt, indeed, that these
-objects were peculiar and unique. Thus, for example, as regards God,
-it was held necessary by the logician who saw tradition in its true
-light to prove His existence': and various arguments to that end were
-at different times devised. With regard to the human Soul, similarly,
-it was considered essential to establish its independent reality as a
-thing really separate from the bodily organism with which its phenomena
-were obviously connected,--to prove, in short, its substantial
-existence, and its emancipation from the bodily fate of dissolution and
-decay. With reference to the World, the problem was rather different:
-it was felt that the name suggested problems for thought rather than
-denoted reality. How can we predicate of the whole what is predicable
-of its parts? This or that may have a beginning and a cause, may have
-a limit and an end: but can the totality be presented under these
-aspects, without leading to self-contradiction? And the result of
-these questions in the case of 'Cosmology' was to shed in the long run
-similar doubts on 'Rational' Theology and 'Rational' Psychology.
-
-Practically this metaphysical science--which is so called as dealing
-with a province or provinces of being _beyond_ the ordinary or natural
-_(physical)_ realities--treated God and the Soul by the same terms
-(or _categories_) as it used in dealing with 'material' objects. God
-e. g. was a force, a cause, a being; so, too, was the Soul. The main
-butt of Kant's destructive _Criticism of pare Reason_ is to challenge
-the justice of including God and the Soul among the objects of
-science,--among the things we can know as we may know plants or stars.
-To make an object of knowledge (in the strict sense), to make a thing,
-the prerequisite, Kant urges, is perception in space and time. Without
-a sensation--and that sensation, as it were, laid out in place and
-duration--an object of science is impossible. No mere demonstration
-will conjure it into existence. And with that requirement the old
-theology and psychology, which professed to expound the object-God and
-the object-soul, were ruled out-of-order in the list of sciences, and
-reduced to mere dialectical exercises. The circle of the sciences,
-therefore, does not lead beyond the conditioned,' beyond the regions
-of space and time. It has nothing to say of a 'first cause' or of an
-ultimate end.
-
-Such was the result that might fairly be read from Kant's _Criticism of
-pare Reason_,--especially if read without its supplementary sequels,
-and, above all, if read by those in whom feeling was stronger than
-thought, or who were by nature more endowed with the craving for faith
-than with the mind of philosophy. Such a personality appeared in J.
-H. Jacobi, the younger brother of a poet not undistinguished in his
-day. Amid the duties of public office and the cares of business, he
-found time to study Spinoza, the English and Scotch moralists, and
-above all to follow with interest the development of Kant from the year
-1763 onwards. His house at Düsseldorf was the scene of many literary
-reunions, and Jacobi himself maintained familiar intercourse with
-the leaders of the literary and intellectual world, such as Lessing,
-Hamann, Goethe. His first considerable works were two novels, in
-letters,--Allwill, begun in a serial magazine in 1775, and Woldemar,
-begun in another magazine in 1777; both being issued as complete works
-in 1781. Both turn on a moral antithesis, and both leave the antithesis
-as they found it. _Here_ pleads the advocate of the heart: 'it is the
-heart which alone and directly tells man what is good': 'virtue is a
-fundamental instinct of human nature': the true basis of morals is an
-immediate certainty; and the supreme standard is an 'ethical genius'
-which as it were discovered virtue and which still is a paramount
-authority in those exceptional situations in life when the 'grammar
-of virtue' fails to supply adequate rules, and where, therefore, the
-immediate voice of conscience must in a 'licence of sublime poesy[5]'
-dare, as Burke says, to 'suspend its own rules in favour of its own
-principles.' _There_, on the other hand, is the champion of reason,
-who declares all this sentimentalism 'a veritable mysticism of
-antinomianism and a quietism of immorality[6]': 'To humanity,' he says,
-'and to every man (every complete man) principles, and some system
-of principles, are indispensable.' Woldemar concludes with the pair
-of mottoes: 'Whosoever trusts to his own heart is a fool,' and 'Trust
-love: it takes everything, but it gives everything.'
-
-In 1780 Jacobi had his historic conversation with Lessing at
-Wolfenbüttel[7]. The talk turned on Spinoza. For many years the
-philosophy of Spinoza had seemed to vanish from the world. His name
-was only heard in a reference of obloquy, as if it were dangerous to
-be even suspected of infection with the taint of Atheism. But both
-Lessing and Jacobi had found him out. The former saw in him an ally in
-that struggle for higher light and wider views which he undertook in
-a spirit and with a scope hardly surmised by those he usually wrought
-with. Jacobi, on the contrary, saw in him personified the conjunction
-of all those irreligious tendencies which all philosophy in some degree
-exhibited: the tendency to veil or set aside God and personality. 'I
-believe,' says Jacobi, as he began the conversation 'in an intelligent
-personal cause of the world.' 'Then I am going,' replied Lessing, 'to
-hear something quite new': and he dryly put aside the other's rhapsody
-on the 'personal extra-mundane deity with the remark 'Words, my dear
-Jacobi, words.' Jacobi's work _Letters on the doctrine of Spinoza_
-(it appeared in 1785) was the beginning of a controversy in which
-Mendelssohn and Herder took part, and in which Goethe took an interest
-under Herders tutorship. To the exact philological study of Spinoza
-it did not contribute much: for the Spinoza whom Herder and Goethe
-saw as their spiritual forefather was transfigured in their thought
-to a figure to which Leibniz had almost an equal right to give his
-name. He upheld to them the symbol of the immanence of the divine in
-nature: he was the leader in the battle against 'philistine' deism and
-utilitarianism.
-
-With the Kantian criticism of the pseudo-science of theology Jacobi had
-in one way no fault to find. That reasoning by its demonstration cannot
-find out God, was to him an axiomatic belief. But the 'man of feeling'
-felt uneasy at the trenchant methods of the Königsberg man of logic.
-He seemed to see the world of men and things passing under Kant's
-manipulation into a mere collection of phenomena and ideas of the mind.
-Still more was he sensible to the loss of his God. That surrogate of an
-argument for theism which Kant seemed to offer in the implications of
-the Moral Law did not give what Jacobi wanted. Mere morality is a cold
-and mechanical principle--he thinks--compared with that infinite life
-and love which we deem we have in God. The son of man, he felt, was, in
-virtue of an indwelling genius of conscience, supreme over the moral
-law: how much more, then, the Absolute and Eternal on a higher grade of
-being than its mechanical regularities!
-
-If the way of reasoning will not carry us to the Absolute, still
-less (and that is whither Jacobi wishes to reach) to God, there must
-be another way: for something in him, which may be called Faith
-or Feeling, Spiritual Sense or Reason, proclaims itself certain
-of the reality both of God and Nature. There _is_ an objective
-reality--outside and beyond him--yet somehow to be reached by a daring
-leap,--whereby, out of sheer force of will, he, shutting his eyes
-to the temporal and the mechanical, finds himself carried over the
-dividing gulf into the land of eternal life and love.
-
-'I appeal' he says in his latest utterances[8] 'to an imperative, an
-invincible feeling as the first and underived ground of all philosophy
-and all religion,--to a feeling which lets man become aware of and
-alive to the fact that he has a sense for the supersensuous.' 'As it
-is religion which makes man man,' he continues, 'and which alone lifts
-him above the animals, so it also makes him a philosopher.' Such an
-organ for the supersensuous is what in his later writings he calls
-_Vernunft_ (Reason) and distinguishes from _Verstand_ (Understanding).
-'This reason,' says Coleridge (to whom we owe this use of the terms in
-English) in the _Friend,_ 'is an organ bearing the same relation to
-spiritual objects as the eye bears to material phenomena,' It is 'that
-intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves as one with
-the whole and is opposed to that 'science of the mere understanding'
-in which 'transferring reality to the negations of reality (to the
-ever-varying framework of the uniform life) we think of ourselves
-as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as
-object to subject, thing to thought, death to life.' But this Reason
-is even more than this. It is the direct contact with reality, which
-it affirms and even _is._ It apprehends the _me_ and the _thee,_ it
-apprehends above all the great _Thee,_ God: apprehends, and we may even
-say appropriates[9]. And it apprehends them at one bound--in one _salto
-mortale_--because it is really in implicit possession of them. Call the
-step a miracle, if you will: you must admit, he adds, that 'some time
-or other every philosophy must have recourse to a miracle[10].'
-
-And yet the asseveration rings false--it shows a womanish wilfulness
-and weakness in its reiteration. He has the reality; yet he has it
-not. 'Were a God known,' he says in one place, 'He would not be God.'
-He yearns with passionate longing to find the living and true: he
-feels himself and the Eternal clasped in one: his faith effects the
-reality of things hoped for. But, he adds, 'We never see the Absolute':
-the primal light of reason is but faint. It is but a presage--a
-pre-supposition--of the Everlasting. This reason, in short, needs
-discipline and development, it needs the ethical life to raise it:
-'without morality no religiosity,' he says. 'Light,' he complains,
-'is in my heart,' but at the moment I want to bring it into the
-understanding, the light goes out.' And yet he knows--and Coleridge
-repeats--'the consciousness of reason and of its revelations is only
-possible in an understanding.'
-
-'There seem to be one or two motives acting upon Jacobi. The 'plain
-man,' especially if he be of high character and of 'noble' religiosity,
-has a feeling that the lust of philosophising disturbs the security of
-life, and endangers things which are deservedly dear to him. In such
-an one the 'enthusiasm of logic'--the calm pursuit of truth at all
-costs, so characteristic of Lessing--is inferior to the 'enthusiasm
-of life,'--a passion in which the terrestrial and the celestial are
-inextricably blended, where one clings to God as the stronghold of
-self, and sets personality--our human personality--in the throne of
-the Eternal. He will be all that is noble and good, if only he be not
-asked utterly to surrender self. So, too, Jacobi's God--or Absolute
-(for he leaves his 'non-philosophy' so far as to use both names), is
-rather the final aim of a grand, overpowering yearning, than a calm,
-self-centred, self-expanding life which carries man along with it.
-It would be, he feels, so very terrible, if at the last there were
-no God to meet us--to find the throne of the universe vacant. Avaunt
-philosophy, therefore! Let us cling to the faith of our nature and our
-childhood, and refuse her treacherous consolations! With the central
-proposition of Jacobi, Hegel, for one, is not inclined to quarrel. He
-too, as he asks and answers the question as to the issues of this and
-of the better life, might say
-
-                                      'Question, answer presuppose
-    Two points: that the thing itself which questions, answers,--_is,_ it
-        knows;
-    As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself--a force
-    Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course,
-    Unaffected by its end,--that this thing likewise needs must be;
-    Call this--God, then, call that--Soul, and both the only facts for me.
-    Prove them facts? that they o'erpass my power of proving proves
-        them such:
-    Fact it is, I know, I know not something which is fact as much.'
-
-But when Jacobi goes on to say that it is the supreme and final duty
-of the true sage 'to unveil reality,'--meaning thereby that, given the
-feeling, he has only to
-
-                    'Define it well
-    For fear divine Philosophy
-    Should push beyond her mark and be
-    Procuress to the Lords of Hell,'
-
-Hegel withdraws. It is the duty of philosophy to labour to make the
-perception--the fleeting, uncertain, trembling perception--of faith,
-a clear, sure, inwardly consistent knowledge: to show, and not merely
-to assert, that 'the path of (this world's) duty is the way to (that
-world's) glory.' There is, Hegel himself has said more than once,
-something opposed to ordinary ways of thinking in the procedure of the
-philosopher. To the outsider, it seems like standing on your head.
-It involves something like what, in religious language, is termed
-conversion--a new birth--becoming a new man. But though such a change
-always seems to culminate in a moment of sudden transformation,--as if
-the continuity of old and new were disrupted, the process has a history
-and a preparation. Of that pilgrim's progress of the world-distracted
-soul to its discovery of its true being in God, philosophy is the
-record: a record which Hegel has written both in the _Phenomenology of
-Mind_, and, more methodically, in his _Encyclopaedia._ The passage from
-nature to God--or from man's limitations to the divine fullness--must
-be made, he urged, in the open day and not in the secret vision when
-sleep falls upon men. When the aged Jacobi read these requirements of
-Hegel, he wrote to a friend: 'He may be right, and I should like once
-again to experiment with him all that the power of thinking can do
-alone, were not the old man's head too weak for it[11].'
-
-'For a philosophy like this,' says Hegel[12], 'individual man
-and humanity are the ultimate standpoint:--as a fixed invincible
-finitude of reason, not as a reflection of the eternal beauty, or as
-a spiritual focus of the universe, but as an ultimate sense-nature,
-which however with the power of faith can daub itself over here and
-there with an alien supersensible. Let us suppose an artist restricted
-to portrait-painting; he might so far idealise as to introduce in the
-eye of a commonplace countenance a yearning look, and on its lips a
-melancholy smile, but he would be utterly debarred from depicting the
-Gods, sublime over yearning and melancholy--as if the delineation of
-eternal pictures were only possible at the cost of humanity. So too
-Philosophy--on this view--must not portray the Idea of man, but the
-abstraction of a humanity empirical and mingled with short-comings, and
-must bear a body impaled on the stake of the absolute antithesis; and
-when it clearly feels its limitation to the sensible, it must at the
-same time bedeck itself with the surface colour of a supersensible,
-and point the finger of faith to a something Higher.
-
-'But the truth cannot be defrauded by such a consecration if finitude
-be still left subsisting; the true consecration must annihilate it.
-The artist, who fails to give actuality the true truth by letting
-fall upon it the ethereal illumination and taking it completely in
-that light, and who can only depict actuality in its bare ordinary
-reality and truth (a reality however which is neither true nor real)
-may apply the pathetic remedy to actuality, the remedy of tenderness
-and sentimentality, everywhere putting tears on the cheeks of the
-commonplace, and an O God! in their mouth. No doubt his figures in
-this way direct their look over the actual heavenwards, but like
-bats they belong neither to the race of birds nor beasts, neither to
-earth nor heaven. Their beauty is not free from ugliness, nor their
-morals without weakness and meanness: the intelligence they haply may
-show is not without banality: the success which enters into it is
-not without vulgarity, and the misfortune not without cowardice and
-terror; and both success and misfortune have something contemptible.
-So too philosophy, if it takes the finite and subjectivity as absolute
-truth in the logical form habitual to her, cannot purify them by
-bringing them into relation with an infinite: for that infinite is not
-itself the true, because it is unable to consume finitude. But where
-a philosophy consumes the temporal as such and burns up reality, its
-action is pronounced a cruel dissection, which does not leave man
-complete, and a forcible abstraction which has no truth, above all
-no truth for life. And such an abstraction is treated as a painful
-amputation of an essential piece from the completeness of the whole:
-that essential piece, and absolute substantiality being believed to
-consist in the temporal and empirical, and in privation. It is as if
-a person, who sees only the feet of a work of art, were to complain,
-should the whole work be unveiled to his eyes, that he was deprived of
-the privation, that the incomplete was decompleted.'
-
-Jacobi has been spoken of as the leader of this 'Un-philosophy' of
-faith. As such his allies lie on one side among philosophers who hold
-by the deliverances of 'common sense,' by the consciousness of the
-unsophisticated man shrinking from the waywardness of an idealism that
-deprives him of his solidest realities. The type of such a philosopher
-has been drawn by Hegel[13] in Krug. But, on the other side, Jacobi
-touched hands--though not in a sympathetic spirit--with a somewhat
-motley band which also had set its face to go to the everlasting gates,
-but had turned aside to aimless wandering on the Hill Difficulty, or
-sought too soon the repose of the Delectable Mountains, without due
-sojourn in the valley of Humiliation or descent under the Shadow of
-Death. Like Wordsworth, they felt that the world is too much with
-us: that our true self is frittered away into fragments and passing
-stages, in which we are not ourselves,--whereby we also lose the true
-perception of the essential life of nature. Gradually we have sunk
-into the deadening arms of habit, reduced ourselves to professional
-and conventional types, and lost the freer and larger mobility of
-spiritual being. We have grown into _verständige Leute_--people of
-practical sense and worldly wisdom. To such, philosophy would come--if
-it could come--as the great breath of life--of 'reason' (_Vernunft_)
-which transcends the separations inevitable in practical will and
-knowledge. But to this band--which has been styled the Romantic School
-of Germany--the liberation came in ways more analogous to that craved
-for by Jacobi. Their way was the way of Romance and Imagination. The
-principle of Romance is the protest against confining man and nature
-to the dull round of uniformities which custom and experience have
-imprisoned them in. Boundless life, infinite spontaneity is surging
-within us and the world, ready to break down the dams convention
-and inertia have established. That inner power is an ever-fresh,
-ever-restless Irony, which sets up and overthrows, which refuses to be
-bound or stereotyped, which is never weary, never exhausted,--free in
-the absolute sense. It is the mystic force of Nature, which they seemed
-to see ever on the spring to work its magic transformations, and burst
-the bulwarks of empirical law. It is the princely _jus aggratiandi,_
-the sportive sovereignty of the true artist, who is able at any moment
-to enter into direct communion with the heart of things.
-
-The beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany, as well as in
-England, was a period of effervescence:--there was a good deal of fire,
-and naturally there was also a good deal of smoke. Genius was exultant
-in its aspirations after Freedom, Truth, and Wisdom. The Romantic
-School, which had grown up under the stimulus of Fichte's resolve to
-enact thought, and had for a time been closely allied with Schelling,
-counted amongst its literary chiefs the names of the Schlegels, of
-Tieck, Novalis, and perhaps Richter. The world, as that generation
-dreamed, was to be made young again,--first by drinking, where
-Wordsworth led, from the fresh springs of nature,--afterwards when, as
-often has happened, doubts arose as to where Nature was really to be
-found, by an elixir distilled from the withered flowers of medieval
-Catholicism and chivalry,
-
-    'Since the Mid-Age was the Heroic Time'
-
-and even from the old roots of primeval wisdom. The good old times of
-faith and harmonious beauty were to be brought back again by the joint
-labours of ideas and poetry.--
-
-    'So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
-    This Duke would fain know he was without being it.'
-
-To that period of incipient and darkling energy Hegel stands in
-very much the same position as Luther did to the pre-Reformation
-mystics, to Meister Eckhart, and the unknown author of the 'German
-Theology.' It was from this side, from the school of Genius and Romance
-in philosophy, that Hegel was proximately driven, not into sheer
-re-action, but into system, development, and science.
-
-To elevate philosophy from a love of wisdom into the possession of real
-wisdom, into a system and a science, is the aim which he distinctly
-set before himself from the beginning. In almost every work, and every
-course of lectures, whatever be their subject, he cannot let slip the
-chance of an attack upon the mode of philosophising which substituted
-the strength of belief or conviction for the intervention of reasoning
-and argument. There may have been a strong sympathy in him with the
-end which these German contemporaries and, in some ways, analogues
-to Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron had in view. No one who
-reads his criticism of Kant can miss perceiving his bent towards the
-Infinite. But he utterly rejects the vision of feeling, whether as
-longing faith or devout enjoyment, as an adequate exposition of the
-means to this end. Whereas these fantastic seers and sentimentalists
-either disparage science as a limitation to the spirit, in the calm
-trust of their life in God, or yearn throughout life for a peace
-which they never quite reach, Hegel is bent upon showing men that the
-Infinite is not unknowable, as Kant would have it, and yet that man can
-not, as Jacobi would have it, naturally and without an effort enjoy
-the things of God[14]. He will prove that the way of Truth is open, and
-prove it by describing in detail every step of the road. Philosophy for
-him must be reasoned truth. She does not visit favoured ones in visions
-of the night, but comes to all who win her by patient study.
-
-'For those,' he says, 'who ask for a royal road to science, no more
-convenient directions can be given than to trust to their own sound
-common sense, and, if they wish to keep up with the age and with
-philosophy, to read the reviews criticising philosophical works, and
-perhaps even the prefaces and the first paragraphs in these works
-themselves. The introductory remarks state the general and fundamental
-principles; and the reviews, besides their historical information,
-contain a critical estimate, which, from the very fact that it is
-such, is beyond and above what it criticises. This is the road of
-ordinary men: and it may be traversed in a dressing-gown. The other
-way is the way of intuition. It requires you to don the vestments of
-the high-priest. Along that road stalks the ennobling sentiment of the
-Eternal, the True, the Infinite. But it is wrong to call "this a road.
-These grand sentiments find themselves, naturally and without taking
-a single step, centred in the very sanctuary of truth. So mighty is
-genius, with its deep original ideas and its high flashes of wit. But
-a depth like this is not enough to lay bare the sources of true being,
-and these rockets are not the empyrean. True thoughts and scientific
-insights are only to be gained by the labour which comprehends and
-grasps its object. And that thorough grasp alone can produce the
-universality of science. Contrasted with the vulgar vagueness and
-scantiness of common sense, that universality is a fully-formed and
-rounded intellect; and, contrasted with the un-vulgar generality of
-the natural gift of reason when it has been spoilt by the laziness and
-self-conceit of genius, it is truth put in possession of its native
-form, and thus rendered the possible property of every self-conscious
-reason[15].'
-
-These words which were taken to heart (unnecessarily, perhaps) by the
-patron of the _Intellectual Intuition_ rung the knell to the friendship
-of Hegel with his great contemporary Schelling. Yet this hard saying
-is also the keynote to the subsequent work of the philosopher. In
-Hegel we need expect no brilliant _apergus_ of genius, no intellectual
-legerdemain, but only the patient unraveling of the clue of thought
-through all knots and intricacies: a deliberate tracing and working-out
-of the contradictions and mysteries in thought, until the contradiction
-and the mystery disappear. Perseverance is the secret of Hegel.
-
-This characteristic of patient work is seen, for example, in the
-incessant prosecution of hints and glimpses, until they grew into
-systematic and rounded outline. Instead of vague anticipations and
-guesses at truth, fragments of insight, his years of philosophic study
-are occupied with writing and re-writing, in the _V_ endeavour to clear
-up and arrange the masses of his ideas. Essay after essay, and sketch
-after sketch of a system, succeed each other amongst his papers. His
-first great work was not published before his 37th year, after six
-years spent in university work at Jena, following as many spent in
-preliminary lucubration. The notes which he used to dictate some years
-afterwards to the boys in the Gymnasium at Nürnberg bear evidence
-of constant remodelling, and the same is true of his professorial
-lectures.
-
-Such insistance in tracing every suggestion of truth to its place
-in the universe of thought is the peculiar character and difficulty
-of Hegelian argument. Other observers have now and again noticed,
-accentuated, and, it may be, popularised some one point or some one
-law in the evolution of reason. Here and there, as we reflect, we
-are forced to recognise what Hegel termed the dialectical nature in
-thought,--the tendency, by which a principle, when made to be all that
-it implied, when, as the phrase is, it is carried to extremes, recoils
-and leaves us confronted by its antithesis. We cannot, for example,
-study the history of ancient thought without noting this phenomenon.
-Thus, the persistence with which Plato and Aristotle taught and
-enforced the doctrine that the community was the guide and safeguard
-of the several citizens, very soon issued in the schools of Zeno and
-Epicurus, teaching the rights of self-seeking and of the independent
-self-realisation of the individual. But the passing glimpse of an
-indwelling discord in the terms, by which we argue, is soon forgotten,
-and is set aside under the head of accidents, instead of being referred
-to a general law. Most of us take only a single step to avoid what has
-turned out wrong, and when we have overcome the seeming absoluteness of
-one idea, we are content and even eager to throw ourselves under the
-yoke of another, not less one-sided than its predecessor. Sometimes
-one feels tempted to say that the course of human thought as a whole,
-as well as that branch of it termed science, exhibits nothing but a
-succession of illusions, which enclose us in the belief that some idea
-is all-embracing as the universe,--illusions, from which the mind is
-time after time liberated, only in a little while to sink under the
-sway of some partial correction, as if it and it only were the complete
-truth.
-
-Or, again, the Positive Philosophy exhibits as one of its features an
-emphatic and popular statement of a fallacy much discussed in Hegel.
-One of the best deeds of that school has been to protest against a
-delusive belief in certain words and notions; particularly by pointing
-out the insufficiency of what it calls metaphysical terms, i. e. those
-abstract entities formed by reflective thought, which are little else
-than a double of the phenomenon they are intended to explain. To
-account for the existence of insanity by an assumed basis for it in
-the 'insane neurosis,' or to attribute the sleep which follows a dose
-of opium to the soporific virtues of the drug, are some exaggerated
-examples of the metaphysical intellect which is so rampant in much
-of our popular, and even of our esoteric science. Positivism by its
-logical precepts ought at least to have instilled general distrust of
-abstract talk about essences, laws, forces and causes, whenever they
-claim an inherent and independent value, or profess to be more than
-a reflex of sensation. But all this is only a desultory perception,
-the reflection of an intelligent observer. When we come to Hegel, the
-Comtian perception of the danger lying in the terms of metaphysics is
-replaced by the Second Part of Logic, the Theory of Essential Being,
-where substances, causes, forces, essences, matters, are confronted
-with what Mr. Bain has called their 'suppressed correlative[16].'
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Aus Schellings Leben (Plitt.), ii. 161.]
-
-[Footnote 2: Hegel's _Briefe_, ii. 377.]
-
-[Footnote 3: _Phenomenologie des Geistes,_ p. 9.]
-
-[Footnote 4: Cf. Notes and Illustrations in vol. ii. 396, and chapter
-iii. of the _Logic._]
-
-[Footnote 5: Jacobi's _Werke_, v. 79, III, 115, 417.]
-
-[Footnote 6: Ibid., i. 178.]
-
-[Footnote 7: Jacobi's _Werke,_ iv. i. Abth. p. 55 seqq.]
-
-[Footnote 8: Jacobi's _Werke_, iv. i, p. xxi.]
-
-[Footnote 9: Jacobi's _Briefwechsel,_ i. 330.]
-
-[Footnote 10: Jacobi's _Werke_, iii. 53.]
-
-[Footnote 11: Jacobi's _Briefwechsel_, ii. 468.]
-
-[Footnote 12: Hegel's _Werke,_ i. 15.]
-
-[Footnote 13: Hegel's _Vermischte Schriften,_ i. 50.]
-
-[Footnote 14: Compare pages 121-142 of the _Logic._]
-
-[Footnote 15: _Phenomenologie des Geistes_, p. 54 (_Werke_, ii).]
-
-[Footnote 16: _Practical Essays,_ p. 43.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VI.
-
-
-THE SCIENCES AND PHILOSOPHY.
-
-
-By asserting the rights of philosophy against the dogmatism of
-self-inspired 'unphilosophy,' and by maintaining that we must not feel
-the truth, with our eyes as it were closed, but must open them full
-upon it, Hegel does not reduce philosophy to the level of one of the
-finite sciences. The name 'finite,' like the name 'empirical,' is not
-a title of which the sciences have any cause to be ashamed. They are
-called empirical, because it is their glory and their strength to found
-upon experience. They are called finite, because they have a fixed
-object, which they must expect and cannot alter; because they have an
-end and a beginning,--presupposing something where they begin, and
-leaving something for the sciences which come after. Botany rests upon
-the researches of chemistry: and astronomy hands over the record of
-cosmical movements to geology. Science is interlinked with science; and
-each of them is a fragment. Nor can these fragments ever, in the strict
-sense of the word, make up a whole or total. They have broken off,
-sometimes by accident, and sometimes for convenience, from one another.
-The sciences have budded forth here and there upon the tree of popular
-knowledge and ordinary consciousness, as the interest and needs of the
-time drew attention closer to various points and objects in the world
-surrounding us.
-
-Prosecute the popular knowledge about any point far enough,
-substituting completeness and accuracy for vagueness, and especially
-giving numerical definiteness in weight, size, and figure, until
-the little drop of fact has grown into an ocean, and the mere germ
-has expanded into a structure with complex interconnexion,--and
-you will have a science. By its point of origin this luminous body
-of facts is united to the great circle of human knowledge and
-ignorance. Each special science is a part, which presupposes a total
-of much lower organisation, but much wider range than itself: each
-branch of scientific knowledge grows out of the already existent
-tree of acquaintance with things. But the part very soon assumes an
-independence of its own, and adopts a hostile or negative attitude
-towards the general level of unscientific opinion. This process of what
-we may, from the vulgar point of view, call abnormal development, is
-repeated irregularly at various points along the surface of ordinary
-consciousness. At one time it is the celestial movements calling for
-the science of astronomy: at another the problem of dividing the soil
-calling for the geometrician. Each of these outgrowths naturally
-re-acts and modifies the whole range of human knowledge, or what we
-may call popular science; and thus, while keeping up its own life, it
-quickens the parent stock with an infusion of new vigour, and raises
-the general intelligence to a higher level and into a higher element.
-
-The order of the outcome of the sciences in time, therefore, and their
-connexions with one another, cannot be explained or understood, if we
-look only to the sciences themselves. We must first of all descend
-into the depths of natural thought, or of general culture, and trace
-the lines which unite science with science in that general medium. The
-systematic interdependence of the sciences must be chiefly sought for
-in the workings of thought as a whole in its popular phases, and in the
-action and reaction of that _general_ human thought with the sciences,
-those definite organisations of knowledge which form sporadically round
-the _nuclei_ here and there presented in what would superficially be
-described as the inorganic mass and medium of popular knowledge. Thus,
-by means of the sciences in their aggregate action, the material of
-common consciousness is expanded and developed, at least in certain
-parts, though the expansion may be neither consistent nor systematic.
-But so long as this work is incomplete, so long, that is to say, as
-every point in the line of popular knowledge has not received its due
-elaboration and equal study, the sciences merely succeed each other in
-a certain imperfect sequence, or exist in juxtaposition: they do not
-form a total. The whole of scientific knowledge will only be formed,
-when science shall be as completely rounded and unified, as in its
-lower sphere and more inadequate element the ordinary consciousness of
-the world is now.
-
-Up to a certain point the method of science is but the method of
-ordinary consciousness pursued knowingly and steadily. But ere long
-the method acquires a distinctive character of its own. It shakes
-off the pressure of that immediate subservience in which ordinary
-knowledge stands to man's needs, wishes and interests. Knowledge
-is pursued--within a wide range--for its own sake, and by a class
-more or less definitely set apart by humanity for its scientific
-service,--which is thus performed more systematically and continuously.
-But the great step which carries ordinary knowledge into its higher
-region is the discovery, due to reflection and comparison, that
-there is a double grade of reality-a permanent, essential, uniform,
-substantial being, which is contrasted with an evanescent, apparent,
-varying and accidental. To know a thing is in all cases to _relate it_
-to something else: to know it in the higher sense_--vere scire_--is
-to relate it to its essence, its substantial or universal form, its
-permanent self. Ordinary knowledge, e. g., fixes a thing by referring
-to its antecedents: scientific knowledge refers it to its 'invariable,
-'unconditional' or 'essential' antecedent,--to something which
-contains it implicitly, and necessarily, and is not merely by accident
-or juxtaposition associated with it. To discover this permanent,
-underlying substance or reality comes to be the problem of science--a
-problem which may be taken in the widest generality, or restricted
-to some one group of existences. What is asked for, e.g., may be
-the uniformity and essence in the appearance of the diurnal journey
-of the sun, or it may be the underlying, invisible, nature which
-displays itself in all the variety of minerals, and in animal and plant
-life. The one-and-the-same in a diversity of many; the type-form in
-individuals: the cause which is the key to understanding an effect that
-always and unconditionally follows it; the force which finds different
-expression in actions--are what Science seeks.
-
-In that search two points emerge as regards the method. The first is
-the importance of quantitative statements or numerical appreciations,
-and the general law that variations in the qualitative are in some
-ratio concomitant with variations in the quantitative. Mathematics,
-in a word, is found to be an invaluable instrument for recording
-with accuracy the minutest as well as the most immense differences
-of quality. First, it is seen that qualitative differences within a
-given range, e.g. various colours or various musical notes, can be
-accurately expressed by a numerical ratio. But, secondly, it soon
-appears that even greater divergences of quality, e.g. those of colour
-and of chemical quality, may possibly be reduced to stages on one
-quantitative scale. It is not unnatural that such experiences should
-give rise to a hope--and in sanguine minds, an assurance--that all the
-phenomena of nature are ultimately phases of some common nature--some
-elementary being--which runs through an infinite gamut of numerically
-defined adjustments.
-
-But the numerical prepossession--as we may call it--creates another
-assumption. Every number consists of units: every cube can be regarded
-as an aggregation of smaller cubes, and in measurement is (implicitly
-at least) so regarded. Transferring this to the physical world, every
-object is regarded as a composite--a Large, made up by the addition
-and juxtaposition of many (relatively) Littles. The essentials of the
-composite are here the elements that compose it: these, by a natural
-tendency, we proceed to conceive as remaining always unchanged, and
-giving rise by their peculiar juxtaposition to certain perceptions in
-the human being. You whirl rapidly a blazing piece of wood, and instead
-of a discontinuous series of flashes you see one orbit of luminous
-matter: or, let falling rain-drops take up a particular position in
-reference to your eyes and the sun, and a rainbow is visible. In both
-cases there is what may be called an illusion--the illusion, above
-all, of unity and continuity. Now what is in these cases obviously
-and demonstrably seen, is, as Leibniz in particular has reminded us,
-the general law of all matter as such. In the extended and material
-world there is nowhere a real unity discoverable. The small is made
-up of the smaller _ad infinitum_[1]. But the conclusion (which
-Leibniz drew)--that unity belongs only to v,' Monads and never by any
-possibility to a material substance, was not that commonly reached
-or accepted. There are--or there must be,--said the prevalent creed,
-ultimates, indivisibles, indecomposables, simples, atoms. These are the
-final bricks of reality, out of which the apparent universe is built:
-each with a maximum,--a _ne plus ultra_--of resistibility, hardness,
-fullness, and unsqueezable bulk.
-
-Into further details of these ultimate irreducibles we need not enter.
-It is sufficient to denote the general purport of the conception, and
-the tendency it implies.
-
-In these ultimates supreme reality is understood to lie; and on them
-at last, and indeed always, rests whatever reality truly exists in
-any object. All else is secondary--and, comparatively speaking,
-illusory,--unreal. Any phenomena that may be noted only affect the
-surface or show of these reals: the inner reality continues one
-and unchanged. Outside them, around them, is the void--emptiness,
-non-entity. Yet null and void as it may be, we may, in passing,
-reply,--this circumambient is the source of all that gives these
-masses of atoms any distinctive reality--any character of true being.
-Space may be empty enough,--a mere spectre-shell; and yet it is their
-differences in spatial circumstance that bring out and actualise what
-they implicitly are. These '_individua_' these units of reality, these
-atoms, are real and knowable only in their relations. So too Time may
-be contemptuously treated as a passive receptacle: yet it is only by
-its connexions in the past and the future that the present moment has
-any actuality it may claim. And time and space are potent agencies--in
-popular mode of utterance--whatever the mechanical philosophy may say.
-
-But all of these relations are in the realm of unreality. The atoms
-alone _are_: and yet the void, which ought _not_ to _be,_ in an
-unmistakable way _is_ also. To this mysterious vacuum which lies
-outside (and yet not outside) reality, to this not-being which _is,_
-there can only be given a half-negative and baffling name. Let it
-be called Chance--or let it be called Necessity; let it be called
-inexplicable Law of co-existence and sequence,--the Force which is the
-beginning of motion. It is the ultimate key to the mystery--but it is
-at least a key which no human hand can use, or even lay hold of. It is
-enough for science if, leaving this ultimate inexplicability untouched,
-it trace in each separate instance the exact equation between the sum
-of the constituents and the total which they compose,--if it prove that
-the several items when put together exactly give the sum proposed.
-Identification--the establishment of quantitative equations--is the
-work of science. Identity is its canon, working on the presumption
-or axiom that there can be nothing in the result which was not in
-the antecedents or conditions. _Ex nihilo nihil fit._ The quantity
-of energy must always be the same, though its phases may vary, or
-temporarily avoid detection. Matter, i.e. the ultimate reality, is
-indestructible. In short, the method of analysis and synthesis, as that
-of addition and subtraction, is a calculus which takes the form of an
-equation.
-
-So far the inorganic, inanimate world has been mainly in view. If we
-now turn to the organisms, we find the popular creed expressed in the
-adage _Omne vivum e vivo._ No eye has ever seen--though fanatical
-observers have sometimes so deluded themselves as to think they saw--a
-living being directly emerge from inorganic stuff. The saner student
-of physiology contents himself with leaving for the while the crux of
-the genesis of Life, and examining only the building up of the living
-creature out of its constituents. Here the atom is called the cell:
-every organism is a synthesis of cells, and in the cell we have the
-primary element of organic reality: _Omnis cellula e cellula,_ In the
-atom we have the ultimate element; in the cell a relative element,--the
-absolute beginning of a new order of things,--which we may, if we
-like, choose to treat (though only for logical simplicity's sake) as a
-gradual development from the other and more primitive, but which, so
-far as experience and history teach, is equally ultimate in its kind.
-But be the final constituent (physical) atom, or (physiological) cell,
-the relation of these constituents is at first conceived by science
-only as composition, or mechanical synthesis. It is only gradually
-that science begins to have doubts as to the inviolability and
-unalterableness of the elements. When the idea--not altogether new--of
-a 'latent meta-schematism' and latent process within the constituents
-is entertained and carried out in earnest, science has passed on to a
-new stage: from mechanical atomism to a dynamic and organic theory of
-existence. And the governing ideas of scientific logic have then ceased
-to be co-existence, and sequence, correlation and composition: the new
-category is intus-susception, development, adaptation not only external
-but internal.
-
-_Divide et impera_ is the motto of Science. To isolate one thing
-or one group of facts from its context,--to penetrate beneath the
-apparent simplicity, which time and custom have taught ordinary eyes
-to see in the concrete object, to the multitude of underlying simple
-elements,--to leave everything extraneous out of sight,--to abolish the
-teleology which imposes upon Nature a permanent tribute (direct or
-indirect) towards the supply of human wants,--and to take, as it were,
-one thing at a time and study it for itself disinterestedly; that is
-the problem of the sciences. And to accomplish that end they do not
-hesitate to break the charmed links which in common vision hold the
-world together,--to disregard the spiritual harmony which the sense of
-beauty finds in the scene,--to strip off the relations of means and
-end, which reflection has thrown from thing to thing, and the sensuous
-atmosphere of so-called 'secondary' qualities in which human sense has
-enveloped each; and finally to sever its connexion by which
-
-    'the whole round world is every way
-    Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.'
-
-In those days when reflection had not set in,--when humanity had not
-yet found itself a stranger in the house of Nature, and had not yet
-dared to regard her as a mere automatic slave, men had no doubts as to
-the meaning of things. They lived sympathetically her life.
-
-         'Man, once descried, imprints for ever
-    His presence on all lifeless things: the winds
-    Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,
-    A querulous mutter, or a quick gay laugh.'
-
-To the extent of his abilities and his culture, indeed man has in all
-ages read himself into the phenomena external to him. Such readings, in
-times when he feared and loved his kinsfolk of Nature, were fetichism
-and anthropomorphism. Gradually, however, forgetting his community, he
-claimed to be the measure and master of all things: to decree their use
-and function. But in course of time, when the sciences had emancipated
-themselves from the yoke of philosophy, they refused to borrow any such
-help in reading the riddle of the universe, and resolved to begin,
-_ab ovo_, from the atom or cell, and leave the elements to work out
-their own explanation. Modern science in so doing practises the lessons
-learned from Spinoza and Hume. The former teaches that all conception
-of order, i. e. of adaptation and harmony in nature, and indeed all
-the methods by which nature is popularly explained, are only modes of
-our emotional imagination, betraying how imperfect has been in most
-of us the emancipation of human intellect from the servitude to the
-affections[2]. The latter points out that all connexions between things
-are solely mental associations, ingrained habits of expectation, the
-work of time and custom, accredited only by experience[3]. There must
-be no pre-suppositions allowed in the studies of science, no help
-derived prematurely from the later terms in the process to elucidate
-the earlier. Let man, it is said, be explained by those laws, and by
-the action of those primary elements which build up every other part
-of nature: let molecules by mechanical union construct the thinking
-organism, and then construct society. The elements which we find by
-analysis must be all that is required to make the synthesis. Thus in
-modern times science carries out, fully and with the details of actual
-knowledge in several branches, the principles of the atom and the void,
-which Democritus suggested.
-
-The scientific spirit, however, the spirit of analysis and abstraction
-(or of 'Mediation' and 'Reflection'), is not confined in its
-operations to the physical world. The criticism of ordinary beliefs
-and conventions has been applied--and applied at an earlier period--to
-what has been called the Spiritual world, to Art, Religion, Morality,
-and the institutions of human Society. Under these names the agency of
-ages, acting by their individual minds, has created organic systems,
-unities which have claimed to be permanent, inviolable, and divine.
-Such unities or organic structures are the Family, the State, the works
-of Art, the forms, doctrines, and systems of Religion, existing and
-recognised in ordinary consciousness. But in these cases, as in Nature,
-the reflective principle may come forward and ask what right these
-unities have to exist. This is the question which the 'Encyclopaedic,'
-the 'Aufklärung,' the 'Rationalist' and 'Freethinking' theories,
-raise and have raised in the last century and the present. What is
-the Family, it is said, but a fiction or convention, which is used to
-give a decent, but somewhat transparent covering to a certain animal
-appetite, and its probable consequences? What is the State, and what
-is Society, but a fiction or compact, by which the weak try to make
-themselves seem strong, and the unjust seek to shelter themselves from
-the consequences of their own injustice? What is Religion, it is said,
-but a delusion springing from the fears and weakness of the crowd, and
-the cunning of the few, which men have fostered until it has wrapped
-humanity in its snaky coils? And Poetry, we are assured, like its
-sister Arts, will perish and its illusions fade away, when Science,
-now in the cradle, has become the full-grown Hercules. As for Morality
-and Law, and the like, the same condemnation has been prepared from
-of old. All of them, it is said, are but the inventions of power and
-craft, or the phantoms of human imagination, which the strength of
-positive science and bare facts is destined in no long time to dispel.
-
-When they insisted upon a severance of the elements in the
-vulgarly-accepted unities of the world, Science and Freethinking, like
-Epicurus in an older day, have believed that they were liberating the
-world from its various superstitions, from the bonds which instinct
-and custom had fastened upon things so as to combine them into systems
-more or less arbitrary. They denied the supremacy and reality of those
-ideas which insist on the essential unity and self-sameness in things
-that visibly and tangibly have a separate existence of their own, and
-branded these ideas comprehensively as mysticism and metaphysics.
-They sought to disabuse us of spirits, vital forces, divine right of
-governments, final causes, _et hoc genus omne._ They were exceedingly
-jealous for the independence of the individual, and for his right to
-demand satisfaction for the questioning, ground-seeking faculty of
-his nature. But while they did so they hardly realised how entirely
-the spectator is the part, the product of what he surveys, and while
-surveying treats as if it were but a spot or mark on the circumference
-of the circle that lies--some way off--around him. 'Phenomenalism,' as
-this mode of looking at things has been called, is false to life, and
-would cut away the ground from philosophy.[4]
-
-To some extent philosophy returns to the position of the wider
-consciousness, to the general belief in harmony and symmetry. It
-reverts to the unity or connexion, which the natural presumptions of
-mankind find in the picture of the world. The _nolo philosophari_
-of the intuitivist, in reaction from the supposed excesses of the
-sciences, simply reverted to the bare re-statement of the popular
-creed. If science, e. g., had shown that the perception of an
-external world pre-supposed for its accomplishment an unsuspected
-series of intermediate steps, the mere intuitivist simply denied
-the intermediation by appealing to Common Sense, or to the natural
-instincts and primary beliefs of mankind. Conviction and natural
-instinct were declared to counterbalance the abstractions of science.
-But philosophy which seeks to comprehend existence cannot take the
-same ground as the intuitional school, or neglect the testimony of
-science. If the spiritual unity of the world has been denied and lost
-to sight, mere assertion that we feel and own its pervading power will
-not do much good. It is necessary to reconcile the contrast between
-the wholeness of the natural vision, and the fragmentary, but in its
-fragments elaborated, result of science.
-
-The sciences break up the rough generalisations or vulgar concepts of
-everyday use, and make their fixed distinctions yield to analysis.
-They thus render continuous things which were looked at as only
-separate. But they tend again to substitute the results of their
-analysis as a new and permanent distinction and principle of things.
-They are like revolutionists who upset and perturb an old order, and
-set up a new and minuter tyranny in its place. Gradually, the general
-culture, the average educated intelligence gathers up the fruit of
-scientific research into the total development of humanity: and uses
-the work of science to fill up the _lacunae,_ the gaps, which make
-popular consciousness so irregular and disconnected. A sort of popular
-philosophy comes to sum up and estimate what science has accomplished:
-and therein is as it were the spirit of the world taking into his own
-hand the acquisitions won by the more audacious and self-willed of
-his sons, and investing them in the common store. They are set aside
-and preserved there, at first in an abstract and technical form, but
-destined soon to pass into the possession of all, and form that mass of
-belief and instinctive or implanted knowledge whence a new generation
-will draw its mental supplies. Each great scientific discovery is in
-its turn reduced to a part of the common stock. It leaves the technical
-field, and spreads into the common life of men, becoming embodied in
-their daily beliefs,--a seed of thought, from which, by the agency of
-intelligent experience, new increments of science will one day spring.
-
-Philosophy properly so called is also the unification of science,
-but in a new sphere, a higher medium not recognised by the sciences
-themselves. The reconciliation which the philosopher believes himself
-to accomplish between ordinary consciousness and science is identified
-by either side with a phase of its antagonist error. Science will
-term philosophy a modified form of the old religious superstition.
-The popular consciousness of truth, and especially religion, will
-see in philosophy only a repetition or an aggravation of the evils
-of science. The attempt at unity will not approve itself to either,
-until they enter upon the ground which philosophy occupies, and move
-in that element. And that elevation into the philosophic ether calls
-for a tension of thought which is the sternest labour imposed upon
-man: so that the continuous action of philosophising has been often
-styled superhuman. If anywhere, it is in pure philosophy that proof
-becomes impossible, unless for those who are willing to think for
-themselves[5]. The philosophic lesson cannot be handed on to a mere
-recipient: the result, when cut off from the process which produced
-it, vanishes like the palace in the fairy tale.
-
-'The whole of philosophy is nothing but the study of the specific
-forms or types of unity.[6] There are many species and grades of this
-unity. They are not merely to be enumerated and asserted in a vague
-way, as they here and there force themselves upon the notice of the
-popular mind. Philosophy sees in that unity neither an ultimate and
-unanalysable fact, nor a deception, but a growth (which is also a
-struggle), a revealing or unfolding, which issues in an organism or
-system, constructing itself more and more completely by a force of its
-own. This system formed by these types of the fundamental unity is
-called the 'Idea,' of which the highest law is development. Philosophy
-essays to do for this connective and unifying nature, i. e. for the
-thought in things, something like what the sciences have done or
-would like to do for the facts of sense and matter,--to do for the
-spiritual binding-element in its integrity, what is being done for
-the several facts which are more or less combined. It retraces the
-universe of thought from its germinal form, where it seems, as it were,
-an indecomposable point, to the fully matured system or organism, and
-shows not merely that one phase of pure thought passes into another,
-but how it does so, and yet is not lost, but subsists suspended and
-deprived of its narrowness in the maturer phase.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Leibniz, ed. Gerhardt, iii. 507: 'Les atomes sont l'effet
-de la foiblesse de nostre imagination, qui aime à se reposer et à se
-hater à venir à une fin dans les sous-divisions et analyses: il n'en
-est pas ainsi dans la nature qui vient de l'infini et va à l'infini.']
-
-[Footnote 2: Spinoza, _Ethica,_ i. 36, App. '_Quoniam ea nobis prae
-ceteris grata sunt quae facile imaginari possumus, ideo homines ordinem
-confusioni praeferunt; quasi ordo aliquid in natura praeter respectum
-ad nostram imaginationem esset... Videmus itaque omnes rationes quibus
-vulgus solet naturam explicare modos esse tantummodo imaginandi._' Cf.
-_Eth._ iv. praef.: Epist. xxxii.]
-
-[Footnote 3: 'This transition of thought from the Cause to the Effect
-proceeds not from Reason. It derives its origin altogether from
-Custom and Experience.' Hume, Essay V. (Enquiry concerning Human
-Understanding.) 'All inferences from Experience therefore are effects
-of Custom.' (Ibid.)]
-
-[Footnote 4: J. Grote, _Exploratio Philosophica._]
-
-[Footnote 5: Cf. vol. ii. p. 4.]
-
-[Footnote 6: _Philosophie der Religion,_ i. p. 97: 'Die ganze
-Philosophie ist nichts Anderes als das Studium der Bestimmungen der
-Einheit.' See especially _Encycl._ § 573 (Philosophy of Mind, pp. 192
-seqq.).]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VII.
-
-
-ANTICIPATORY SKETCH OF THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY.
-
-
-The psychology of the Greeks has to all appearance given the mere
-intellect an undue pre-eminence, if it has not even treated it as man's
-essential self. Whether the appearance is altogether sound might be
-a profitable inquiry for those who most criticise it. At any rate, a
-later psychology has taught us to regard man as at once a cognitive, an
-emotional, and a volitional being. It has arrived at this conclusion as
-it looked at the division that parted off the systems of science from
-the sphere of conduct and social life, and both from the inner life of
-sentiment, of love, admiration and reverence. And the inference was
-justifiable, in the same way as Plato's when, as he surveyed the triple
-sphere into which the outward world of his contemporary society was
-divided, he concluded a triplicity of the soul. If it was justifiable,
-it was also, as in his case, somewhat misleading. In the outward
-manifestation, where the letters are posted up on a gigantic scale,
-one tends to forget that they only spell one word. Their difference
-and distance seem increased, and we fail to note that, though there
-are three aspects, yet there is only one power or soul, which exhibits
-itself under one or other of the three tones or modes. In the actual
-human being, cognition is always of some emotional interest and always
-leads up to some practical result. From different points of view one or
-other is occasionally declared to be primary and original; the others
-derivative and secondary. At any rate we may say that in the ordinary
-human being who is still in the garden of preparation and has not yet
-stepped forth on one of the separate routes of life, his knowledge, his
-emotional and his active life are in a tolerable harmony, and that each
-in its little development is constantly followed by the other.
-
-But with the outward differentiation an inward went hand in hand. In
-some cases the intellectual or scientific, in others the emotional, in
-others the active faculties became predominant. Human nature in order
-to attain all its completeness had first of all, as it were, to lose
-its life in order to gain it. The individual had to sacrifice part of
-his all-sided development in order that he might gain it again, and
-in a larger measure, through the medium of society. This process is
-the process of civilisation: the long and, as it often seems, weary
-road by which man can only realise himself by self-sacrifice: can only
-reach unity through the way of diversity, and must die to live. It is a
-process in which it is but too easy to notice only one stage and speak
-of it as if it were the whole. It is possible sometimes to identify
-civilisation with the material increase in the means of producing
-enjoyment, or with the progress of scientific teaching as to the laws
-of those material phenomena on which material civilisation is largely
-dependent. It is possible sometimes to take as its test the stores of
-artistic works, and the extension of a lively and delicate love of all
-that is beautiful and tasteful. One may identify it with a high-toned
-moral life, and with an orderly social system. Or one may maintain that
-the real civilisation of a country presupposes a lofty conception and
-reverent attitude to the supreme source of all that is good, and true,
-and beautiful.
-
-The question is important as bearing on the relation of philosophy to
-the special sciences. Philosophy is sometimes identified with the sum
-of sciences: sometimes with their complete unification. Philosophy,
-says a modern, is knowledge completely unified. It is of course to some
-extent a question of words in what sense a term is to be defined. And
-no one will dispute that the scientific element is in point of form the
-most conspicuous aspect of philosophy. Yet if we look at the historical
-use of the term, one or two considerations suggest themselves.
-Philosophy, said an ancient, is the knowledge of things human and
-divine. Again and again, it has claimed for its task to be a guide and
-chart of human life--to reveal the form of good and of beauty. But to
-do this, it must be more than a mere science, or than a mere system
-of the sciences. Again, it has been urged by modern critics that Kant
-at last discovered for philosophy her true province--the study of the
-conditions and principles of human knowledge. But though epistemology
-is all-important, the science of knowledge is not identical with
-philosophy: nor did Kant himself think it was. Rather his view is on
-the whole in accord with what he has called the 'world's (as opposed
-to the scholar's) conception of philosophy[1],' as the science of the
-bearing of all ascertainable truths on the essential aims of human
-reason--_teleologia humanae rationis_,--in accord, too, with the
-world's conception of the philosopher as no mere logician, but the
-legislator of human reason.
-
-This, it need hardly be added, is the conception of philosophy which
-is implicitly the basis of Hegel's use. Let us hear Schelling. 'A
-philosophy which in its principle is not already religion is no true
-philosophy[2].'
-
-Or again, as to the place of Ethics: 'Morality is Godlike disposition,
-an uplifting above the influence of the concrete into the realm of the
-utterly universal. Philosophy is a like elevation, and for that reason
-intimately one with morality, not through subordination, but through
-essential and inner likeness[3].' But, again, it has more than once
-been felt that philosophy is kindred with Art. It has been said--not
-as a compliment--that philosophy is only a form of gratifying the
-aesthetic instincts. Schopenhauer has suggested--as a novelty--that
-the true way to philosophy was not by science, but through Art. And
-Schelling before him had--while asserting the inner identity of the
-two--even gone so far as to assert[4] that 'Art is the sole, true and
-eternal organon as well as the ostensible evidence of philosophy.'
-
-Philosophy, therefore, is one of a triad in which the human spirit has
-tried to raise itself above its limitations and to become god-like. And
-philosophy is the climax; Art the lowest; Religion in the mean. But
-this does not mean that Religion supersedes Art, and that Philosophy
-supersedes religion; or, if we retain the term 'supersede,' we must add
-that the superseded is not left behind and passed aside: it is rather
-an integral constituent of what takes its place. Philosophy is true and
-adequate only as it has given expression to all that religion had or
-aimed at. So, too, Religion is not the destruction of Art: though here
-the attitude may often seem to be more obviously negative. A religion
-which has no place for art is, again, no true religion. And thus again,
-Philosophy becomes a reconciler of Art and Religion: of the visible
-ideal and the invisible God. Art, on the other hand, is a foretaste
-and a prophecy of religion and philosophy.
-
-But Art, Religion, and Philosophy, again, rest upon, grow out of, and
-are the fulfilment of an ethical society-a state of human life where an
-ordered commonwealth in outward visibility is animated and sustained by
-the spirit of freedom and self-realisation. And that public objective
-existence of social humanity in its turn reposes on the will and
-intelligence of human beings, of souls which in various relations
-of discipline and interaction with their environment have become
-free-agents, and have risen to be more than portions of the physical
-world, sympathetic with its changes, and become awake to themselves and
-their surroundings. Such is the mental or spiritual life as it rises to
-full sense of its power, recognises its kindred with the general life,
-carries out that kindred in its social organisation, and at length
-through the strength social union gives floats boldly in the empyrean
-of spiritual life, in art, religion, and philosophy.
-
-But, what about the special relationship of philosophy to the sciences?
-Undoubtedly the philosophers of the early years of the century
-have used lordly language in reference to the sciences. They have
-asserted--from Fichte downwards--that the philosophical construction,
-of the universe must justify itself to itself--must be consistent,
-continuous, and coherent--and that it had not to wait for experience
-to give it confirmation. Even the cautious Kant[5] had gone so far
-as to assert that the 'understanding gives us nature'--i. e. as he
-explains, _natura formaliter spectata_, viz., the order and regularity
-in the phenomena--that it is the source of the laws of nature and
-of its formal unity. The so-called proofs of natural laws are only
-instances and exemplifications, which no more _prove_ them, than we
-prove that 6 x 4 = 24, because 6 yards of cloth at 4s. must be paid
-for by 24 shillings. To assert that this instance is no proof, is
-not to reject experience--still less to refuse respect to the new
-discoveries of science. But it is unquestionably to assert that there
-is something prior to the sciences--prior, i. e. in the sense that Kant
-speaks of the _a priori,_ something which is fundamental to them, and
-constitutes them what they are--something which is assumed as real if
-their syntheses (and every scientific truth is a synthesis) are to be
-possible. The analysis and exhibition in its organic completeness of
-this Kantian _a priori_ is the theme of the Hegelian Logic.
-
-The Philosophy of Nature stands in the Hegelian system between Logic
-and Mental or Spiritual Philosophy. Man--intelligent, moral, religious
-and artistic man--rests upon the basis of natural existence: he
-is the child of the earth, the offspring of natural organisation.
-But Nature itself--such is the hypothesis of the system--is only
-intelligible as the reflex of that _a priori_ which has been
-exhibited in Logic. The whole scheme by which the natural world is
-scientifically held together, apprehended by ordinary consciousness
-and elaborated by mathematical analysis, presupposes the organism
-of the categories--these fundamental habits of thought or form of
-conception which are the framework of the existence we know. Yet
-Nature never shows this intelligible world--the Idea--in its purity
-and entirety. In the half-literal, half-figurative phrases of Hegel,
-Nature shows the Idea beside itself, out of its mind, alienated, _non
-compos mentis._ 'It is a mad world, my masters,' 'The impotence of
-nature_--Ohnmacht der Natur_[6]--is a frequent phrase, by which he
-indicates the a-logical, if not illogical, character of the physical
-world. Here we come across the negation of mind: chance plays its part:
-contingency is everywhere. If you expect that the physical universe
-will _display_ unquestioning obedience to the laws of reason and of the
-higher logic, you will be disappointed. What you _see_ is fragmentary,
-chaotic, irregular. To the bodily sense--even when that sense has been
-rendered more penetrating by all the many material and methodical
-aids of advanced civilisation--the Idea is in the natural world
-presented only in traces, indications, portions, which it requires a
-well-prepared mind to descry, still more to unite. Yet at the same
-time the indications of that unity are everywhere, and the hypothesis
-of the logical scheme or organisation of the Idea is the only theory
-which seems fully to correspond with the data. Nature[7], says Hegel,
-is the Idea as it shows itself in sense-perception, not as it shows
-itself in thought. In thought a clear all-comprehending total; in sense
-a baffling fragment. The Idea--the unity of life and knowledge--is
-everywhere in nature, but nowhere clearly, or whole, or otherwise
-than a glimpse; not a logical scheme or compact theory. Nature is the
-sensible in which the intelligible is bound--the reality which is the
-vehicle of the ideal. But the ideal treasure is held in rough and
-fragile receptacles which half disclose and half conceal the light
-within. Nature in short contains, but disguised, the idea, in fainter
-and clearer evidences: it is the function of man, by his scientific
-intelligence and ethical work, building up a social organisation,
-to provide the ground on which the ultimate significance and true
-foundation of the world may be deciphered, guessed, or believed, or
-imaginatively presented. The verification of the guess or deciphering,
-of course, lies in its adequacy to explain and colligate the facts.
-The true method and true conception is that which needs no subsequent
-adjustments--no epicycles to make it work--which is no mere hypothesis
-useful for subjective arrangement, but issues with uncontrollable force
-and self-evidence from the facts.
-
-What Hegel has called the 'impotence of nature,' Schopenhauer has
-styled the irrational Will, and it is from that end, so to speak, that
-Schopenhauer's philosophy begins. Nature--the basis of all things--the
-fundamental prius--is an irresistible and irregular appetite or craving
-to be, to do, to live,--but an _appetitus_ or _nisus_ which ascends
-from grade to grade--from mere mechanical forces acting in movement up
-to the highest form of animal activity. But as this 'Will' or blind
-lust of being and instinct of life gets above the inorganic world, and
-manifests itself in the animal organism, there emerges a new order of
-existence--the intellect, or the ideal world. Seen from the underside,
-indeed, all that has appeared now in the animal is a brain and a
-nerve-system--a new species of matter. But there is another side to the
-Mind which has thus awakened out of the sleep of natural forces. This
-intellect is unaware and can never be made aware that it is a child of
-nature: it acknowledges no superior, and no beginning or end in time.
-Its natal day is infinitely beyond the age when the cosmic process
-began its race; before stars gathered their masses of luminosity, and
-the earth received the first germs of life. As the genius of Art, it
-arrests the toiling struggle of existence to produce new forms and
-destroy old ones; it sets free in typical forms of eternal beauty
-the great ideas that nature vainly seeks to embody, and as moral and
-religious life its aim is to annihilate the craving and the lust for
-more and ever more being and to enter in passionless and calm union
-with the One-and-All.
-
-Thus it is, if not absurd, at least misleading, to speak of Hegel's
-system as Panlogism. Strictly speaking, it is only of the Logic
-that this is the proper name: there, unquestionably, reason is all
-and in all. Yet to hold that reason is the very life and centre of
-things is for philosophy the cardinal article--the postulate which
-must inspire her first and last steps and guide her throughout. But
-the Logical Idea, if put at the beginning, is at first only put as a
-presupposition, which it is the task of human intelligence to work
-out and organise. If it be the key which is to explain nature and
-render it intelligible, it is a key which has only been gained in the
-process--the long process--by which man has risen from his natural
-origin--never however parting company with it--to survey and comprehend
-himself and his setting. The faculty of 'pure thinking,' which is the
-pre-condition of Logical study, is the result of a gradual development
-in which animal sense has grown, and metamorphosed, and worked itself
-up to be a free intelligence and a good will capable of discerning
-and fulfilling the universal and the eternal. Thus in the Logic the
-system constructs the pure Idea--the ideal timeless organisation of
-thoughts or λόγοι on which all knowledge of reality rests--the diamond
-net which suffers nothing to escape its meshes: in the Philosophy of
-Nature it tries to put together in unity and continuity the phases
-and partial aspects which the physical universe presents in graduated
-exemplification of the central truth: and in the Philosophy of Mind it
-traces the steps by which a merely natural being becomes the moral and
-aesthetic idealist in whom man approaches deity.
-
-It is indeed Hegel's fundamental axiom that actuality is reasonable.
-But the actuality is not the appearance--the temporary phases--the
-succession of event: it is the appearance rooted in its essence--the
-succession concentrated (yet not lost) in its unity. There is room
-for much so-called irrationality within these ranges. For, when
-human beings pronounce something irrational, they only mean that
-their practical intelligence would have adopted other methods to
-arrive at certain conclusions. They judge, in fact, by their limited
-understandings and not _ex ordine universi._ Hegel's doctrine is after
-all only another way of stating the maintenance of the fittest; and
-it is liable to the v same misconception by those who employ their
-personal aims as the standards of judgment.
-
-So too there is reason--there is the Idea--in Nature. But it is
-there only for the artist, the religious man, and the philosopher;
-and they see it respectively by the eye of genius, by the power of
-faith, by the thought of reason. They see it from the standpoint
-of the absolute_--sub specie quadam aeternitatis._ It is therefore
-a recalcitrant matter in which Nature presents the Idea: or, if
-recalcitrant suggests a positive opposition, let us say rather a realm
-in which the Idea fails to come out whole and clear, where unity has to
-be forced upon and read into the facts. Science, says one writer, is
-an ideal construction: it implies an abstraction from irregularities
-and inequalities: it smoothes and sublimates the rough and imperfect
-material into a more rounded and perfect whole. Its object, which it
-terms a reality, is a non-sensible, imperceptible reality: what one
-might as well call an ideality, were it not that here again the popular
-imagination twists the word into a subjective sense to mean the private
-and personal ideas of the student.
-
-But the obvious individual reality never quite in its obviousness
-equals the 'golden mediocrity' of the ideal. Its myriad grapes must be
-crushed to yield the wine of the spirit.
-
-    'It's a lifelong toil till our lump be leavened'
-
---till the ore be transformed into the fine gold. But the gold is
-there, and in the great laboratory of _natura_ _naturans_ is the
-principle and agent of its own purification. 'Nature is made better by
-no mean, but nature makes that mean'--for nature is spirit in disguise.
-
-It is on this side that a certain analogy of Hegel's and Schelling's
-philosophy of nature with the Romantic school comes out. Nature
-is felt, as it were, to be spirit-haunted, to give glimpses of a
-solidarity, a design, a providentiality, which runs counter to that
-general outward indifference in which part seems to have settled beside
-part, each utterly indifferent to the other. Romance is the unexpected
-coincidence, the sudden jumping together of what seemed set worlds
-apart and utterly alien. It was the sense of this Romance which wove
-its wild legends of nymph and cobold, of faun and river-god, of imp and
-fairy, wielding the powers of the elements and guiding the life of even
-the so-called inanimate world. But it is no less the theme of the fairy
-tale of science. Even in the austere demonstrations of geometry, and
-the constructions of mechanics, the un-looked-for slips upon us with
-gipsy tread. Who has not--in his early studies of mathematics--been
-fain to marvel at the almost unexpected consilience of property with
-property in a figure, suddenly placing in almost 'eery' relief the
-conjunction of what was apparently poles asunder? It is not a mere
-form of words to speak of beautiful properties of a conic section or
-a curve. Custom perhaps has blunted our sense for the symmetries of
-celestial dynamics, but they are none the less admirable, because we
-are otherwise engrossed. To the first generation of our century the
-phenomena of chemistry, magnetism and electricity appealed--as they
-have never since done--with a tangible demonstration of that _appetitus
-ad invicem,_ that instinct of union Bacon speaks of; and this time in
-a higher form than in mere mechanism. Polarity--the bifurcation of
-reality into a pair of opposites which yet sought their complement
-in each other--eternally dividing only eternally to unite, and thus
-only to exist--became a process pressed into general service. Lastly,
-what more admirable than that adaptation of the individual to the
-environment--and of the environment to the individual--of the organs in
-him to his total, and of his total to his organs. One in all and All in
-one: one life in perpetual transformation, animals, plants, and earth
-and air; one organism, developing in absolute coherence. This was the
-vision which the genius of Schelling and his contemporaries saw--the
-same vision which, by accumulation of facts and pictorial history,
-Darwin and his disciples have impressed in some measure even on the
-dullest.
-
-But there is a profound difference between the spirit of a Philosophy
-of Nature and the aggregate of the physical sciences. Each science
-takes the particular quarry which accident or providence has assigned
-to it, and does its best to 'put out' every piece of rock it contains.
-But it seldom goes, unless by constraint, and in these days of
-specialisation it does so less and less, to examine the neighbouring
-excavation, and see if there be any connexion between the strata. Even
-within its own domain it is ashamed to put forward too much parade of
-system. Its method is often like that of the showman in the travelling
-menagerie: 'And now, please pass to the next carriage.' It respects
-the compartmental arrangement into which it finds the world broken up,
-and often thinks it has deserved well if it has filled the compartment
-fuller than before, or succeeded in creating a few sub-compartments
-within the old bounds. Even the so-called mental and moral sciences
-when they lose their philosophical character tend to imitate these
-features. Yet in every science there is an outlook and an outlet,
-for whosoever has the will and the power, to emerge from his narrow
-domain on the open fields and free prospect into the first fountains
-and last great ocean of being. Always, and not least in our own day,
-the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist, the psychologist, the
-sociologist, and the economist, have made their special field a
-platform where they might discourse _de omnibus rebus,_ and become
-for the nonce philosophers and metaphysicians. It would be a silly
-intolerance and a misconception of the situation to exclaim _Ne sutor
-ultra crepidam_. In the organic system of things 'each "moment" even
-independent of the whole is the whole; and to see this is to penetrate
-to the heart of the thing.' We need hardly go to Hegel to be told that
-to know one thing thoroughly well is to know all things. The finite,
-which we inertly rest content with, would, if we were in full sympathy
-with it, open up its heart and show us the infinite. And yet if the
-specialist when he rises from his shoe-making, with a heart full of
-the faith that 'there is nothing like leather,' should proclaim his
-discovery of it in regions where it was hitherto unsurmised, one may
-smile incredulous and be no cynic.
-
-Philosophy then keeps open eye and ear--as far as may be no doubt for
-the finer shades and delicate details--but essentially for the music
-of humanity and the music of the spheres--for the general purpose and
-drift of all sciences--from mathematics to sociology--as they help to
-make clear the life of nature and further the emancipation of man. It
-will seem occasionally to over-emphasise the continuity of science
-and to make light of its distinctions: it will seem occasionally more
-anxious as to the order than as to the contents of the sciences: it
-will remind the sciences of the hypothetical and formal character of
-much of their method and some of their principles: and sometimes will
-treat as unimportant, results on which the mere scholar or dogmatist
-of science lays great weight. From his habit of dealing with the
-limitations and mutual implication of principles and conceptions,
-the philosopher will often be able--and perhaps only too willing--to
-point out cases where the mere specialist has allowed himself to
-attribute reality to his abstraction. He will tell the analyst of
-the astronomical motions that he must not take the distinction of
-centrifugal and centripetal force, into which mechanics disintegrate
-the planetary orbit, as if it really meant that the planet was pulled
-inward by one force and sent on spinning forward by another[8]. And
-the scientist, proud of his mathematics, will resent and laugh at
-the philosopher who lets fall a word about the planets moving in
-grand independence like 'blessed gods.' The philosopher will hint to
-the chemist that his formulae of composition and decomposition of
-bodies are, as he uses them, somewhat mythological, picturing water
-as atom of oxygen locked up with atom of hydrogen; and the chemist
-will go away muttering something about a fool who does not believe
-in the well-ascertained chemical truth that water is composed of
-these two gases. If the philosopher further hints that it is not the
-highest ideal of a chemical science to be content with enumerating
-fifty or sixty elements, and detecting their several properties
-and affinities[9]; that it would be well to find some principle of
-gradation, some unity or law which brought meaning into meaningless
-juxtaposition, the mere dogmatist, whose chemistry is his living and
-who shrinks from disendowment, will scent a propensity towards the
-heresy which sinks all elements in one. And yet, even among chemists,
-the instinct for law and unity begins to demand satisfaction.
-
-A still richer store of amazing paradox and perplexing analogies awaits
-anyone who will turn over the volume in Hegel's _Werke_ (vii. i) and
-select the plums which lie thick in the lecture-notes. He will find
-a great deal--and probably more, the less he really knows of any of
-the subjects under discussion--that he cannot make head or tail of:
-language where he cannot guess whether it should be taken literally or
-figuratively. For Hegel seriously insists on the essential unity and
-identity of all the compartments of the physical universe; he will not
-keep time and space on one level, matter and motion on another, and
-senses, suns, plants, passions, all in their proper province. Going
-far beyond the theory which supposes that all the complex difference
-of organisation has grown up in endless, endless ages from a primitive
-indistinctness, so that the gap of time acts as a wall to keep early
-and late apart, Hegel insists upon their essential unity to-day. And
-that sounds hard--the herald of anarchy, of the collapse of the ordered
-polity of the scientific state. It is no doubt probable that Hegel,
-like other men, made mistakes; that he over-estimated the supposed
-discoveries of the day: that he indulged in false analogies, and that
-he was attracted by a daring paradox. All this has nothing to do with
-his main thesis: which is, that the natural realm is as it stands an
-a-logical realm where reason has gone beside itself, and yet containing
-an instrument--man, and that is mind--by which its rationality may be
-realised and restored. In that point at least he and Schopenhauer are
-at one.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Kant's _Kritik d. r. Vernunft_: Methodenl. Architektonik
-d. r. Vern.]
-
-[Footnote 2: Schelling's Werke, v. 116.]
-
-[Footnote 3: Ibid. v. 276.]
-
-[Footnote 4: Ibid. iii. 267.]
-
-[Footnote 5: Kant, _Kritik d. r. Vern.,_ Deduction of the Categories,
-Sect. III.]
-
-[Footnote 6: _Encyclopaedie_, § 250.]
-
-[Footnote 7: _Encycl._ Sect. 244 (_Logic,_ p. 379).]
-
-[Footnote 8: _Encyclop._ §§ 266, 269; cf. the lecture-note as given
-in _Werke_ vii i. p. 97. A large number of paradoxical analogies
-from Hegel's _Naturphilosophie_ has been collected by Riehl in his
-_Philosophisher Criticismus_, ii. 2, 120.]
-
-[Footnote 9: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. 419.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VIII.
-
-
-THE SCEPTICAL DOUBT: HUME.
-
-
-We have seen that an innate tendency leads the human mind to connect
-and set in relation,--to connect, it may be erroneously, or without
-proper scrutiny, or under the influence of passions or prejudices,--but
-at any rate to connect. Criticism occasionally has impatiently banned
-this tendency as a mere fountain of errors. The human mind, says
-Francis Bacon, always assumes a greater uniformity in things than it
-finds; it expects symmetry, is bold in neglecting exceptional cases,
-and would fain go beyond all limits in its everlasting cry, Why and To
-what end. It varies in individuals between a passion for discovering
-similarities and an intent acuteness to every shade of unlikeness. But
-notwithstanding these warnings of the hen, the ugly duckling Reason
-_will_ go beyond what is given: it knows no insuperable limitation.
-It may be guilty of what Bacon calls 'anticipation'--an induction
-on evidence insufficient--or it may subdue itself to the duty of
-'interpretation' of nature by proper methods: in either case, it is
-an act of association, synthesis, unification. For Nous _is_ archè,
-and knows that it is: it will not yield to clamour or mere rebuke: it,
-too, cannot be commanded, unless by first obeying it: and Bacon, having
-duly objurgated the 'mind left to itself,' is obliged to let it go to
-gather the grapes before they are quite ripe, and to indulge it with
-a 'prerogative' of instances. As Mr. Herbert Spencer and many others
-are never weary of telling us: 'We think in relations. This is truly
-the form of all thought: and if there are any other forms they must be
-derived from this[1].' Man used to be defined as a thinking or rational
-animal: which means that man is a connecting and relation-giving
-animal; and from this, Aristotle's definition, making him out to be
-a 'political' animal, is only a corollary, most applicable in the
-region of Ethics. Here is the ultimate point, from which the natural
-consciousness, and the energies of science, art, and religion equally
-start upon their special missions.
-
-In ordinary life we attach but little importance to this machinery of
-cognition. We incline to let the fact of synthesis drop out of sight,
-as if it required no further study or notice, and we regard the things
-connected as exclusively worth attending to. The interest centres
-on the object--on the matter: the formal element--the connective
-tissue--is _only_ an instrument of no importance, except in view of
-the end it helps us to. We use general and half-explained terms, such
-as development, evolution, continuity, as bridges from one thing to
-another, without giving any regard to the means of locomotion on their
-own account. Some one thing is the product of something else: we let
-the term 'product' slip out of the proposition as unimportant: and
-then read the statement so as to explain the one thing by turning it
-into the other. Things, according to this opinion, are all-important:
-the rest is mere words. These relations between things are not open
-to further investigation or definition: they are each _sui generis,_
-or peculiar: and even if the logician in his analysis of inference
-finds it advisable to deal with them, he will be content, if he can
-classify them in some approximate way, as a basis for his subdivision
-of propositions. This is certainly one way of getting rid of
-Metaphysics--for the time.
-
-But there are epochs in life, and epochs in universal history, when the
-mind withdraws from its immersion in active life, and reflects upon its
-own behaviour as on the proceedings of some strange creature, of which
-it is a mere spectator. At such seasons when we stop to reflect upon
-the partial scene, and close our eyes to the totality, doubts begin to
-arise, whether our procedure is justified when we unify and combine the
-isolated phenomena. Have we any right to throw our own subjectivity,
-the laws of our imagination and thought, into the natural world? Would
-it not be more proper to refrain altogether from the use of such
-conceptions?
-
-Philosophy, said one of the ancients[2], begins in wonder, and ends in
-wonder. It begins from the surprise that something could _be_ what it
-purports to be: it ends in the marvel of our having _thought_ anything
-else possible. Such a phrase well becomes the naive age in which the
-soul goes freely forth, wandering from one novelty to another, curious
-to find out all that can be known,--like the young wanderer on the
-sea-shore whom fresh pebbles and new shells tempt endlessly to fill his
-basket. But as the ages roll on, and the accumulations of the past grow
-heavier in the receptacle, the need of a re-examination of the stores
-becomes imperative. The bright colours have faded--and generally
-they fade soon: there has been much picked up in the inexperience of
-youthful enthusiasm which maturer reflection hardly can think worth
-carrying further.
-
-The duty of doubt and of re-examination of what tradition has
-bequeathed has been enforced by philosophy in all ages. For it is the
-cardinal principle of philosophy to be free--to possess its soul--never
-to be a mere machine or mere channel of tradition. But, in some ages,
-this assertion of its freedom has had for the soul a pre-eminently
-negative aspect. It has meant only freedom _from_--and not also freedom
-_in_ and _through_--its environing, or rather constituting, substance.
-Such an epoch was seen in the ancient world when the _New Academy_,
-with its sceptical abstention from all objective assertions, had to
-protest against the dogmatism of the Stoic and Epicurean schoolmen.
-In modern times the initial shudder before plunging in has been a
-recurrent crisis. Each thinker--as he personally resolved to thread his
-way through the wilderness of current opinion to the realm of certified
-truth--has had to remind himself (and his contemporaries) that in
-knowledge at least no possessions are secured property unless they have
-been earned by the sweat of their owner's brow. This is the common
-theme of Bacon's aphorisms in the beginning of the _Novum Organum_, of
-Descartes' _Discourse of Method_, and of Spinoza's unfinished essay
-on the _Emendation of the Intellect._ There is indeed a discrepancy
-in these utterances as to the measure in which they severally think
-it needful to insist as preliminary on a kind of moral and religious
-consecration of life to the service of truth. But a more compelling
-division arises. The maxim may be understood to say, 'Divest thy mind
-of its ill-gotten gains, its evil habits, prejudices, and system,
-and in childlike simplicity prepare thine eye and ear to receive in
-pure vessels the stores of truth which are ready to stream in from
-the world.' Or it may rather be held to say, 'Remember that thou art
-a conscious, waking mind, and that every idea thou hast is thine by
-thine own assent: insist upon thy right of free intelligence, and give
-no place to any belief which thou hast not raised into full light of
-consciousness, and found to be completely consistent with the whole
-power and content of thy clearest thought.' And, we may add, if the
-maxim be obeyed too exclusively in either way, it will be obeyed amiss.
-
-With Locke the question comes into even greater prominence. On
-what conditions can I have knowledge? How can I be certified that
-my ideas--the subjective images in _my_ mind--have a reference to
-something objective and real? Locke's answer is, not unnaturally
-perhaps, somewhat prolix, and wanting in fundamental precision of
-principles. After dismissing the view that, even before experience,
-there are certain common ideas spontaneously and by original endowment
-present in all human beings, he goes on to show how we can sufficiently
-account for the ideas we actually find by supposing in us an almost
-unlimited power of joining and disjoining, of comparing, relating,
-and unifying the various elementary 'ideas' which make their way into
-the empty chambers of our mind by the senses. As to the source, the
-channel, and the nature of these sense-ideas, Locke is obscure and
-apparently inconsistent: though clearly it should be all important
-to know how an idea can be caused by, or spring from, a material
-thing. When in his fourth book he comes to the question of what is the
-reality, or the _meaning_ of our ideas, he does not really get beyond a
-few--rather dubiously reasoned-out--conclusions that, although strictly
-we cannot go beyond 'the present testimony of our senses employed
-about the particular objects that do affect them,' we may for practical
-purposes allow a good deal to the presumptions of general probability.
-
-But Locke had also begun to criticise our ideas, in his account of
-their formation out of the 'simple ideas'-- (which neither Locke
-nor any other atomist of mind has succeeded in making clear)--which
-the several senses give, and by observing or reflecting on what
-goes on or is present in _our_ minds, _we_ 'form,' he says, various
-ideas. In a style of discussion which is on the borderland between
-vulgar and philosophical analysis-- (never quite false, but nearly
-always inadequate, because it almost invariably assumes what it
-ostensibly proposes to explain,) Locke tells us how we get one idea by
-'enlarging,' another by 'repeating,' as we please, the bounteous data
-of the touch and sight. But amongst the compounds there are some of
-more disputable origin. There are some--e.g. ideas of punishable acts
-or legalised states--which are 'voluntary collections of ideas put
-together in the mind independent from any original patterns in nature,'
-These, though entirely subjective, are entirely real, because they only
-serve as patterns by which we may judge or designate things so and so.
-It is worse with the idea of power, which we only 'collect' or 'infer,'
-and that not from matter, where it is invisible, but only in a clear
-light when we consider God and spirits. Still worse, perhaps, is it
-with the idea of substance, which is a 'collection' of simple ideas
-with the 'supposition' of an 'incomprehensible' something in which the
-collection 'subsists.'
-
-Hump put all this rather more pointedly. We have 'impressions,' i.
-e. lively perceptions by sense. We have also 'ideas,' i. e. fainter
-images of these, but otherwise identical. An idea _should_ be a copy
-of an impression. If you cannot point out any such impression, you
-may be certain you are mistaken when you imagine you have any such
-idea. There is prevalent in the mental world a kind of association; a
-'gentle force' connects ideas in our imagination according to certain
-relations they possess. This 'mind' or this 'imagination' is only a
-bundle or collection of impressions and ideas; but a collection which
-is continually and rapidly changing in its constituents, and in the
-scale of liveliness possessed by each constituent. When an idea is
-particularly fresh and forcible, it is a _belief_ or it is believed in:
-when faint, not so. Or, otherwise put, the object of an idea is _said_
-to _exist_, when the idea itself is vividly _felt_[3]. Really there is
-no such thing as 'external existence' taken literally. 'Our universe is
-the universe of the imagination': all existence is for a consciousness.
-
-Impressions arise in certain orders of sequence or co-existence. When
-two impressions frequently recur and always in the same order, the
-custom binds them so closely together, that, should one of them only be
-given as impression, we cannot help having an idea of the other, which,
-growing more vivid by the contagion of the contiguous impression,
-creates, or is, a belief in its reality. Between the perceptions
-as such, there is no connexion; they are distinct and independent
-existences. They only get a connexion through _our feeling; we feel_
-a 'determination' of our thought to pass from one to another. The
-one impression has no power to produce the other; the one thing does
-not cause the other. 'We never have any impression that contains any
-power or efficacy[4],' Hence the power and necessity we attribute to
-the so-called causal agent and to the connexion are an illegitimate
-transference from our feeling, and a mistranslation of _our_
-incapacity to resist the force of habitual association into a real
-bond between the two impressions _themselves,_ The necessity is in the
-mind--as a habit-caused compulsion--not in the objects.
-
-As with the relation of cause and effect, so it is with others. The
-identity of continued existence is only another name--an objective
-transcript--of the feeling of smooth uninterrupted succession of
-impressions in which our thought glides along from one in easy
-transition to another. And here the coherence and continuity of
-perceptions need not be absolute. A vivid impression of unbroken
-connexion in a part will, if predominant, by association fill up the
-gaps and weak points, and behind the admitted breaks in the line of
-our ideas will suppose--invent--or create an imperceptible but _real_
-continuity in the supposed things. And by this fiction of a continuous
-existence of our perceptions, we easily lapse into the doctrine that
-our perceptions have an independent existence as objects or things in
-themselves:--a doctrine which according to Hume is contrary to the
-plainest experience.
-
-But if the world is always the world of imagination--of
-_Vorstellung_--of mental representation, Hume is aware that we must
-admit two orders or grades of such representation. We must distinguish,
-he remarks[5], 'in the imagination betwixt the principles which
-are permanent, irresistible and universal (such as the customary
-transition from causes to effects and from effects to causes), and the
-principles which are changeable, weak and irregular. The former are
-the foundation of all our thoughts and actions,' There are, in other
-words, normal and general laws of association--such as the relation
-of cause and effect--which persuade us of real existence. By its own
-laws, therefore, within the realm of _Vorstellung_ or Mental idea,
-there grows up a permanent, objective world for all, contrasted with
-the temporary, accidental perception of the individual and of the
-moment; and this serves as the standard or the one common measure by
-which occasional perturbations are to be measured. Within the limits of
-the subjective in general there arises a subjective of higher order,
-which is truly objective. This same change of front--as it may be
-called--Hume makes in morals. There the mind can modify and control
-its passions according as it can feel the objects of them near or far;
-and though each of us has his 'peculiar position,' we can--so creating
-the ethical basis--'fix on some steady and general points of view, and
-always in our thoughts place ourselves in them, whatever may be our
-present situation[6]': we can 'choose some common point of view,' and
-from the vantage-ground of a permanent principle, however distant, we
-have a chance of gaining the victory over our passion, however near.
-
-Thus far Hume had gone in the development of idealism,' Whether his
-theory is consistent from end to end, need not be here discussed. But
-it is evident that Hume was not lost in the quagmire of subjective
-idealism. The objective and the subjective are with him akin: the
-objective is the subjective, which is universal, permanent, and normal.
-The causal relation has, in the first instance, only a subjective
-necessity; but through that subjective necessity or its irresistible
-belief, it generates an objective world. But it has been and is the
-fortune of philosophers to be known in the philosophical world by some
-conspicuous red rag of their system which first caught the eye of the
-bull-like leaders of the human herd. It was so notably with Hobbes
-and Spinoza; and most of the thinkers whose names appear in the pages
-of Kant suffer from this curtailment. Descartes, Locke, Leibniz,
-Berkeley, Hume, are _there_ not the real philosophers, discoverable in
-their works, but the creatures of historic reputation and of popular
-simplification who do duty for them.
-
-Kant's Hume is therefore a somewhat imaginary being: the product,
-partly of imperfect knowledge of Hume's writings, partly of
-prepossessions derived from a long previous training in German
-rationalism. Such a Hume was--or would have been, had he existed--a
-philosopher who 'took the objects of experience for things in
-themselves,' who 'treated the conception of cause as a false and
-deceptive illusion,' who did not indeed venture to assail the certainty
-of mathematics, but held--as regards all knowledge about the existence
-of things-- 'empiricism to be the sole source of principles,' founding
-his conclusion mainly on an examination of the causal nexus[7]. This
-'note of warning' sounded against the claims of pure reason--as he
-calls Hume's _Enquiry_ was what about 1762 broke Kant's dogmatic
-slumber and forced him to give his researches in speculative philosophy
-a new direction. His first step was to generalise Hume's problem from
-an inquiry into the origin of the causal idea into a general study
-of the synthetic principles in knowledge. His next was to attempt to
-fix the number of these concepts and synthetic principles. And his
-third was to 'deduce' them: i. e., to prove the reciprocal implication
-between experience or knowledge and the concepts or categories of
-intelligence.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: _First Principles_, p. 162. It may be as well to remark
-that Relation is scarcely an adequate description of the nature of
-thought as a whole. We shall see when we come to the theory of logic,
-that the term is applicable--and then somewhat imperfectly--only to the
-second phase of thought, the categories of reflection, which are the
-favourite categories of science and popular metaphysics.]
-
-[Footnote 2: Arist. _Metaph._ i. 2. 26.]
-
-[Footnote 3: _Treatise of Human Nature_ (Understanding), iii. 7 and ii.
-6.]
-
-[Footnote 4: Ibid. iii. 14.]
-
-[Footnote 5: _Treatise of Human Nature_ (Understanding iv. 4.)]
-
-[Footnote 6: _Treatise of Human Nature_ (Morals), iii. i.]
-
-[Footnote 7: Kant, _Prolegomena_ to Metaph. Introduction and _Crit. of
-Practical Reason_ (on the Claim of Pure Reason, _Werke,_ viii. 167).]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IX.
-
-
-THE ATTEMPT AT A CRITICAL SOLUTION: KANT.
-
-
-The _Criticism of Pure Reason_ has been described by its author as a
-generalisation of Hume's problem. Hume, he thought, had treated his
-question on the 'relations of ideas' in their bearing upon 'matters of
-fact' mainly with reference to the isolated case of cause and effect.
-Kant extended the inquiry so as to comprise all those connective and
-unifying ideas which form the subject-matter of metaphysics. In his own
-technical language--which has lost its meaning for the present day--he
-asked, 'Are Synthetic judgments _a priori_ possible?'--a question which
-in another place he has translated into the form, 'Is the metaphysical
-faith of men sound, and is a metaphysical science possible?' By a
-metaphysics he meant in the first instance the belief in a more than
-empirical reality, and secondly the science which should give real
-knowledge of God, Freedom and Immortality,--a science whose objects
-would be God, the World, and the Soul. From a comparatively early date
-(1762-4) Kant had been inclined to suspect and distrust the claims
-of metaphysics to replace faith, and to give knowledge of spiritual
-reality; and he had tried to vindicate for the moral and religious life
-an independence of the conclusions and methods of the metaphysical
-theology and psychology of the day. But it was not till some years
-later--in 1770--that he formulated any very definite views as to the
-essential conditions of scientific knowledge: and it was not till 1781
-that his theory on the subject was put together in a provisionally
-complete shape.
-
-What then are the criteria of a science? When is our thought knowledge,
-and of objective reality? In the first place, there must be a given
-something--a sens_-datum_--an 'impression' as Hume might have said. If
-there be no impression, therefore, there can be no scientific idea,
-no real knowledge. There must be the primary touch--the feeling--the
-affection--the _je ne sais quoi_ of contact with reality. Secondly,
-what is given can only be received if taken up by the recipient, and
-in such measure as he is able to appropriate it. The given is received
-in a certain mode. In the present case, the sensation is apprehended
-and perceived under the forms of space and time. Perception, in other
-words, whatever may be its special quality or its sensuous material,
-is always an act of dating and localisation. The distinction between
-the mere lump of feeling or sensibility and the perception is that
-the latter implies a field of extended and mutually excluding parts
-of space, and a series of points of time, both field and series being
-continuous, and, so far as inexhaustibility goes, infinite. Thirdly,
-even in the reception of the given there is a piece of action and
-spontaneity. If the more passive recipiency be called Sense, this
-active element in the adaptation may be termed Intellect. Intellect is
-a power or process of choice, selection, comparison, distinguishing and
-dividing, analysis and synthesis, affirmation and negation, numeration,
-of judgment and doubt, of connexion and disjunction, differentiation
-and integration. Its general aspect is by Kant sometimes described
-as Judgment--the act of thought which correlates by distinguishing;
-sometimes as Apperception, and the unity of apperception. It is, i.
-e., an active unity and a synthetic energy; it unifies, and always
-unifies. It links perception to perception, correlating one with
-another--interpreting one by another; estimating the knowledge-value of
-one by the rest. It thus 'apperceives.' It is a faculty of association
-and consociation of ideas. But the association is inward and 'ideal'
-union: the one idea interpenetrates and fuses with the other, even
-while it remains distinct.
-
-Kant's work may be described--in its first stage--as an analysis and a
-criticism of experience. The term Experience is an ambiguous one. It
-sometimes means what has been called the 'raw material' of experience:
-the crude, indigested mass of poured-in _matter_-of-knowledge. If
-there be such a shapeless lump anywhere,--which has to be considered
-presently--it, at any rate, is not on Kant's view properly entitled to
-the name of Experience. The Given must be felt and apprehended: and--to
-put the point paradoxically--to be felt it must be more than felt,--it
-must be perceived. It must, in other words, be projected--set in space
-and time: let out of the mere dull inner subjectivity of feeling into
-the clear and distinct outer subjectivity of perception. But, again,
-to be perceived, it must be apperceived: to be set in time and space,
-it must first of all be in the hands of the unifying consciousness,
-which is the lord of time and space. For in so far as space and time
-mean a place and an order--in so far as they mean more than an empty
-inconceivable receptacle for bulks of sensation, in the same degree
-do they presuppose an intellectual, synthetic genius, which is in all
-its perceptions one and the same,--the fundamental, original unity of
-consciousness. And this analysis of experience is transcendental.'
-Beginning with the assumed datum--the object of or in experience--it
-shows that this object which is supposed to be _there_--to exist by
-itself and wait for perception--is created by and in the very act which
-apprehends it. Climbing up and rising above its habitual absorption
-_in_ the _thing_, consciousness (that of the philosophic observer and
-analyst) sees the thing in the act of making, and watches its growth.
-
-We have seen that Kant made free use of the metaphor of giving and
-receiving. But it is hardly possible to use such metaphors and retain
-independence of judgment. The associations customarily attached to the
-figurative language carry one away easily, and often for a long way, on
-the familiar paths of imagination. The analogy is used even where--if
-all were looked into--its terms become meaningless. No reader of Locke
-can have failed, e. g., to notice how he is misled by his own images of
-the dark room and the empty cabinet:--images, useful and perhaps even
-necessary, but requiring constant restraint in him who would ply them
-wisely and to his reader's good. From what has been said above it will
-be clear that the acquisition of experience, the growth of knowledge,
-is a unique species of gift and acceptance. The consciousness which
-Kant describes may be the consciousness of John Doe or Richard Roe:
-but as Kant describes it, the limitations of their personality,
-i.e. of their individual body and soul, have been neglected. It is
-consciousness in general which is Kant's theme, just as it is granite
-in general--and not the block in yonder field,--which is the theme
-of the geologist. Once get that clear, and you will also see clearly
-that consciousness is at once giver and recipient--neither or both:
-at once receptivity and spontaneity. But--you may reply--does not the
-material object _act_ (chemically, optically, mechanically, &c.) on
-the sense-organ on the periphery of my body, does not the nerve-string
-_convey_ the impression to the brain; and is not perception the
-_effect_ of that process, in which the material object is the initial
-_cause_?
-
-In this exposition--which is not unknown in vulgar philosophy--there
-is a monstrous, almost inextricable, complication of fact with
-inference, of truth with error. So long as there is an uncertainty--and
-metaphysicians themselves, we may be reminded, are not agreed upon the
-matter--as to what we are to understand by cause, effect, and act,
-what an impression is, and how brain and intelligence mutually stand
-to each other, it is hardly possible to pronounce judgment upon this
-mode of statement. Yet perhaps we may go so far as to say that while
-the terms quoted bear an intelligible meaning when applied within the
-physiological process they are vain when used of relations of mind to
-body. There is a sense in which we may speak of the action of mind
-on body, and of body on mind: but what we mean would perhaps be more
-unmistakably expressed by saying that the higher intellectual and
-volitional energies are never in our experience entirely independent
-of the influences of the lower sensitive and emotional nature. In
-the metaphysical sense which the terms are here made to bear, they
-mislead. Action and re-action can only take place in the separateness
-of space, where one is here and another there: (though, be it added,
-they cannot take place even on these terms, unless the here and the
-there be somehow unified in a medium which embraces both). _Mens_, said
-Spinoza, is the _idea corporis_[1]: he would hardly have said _Corpus
-habet ideam_. What he meant would scarcely have been well described by
-calling it a _parallelism_ or mutual independence, yet with harmony or
-identity, of body and mind. Apart from body, no doubt, mind is for him
-a nullity: for body is what gives it reality. But, on the other hand,
-Mind is the enveloping and including 'Attribute' of the two: idealism
-overlaps realism.
-
-This was the fundamental proposition which Kant contended for; what he
-spoke of as his own Copernican discovery: though, in reality, for the
-_student_ of the history of philosophy it was only the re-statement,
-in some respects the clearer statement, of the idealism which even
-Hume, not to mention Spinoza and Leibniz, had maintained. The world
-of experience--the empirical, objective, and real world--is a world
-of ideas, of representations which have place only in mind, of
-appearances. Space and time are subjective: the forms of thought are
-subjective: and yet they constitute phenomenal or empirical or real
-objectivity. Such language is--it would seem inevitably--misunderstood:
-and in his second edition, Kant--besides many other minor modifications
-of statement,--had to defend himself by inserting a 'confutation of
-idealism,' i.e. of the theory which holds that the existence of objects
-outside us in space is doubtful, if not even impossible. But no end
-of argument will ever confute the view that Kant's doctrine is such
-idealism: until people can be got to rise to a new view of what is
-subjectivity--what is an idea--and what is existence outside us.
-
-By 'subjective' the world is in the way of understanding what is due
-to personal prepossession, void of general acceptability, a product of
-individual feeling, peculiar and inexplicable tastes. By subjective
-Kant means what belongs to _the_ subject or knowing mind as such and
-in its generality: what is constitutive of intelligence in general,
-what sense and intellect are _semper et ubique_. Into the question
-how the human being came to have such an intellectual endowment--the
-question which Nativist psychology is supposed to settle in one way;
-and Evolutionism in another--Kant does not enter; he merely says
-where there is knowledge, there is a knower,--a knowing subject _so_
-constituted. It comes after all to the tautology that the reality we
-know is a known reality: that knowledge is a growth in the knower,
-and not an accidental product due to things otherwise unknown. The
-predicate (or category) _'is'_ is contained, implicit, in the predicate
-'_is known,_' or what '_is_' puts implicitly, '_is known_' puts
-explicitly and truly.
-
-By 'appearance' the world understands a sham, or at least somewhat
-short of reality. By appearance Kant understands a reality which has
-appeared: or, as that is going too far, a something which is real
-so far as it goes (a _prima facie_ fact), but only a candidate for
-admission into the circle of reals. And such reality depends on nothing
-more than its thorough-going coherence with other appearances, its
-explaining the rest, and being in turn explained by them,--its absolute
-adaptation to its environment. And this environment all lies in the
-common field of consciousness, and in the one correlating and unifying
-apperceptivity of the ego,--that Ego which is the inseparable comrade,
-vehicle, and judge, of all our perceptions. It is the appearance--but
-as yet not the appearance _of_ something,--but rather an appearance
-_to_ or _for_ something.
-
-By an 'idea' the world in general understands what it is sometimes
-ready to call a _mere_ idea. And by a mere idea is meant something
-which is _not_ reality, but a peculiarity of an individual mind, or
-group of minds-a fancy, without objective truth:--something, we may
-even add, which for many people is located in their own head or brain,
-cut off by blank bone-walls from the open air of real being. By idea
-(representation, _Vorstellung_) Kant meant that an object is always
-and essentially the object of a mind: always relative to a subject
-consciousness, and implying it, just as a subject consciousness always
-implies an object.
-
-And by 'existence outside us' the world probably means--for it is
-imprudent to define and refine too much in this hazy medium of words
-where we all drowse--existence of things on an independent footing
-beyond the limits of our personal, i. e. bodily and sentient, self.
-As regards _our own_ trunk and limbs, most of us, except in some most
-strange insanity, are not likely ever to be in doubt, and are indeed
-more likely, after Schopenhauer's model, to take the knowledge of these
-_personalia_ as the one thing immediately and intuitively certain. We
-talk freely enough, it is true, about existence outside our own minds;
-but it is only a drastic method of stating the difference between a
-fancy and a fact. And probably we labour under a half-unconscious
-hallucination that our minds are localised in some material 'seat,'
-somewhere in our bodily limits, and more especially in the central
-nerve-organs.
-
-But, as has been said elsewhere[2], the point of view under which Mind
-is regarded by Kant is that of Consciousness, and especially perceptive
-consciousness. He describes, as we have put it above, the steps or
-conditions under which the single sense-observation is elevated into
-the rank of an experience claiming universality and necessity. But
-the whole machinery of consciousness--the form of sensibility and the
-category of intellect--is originally set in motion by an impetus
-from without: or at least the manipulating machinery requires a raw
-material on which to operate. Consciousness, or the observer who
-takes this point of view, feels that it is being played upon by an
-unknown performer--or that it is attempting to apprehend something,
-which, because the act of apprehension is also to some extent (and to
-what extent, who can say?) a transmutation, it must for ever fail to
-apprehend truly. It is haunted by the phantom of a real,--a thing in
-its own right, which can only appear in forms of sense and intellect,
-never in its own essential being. It is only a short step further--and
-Kant, if one may judge him by several isolated passages, has more than
-once crossed the interval,--to treat, after the manner of uneducated
-consciousness and of popular science, the thing in its independent
-being as the cause which produces the sensation, or as the original
-which the mental idea reproduces under the distortions or modifications
-rendered necessary by the sensuous-intellectual medium. For, if under
-the terms of one analogy the perception is an _effect_ of the thing,
-under those of another it is an _image_ or copy of external reality.
-
-If this be Kantian philosophy--and it can quote chapter and verse in
-its favour--Kantian philosophy is one version of the great dogma of
-the relativity of knowledge. That unhappy phrase seems to have many
-meanings, but none of absolutely catholic acceptation. It may mean that
-knowledge of things states their relations--the way they behave in
-reference to this or that, in these or those circumstances; and that
-of an utterly unrelated and _absolutely_ isolated thing, our knowledge
-is and must be _nil._ Of a thing-in-itself we can know nothing; for
-there is nothing to know. It may mean that knowledge is relative to the
-recipient or the knower,--that it is not a product which can stand
-by itself, but needs a vehicle and an object in close relation. In
-this way, too, knowledge is relative to age and circumstances: grows
-from period to period, and may even decay. And thirdly, the relativity
-of knowledge may be taken to mean that we (and all human beings) can
-never know the reality; because we can only know the phenomenon, i.
-e. the modified, transmuted, reflected thing which has reconstituted
-an image of itself after passing the interfering medium. For, first
-of all, we must strip it--this 'image' so-called (the vulgar call
-it the 'thing')--of the secondary qualities (sound, colour, taste,
-resistance) which it has in the consciousness of a being dependent on
-his sense-organs: and then, we must get rid also of those quantitative
-attributes (figure, number, size) which it has in the consciousness
-of a spatially and temporally perceptive being;--and then;--but the
-prospect is too horrible to continue further and face the Gorgon's head
-in the outer darkness, where man denudes appearance in the hope to meet
-reality.
-
-The fact is, there are too many strands in the web which Kant is
-weaving, for him or perhaps for any man to keep them all well in hand
-and lose none of the symmetry of the pattern he designs. To be just, we
-must, in dealing with him as with any other philosopher, try to keep
-in view the unity of that design instead of insisting too minutely and
-too definitely upon its occasional defects. It is easy to work the pun
-that a 'critical' philosophy must itself expect to be criticised; it is
-more important to remember that by a criticism Kant meant an attempt to
-steer a course between the always enticing extremes of dogmatism and
-scepticism,--an attempt to be fair, i. e. just to both sides, and yet
-neither to sink into the systematised placidity of the former, nor to
-rove in a mere guerilla warfare with the latter. And it is the mere
-privateer who in the popular sense of the word is the mere critic.
-
-Of Kant we must remember that he has the defects of his qualities.
-He prides himself on his distinctions of sense and intellect, of
-imagination and understanding, of understanding and reason; and with
-justice: but his distinctions are sometimes so decisive that it is
-hard work both for him and for his reader to reconstitute their
-unity. He is fond of utilising old classifications to embody his new
-doctrine: and occasionally the result is like what we have been taught
-to expect from pouring new wine into old bottles. He draws hard and
-fast lines, and then has to create, as it seems, supplementary links
-of connexion, which, if they operate, can only do so because they are
-the very unity he began by ignoring. One gets perfectly lost in the
-multitude of syntheses, in the labyrinth of categories, schemata, and
-principles, of paralogisms, antinomies, and ideals of pure reason. One
-part of this formalism _may_ be set down to the pedantry and pipeclay
-of the age of the Great Frederick--pedantry, from which, as we console
-ourselves, our modern souls are freed. But it arises rather from the
-necessity of pursuing the battle between truth and error through every
-complicated passage in that great fortress which ages of scholasticism
-had--on various plans--gradually constructed. Kant is always a little
-of the martinet and the schoolmaster; but it is because he knows that
-true liberty cannot be secured without forms and must capture the old
-before it can plant the new. The forms as they stand in his grouping
-may often appear stiff and lifeless: but a more careful study, more
-sympathetically intent, will find that there is latent life and
-undisplayed connexion in the terms. Unfortunately the classified
-cut-and-dried specimens are more welcome to the collector, and can
-more easily be put in evidence in the examination-room.
-
-Thus the original question, Are synthetic judgments _a priori_
-possible? is answered--somewhat piecemeal--in a way that leads the
-reader to suppose it is a question of psychology. He hears so much of
-sense, imagination, intellect, in the discussion, that he fancies it is
-an account of a process carried on by the faculties of an individual
-mind. And of course nobody need suppose these processes are ever
-carried on otherwise than by individual thinkers, human beings with
-proper names. But scientific investigation is concerned only with
-the essential and universal. For it, really, sense, imagination, &c.
-are not so many faculties in a thinking agent: they are grades and
-aspects of consciousness,-- 'powers' in a process of gradual mental
-complication (involution). Kant is really dealing with a 'normal'
-thought with its distinguishable constituent aspects. Only--he fails
-to 'make this explicit and clear. The individualism--the un-historical
-prepossession--of his age is upon his phraseology, if not upon his
-thought: and one hardly realises that he is really engaged on human
-thought and knowledge as a substantial subject of itself apart from its
-individual vehicles,--on that thought, which lives and grows in social
-institutions and products,--in language, science, literature, and moral
-usage,--the common stock which one age bequeathes to the next, but
-which the later-comer can only inherit if he works for and creates it
-afresh. If it be a psychology, therefore, it is a psychology which does
-not assume a soul with qualities, but which expounds the steps in the
-constitution of a normal intelligence.
-
-One may note, without insisting on them too much, the defects of his
-treatment of the forms of thought. It may be said that, in the _first_
-place, the table of the categories was incomplete. It had been
-borrowed, as Kant himself tells us, from the old logical subdivision
-of judgments, derived more or less directly from Aristotle and the
-Schoolmen. Now many of the relations occurring in ordinary thought
-could not be reduced to any of the twelve forms, without doing violence
-to them. But Kant expressly disclaims exhaustiveness in detail. He
-could, if he would: but that is for another season. In the _second_
-place, the classification did not expressly put forward any principle
-or reason, and gave ground for no development. That there should be
-four fundamental categories, each with three divisions, making twelve
-in all, seems as inexplicable as that there should be four Athenian
-tribes in early times and twelve Phratriai. The twelve patriarchs of
-thought stand as if in equal authority, with little or no bearing upon
-one another. We have here, in short, what seems an artificial and not
-a natural classification of the types of thought. But Kant himself has
-given some explanation of the triad, and a sympathetic interpretation
-has shown how the four main groups are steps in the solution of one
-problem[3] In the _third_ place, the question as taken up seems largely
-psychological, or subjective, concerning the constitution of the human
-mind as a percipient and cognitive faculty. But this is necessary,
-perhaps, to the restricted nature of Kant's problem. He is dealing with
-the elements that form our objective or scientific consciousness of
-the physical world. The deeper question of the place and work of mind
-in life in general, in law and morality and religion, does not at this
-stage come before him. That problem in fact only gradually emerges
-with the Criticism of the Moral Faculty and the Aesthetic Judgment.
-Logic--as the doctrine of the _Logos_ which is the principle of all
-things, even of its own Other--had to wait for its preparation till it
-could be matured.
-
-In Hegel, the question assumes a wider scope, and receives a more
-thorough-going answer. In the _first_ place the question about the
-Categories is transferred from what we have called the epistemological
-or psychological, to what Hegel terms the logical, sphere. It is
-transferred from the Reason subjectively considered as a mere
-receptive and synthetic human consciousness to the Reason which is in
-the world and in history,--a Reason, which our Reason, as it were,
-touches, and so becomes possessed of knowledge. In the _second_ place,
-the Categories become a vast multitude. The intellectual telescope
-discovers new stars behind the constellations named in ancient lore.
-There is no longer, if there ever was, any mystic virtue supposed to
-inhere in the number twelve: while the triadic arrangement is made
-radical and everywhere recurs. The modern chemist of thought vastly
-amplifies the number of its elementary types and factors, and proves
-that many of the old Categories are neither simple nor indecomposable.
-_Thirdly_, there is a systematic development or process which links
-the Categories together, and shows how the most simple, abstract, and
-inadequate, inevitably lead up to the most complex and adequate. Each
-term or member in the organism of thought has its place conditioned by
-all the others: each of them is the germ, or the ripe fruit of another.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Spinoza, _Eth._ ii. 7-13.]
-
-[Footnote 2: _Encyclopaedia_, §§ 415, 420. Consciousness is only as it
-were the surface of the ocean of mind; and reflects only the lights and
-shadows in the sky above it.]
-
-[Footnote 3: It is not the least of the merits of the exposition in
-Caird's _Critical Philosophy_ of Immanuel Kant, vol. i. to have brought
-out this.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER X.
-
-
-THE CRITICAL SOLUTION, CONTINUED: KANT.
-
-
-Kant's answer to his question was briefly this. Intelligence is
-essentially synthetic, always supplementing the given by something
-beyond, instituting relationships, unifying the many, and thus
-building up concrete totalities. In pure mathematics this is obvious:
-the process of numeration shows it creating number out of units, and
-geometry shows elementary propositions leading on to complicated
-theorems. In abstract physics it is hardly less obvious: there, e.g.,
-the principle of reason and consequent or the persistence of substance
-are rational and legitimate steps beyond the mere datum. The more
-important question follows. How are these 'pure' syntheses applicable
-to real fact? To that Kant replies: They apply, because in all that
-we call real or objective fact there is a subjective element or
-constituent. What appears to be purely given, and independent of our
-perceptions, is a product of perceptual and conceptual conditions,--is
-constituted by a synthesis in perception, imagination, conception. Our
-world is a mental growth--not our individual product, but the work of
-that common mind in which we live and think, and which lives and thinks
-in us. Anyhow it is not an isolated self-existing un-intelligent world
-for ever materially outside us--an other world, eternally separate
-from us; but bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, the work realised
-by our great 'elder brother,'--the Idea of human collectivity--the
-Reason or Spirit in which we are all one soul. It is therefore no
-unwarranted step on to a foreign property when we apply the categories
-of thought and forms of sense to determine objective reality: for
-objective reality has been for ever made, and is now making, objective
-and reality by the conscious or unconscious syntheses of perception and
-imagination.
-
-There remains the answer to the same question as regards the objects
-of Metaphysics. These objects are according to Kant inferences, and
-illegitimate inferences. They are not necessary elements or factors
-in the constitution of experience. In order that there should be
-experience, knowledge, science, there must be an endless hold of
-space and time in which to stow it clearly and distinctly away: and
-there must also be ties and relations binding it part to part, links
-of reference and correlation, a sort of logical elastic band that
-will stretch to include infinitely copious materials. But each real
-knowledge attaches to a definite assignable perception, in a single
-place and time. From this point we can travel--by means of like
-points--practically without limit in any direction. But though the old
-margin fades forever and forever as we move, a new margin takes its
-place: the limitation and finitude remain: and new acquisitions are
-always balanced in part by the loss of the old. Yet the heart and the
-imagination are clamorous, and the intellect is ready to serve them.
-Such an intellect Kant has called Reason, and its products (Platonic)
-'Ideas.' The (Platonic) Idea expresses not so much an object of
-knowledge as a postulate, a problem, an act of faith. The 'Vaulting
-ambition' Intelligence 'o'erleaps itself and falls on t'other,'
-Unsatisfied with a bundle of sensations and ideas, it demands their
-abiding unity in a substantial Soul. To simplify the endlessness of
-physical phenomena, it sums them up in a Universe. To gather all mental
-and physical diversities and divisions into one life, it creates the
-ideal of God.
-
-Each single experience, and the collected aggregate of these
-experiences, is felt to fall short of a complete total: and yet this
-complete total, the ultimate unity, is itself not an experience at
-all. But, if it be no object of experience, it is still an idea on
-which reason is inevitably driven: and the attempt to apprehend it, in
-the absence of experience, gives rise to the theories of Metaphysics.
-Everything, however, which can be in the strict sense of the word
-known, must be perceived in space and time, or, in other words, must
-lie open to experience. Where experience ends, human reason meets a
-barrier which checks any efficient progress, but refuses to recognise
-the check as due to a natural limit which it is really impossible to
-pass. The idea of completeness, of a rounded system, or unconditional
-unity, is still left, after the categories of the understanding have
-done their best: and is not destroyed although its realisation or
-explication is declared to be impossible.
-
-There is thus left unexplained a totality which encompasses all the
-single members of experience--a unity compared to which the several
-categories are only a collection of fragments--an infinite which
-commands and regulates the finite concepts of the experiential
-intellect. But in the region of rational thought there is no objective
-and independent standard by which we can verify the conclusions of
-Reason. There are no definite objects, lying beyond the borders of
-experience, towards which it might unerringly turn; and its sole
-authentic use, accordingly, is to see that the understanding is
-thorough and exact, when it deals in the co-ordination of experiences.
-In this want of definite objects, Reason, whenever it acts for itself,
-can only fall into perpetual contradictions and sophistries. Pure
-Reason, therefore, the faculty of ideas, the organ of Metaphysics, does
-not of itself 'constitute' knowledge, but merely 'regulates' the action
-of the understanding.
-
-By this rigour of demonstration Kant dealt a deadly blow, as it seemed,
-to the dogmatic Metaphysics, and the Deism of his time. Hume had
-shaken the certainty of Metaphysics and thrown doubt upon Theology:
-but Kant apparently made an end of Metaphysics, and annihilated
-Deistic theology. The German philosopher, as Hegel has said and Heine
-has repeated, did thoroughly and with systematic demonstration what
-Voltaire did with literary graces and not without the witticisms with
-which the French executioner gives the _coup de grâce._ When a great
-idea had been degraded into a vulgar doctrine and travestied in common
-reality, the Frenchman met its inadequacies with graceful satire, and
-showed that these half-truths were not eternal verities. The German
-made a theory and a system of what was only a sally of criticism; and
-rendered the criticism wrong, by making it too consistent and too
-logical[1].
-
-Science--such is Kant's conclusion--is of the definite and detailed,
-of the conditioned. It goes from point to point, within the
-enveloping unity of what we call experience, and which rests upon the
-transcendental and original unity of consciousness. But a knowledge
-of the whole--of the enveloping unity--is a contradiction in terms.
-To know is to synthetise: you cannot synthetise synthesis. Knowledge
-is of the relative: but an absolute and unconditional totality has no
-relations. We may therefore, possibly, feel, believe in, presuppose
-the absolute: but know it in the stricter sense, we cannot. It may be
-the object of a rational faith. But as for knowledge, we can get on
-in psychology without the invisible and immortal soul: we can carry
-out sciences of the physical universe, without troubling ourselves
-about the 'cosmological' questions of ultimate atoms or ultimate
-void, of first beginning and final end: and no proofs will ever prove
-the _existence_ of that 'ideal' of reason--briefly termed God--which
-transcends and completes and creates all existence. Not that such Ideas
-are useless even in science. They represent--if not without risks--the
-faith and the presupposition which underlie the spirit of scientific
-progress, and set before it an ideal perfection which it will do well
-to strive after, though it can never get beyond approximations. What
-is perhaps more important: this faith of reason science is as little
-competent to disprove, as it is incompetent to prove it. Science is not
-all in all: we are more than mere theoretical and cognitive beings.
-The logic of science is not the sole code of our spiritual or higher
-intellectual life;
-
-    'We live by admiration, hope, and love.'
-
-The sequel and development of the first Criticism are found in Kant's
-works on ethics, aesthetics, teleology and religion. Only in one
-supplementary chapter, and in casual indications as need arises, has
-Kant made any pronouncement on his view of Philosophy as a whole and as
-a system. That it is and can only be a system, when it really engages
-on reconstruction in theory, was of course his fundamental insight.
-But in his stage of _Zetesis_[2], of testing and sifting the sound
-from the professed, he has confined himself to breaking up the mass
-piecemeal, and leaving each result in its turn to corroborate and
-correct the other. Sense and intellect may spring from a common stem;
-but let us, he says, deal with them in their apparent separateness.
-Reason practical must no doubt be identical at bottom with reason
-theoretical: all the more convincing will be the undesigned coincidence
-between the results of an inquiry into the principles of science, and
-one into the principles of morals. We have seen that science ultimately
-rests--though it does not discuss it and would indeed be incompetent
-to do so--on a faith, a hope, a postulate of the ultimate supremacy of
-intelligence,--the faith of reason in its own power (not verifiable
-indeed by an exhaustive list of actual results)--or in the rationality
-of the world. For science--though a kind of action and a part of
-conduct--is a sort of inactive action: an _enclave_ in the busy world,
-a period of preparation for the battle of life. In the field of conduct
-the ultimate presupposition, which was for the luxury of science called
-a reasonable faith or faith of reason, makes itself felt in the more
-forcible form of a categorical imperative.
-
-Or, at least, so it seems on first acquaintance. The command of duty,
-addressed to the sensuously-conditioned nature, brooks no opposition
-and condescends to no reasons in explanation or promises by way of
-attraction. The moral law claims unconditional authority: towards its
-sublime aspect reverence and sheer obeisance is due, utter loyalty to
-duty for duty's sake. Nothing short of this absolute identification
-with the Ought and a willingly willed self-surrender of the whole self
-to it can entitle an agent to the full rank of moral goodness. Such is
-the form--the synthetic link which joins the sensuous will indissolubly
-with the will reasonable of moral law. Now for its explanation.
-Humanity, though in the world of appearance and experience always
-subject to sensuous conditions, is also a power of transcending these
-conditions. Man is more than he can ever show in visibly single act.
-He has in him the hope, the faith, the vision of absolute perfection
-and completeness: but has it not as positive attained vision, but as
-the perpetual unrest of unsatisfied endeavour, as the feeling and
-the anticipation of an unachieved idea. And that perfection, that
-completeness he believes himself to be; he even in some sense is.
-Lapses and ill-success cannot quench the faith: for so long as there is
-life, there is hope.
-
-As he pictures out this invisible self, it may assume various forms
-more or less imaginative. At times it may seem a far away, and yet
-intimately near, being of beings,--the common father of all souls, the
-eternal self-existent centre of life and love, the omnipresent bond
-of nature, the omniscient heart of hearts,--on whom he can lean in
-closest communion; though he is only too well aware how often he lives
-as if God were not, and human beings were roaming specks in chaos. At
-other times, he looks up to it as to an inner and better self, his
-conscience, the true and permanent being, which controls his choices
-and avoidances, which approves and disapproves, commands and condemns:
-his soul of soul, genius, and guardian spirit. In such a mood to be
-true to his own self--to follow the very voice of his nature--is to
-realise his law of life. His Ego is the absolute ego--the reason which
-is all things. And lastly, there are times when he conceives this
-better self and true essence as the community of the faithful, as the
-congregation of reasonable beings, of all perfected humanity.
-
-In Kantian phraseology, man under one visible form is the union of
-an intelligence and a sensibility, of a noümenal with a phenomenal
-being. He is, indeed, says Kant, the former only in idea: it is only
-a standpoint which he assumes. But it is a standpoint he always does
-assume, if he is to be practical, i. e. if he is to move and modify
-the world he finds around him. And what standpoint is that? What is
-the law that has to govern his action, the law of the spiritual world?
-Its supreme law is the law of liberty; and that law is autonomy.
-Action--always under law--but that law a self-imposed one. So act
-that thy will may be thy law, and with thy will the law of all others
-whatsoever; so act that no other human being may by thy act be deprived
-of full freedom and treated merely as a thing: so act as to respect the
-dignity of every human being as implicitly a sovereign legislative.
-In other words, Morality is a stage of struggle and of progress
-which bears witness to something beyond. The 'I ought' represents a
-transition stage towards the 'I will,' or rather it is the translation
-of it into the language of the phenomenal world.[3] Morality, in a
-sense-being, always presents itself as a contest between the good
-and the evil principle: but in the transcendent and noümenal being
-which such a being essentially is,--in the reasonable or good will,
-the victory is already won by the good. Good is the law which governs
-the world, and which is the strength of the individual life. To the
-sensuous imagination, indeed, which here is apt to usurp the place of
-reason, things appear under a somewhat different aspect. There the
-certainty of self-conquest is forced by the difficulties of apparent
-failure to veil itself under the picture of a perpetual approximation
-through endless ages towards the standard of perfect goodness:
-the confidence that the world is reasonable is presented under the
-conception of a God who makes all things work together for good to the
-righteous: and the autonomy of reason presents itself as the postulate
-of freedom to begin afresh, absolutely untrammeled by all that has
-gone before. Thus the kingdom of reason is represented as having its
-times and seasons; as making determinate starts, and working up to a
-consummation in the end of ages. But implicitly Kant's idea of reason's
-autonomy,--of the 'I ought' as in its supreme truth an 'I will,'--is
-an eternal truth. The 'standpoint,' so to call it after Kant, is the
-standpoint which explains life and conduct and which makes conduct
-possible. It is the assertion that the completeness _is,_ and is my
-inmost being, the source of my action, my chief good, and that chief
-good not a gratification or satisfaction to be looked forward to as
-reward, but essential life and self-realisation. And this joy is what
-is hidden under the austere gravity of the categorical imperative.
-
-The Criticism of the Judgment-faculty is Kant's next step towards
-providing a completer philosophy. Ostensibly it owes its origin to
-the need of supplementing the treatment of Understanding and Reason
-by a discussion of Judgment, and of considering our emotional as well
-as our cognitive and volitional appreciations. What it really does
-is to minimise still further the gulf left between the intellect
-and nature--between the natural and the spiritual world. The
-intellect, said the first criticism, makes nature: it makes possible
-the general outlines of our conception of the world around us as
-a causally-connected system, in which a permanent being undergoes
-perpetual alteration, and manifests phenomena subject to mathematical
-conditions. Intellect, in short, has staked out the world which is
-the object of the practical man, and of his adviser the scientist.
-But there is another world--the world of beauty and sublimity--the
-world which art imitates and realises. The interpretation Kant gives
-to the aesthetic world is as follows. The fact of beauty is a witness
-to the presence in the mere copiousness of sensible existence of a
-sub-conscious symmetry or spirit of harmony which realises without
-compulsion and as if by free grace all the proportion and coherence
-which intellect requires. Nature itself has something which does the
-work that intellect was charged with, and does it with a subtle secret
-hand which does not suggest the artificer. The fact of sublimity, on
-the other hand, indicates the presence of an even greater spirit.
-For beauty may seem--from what has been said--to be only an unbought
-accrement to the commodities of life--facilitating the task of the
-practical intellect. But the sublime in nature speaks of something
-which is greater than human utilities and practical conveniences. It
-reveals a something which is in sympathy with our essential and higher
-self, and therefore stirs within us the keen rapture of the traveller
-who sees from afar his home in 'rocky Ithaca,' but a something which
-is cold to daily wants and vulgar satisfactions, and therefore strikes
-upon us a gelid awe.
-
-Another world yet remains, which appeals neither to our utilitarian
-science, nor to our higher sentiments of artistic perfection. This is
-the world as the home of organic life, and perhaps itself an organism.
-The organism is apt to be a poser for the ordinary categories of
-mechanical science. Here the part contains the whole, not less than the
-whole contains the part: the cause is an effect, as well as cause, of
-its effect. One thing is in another, and the other in it: 'the present
-is charged with the past, and pregnant of the future,'--as the great
-founder of modern teleology often said. In the plant and the animal
-the natural world has to a certain degree reached an ideal unity which
-is also real. Reason--the syllogism--is here not merely introduced
-from without, as when man manipulates, but is the immanent law of a
-natural life,--the end working out itself by its own means and act.
-The fact admitted in these creatures suggests extending the conception
-of organism (or teleology) to nature as a whole. From this point of
-view Nature may almost be said to have a history--because it is almost
-conceived as having one abiding self which in apparent unconsciousness
-wonderfully simulates the purposive adaptation of conscious life.
-The older vulgar teleology was somewhat mechanical: it regarded the
-natural world outside of--or as it said, below--man as having no end
-of its own, but in its series subserving man's commodities. In the
-teleology of Kant the supreme end is still in a way man, and still
-there is a little of the mechanical about it: but it is not to promote
-man's happiness, understood as that probably _must_ be in a selfish
-sense, but to produce in him the worthiest agent to carry on to its
-highest the rational process of development. The struggles and pains
-of natural existence, the laws of life, the competition of rivals, are
-all means in the hands of nature to produce an autonomous being. Kant
-says, a moral agent. But a moral agent has been already explained as
-an intelligence certified unto truth and a self-centred will whose law
-is the law of the cosmos,--whose plan of life, if we so put of it, is
-essentially a concentration in miniature and in individuality of the
-system ordained by the all-present God.
-
-It is true that Kant, after all these soarings, checks enthusiasm by
-the words 'not that we can know this, or that it is so: but our nature
-with unmistakable tendency bids us act _as if_ it were so. Logic will
-hardly justify it--but life seems to demand it.' And some have replied:
-'let us trust the larger hope.'
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Hegel's _Werke_, vol. i. p. 140.]
-
-[Footnote 2: Kant from 1762 onwards continues to insist on the
-necessity for philosophy taking up an analytic and critical attitude to
-current conceptions: see especially _Werke,_ i. 95 and 292.]
-
-[Footnote 3: Foundation of Metaph. of Eth. (_Werke_, viii. 82, 89):
-'Dieses Sollen ist eigentlich ein Wollen.']
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XI.
-
-
-SYNTHESIS AND RECONSTRUCTION: FICHTE.
-
-
-To get the full effect of a new doctrine it must be brought into
-contact with a mind unshackled by those traditional prepossessions
-which clung to its original author. Kant, essentially by training a
-man of the school, was by heart and character essentially a seeker
-after the wider ends of the larger world. His lesson is on one hand
-the scholar's disproof of pretended science, and on another an appeal
-and an example to the mere scholar to make his philosophy ample for
-the whole life, and co-extensive with the whole field of reality. His
-first disciples who stand forward as teachers caught only the first
-part of his message, and sought to set theoretical philosophy on a
-sounder basis. Johann Gottlieb Fichte--perhaps the least professional
-of great philosophical professors--with a resolute will, a passion for
-logical thoroughness, and great impulse to force mankind to be free
-and to realise liberty in an institution--was the first who really
-grappled with the searching questions that arose out of Kant's message
-to his age. His was a Kantism, not certainly always of the letter, nor
-indeed always of the spirit: yet for all that, there was substantial
-justice in his claim that his system supplied the presupposition which
-gives meaning and interconnexion to Kant's utterances[1]. It is, says
-the proverb, the first step that costs. And Fichte took that step.
-Before his impetuosity the cautelous clauses which besmirched the great
-purpose of Criticism shrunk away, the central truth was disengaged from
-its old-fashioned swaddling clothes, and openly announced itself as a
-renovating, almost a revolutionary principle.
-
-But, as was to be expected, the unity and force are paid for by a
-considerable surrender of catholicity. If Kant's utterances are
-fused into comparative simplicity, the unification does not embrace
-the whole of the Kantian gospels. What Fichte did in his earlier
-stage--the stage by which he counts in the history of philosophy--was
-to emphasise and exhibit in his systematic statement that priority or
-supremacy of the 'practical' over the 'theoretical' reason which Kant
-had enunciated, and to put in the very foreground that self or Ego
-which Kant had indicated, under the title of 'transcendental unity
-of apperception,' as the focus which gives coherence and objectivity
-to experience. But to put the final presupposition at the head and
-front of all, as a principle originating and governing the whole line
-of procedure, is really to modify in a thorough-going way the whole
-aspect of a doctrine and its inner constitution. Kant's way is quiet
-analysis: from the given, or what is supposed given, up regressively
-to its final presuppositions, its latent _prius._ He shows you the
-thing is so, apparently without effort, by judicious application of
-the proper re-agent, as it were. Fichte, on the contrary, pours forth
-a strong current of deduction: Let it be assumed that so and so is,
-then _must,_ or then shall, something else be; and so onwards. Instead
-of a glance at the secret substructure of the world, you see it, at a
-magician's mandate, building itself up; stone calling to stone, and
-beam to beam, to fill up the gaps and bind the walls together. And you
-must not merely read or listen. You are summoned as a partner in the
-work; a work the author feels, only half-consciously, he has not yet
-quite accomplished, and where therefore he complains of the bystander's
-dullness.
-
-This, one may say, was a new conception, certainly a new practice,
-of philosophy. Kant had indeed hinted that the pupil in philosophy
-must 'symphilosophise'; but practically, even his aim had been to
-describe or narrate a process of thought with such quasi-historical
-vividness and detail that the listener was sympathetically carried
-through the succession of ideas which were called up before him. What
-had been generally given in philosophical literature was a sort of
-historical account of how thoughts happened: a succession of pictures
-presented with the interposition here and there of a little reasoning,
-expository of connexions. You enlisted your reader's sympathy: you
-set his imagination to work by translating the logical process into a
-historical event--the _Logos_ into a _Mythos_--and blending with your
-narrative a little explanation as to general drift and relations, you
-left him to himself to enjoy the _Theoria._ The nearest approach Fichte
-makes to this polite and easy method is in the 'Sun-clear Statement,'
-where he, as he says, attempts to '_force_ the reader to understand'
-him. But probably these things cannot be forced. And for the rest
-Fichte's characteristic attitude is to request, or command, his reader
-(or pupil) to think with him, to put himself in the posture required,
-to perform the act of thought described. He has not merely to be
-present at the lecture, but personally to perform the experiment. It
-is not a mere story to be heard and admired and forgotten. _De te_ O
-pupil! _fabula narratur._ If it be a play, you are the actor as well as
-the onlooker: and the play is not a play, but the drama--the nameless
-drama--of the soul transacted in the unseen sub-conscious depths which
-bear up its visible life.
-
-You do not therefore begin by getting a fact put before you. Your
-_fact,_ in philosophy, must be your own _act_: not something done
-and dead, passive, a thing, but something doing, alive, active: your
-introspection must be, let us say, an experiment in the growing,
-responsive, quick life, not anatomy of the mere _cadaver._ Think,
-therefore, and catch yourself in the act of thinking. Get something
-before your mind's eye, and see what it involves. It matters not what
-you perceive or feel: only realise it fully and penetrate its meaning
-and implications. It is of course the perception of something here and
-now. And you would be, in ordinary life, eager to get on to something
-else--to associate the present fact to something perceived elsewhere,
-to draw conclusions about things yet to come. But if you philosophise,
-you must check this practical-minded impatience and concede yourself
-leisure to ponder deeply all that the single perception involves. Be
-content to sit awhile with Mary, by the side of Rachel of old. Let
-Martha bustle about. Fichte tells you that your perception rests,--and
-you, you _see_ that it rests, on the 'I am that I am,'--on the I = I,
-i. e. on the continuity, identity, and unity of the percipient self.
-Make the statement of what you perceive, believe it, that is, assert
-it: and you have--done what? You have pledged your whole self_--falsus
-in uno, falsus in omnibus_--to its truth: its background is your whole
-and one mental life. And is that all? You have also called the world to
-witness: your statement--if, as it professes, it form an item however
-slight in the realm of knowledge--requests and expects every other 'I'
-to acknowledge your perception. Your certainty of the fact rests on
-the certainty of your self: and your self is a self certified by its
-ever-postulated identity with other selves, so on _ad infinitum_. In
-affirming this (whatever be your statement) you affirm the Absolute
-Infinite Ego. Heaven and earth are at stake in every jot and tittle[2].
-
-At which plain frankness there was much cachinnation and even
-muttering among the baser sort. Even wiser heads forgot--if they
-ever knew--that Leibniz a century before had startled the world of
-his day by a view that 'the Ego or something like it[3] was, under
-the name of _monad_, the presupposition of each and every detail of
-existence in any organic total. It was useless for Fichte to repeat[4]
-that his philosophical Ego was not the empirical or individual ego
-which he in this every-day world had to provide clothes and company
-for. It is hard to persuade the world that it does not know that 'I
-am I,' and what that means. Later, therefore, Fichte, going along
-with the movement of contemporary speculation, and willing to avoid
-one source of confusion, tended to keep off the name of Ego from
-the absolute basis of all knowledge and experienced reality. But
-unquestionably the absolutising of the Ego is the characteristic note
-of his first period in philosophy: and it rings with the spirit of
-the heaven-storming Titan. It means that the cardinal principle and
-foundation of man's conscious moral and intellectual life is identical
-with the principle of the Universe, even if the Universe seem not to
-know it. It means that self-consciousness--the certainty that I am I
-and one in all my manifestations--is the highest word yet uttered. In,
-or under, the surface of human knowledge and belief in reality, there
-is a transcendental Ego--a self identical with all other selves,--
-infinite, unlimited, unconditional, absolute. The certainty of human
-knowledge--and therefore of all reality in consciousness--is the
-Absolute,--an absolute certainty and knowledge--but an absolute with
-which I identify myself,--which I am, and which is me. This is the
-absolute _thesis_--the nerve and utter basis-laying--at the ground, or
-rather under the ground, of all I know, feel, and will.
-
-This, then, is the thesis at the very foundation of all _Wissenschaft_:
-and therefore figures at the head of the _Wissenschaftslehre_,--the
-name Fichte gives his fundamental philosophy. But alone it is
-powerless. A foundation is only a foundation, by being built upon. The
-position must be defined by counterposition: thesis by antithesis: ego
-by non-ego. Ego, in fact, is first made _such_, as set against _you._
-In other words, the perception we assumed to start with does not merely
-_suppose_ and indeed pre-suppose the absolute Ego; but it sets in
-the absolute Ego an ego and a non-ego,--sets against the lesser ego,
-something limiting and limited, something defining it in one particular
-direction; or, if the original consciousness we started to examine was
-an act of will, then, it may be said, the non-ego appears as about to
-be limited and defined by the Ego. Be our consciousness, therefore,
-practical or theoretical, of action or of knowledge, its fundamental
-characteristic is the conjunction (correlation with subjugation)
-of an ego and a non-ego. It is always a synthesis of an original
-antithesis[5]; of self and not-self. But every such synthesis which
-brings together into one a self and a not-self, is possible only in the
-original thesis of a greater self--an absolute Ego--which includes the
-not-self and the self it contrasts within its larger self. The unity
-of the first principle[6] (A = A, or I = I) parting or distinguishing
-itself into the opposition of A versus not-A, Ego set against non-ego,
-re-asserts itself again in consciousness (perception of objects, and
-action upon them by will) as synthesis, i. e. a conjunction (not a real
-union). And this synthesis is either the limitation of the Ego by the
-non-ego or the limitation of the non-ego by the Ego. The former gives
-the formula of theoretical, the latter that of practical consciousness.
-
-We begin with the absolute Ego. It is absolute activity, utter
-freedom. It is the source of all action, all life. Yet if thus
-implicitly everything, it is actually nothing. To be something, it
-must restrict itself, set up in itself an antithesis:--by the setting
-up of a not-self, at once limit and realise itself: translate itself
-from ideal absoluteness and unconditionality into a reality which
-is also limited and partial. All consciousness and action exhibit
-this antithesis of a limited self and an outside and adversative
-other-being; but the antithesis rests upon the medium of a larger life,
-a thesis which transcends and includes the antithesis, and which leads
-to that alternating adaptation of the two sides to one another (their
-synthesis) which actual experience presents as its recurring phase[7].
-The _Wissenschaftslehre_ leaving the absolute Ego in the background
-deals with the play that goes on in human experience between the
-correlatives to which it has reduced itself;--the antagonism, but the
-moderated and overruled antagonism, of Ego and non-ego.
-
-Observe the contrast to the ordinary methods of expression. Popular
-language--if the popular philosophers are to be trusted as its
-exponents--says 'an impression is produced by an external object on
-the senses, and causes an idea in the mind.' The 'object' works a
-series of marvellous effects on a mind, which--to begin with--is hardly
-describable as anything more than an imagined point of resistance,
-getting reality by being repeatedly impinged upon.[8] Fichte's
-statements are rather interpreters of the vulgar phrases, which say
-'I hear, I see';--as if, forsooth, the 'I' did it all. According to
-Fichte, the 'I,'--the absolute 'I,' is the real (but secret) source
-of the position in which consciousness finds itself limited by a
-non-ego. But within the finite ego and its consciousness there is
-no reminiscence or awareness of this its great co-partner's--the
-absolute ego's--act. For the finite consciousness, the beginning of its
-activity--i. e. of all empirical consciousness, lies in an impulse or
-stimulus from without--a mere somewhat of which we can predicate the
-very minimum of attributes. It is only _felt_ as opposing: and this
-is the first stage or grade of theoretical consciousness: Sensation.
-But in the perpetual antithesis--in the self-opposition which is the
-radical act of consciousness--the mere limitation of Ego by non-Ego is
-confronted by the underlying activity of the Ego which re-asserts the
-limitation as its own act. Thus while we are, as it were, impressed, we
-re-act against that impression--we set it forth before us, as ours, and
-free ourselves from its immediate incumbency and oppression. Instead
-of mere sentiency or feeling, we have a perception (or intuition) of it.
-
-It would be out of place, here, to try to write the interpretation
-of that marvellous and difficult piece of dialectic--the
-_Wissenschaftslehre_;--a theme to which Fichte returned again and
-again up to his death, ever modifying details, selecting new modes of
-exposition, and gradually, perhaps, changing the centre of gravity
-of his system. It will be sufficient to note the two purposes which
-it keeps in view. On the one hand it is a systematic theory of the
-categories. It begins, as we have seen, with the three co-ordinates of
-all reflection,--identity, difference, and reason why; it proceeds to
-the co-relative principles of activity and passivity; to condition,
-quantity, &c. And its work is to show how these forms naturally emerge
-in the recurrent antithesis which arises in consciousness, and how
-again they are brought together by the overmastering Absolute thesis
-into a synthesis, from which the same process re-appears. How much this
-corresponds in general conception to the Hegelian Logic is obvious, and
-Fichte has the merit of the original suggestion. With this however he
-conjoins--what Hegel has relegated to his Psychology--an evolutional
-or developmental theory of the mental powers. We have already seen how
-sensation is forced by the latent intelligence to rise into perception
-(_Anschauung_): the line of psychological development is carried on by
-Fichte through imagination to understanding and reason. Hegel's work is
-far more complete, definite, and detailed: but that need not keep us
-from giving due homage to the suggestive sketch of the originator of
-the conception[9].
-
-But the theoretical consciousness is not all; and as we already know,
-the practical Ego is supreme over it. In it lies the key to the mystery
-of the stimulus--the shock from the unknown--which awakened the
-activity of the Ego. The non-ego is only a mass of resistance created
-by the Ego so that it may be active; only a stepping-stone on which
-it may walk; a spring-board from which it may bound. Only so much
-reality has the non-ego; the reality of something which may be shaped,
-made, made use of. Call the something which the stimulus (_Anstoss_)
-pre-supposes, the thing-in-itself (after Kant): and if you ask How are
-things-in-themselves constituted, you get from the _Wissenschaftslehre_
-the answer: 'They are as we should make them[10],' Or, as it is said
-in another place: 'My world is--object and sphere of my duties and
-absolutely nothing else[11]:' if you ask whether there is really
-such a world, the only sound reply I can give is: 'I have certainly
-and truthfully these definite duties, which take the form of duties
-_towards_ such, and _in_ such, objects; and it is only in a world such
-as I there represent and not elsewhere that I can perform these duties
-which I cannot conceive otherwise,'
-
-This is a grand word: and yet we feel that, in the intensity of
-intellectual consecutiveness and moral inflexibleness, we have lost
-some elements to which Kant had given their place in the philosophy
-of life. The third of Kant's three Criticisms is conspicuous by its
-absence from the Fichtean field of view, and has no recognition in
-this scheme of the universe: and the great conception of the natural
-world as an organism, in which natural man is only a part, and all
-is controlled by an autonomous principle of life, has been for the
-while allowed to drop. Even more than in Kant religion tends to be an
-epilogue or appendix to morality: and God is identified with the moral
-order of the world. It is customary to speak of Fichte's idealism as
-ethical, or as subjective: and so long as these words are understood,
-no harm is done. But to call it subjective does not mean that Fichte
-was so far beside himself as to believe the world was only a picture
-or a function of his individual brain. It means that he throws the
-weight too much on the side of subjectivity. The Absolute is, for him
-in his first stage, described as an Absolute Ego--and thereby the
-natural world seems to be left without God: and subjective duty has too
-exclusively thrown on it the weight of certifying objective existence.
-The world, as we shall see, and have indeed indirectly gathered from
-Kant, is too good and worthy to be the mere block of stone out of
-which our duties are to be hewn. And similarly, to call Fichte an
-ethical idealist is only to name him right, when we add that his were
-idealist ethics. The world is not here merely that social decorum may
-be maintained, and that puritanical virtue may pronounce that all is so
-well, that thenceforth there shall be no cakes and ale, nor ginger be
-hot in the mouth. The friend of the two brothers Schlegel, and their
-remarkable wives, Dorothea and Caroline, touched hands with a social
-group[12] which, for good and for ill, had emancipated itself from all
-codes except that which bids
-
-                    'To thine own self be true:
-    Thou canst not then be false to any man.'
-
-To him, as to Kant, morality presented itself as autonomy, as the
-dignity and grace of human nature in freest development; but to him,
-more than to Kant, there commended itself the ideal of a city of
-reason, a thoroughly socialised community[13], in which the welfare of
-each would be an obligation on all, and the machinery of government
-would be so marvellously self-corrective that all would do right and
-all fare well.
-
-Fichte's place in the annals of philosophy depends on his academic
-treatises of 1794-98, and on his more popular works from the first
-date down to 1808. In a study of the philosopher as a whole it would
-be necessary to go beyond these dates, and take account of the
-displacement which a development of thought, which there is no good
-reason to suppose other than gradual, made in the scale of his earlier
-views. But for our purposes that is out of the question. In justice,
-however, it must be added that some things that seem inadequately
-treated, some shortcomings in catholicity of mind, would appear in
-another light if the later writings--not published till after Hegel's
-death--were duly taken into account. But even at the close of the
-century the advancing thought of Germany was seeking other leaders.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 399.]
-
-[Footnote 2: Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 387.]
-
-[Footnote 3: Leibniz, _Werke,_ ed. Gerhardt, iv. p. 392.]
-
-[Footnote 4: Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 393.]
-
-[Footnote 5: The _antithesis_ has two members: the partial ego, and the
-non-ego, which confronts. The _synthesis_ is a putting together two
-separate things, so as to correlate them; but it falls short of what
-would be understood in some present usage by 'synthetic unity' which
-has a certain mystical ring. It is important for a student of Schelling
-or Hegel to remember this distinction of synthesis from 'absolute unity
-e.g. Schelling, _Werke_, v. 43.]
-
-[Footnote 6: _A = A_ is the more purely logical formula: _I=I_ presents
-it as a personal and metaphysical identity. The _A_, which is _-A,_ is
-to be distinguished from the _A_ which is opposed to _not-A._ But it is
-Fichte's standpoint to insist on their being one Ego.]
-
-[Footnote 7: To give this interpretation of the larger Ego as Life and
-Blessedness is to assume that the teaching, e. g. of the _Anweisung zum
-Seligen Leben,_ is the logical deepening of the earlier language about
-the Ego.]
-
-[Footnote 8: Cf. the description of mind as 4 a bundle of impressions.']
-
-[Footnote 9: Especially given in the Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der
-Wiss. (_Werke,_ i. 331). Of course Fichte goes through a corresponding
-'deduction' of the emotional or moral nature. Schelling (_System des
-transcend. Idealismus_) works out the 'deduction' still more at length.]
-
-[Footnote 10: Fichte, _Werke_, i. 286.]
-
-[Footnote 11: Ibid. ii. 261.]
-
-[Footnote 12: It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that the state of
-affairs alluded to, which has its literary memorials in F. Schlegel's
-_Lucinde_, and in the warm defense of that book by Scheiermacher, was
-only a passing experiment in which a high-strung idealism amid a lax
-society sought for truth at all costs and dared a noble lie.]
-
-[Footnote 13: In the _Geschlossener Handelstaat_ (of 1800), the
-'classical' document of characteristic German Socialism in its earlier
-and idealist phase.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XII.
-
-
-THE BEGINNINGS OF SCHELLING.
-
-
-Schelling and Hegel had been fellow-students at Tübingen, where,
-besides the ostensible lessons of the class-room, they had drunk gladly
-of the springs of thought Lessing had set running, had felt the hopes
-and the fears of the struggle republican France waged against the
-German powers, and had seen that Kantian criticism contained within
-it a fire which would burn up the hay and stubble of old theology.
-Hegel, five years the elder of the two, had passed through his college
-career in a very creditable but by no means brilliant way. Among his
-fellows he had gained the reputation of a quiet, and rather reflective
-mind, which, however, under an old-fashioned exterior, breathed a deep
-impassioned zeal for that higher life of which the nobler spirits among
-the young then, as now, longed to accelerate the advent. Schelling,
-singularly gifted with speculative ability, literary art, and the
-receptivity of genius to catch and string together the theories
-that rose to the top in science and letters, had already made his
-mark as a philosophic writer, while his senior compatriot, leading
-the inconspicuous life of a private tutor, was only working up and
-widening his ideas. Schelling's first essays in metaphysics trod the
-same lines as Fichte; but in 1797 (when he was aged 22) appeared his
-_Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature._ A year later he was lecturing
-at Jena, in friendly association with the Schlegels, and with Fichte,
-who, however, soon quitted the place. In 1800 appeared the _System of
-Transcendental Idealism_, and in 1801 the _Exposition of my System_;
-followed in 1802 by _Bruno_, and in 1803 by the _Lectures on University
-Studies._ Brief periods of academic teaching at Würzburg, Erlangen, and
-Munich, and after 1841 at Berlin, broke the silence which set in after
-his _Inquiries into the nature of human liberty_ in 1809; but little
-certain was known to the outside public of the final standpoint till
-the publication of his collected works (1856-61).
-
-An involuntary touch of sadness falls upon they historian as he surveys
-Schelling's career. Seldom had a thinker's life begun with better
-promise, and more distinguished performance; seldom had a nobler
-inspiration, a more liberal catholicity of mood, guided and propelled
-the intellectual interest; seldom had expectation of greater things
-yet to come followed a writer's traces than was the lot of Schelling.
-On one hand, a lively and active appropriation of the results of
-scientific discovery, at least in its more suggestive advances: on the
-other, a mastery of words and style which fitted him to hold his own
-amongst the literary leaders; and, again, a sympathy, that seemed to
-be religious, with the movement which sought _lucem ex Oriente_, and
-wisdom from the treasures of the world's purer youth. And yet--in the
-main--the net result, oblivion more complete than has ever befallen a
-great thinker. At first, one is inclined to pass on with the remark
-that even books and thinkers have their fates, and that some momentary
-forgetfulness let the tide slip unused. But it is possible to be less
-oracularly-obscure: and without detracting from the splendid faculty
-and great achievement of Schelling to note some of the causes of his
-lapse into a mere episode.
-
-In the first place, though his conception is of a system, his
-performance is only a succession of fragments. The nearest approach
-to an encyclopaedic exposition of his ideas is found in his popular
-_Lectures on the Studies of University._ More than once he starts
-on the task of exposition, but lets it break off about the middle.
-Again, at each new occasion, the features of his scheme of thought
-have slightly altered, and not merely does his philosophy profess
-at first to present two distinct sides, but these two sides of the
-shield vary. Thirdly, the interest in scientific novelties, always
-disposed to seek the curious, the far-reaching and suggestive, more
-than the sounder generalisations, tends as time goes on to fasten too
-greedily on the miraculous and mysterious night-side of nature, on
-magic powers and mystic discernments--a path which descends to the
-abyss of a 'positive,' i.e. a quasi-materialistic, theosophy. The
-matter-of-fact rationalists (both the Catholics in Bavaria, and the
-Protestant theologian Paulus, once a friend, but latterly his bitterest
-foe) regard him as a crypto-catholic, the advocate of medieval
-obscurantism so hateful to true enlightenment. Even his literary art
-renders him suspected: for there is an old quarrel between philosophy
-and fiction; and grave-eyed wisdom is jealous of her gipsy rival.
-Ill-advised indications of a sense of lofty superiority to the average
-teacher increased the numbers and the venom of his opponents. Nor is
-it perhaps beneath the dignity of history to suggest that his first
-wife, Caroline, with all her wonderful attractions of intellect and
-character, and notwithstanding all that she had been to Schelling in
-encouragement and counsel, was too clever and too critical not to sow
-many jealousies, and to add through the female line to the ranks of
-those with whom he stood suspect.
-
-But perhaps the real reason of Schelling's failure was a certain
-excess of objectivity. Fichte had drawn attacks down by an abnormal
-subjectivity which would fain reform the surroundings wherever he
-went. Schelling stood more apart--animated by an immense curiosity,
-a boundless interest in all the expanse of objective existence; but
-withal he seemed not to have his heart, deeply set and pledged to
-a distinctively human interest. His first love is the Romance in
-nature; and when he turns to history it is by preference to ages far
-remote. His ideal of philosophy is to see it achieve its work by
-the instrumentality of Art. Religion seems to culminate for him in
-a mythology. Reflection and speculation are to him always somewhat
-of a disease--whence philosophy is to carry us--almost magically if
-possible--to rest again in the primeval unity of life. It is only an
-instrument towards a great end--and that end a godlike, even if you
-like a religious, Epicurean life. From such a standpoint it would be
-easy, in youth, to relapse into naturalism; it would be equally easy,
-in later life, to fall into supernaturalism. Philosophy--at least as
-Hegel understood it--is merely neither: but the life, which never
-can quite cease to be an effort, of idealism. And so Schelling could
-not earn the confidence which only goes to those who are felt to be
-fellow-fighters with those they lead.
-
-With Schelling occurs the confluence, into the main current of
-philosophy, of streams of idea and research which had already
-exercised a stimulative effect on the tone and products of the higher
-literature of Germany. As early as 1763 (at the very date Kant let the
-English and Scotch 'empiricists' shake him out of his 'rationalist'
-dogmatism) Lessing--in a couple of pages _On the reality of things
-outside God_--threw doubts on the tenability of the ordinary deistic
-arrangement of his day, which set God _there_ and man and his
-surroundings _here,_ each side, for the time at least, undisturbedly
-enjoying his own. Lessing read Leibniz by the light of Spinoza, and
-Spinoza by the light of Leibniz: and, if he emphasised the absolute
-right to the completest individual self-development on one hand, he no
-less declared on the other that 'nothing in the world is insulated,
-nothing without consequences, nothing without eternal consequences.'
-'I thank the Creator that I must,--must the best,' he adds (1774). Of
-his conversations on these high topics with Jacobi, we have already
-spoken. While Spinoza and Leibniz were either decried, or--what is
-worse--misunderstood, by the established masters of instruction, they
-were welcomed by a more sympathetic and, with all its drawbacks, more
-appreciative study from the non-academic leaders of thought.
-
-Amongst these one of the most interesting and influential was Herder.
-Herder, who had been amongst Kant's students in 1763, and who has
-expressed his admiration of his then teacher, came as years passed-by
-to consider himself the appointed antagonist of the Kantian system.
-The two men were mentally and morally of different types: and in
-Herder's case, a sense of injury, in the end, positively blinded
-him to the meaning no less than to the merits of a doctrine he had
-decreed to be pernicious. In Herder's opinion, the Kantian system
-laboured throughout from the fault of a dead logical formalism and
-abstractness: it inhabited a sort of limbo, cut off alike from the
-fresh breath of nature and the growing life of history, and from the
-eternal spirit of divine truth: it undermined (so his experience at
-Weimar[1] indicated) the traditional faith, and inspired its 'adepts'
-with a revolutionary superciliousness to all dogma. Its cut-and-dried
-logicality, its trenchant divisions and analyses were obnoxious to his
-poetically-fervid, largely-enthusiastic, and essentially-historical
-soul. Man--in his concrete completeness, in his physical surroundings
-and his corporeal structure, in his social organisation, in his
-literary and artistic life, above all in his poetry and traditions of
-religion--was the theme of his studies; and he looked with distrust on
-every attempt to analyse and disintegrate the total unity of humanity
-by a criticism first of this, and then a criticism of that side of
-it, carried on separately. Ossian had been an early favourite of his;
-and the twilight that hovers with the haze of pensive myth around the
-figures of that visionary world hangs with a charm and a confusion
-around the ultimate horizon of Herder's ideas.
-
-In 1774 and 1775 Herder wrote and wrote again an essay (published 1778)
-for a prize offered by the Berlin Academy on the subject of 'Sensation
-and Cognition in the human Soul.' Its fundamental points are that
-'no psychology is possible, which is not at every step a distinct
-physiology': that 'cognition and volition are only _one_ energy of the
-soul': that 'all our thought has arisen out of and through sensation,
-and in spite of all distillation still contains copious traces of
-it': that there are not separate faculties of thought, but one divine
-power, which unifies all the broad stream of inflowing sensation,--'one
-energy, and elasticity of the soul, which reaches its height through
-the medium of language.' 'What is material, what non-material in
-man, I know not,' he says; 'but I am in the faith that nature has not
-fastened iron plates between them,' 'Man is a slave of mechanism (but
-a mechanism disguised in the garb of a lucid celestial reason) and
-fancies himself free,' 'Self-feeling and fellow-feeling (a new phase of
-expansion and contraction) are the two expressions of the elasticity of
-our will': they vary directly with each other: and 'love therefore is
-the highest reason'--a proposition, adds Herder, for which 'if we will
-not trust St. John, we may trust the undoubtedly more divine Spinoza,
-whose philosophy and ethics turn wholly upon this axis.'
-
-Herder's great work, however,--which, side by side with Lessing's
-_Education of the Human Race,_ and with Kant's _Idea for a Universal
-History_, helped to constitute that conception of history, as
-philosophy in concrete form, which appears in Schelling, Schlegel, and
-Hegel,--was the _Ideas for a Philosophy of History._ It is the pendant
-and contrast to Kant's three Criticisms, with which it is nearly
-contemporaneous (1784-91). Even in history Kant emphasises the work of
-intelligence, of reason: and puts the intelligently-organised state--if
-possible, the world-commonwealth, when war shall be transformed into
-merely stimulating competition,--as the final triumph of the reason.
-To Herder, while on the one hand the nature-basis is all-essential,
-and must form the foundation of any genetic explanation of spiritual
-phenomena, the ideal of humanity presents itself rather as a free
-development of the many-sided individual--a development tempered by
-the association of the family and the claims of friendship. In Kant's
-view of civilisation, natural reason by its indwelling presuppositions
-works out the end of culture: Herder, on the contrary, allows himself
-to introduce--but only in and from the dim background--a supernatural
-aid to actualise the germs of rationality latent in man's nature.
-Yet, though at the first step into history the Godhead appears, and
-a deified humanity looms ahead as the consummation of the process
-of evolution, the development between these two extreme poles is
-homogeneous and indeed one. The same law governs it throughout:
-
-'Ethics is only a higher physics of the mind.' Man is from the
-first endowed with tendencies which, through the medium of society
-and tradition, carry him on to the double end, so hard to combine,
-of 'humanity and happiness,' 'humanity and religion.' But, for
-this training of the spirit he is prepared by a special natural
-endowment of the body: and Herder can go so far as to say that 'in
-order to delineate the duties of man, we need only delineate his
-form.' Developing under the influence of cosmic and geographical
-conditions, and formed of the same protoplasm and on the same type
-as other animals, man possesses an unique organisation, a definitely
-proportioned mechanism, which is his distinctive and permanent specific
-character. General identity of plan and condition prevails for man
-and animals; but Herder keeps back from the Darwinian inference which
-interprets the graduated diversity of type as indicating that man is
-the phase reached _pro tempore_ in the gradual slide along which the
-continuous change of environment carries the unstable types which
-earlier environments have helped to form. For Herder's conception of
-nature there are fixed differences beyond which research cannot go; and
-we shall see that both Schelling and Hegel accept this reservation.
-
-Herder, finally, struck a blow in the war that was waged after
-Lessing's death between the friends and foes of Spinozism. His little
-book _God_ (1787) is a vindication v of Spinoza against Jacobi's
-attack. Antiquarian accuracy it can lay no claim to: the picture
-of Spinozism, one-sided at the best, is further vitiated by an
-interpretation of the doctrine which leavens it to indistinctness with
-the ideas of Leibniz and Shaftesbury. It was a grand--but it was also
-an audacious--vision of Spinozism which found it not inconsistent with
-a fundamental theism on one side and with the poetry of nature on the
-other. Yet Herder had the merit of being perhaps the first to pierce
-the hard logical shell of rationalism under which Spinoza had lain
-hidden, and to reveal the mystic passion for God which so quaintly
-called itself _amor erga rem infinitam et aeternam._ 'Spinoza,' says
-Herder, 'was an enthusiast for the being of God,' Even where he
-translates Spinoza's terms into ample equivalents, he does service by
-teaching men that the vapid inanities they associate with terms like
-_substance_, _mode, cause_, are inadequate to interpret the intensity
-of meaning they had for the philosopher. To remove the seals which
-rendered both Leibniz and Spinoza a mystery for the world was to
-prepare the way for Schelling and Hegel[2].
-
-It is under the aegis of Spinoza and Leibniz that Schelling begins
-his first characteristic work,--the _Ideas towards a philosophy of
-Nature._ In these thinkers he found first proclaimed as the fundamental
-standpoint of philosophy the unity of the finite and the infinite, of
-the real and the ideal, of the absolutely active and the absolutely
-passive. They differed indeed in this, that whereas this unity is
-pre-supposed by Spinoza as infinite and absolute substance, of which
-all separate existence, body or mind, is only a _modus_, it is taken
-by Leibniz as the universal characteristic of every individual being.
-Every monad--and the human soul is the typical monad--is at once finite
-and infinite, real and ideal, active and passive. But--whether as
-underlying substance, or as unity of reality--both hold the cardinal
-doctrine that the absolute (the 'Object' of philosophy) is the unity
-and unification--the identity--of what outside it appears as two
-sides or orders of being, the real and the ideal. To philosophise,
-therefore--or to see things in the absolute--is (not as Hegel's
-malicious joke puts it[3], to look at them 'in the night when all cows
-are dark,'--but) to see them in the intense light that proceeds from
-the identity of the _Spirit_ within us with the _Nature_ without us.
-
-Fichte had caught hold of this standpoint. He had seen that the
-original antithesis which confronts us, and the conjunction (synthesis)
-of its members, presupposed a still more fundamental and indeed
-absolute thesis,--an aboriginal and active unity. That antithesis is
-the opposition of ego and not-ego; that synthesis is every act of
-knowledge and will, by which each of these powers is in turn limited
-by the other. Such a synthesis (volition or cognition) would be
-impossible unless on the fundamental thesis (or hypothesis) of a unity,
-or identity, which gives rise to the antithesis and has the power of
-overcoming it. Such an original unity is what he calls the absolute
-Ego. I am what I know and will, and what I know and will is Me. Such
-is the equation (briefly written, I = I) which identifies subject
-and object (of knowledge and will). But the associations clinging to
-the terms Fichte used gave this thought a one-sided direction. The
-'_I_' is opposed to the _'Thee,'_ and the '_Them,_' and the 'It.' The
-'thing'--or non-ego--is depreciated as compared with the thinker and
-willer. It is postulated _ad majorem gloriam_ of the Ego: in order that
-I may work out the full fruition of my being. It is what I ought to
-make out of it. It _is_ nothing but what it _will be_--or will be if
-I do what I ought to do. The identity of the two sides therefore is
-left as 'the object of an endless task, an absolute imperative.' The
-Absolute is not yet:--it is only the forecast of a postulated result.
-
-'If this be what Fichte teaches, and be called subjective idealism,
-then for Schelling the first thing is to quit the house of bondage. Let
-us leave out of view the Ego, with its misleading associations, and
-begin with the two fields which are known to us, the fields of Nature
-and Spirit. Nature--not Matter--is the one side: Mind or Spirit the
-other. Each of them furnishes the object of one branch of philosophy--a
-philosophy of Nature, on one hand, and a transcendental idealism on the
-other. The former is new, and more especially Schelling's own proper
-continuation of Kant: the other partly a continuation of Fichte's work.
-But as they are both philosophy, they must coincide or meet. The whole
-philosophy may therefore call itself a philosophy of Identity; but, for
-the while, it will present itself under the two aspects of a philosophy
-of Nature, conceived as the blind and unconscious, a philosophy of Mind
-and history, as the free and conscious product of intelligence.[4]
-
-
-[Footnote 1: He held posts of large general superintendence over church
-and school affairs at Weimar.]
-
-[Footnote 2: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 420.]
-
-[Footnote 3: Hegel, _Werke_, ii. 13.]
-
-[Footnote 4: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 392.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIII.
-
-
-THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND IDEALISM.
-
-
-What is meant by a 'philosophy of Nature'? 'To philosophise on Nature,'
-says Schelling, 'means to lift it up out of the dead mechanism in
-which it appears immersed,--to inspire it, so to speak, with liberty,
-and to set it in free process of evolution: it means, in other words,
-to tear ourselves away from the vulgar view which sees in Nature only
-occurrences, or at the best sees the action _as a fact, not the action
-itself_ in the action[1].' There is in short a process in nature
-parallel in character to what Fichte had exhibited for consciousness.
-The natural world is no longer subordinated, but to appearance
-co-ordinate: and evolution or development, exhibited under the logical
-title of a 'deduction,' is the common law of both. The real order and
-the ideal order of the world are equally the work of an infinite and
-unconditioned activity, 'which never quite exhausts itself in any
-finite product, and of which everything individual is only as it were a
-particular expression.' The nature which we see broken up in groups and
-masses, and individual objects, is to be explained as a series of steps
-in a process of development: the steps in a single continuous product
-which has been arrested at several stages,--which presents distinct
-epochs, but nevertheless all approximations, with divergences, to a
-single original ideal.
-
-In Nature, as in Mind, the most typical phenomenon is an original
-heterogeneity, duplicity, or difference, which, however, points
-back to a still more fundamental homogeneity, unity, or identity.
-This primary unity or ground of unification does not indeed appear
-to sight; the 'soul of Nature,' the _anima mundi,_ nowhere presents
-itself as such in its undivided simplicity; but only as the perpetually
-recurring re-union of what has been divided. But though unapparent,
-the absolute identity is the necessary presupposition of all life
-and existence, as of all knowledge and action. It is the link or
-'copula' which perpetually reduces the antithesis to unity, and the
-heterogeneity to homogeneity, and the different to redintegration. To
-this fact of antithesis, presupposing and continually reverting to an
-original unity, Schelling gives the name 'Polarity,' 'It is impossible
-to construe the main physical phenomena without such a conflict of
-opposite principles. But this conflict only exists at the instant
-of the phenomenon itself. Each natural force _awakes_ its opposite.
-But that force has no independent existence: it only exists in this
-contest, and it is only this contest which gives it for the moment a
-separate existence. As soon as this contest ceases, the force vanishes,
-by retreating into the sphere of homogeneous forces[2].' Polarity,
-therefore, is a general law of the cosmos.
-
-A ceaseless, limitless activity, therefore, as the basis or groundwork
-of all, for ever crossing, arresting, and limiting itself: an eternal
-war, which, however, is always being led back to peace,--a process
-of differentiation which rests upon, is the product of, and is for
-ever forced back to integration, is the perpetual rhythm of the
-natural universe. It is a process in which can be traced three grades,
-stages, or 'powers' (first, second, and third, &c.). By its more
-generally descriptive name it is called Organisation. 'Organism,'
-says Schelling, 'is the principle of things. It is not a property
-of single natural objects; but, on the contrary, single natural
-objects are so many limitations, or single modes of apprehending the
-universal organism[3].' 'The world is an organisation; and a universal
-organism itself is the condition (and to that extent the positive)
-of mechanism[4].' 'Mechanism is to be explained from organism: not
-organism from mechanism.' 'The _essential_ of all things is _life_: the
-_accidental_ is only the _kind_ of their life: and even the dead in
-Nature is not utterly dead,--it is only extinct life.'
-
-But if the conception of an organism be thus the adequate or
-complete idea of Nature as a whole, that idea is only realised as
-a third 'power' supervening on, and by means of two subordinate or
-inferior ranges or 'powers.' The first stage is that occupied by the
-mathematical and mechanical conception of the world,--the bare skeleton
-or framework which has to be clothed upon and informed with life and
-growth. This first 'power' in the world-process of antithetical forces,
-under the control of, and on the basis supplied by, the original
-thetic unity which synthetises them, is Matter. In Matter we have the
-equilibrium and statical indifference of two opposing forces--one
-centrifugal, accelerating, repulsive, the other contripetal, retarding,
-attractive--which, working under the synthetising unity supplied by the
-force of universal gravitation, build up in their momentary arrests
-or epochs the various material forms. In this first 'power' we have
-as it were the scheme or machinery through which organisation will
-work: the outward and 'abstract, organism. And the essential feature
-of this 'construction' or 'deduction' of matter is that it does not
-take material atoms and build them into a world, but 'deduces' the
-properties of matter as issuing from the play of opposing forces, and
-as due to the temporary syntheses resulting from the presence of unity
-making itself felt in the opposites.
-
-A second and higher 'power' is seen in the physical universe as it
-presents, itself to the sciences of electricity, magnetism, and
-chemistry. If the former briefly be denominated the mechanical,
-this is the chemical world. The law of polarity is here especially
-prominent: the neutrality or indifference of parts is replaced by an
-intenser antithesis and affinity: and the return from heterogeneity
-to homogeneity takes place with more striking and even sudden effect.
-Here, matter, even as inorganised, has a certain _simulacrum_ of life
-and sensibility: there is in it the trace of a spirit which emerges
-above the mere contiguity and juxtaposition of mechanical atoms. The
-atomic theory shows itself less and less adequate as an attempt to
-represent the whole phenomena of inanimate matter, and the material
-universe is already charged with sympathies and antipathies which are
-full of the promise and the potency of the organic world.
-
-The mechanical theory of the universe, in the ordinary sense, which
-deals with the mathematical formulation of the laws of planetary
-movement, had been the work of the seventeenth century. The eighteenth
-century had seen attempts to explain the _status quo_ of the
-planetary system as a resultant from the evolution of an elementary
-molecular state of the cosmic mass. With the close of the eighteenth
-century there appeared a group of new sciences dealing with subtler
-energies of matter,--with electricity, galvanism, and above all with
-the connexions of chemical, electric, and magnetic science. The
-ideas thus suggested--embraced with some generality under the title
-Polarity--threw light backward upon the old mechanical conceptions,
-and gave them a decidedly dynamic character. Even the tranquil rest
-of geometrical figures came to be explained as a meeting point and
-transition moment of opposite forces. But these ideas produced an even
-greater effect on biology. Here, too, the need of a special 'vital
-force' to explain life and organisation disappeared: organism was
-but a higher stage, a completer truth of mechanism: and both found
-their explanation in the antithesis and synthesis of forces, or in
-differentiation and integration of what has recently been termed an
-'idée-force.' In this direction, so far as Schelling was concerned,
-the obvious stimulus came from the programme sketched by Kielmeyer at
-Stuttgart in 1793, in a lecture 'on the proportions of organic forces,'
-According to Kielmeyer there are three types of force in the animal
-organisation, sensibility, irritability and reproduction[5]. The last
-of these is the basic force which builds up and propagates the animal
-system. With irritability, or contraction in response to external
-stimuli--material adaptation to environment--a higher level of animal
-life is reached. But the highest of all forces in the living being is
-sensibility. In this same order may we reasonably conceive that the
-'plan of nature' proceeds. Her first products show little beyond that
-reproductive power which makes broad and high the pyramid of life. But
-as the creature acquires increasing heterogeneity and a comparatively
-independent position, it plays the part of a re-agent against stimuli,
-and a source of movements. Lastly, it not merely responds to, but
-assimilates and appropriates the impression into a sensation: it
-internalises the external, and carries within itself by means of the
-sensibility an ever-increasing picture of the world around it.
-
-The idea of Evolution or Development, thus introduced by Schelling into
-philosophy as a governing principle in the study of matter and of mind,
-is not to be confused either with the older use of these terms or with
-their current applications to-day[6]. By evolution (or development)
-and involution (or envelopment) the earlier speculation on biology had
-denoted the view that the organic germ contained _in parvo_ all that
-the matured organism showed in large. As the mature bulb of the healthy
-hyacinth shows, when cut open, to the naked eye, the stem and flowers
-that will issue from it next spring; so in general the seed can be
-treated as a miniature organism needing only an increase of bulk to
-make it fully visible in details. Growth is thus not accretion, but
-explication and enlargement of a microscopic organism subsisting in the
-germ.
-
-Evolution, in the present time, and especially since Darwin, means
-something more than this. It implies a theory of descent of the variety
-of existing organisms from other organisms of a previous age, less
-individualised in forms and functions. From comparatively simple and
-homogeneous creatures there have issued in the course of ages creatures
-of more complex, more highly differentiated structure; and this process
-of gradual differentiation may be conceived as going on through an all
-but infinite period. At one end we may conceive matter, just endowed
-with the faculties of life and organisation, but in a minimal degree;
-at the other end of the developmental process, creatures which have
-organised within themselves powers, maximal both in range and variety.
-The result (so far as we at present go) is a genealogy of organism
-which, to quote Darwin, pictures before us a 'great tree of life which
-fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth and
-covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.'
-
-Even Bugon, seeing how naturally he could regard 'the wolf, the fox,
-and the jackal' as 'degenerate species of a single family,' concluded
-we could not go wrong in supposing that 'nature could have with
-time drawn from a single being all other organised beings.' Erasmus
-Darwin (1794) had insisted on the power of 'appetency' in the organs
-of a living creature to create and acquire new structures which it
-handed down to its posterity. G. R. Treviranus[7] in his _Biology_
-(1802-5) had noted the influence of environment, and Jean Lamarck in
-his _Philosophie Zoologique_ (1809) had--after assuming that 'nature
-created none but the lowest organisms'--maintained that need and use
-(or disuse) can so effectively modify a creature that it may even
-produce new organs, and give rise by imperceptible degrees to a variety
-of creatures as widely divergent as they now appear. E. g. 'The giraffe
-owes its long neck to its continued habit of browsing upon trees.' And
-gradually it had become recognised by speculators on this subject that,
-as Mr. H. Spencer wrote in 1852, 'by small increments of modification
-any amount of modification may in time be generated.' Finally, in 1859,
-Darwin, with an ample resource of illustrative examples, enforced the
-doctrine that the existing fauna and flora of the earth represent the
-result of a struggle for existence, protracted during vast ages, in
-which those creature's have been preserved (selected to live) which,
-among all the variously-endowed offspring of any kind, were best fitted
-to appropriate the means of subsistence in the circumstances in which
-they for the time found themselves placed. The circumstances of life
-on the globe are perpetually varying from place to place and time to
-time: progeny never exactly reproduce their parents, and diverge widely
-from each other: hence each form of life is perpetually sliding on from
-phase to phase, and only those survive which are best adapted to the
-new conditions of life.
-
-So far as Darwinism is an attempt to show that the classes of plants
-and animals are not a mere juxtaposition and aggregation, but are to be
-explained by reference to a single genetic principle, it is in harmony
-with the Evolution taught by Schelling and Hegel. Both alike overthrow
-the hard and fast lines of division which semi-popular science insists
-upon, and restore the continuity of existence. Both regard Nature as
-an organic realm, developing by action and re-action within itself,
-living a common life in thorough sympathy and solidarity, and not a
-mere machine in which the several parts retain without change the
-features and functions impressed upon them at creation by some supernal
-architect. But they differ in other points. Ordinary Darwinism,
-at least, talks as if circumstances and organism were independent
-originally, and only brought as it were, incidentally, in contact
-and correlation. It fails to keep hold of the fact--of which it is
-abstractly aware--that the two act upon and modify each other because
-they are members of a larger organism. It forgets, in short, what
-Schelling so thoroughly realised, that the organic and inorganic,
-ordinarily so called, are both in a wider sense organic. It wants the
-courage of recognising its own tacit presuppositions.
-
-But the characteristic difference between the evolution theory of
-to-day and that meant by the philosophers is different from this,
-though connected with it. 'The assertion,' says Schelling, 'that
-the various organisms have formed themselves by gradual development
-from one another, is a misconception of an Idea which really lies in
-reason[8].' And Hegel no less decidedly asserts that 'Metamorphosis'
-(as the term was then applied, e. g. by Goethe, to what we now call
-Evolution) really _exists_ as a fact only in the case of the living
-individual,--not in the supposed or theoretical continuity of the
-species. 'It is an awkward way both ancient and modern speculative
-biology have had of presenting the development and transition of one
-physical form and sphere into a higher one as an outwardly-actual
-production,--which, however, in order to make it clearer, has been
-thrown back into the darkness of the past.'[9] Yet notwithstanding
-these and even later protests, there is a great charm for many minds in
-the evolutionist picture, e. g., of the horse of to-day as the literal
-descendant through nearly fifty great stages (called species) from
-some creature of the eocene age, which gradually transformed itself in
-consequence of innate instability or variability of construction and in
-obedience to changes in its environment. But whatever value there may
-be in these as yet hypothetical aids to the imagination in grasping and
-unifying the variety of organic life, they run on another line from the
-philosophical evolution. That evolution is in the _Idea_, the _Notion._
-It is the 'fluidity' of terms of thought that is here sought, not
-of the kinds of things,--except in a secondary way. And above all,
-philosophy does not deal with a problem in time, with a mere sequence;
-if it deals with a history of nature, the agents of that history are
-powers and forces--and powers which are ideal no less than real.
-
-A nearer approach to the philosophic conception is to be found in the
-views which modern physiology takes of the nature of organic structure
-and function[10]. In the simplest phases of protoplasm, the apparently
-homogeneous mass is really undergoing a series of changes, and indeed
-only exists as such, because it is the ever-renewed resultant of
-two correlated processes,--a movement up (anabolic change) by which
-dead matter is assimilated and built into it, and a movement down
-(katabolic changes) by which its composing elements are disintegrated
-and left behind, with accompanying liberation of energy. Protoplasm or
-'living matter' is the incessantly formed and re-formed thin line on
-which these two currents for the moment converge,-a temporary crest
-of white foam, as it were, raising itself on the Heraclitean wave of
-vicissitude, where all things flow on and nothing abides. But wherever
-protoplasm arises and maintains itself on this borderline of ascending
-and descending states, it exhibits the three well-known properties of
-assimilation, contractility, and sensitiveness. Protoplasm, placed
-as it were in the mean between these two processes, is or has the
-synthetic power which governs them and keeps them in one. It is no
-mere chemical substance, undergoing composition and decomposition,
-but rather, if looked at from the somewhat speculative standpoint of
-molecular physics, a kind of intricate movement or dance of particles,
-a shape or 'form' instinct with the power of producing and reproducing
-itself, and, ultimately, in some highly differentiated phases
-(nerve-system), with a power of producing and reproducing a world of
-imagination.
-
-A philosophy of Nature is only half a philosophy. Its purport is
-to set free the spirit in nature, to release intelligence from its
-imprisonment in material encasements which hide it from the ordinary
-view, and to gather together the _disjecta membra_ of the divine into
-the outlines of one continuous organisation. It seeks to spiritualise
-nature, i. e. to present the inner idea, unity, and genetic
-interdependence of all its phenomena: to delineate _natura formaliter
-spectata_ not as a logical skeleton of abstract categories, but in its
-organisation and continuous life. There remains the problem of what
-Schelling calls 'Transcendental Idealism':--called 'transcendental'
-to avoid confusion with the vulgar idealism which supposes the world
-to be what it calls a mere 'idea' or phantom of the mind. Schelling's
-is on the contrary an 'Ideal-Realism': it 'materialises the laws of
-intelligence to laws of nature[11].'
-
-We need not in details consider the genesis of Reality from the action
-of the Ego. Substantially it is the same as that given by Fichte.
-An activity, which is at once self-limiting and superior to all
-limit, rises through stage to stage, from sensation and intuition,
-to reflection and intelligence, till it becomes the consciousness of
-a world of ob; ective reality. 'Give me,' says the transcendental
-philosopher, 'a nature with opposing activities, of which the one
-goes to infinity, and the other endeavours to behold itself in this
-infinity,--and from that I will show you intelligence arising with the
-whole system of its ideas[12].' In the first phase the 'ideal-real'
-world arises by the synthetic action of the 'productive intuition,'
-Ideas, as it were, live and move: they grow and build up: causality
-is neither a category nor a schema, but an intelligent 'form' which
-is also a force--an 'idée-force,' They are (in the Hegelian sense)
-'Ideas,' i.e. neither merely objective nor merely subjective, but both
-at once. But such an ideal world is outside and beyond consciousness:
-it belongs to the same region as that higher Ego where there is no
-distinction between the Ego I am and the Ego I know. To follow the
-movement in this region needs a combination of mental vision and visual
-intellect, which Schelling has called the 'Intellectual Intuition.'
-It is a power which rising above the materialism of sense yet retains
-its realism; which, while intellectual, is free from abstractness.
-It is synthetic, and widely different from mere logical analysis.
-It is, in short, analogous to the artistic genius: it creates a
-quasi-objectivity, an ideal-reality, without which the mere words of
-the speculator are meaningless. By means of this 'organ,' philosophy
-can 'freely imitate and repeat the original series of actions in which
-the one "act" of self-consciousness is evolved[13].
-
-But the 'productive intuition' is, as Kant would say, blind: it is
-unconscious in its operation: and it is only after an arrest, a Sabbath
-when it surveys and judges its work, that it begins to realise itself
-through a process of analysis and reflection which elicits and fixes
-the categories that have been operative in it. By this abstraction
-intelligence rises out of mere production to intelligent and conscious
-production, i.e. to volition, where it has an ideal and realises it.
-With volition and voluntary action, objectivity is to appearance
-further certified and fortified. It is as active, i. e. as free, and
-even moral, agents, that we set forward categorically the reality of
-the world. So, too, Fichte had declared. But, as Schelling reminds
-us, with this intensified assertion of a law and an ideal to which
-the real must and shall correspond,--with the declaration that the
-realm of absolute consistency and ideal truth of reason is the true
-and real for ever and ever--we come across the fundamental antithesis
-of the 'Is' and the 'Ought,5 of the objective and subjective, of
-unconscious necessity and self-conscious freedom. With an attempt to
-get a philosophy of history,--i. e. of man and mind as the culminating
-truth of things, we see ourselves confronted with the opposition of
-fatalism and chance. On one hand history is only possible for beings
-who have an ideal in view,--one persistent aim and principle which
-their work and will is the means of realising. And yet it is an ideal
-which only the series of generations, only the whole race, can realise.
-Man's license to do or to refrain rests upon a larger, latent, divine
-necessity which constrains it. What human agents by their free choice
-determine and carry out, is carried out, in the long run, by the force
-of an everlasting and unchanging order, to which their wills seem but
-a mere plaything. But that man's free agency should thus harmonise
-with the constrained uniformities of nature is only possible on the
-assumption that both are phenomena of a common ground, or basis of
-identity, of an 'absolute identity, in which there is no duplication,
-and which for that reason, because the condition of all consciousness
-is duplication, can never reach consciousness. This ever-Unconscious,
-which, as it were the everlasting Sun in the spirit-kingdom, is hidden
-in its own undimmed light, and which, though it is never an object,
-still impresses its identity on all free objects, is simultaneously
-the same for all intelligences, the invisible "root" of which all
-intelligences are only the "powers," and the everlasting mediator
-between the self-determining subjective in us and the objective or
-percipient,--simultaneously the ground of the uniformity in freedom,
-and of the freedom in uniformity of the objective[14].' To rise to the
-sense of this Absolute Identity, as common basis of harmony between the
-'Ought' and the 'Is,' is to recognise Providence: it is Religion.
-
-But this 'Absolute' is never in history completely revealed--we cannot
-_see_ free action coincide with predetermination. Thus if History as
-a whole be> conceived as a 'continuous and gradual self-revelation;
-of the Absolute,' 'God never _is,_ if _is_ means exhibition; in the
-objective world: _if God were, we_ should not be[15].' Nor is the
-Absolute so revealed in Nature. Yet, even as the apparent contingency
-of human action throws us back on an everlasting necessity which is
-yet freedom, so the apparent uniformity of natural order shows us in
-organic life the traces of a free self-regulating development. To
-apprehend the truth at which both seem to point we want an organ of
-intelligence which shall unite in itself the conscious activity of
-free production with the unconscious instinct of natural creation.
-Such an organ is found in they aesthetic power of genius, in the
-Artist. The artistic product is the work of two intimately-conjoined
-principles:--of the art (in the narrower sense) which can be taught
-and learned, and is exercised consciously and with reflection, and of
-that 'poesy in Art,' the unconscious grace of genius which can neither
-be handed down nor acquired, but can only be inborn by free gift of
-nature. In the work thus brought to birth there is something definite,
-precise, and capable of exposition in finite formulae: there is also
-something which no 'prose' can ever explicate, something which tells us
-of the infinite and eternal, which ever reveals and yet conceals the
-Absolute and Perfect. Art, thus springing from 'imagination, the one
-sole power by which we can think and conjoin even the contradictory,'
-gives objectivity and outward shape to that 'intellectual intuition' by
-which the philosopher subjectively (in his own consciousness) sought to
-realise to himself the unity of thought and existence.
-
-'To the philosopher,' Schelling concludes, 'Art is supreme, because it
-as it were opens to him the Holy of Holies, where in everlasting and
-original unity there burns, as it were in one flame, what is parted
-asunder in nature and history, and what in life and conduct, no less
-than in thinking, must for ever flee apart. The view the philosopher
-artificially makes for himself of nature is for Art the original and
-natural. What we call nature is a poem which is locked up in strange
-and secret characters. Yet could the riddle be disclosed, we should
-recognise in it the Odyssey of the mind, which, strangely deceived, in
-seeking itself, flees from itself: for through the sense-world there
-is a glimpse, only as through words of the meaning, only as through
-half-transparent mist of the land %of imagination, after which we
-yearn. That splendid picture emerges, as it were, by the removal of the
-invisible partition-wall which sunders the actual and the ideal world,
-and is only the opening by which those figures and regions of the world
-of imagination, that but imperfectly glimmer through the actual, come
-forward in all their fulness. Nature is to the artist no more than
-it is to the philosopher, viz. the ideal world as it appears under
-constant limitations, or only the imperfect reflex of a world which
-does not exist outside him, but within him.'
-
-'If it is Art alone, then, which can succeed in making objective
-and universally accepted what the philosopher can only exhibit
-subjectively, it may also be expected that philosophy, as it was in
-the infancy of science born and nourished by poetry, and with it
-all those sciences which were by it carried on towards perfection,
-will after their completion flow back as so many single streams into
-the universal ocean of poetry from which they issued. Nor is it in
-general hard to say what will be the means for the return of science
-to poetry: for such a means has existed in mythology before this, as
-it now seems, irrevocable separation took place. But as to how a new
-mythology,--which cannot be the invention of the single poet, but of
-a new generation, as it were representing only a single poet,--can
-itself arise, is a problem, the solution of which is to be expected
-only from the future destinies of the world and the further course of
-history[16].'
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Schelling, _Werke_, iii. 13. (References always to the
-first series.)]
-
-[Footnote 2: Schelling, _Werke,_ ii. 409.]
-
-[Footnote 3: Schelling, _Werke_, ii. 500.]
-
-[Footnote 4: Ibid. ii. 350.]
-
-[Footnote 5: Compare vol. ii. 360 and 429.]
-
-[Footnote 6: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 424.]
-
-[Footnote 7: 'Every inquiry into the influence of general nature on
-living beings,' says Treviranus, 'must start from the principle that
-all living forms are products of physical influences which still go on
-at the present time and are altered only in degree and direction.']
-
-[Footnote 8: Schelling, _Werke_, iii. 63.]
-
-[Footnote 9: Hegel, _Encyclopaedie,_ § 249.]
-
-[Footnote 10: See e. g. Professor Michael Fosters article on Physiology
-in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica._]
-
-[Footnote 11: Schelling, iii. 352, 386.]
-
-[Footnote 12: Ibid. iii. 427.]
-
-[Footnote 13: Schelling, iii. 397.]
-
-[Footnote 14: Schelling, iii. 600.]
-
-[Footnote 15: Ibid. iii. 603.]
-
-[Footnote 16: Schelling, iii. 628.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIV.
-
-
-TRANSITION TO HEGEL.
-
-
-Thus far Schelling (aetat. 25) had gone in 1800. Two sides of
-philosophy had been alternately presented as complementary to each
-other; and now the task lay before him to publish the System itself
-which formed the basis of those complementary views. To that task
-Schelling set himself in 1801 (in his Journal for Speculative Physics):
-but the _Darstellung meines Systems_ remained a torso. The Absolute
-was abruptly 'shot from the pistol': but little followed save a
-restatement in new terms of the Philosophy of Nature. Meanwhile Hegel,
-who had inherited some little means by his father's death, began to
-think that the hour had struck for his entrance into the literary and
-philosophical arena, and wrote in the end of 1800 to Schelling asking
-his aid in finding a suitable place and desirable surroundings from
-which to launch himself into action. What answer or advice he received
-is unknown: at any rate in the early days of 1801 he took up his
-quarters at Jena, and in the autumn he gave his first lectures at the
-University. Gossip suggested that Schelling, left alone (since Fichte's
-departure) to sustain the onset of respectability and orthodoxy upon
-the extravagances of the new Transcendentalism, had summoned his
-countryman and old friend to bear a part in the fray. And the rumour
-seemed to receive corroboration. The two friends issued conjointly
-a _Critical Journal of Philosophy,_ which ran through two years. So
-closely were the two editors associated that in one article it seems as
-if the younger had supplied his more fluent pen to expound the ideas of
-his senior.
-
-The influence of Hegel is to be seen in the _Bruno_, _or on the Divine
-and Natural Principle of Things_, published in 1802. It is a dialogue,
-in form closely modelled after the _Timaeus_ of Plato, dealing with the
-old theme of the relation of art (poesy) and philosophy, and with the
-eternal creation of the universe. It presents philosophy as a higher
-than Art; for while Art achieves only an individual truth and beauty,
-philosophy cognises truth and beauty in its essence and actuality
-(_an und für sich_). Philosophy itself Bruno (the chief speaker of
-the dialogue) does not profess to set forth, but 'only the ground and
-soil on which it must be built up and carried out': and that soil
-is 'the Idea of something in which all antitheses are not so much
-combined, as rather one, and not so much superseded, as rather not at
-all parted,'--'a unity, in which unity and antithesis, the self-similar
-with the dissimilar, are one[1].' From such a standpoint it is not
-wonderful that 'in the finite understanding (_Verstand,_) compared with
-the supreme Idea and the way in which all things are in it, everything
-seems reversed, and as if standing on its head, exactly like the things
-we see mirrored on the surface of water[2].'
-
-This supreme Unity is essentially a trinity: an Eternal, embracing
-infinite and finite; an eternal and invisible father of all things,
-who, never issuing forth from his eternity, comprehends infinite and
-finite in one and the same act of divine knowledge. The infinite,
-again, is the Spirit, who is the unity of all things; while the finite,
-though potentially equal to the infinite[3], is by its own will a God
-suffering and made subject to the conditions of time[4]. This trinity
-in unity (which is the Absolute) is by logic--a mere science of
-understanding--rent asunder: and the one Subject-object of philosophy
-becomes for reflection and understanding the three independent objects
-which such a 'logical' philosophy calls respectively the Soul (erewhile
-the infinite), the world (once the finite), and God (the eternal
-unity). 'Opposing and separating the world of intelligence from the
-world of nature, men have learned to see nature outside God, and God
-outside nature, and withdrawing nature from the holy necessity, have
-subordinated it to the unholy which they name mechanical, while by the
-same act they have made the ideal world the scene of a lawless liberty.
-At the same time as they defined nature as a merely passive entity,
-they supposed they had gained the right of defining God, whom they
-elevated above nature, as pure activity, utter "actuosity," as if the
-one of these concepts did not stand and fall with the other, and none
-had truth by itself[5].'
-
-The problem therefore of philosophy is on one hand to 'find the
-expression for an activity which is as reposeful as the deepest repose,
-for a rest which is as active as the highest activity[6].' On the
-other hand; 'to find the point of unity is not the greatest thing, but
-from it also to develop its opposite, this is the proper and deepest
-secret of art[7].' The world as it first presents itself labours under
-a radical antithesis: it offers a double face, body and soul, finite
-and infinite. But to an absolute philosophy, or that high idealism
-which sees all things in the light of the Eternal, the two sides are
-not so separate as they first appeared. Each is also the whole and
-one, but under a phase, a '_Differenz_' a preponderating aspect which
-disguises the essential identity of both. Behind mind, as it were,
-looms body: through body shines mind. The ideal is but a co-aspect with
-the real. The difference of nature and spirit presupposes and leads
-back to the indifference of the Absolute One. 'Wherever in a thing soul
-and body are equated, in that thing is an imprint of the Idea, and as
-the Idea in the Absolute is also itself being and essence, so in that
-thing, its copy, the form is also the substance and the substance the
-form[8].'
-
-'Thus,' so Bruno concludes, 'we shall, first in the absolute equality
-of essence and form, know how both finite and infinite stream forth
-from its heart, and how the one is necessarily and for ever with the
-other, and comprehend how that simple ray, which issues from the
-Absolute and is the very Absolute, appears parted into difference and
-indifference, finite and infinite. We shall precisely define the mode
-of parting and of unity for each point of the universe, and prosecute
-the universe to that place where that absolute point of unity appears
-parted into two relative unities. We shall recognise in the one the
-source whence springs the real and naturals world; in the other, of
-the ideal and divine world. With the former we shall celebrate the
-incarnation of God from all eternity; with the latter the necessary
-deification of man. And while we move freely and without resistance up
-and down on this spiritual ladder, we shall, now, as we descend, see
-the unity of the divine and natural principle parted, now, as we ascend
-and again dissolve everything into one, see nature in God and God in
-nature[9].' Such was the programme which Schelling offered. Hegel
-accepting it,--or perhaps helping to frame it--made two not unimportant
-changes. He attempted in his _Phenomenology_ to lead up step by step
-to, and so warrant, that strange position of idealism u which claims to
-be the image of the Absolute. He tried in his _Logic_ to give for this
-point of view a systematic basis and a filling out of the bare Idea of
-a Unity, neither objective nor subjective, neither form nor substance,
-neither real nor ideal, but including and absorbing these. He tried, in
-short, to trace in the Absolute itself the inherent difference which
-issued in two different worlds, and to show its unity and identity
-there.
-
-A _System_ of philosophy, and a philosophy of the _Absolute!_ The
-project to the sober judgment of common sense stands self-condemned,
-palpably beyond the tether of humanity. For if there be anything agreed
-upon, it is that the knowledge of finite beings like us can never be
-more than a--comparatively poor--collection of fragments, and can
-never reach to that which--and such is the supposed character of the
-Absolute--is utterly un-related, rank non-relativity. But in the first
-place, let us not be the slaves of words, and let us not be terrified
-by unfamiliar terms. After all, a System is only our old friend the
-unity of knowledge, and the Absolute is not something let quite loose,
-but the consummation and inter-connexion of all ties. It is no doubt
-an audacious enterprise to set forth on the quest of the unity of
-knowledge, and the completion of all definition and characterisation.
-But, on the other hand, it may perhaps claim to be more truly modest
-than the self-complacent modesty of its critics. For ordinary belief
-and knowledge rest upon presuppositions which they dare not or will
-not subject to revision. They too are sure that things on the whole,
-or that the system of things, or that nature and history, are a realm
-of uniformity, subject to unvarying law, in thorough interdependence.
-They are good enough, occasionally, to urge that they hold these
-beliefs on the warranty of experience, and not as, what they are
-pleased to call, intuitions, _a priori_ ideas, and what not. But to
-base a truth on experience is a loose manner of talking: not one whit
-better than the alleged Indian foundation of the earth on the elephant,
-and the elephant erected on the tortoise. For by Experience it means
-experiences; and these rest one upon another, one upon another, till
-at length, if this be all that holds them together, the last hangs
-unsupported, (and with its superincumbent load), ready to drop in the
-abyss of Nought.
-
-This 'transcendental,' 'absolutist,' '_a priori_' philosophy, which
-stands so strange and menacing on the threshold of the nineteenth
-century, is after all only, as Kant sometimes called it, an essay
-to comprehend and see the true measures and dimensions of this
-much-quoted Experience. All knowledge rests _in_ (not _on_) the unity
-of Experience. All the several experiences rest in the totality
-of one experience,--ultimate, all-embracing, absolute, infinite,
-unconditioned; universal and yet individual, necessary and yet
-free,--eternal, and yet filling all the nooks of time,--ideal, and yet
-the mother of all reality,--unextended, and yet spread through the
-spaces of the universe. Call it, if you like, the experience of the
-race, but remember that that apparently more realistic and scientific
-phrase connotes neither more nor less (if rightly understood) than
-normal, ideal, universal, infinite, absolute experience. This is the
-Unconditioned, which is the basis and the builder of all conditions:
-the Absolute, which is the home and the parent of all relations.
-Experience is no doubt yours and mine, but it is also much more than
-either yours or mine. He who builds on and in Experience, builds on
-and in the Absolute, in _the_ System--a system which is not merely
-_his._ In his every utterance he claims to speak as the mouth-piece of
-the Absolute, the Unconditioned; his words expect and require assent,
-belief, acceptance;--they are candidates (not necessarily, or always
-successful) for the rank of universal and necessary truth: they are
-dogmatic assertions, and even in their humblest tones, none the less
-infected with the fervour of certainty. For, indeed, otherwise, it
-would be a shame and an insult to let them cross the lips.
-
-It is the aim of the Absolute _a priori_ philosophy to raise this
-certainty to truth: or, as one may rather say, to reduce this certainty
-to its kernel of truth. It seeks to determine the limits--not _of_ this
-absolute and basic experience (for it has no external limits)--but
-_in_ this experience: the anatomy and physiology of the Absolute,--the
-correlations and inclusions, the distinctions and syntheses in the
-unconditioned field. It examines the _foundation_ of all knowledge.
-But--if this be the phrase--we must be on our guard against a
-misapprehension of its terms. The foundations are also knowledge:
-they are _in_ all knowledge and experience, its synthetic link and
-its analytic distinctions. We must not shrink from paradoxes in
-expression. The house of knowledge, the world of experience, is as
-self-centred and self-sustaining, and even more so, than the planetary
-system. It is a totality in which each part hangs upon and helps to
-hold up the others, but which needs no external help, resting and yet
-moving, self-poised and free.
-
-We may be spared, therefore, verbal criticism on the Absolute and
-Unconditioned. The Absolute, and Infinite, and Eternal is no mere
-negation:--the only pure negation is NOT, and even that has a flaw in
-its claim. It is perfectly true--and it can only be babes and sucklings
-that need to be reminded of the fact--that none of us realises and
-attains the _ne plus ultra_ of knowledge and that all our systems
-have their day,--have their day and cease to be. 'The coasts of the
-Happy Isles of philosophy where we would fain arrive are covered only
-with fragments of shattered ships, and we behold no intact vessel in
-their bays[10].' So too the whole earth is full of graves; and yet
-humanity lives on, charged with the attainments of the past and full
-of the promise of the future. Let us by all means be critical and
-not dogmatic: let us never entirely forget that each utterance, each
-science, each system of ours falls short of what it wanted to be,
-and for a moment at least thought it was. But let us not carry our
-critical abstinence into dogmatic non-intervention: or, if so, let us
-silently accept the great renunciation of all utterance henceforth.
-System we all presuppose in our words and deeds, and should be much
-hurt if our defect in it were seriously alleged: the Absolute we all
-rest in, though amid so many self-imposed and other distractions we
-feel and see it not. The philosopher proposes for his task--or rather
-the philosopher is one on whom this task forces itself as for him the
-one thing inevitable--to determine what is that system and what that
-Absolute, or, if the phrase be preferred, the philosopher traces to its
-unity, and retraces into its differences that Experience--that felt,
-known, and willed synthesis of Reality,--that realised ideal world--on
-which and in which we live and move. He does not make the system, nor
-does he set up the Absolute. He only tries to discover the system, and
-to construe the Absolute.
-
-It may be said that the best of philosophers can do no more than
-give us _a_ System and _an_ Absolute. Undoubtedly that is so. Each
-philosophy is from one point of view a strictly individualist
-performance. It is not, in one way, _the_ Absolute truth, which it
-promises or hopes to disclose. The truth is seen through one being's
-eyes; and his 'measure,' as Protagoras might have said, is upon it. Yet
-it is still _the_ Absolute, as seen through those eyes; it is still
-in a marvellous measure that truth, that absolute truth, 'which the
-actual generations garble.' For both the artist and the philosopher,
-if they create, only re-create or imitate; if they are makers, they
-are still more seers: and their power of 'imitation' and of 'vision'
-rests on their capacity to de-individualise themselves of their
-eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, and to bring out only that in them
-which is the common truth of all essential thought and vision. In
-proportion as they purge themselves of this _evil_ subjectivity are
-they true artists and philosophers. They are both--and so, too, is
-the religious genius--idealists: but the test of the value of their
-idealism is its power of including and synthetising reality. That is
-their verification: that, and not their concord with this or that
-opinion, this or that theory of individuals or of groups. Not that the
-views either of groups or individuals are unimportant. But often they
-are but frozen lumps in the stream, temporary islands which have lost
-their fluidity, and which imagine themselves continental and permanent.
-
-Truth, then, reasoned truth, harmonious experience, absolute system,
-is the theme of philosophy. Or, in Hegelian language, its theme is
-the Truth, and that Truth, God. Not alum, an aggregate, or even what
-is ordinarily styled a system, of truths: but the one and yet diverse
-pulse of truth, which beats through all: the supreme point of view in
-which all the parts and differences, occasionally standing out as if
-independent, sink into their due relation and are seen in their right
-proportion.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Schelling, iv. 231, 235, 236.]
-
-[Footnote 2: Ibid. 244.]
-
-[Footnote 3: 'In things thou seest nought but the misplaced images of
-that absolute unity; and even in knowledge, so far as it is a relative
-unity, thou seest nought but an image--only drawn amiss in another
-direction--of that absolute cognition, in which being is as little
-determined by thought as thought by being.']
-
-[Footnote 4: Schelling, iv. 252. See further, iv. 327: 'The pure
-subject, that absolute knowledge, the absolute Ego, the form of all
-forms, is the only-begotten Son of the Absolute, equally eternal with
-him, not diverse from his Essence, but one with it.']
-
-[Footnote 5: Schelling, iv. 306. Cp. for actuosity, notes in vol. ii.
-396. Spinoza, Cogit. Met. ii. 11, speaks of the actuosa essentia of
-God.]
-
-[Footnote 6: Schelling, iv. 305.]
-
-[Footnote 7: Ibid. iv. 328.]
-
-[Footnote 8: Ibid. iv. 306.]
-
-[Footnote 9: Schelling, iv. 328.]
-
-[Footnote 10: Hegel, Werke, i. 166.]
-
-
-
-
-PROLEGOMENA
-
-BOOK II
-
-_IN THE PORCHES OF PHILOSOPHY_
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XV.
-
-
-THE TWO AGES OF REASON.
-
-
-The eighteenth century--it has been often said--was a rationalising,
-unhistorical, age: and, in contrast, the nineteenth has been declared
-to be _par excellence_ the founder and the patron of the historical
-method. In the one, the tendency governing the main movement of
-European civilisation was towards cosmopolitan and universal
-enlightenment. A common ideal, and, because common, necessarily rather
-general and abstract, perhaps even somewhat vulgarly utilitarian,
-pervaded Western Europe, and threw its influence for good and evil
-on literature and art, on religion and polity. It grew out of a
-revulsion, in many ways natural, from the religious extravagances
-of the century-and-a-half preceding, which had led prudent thinkers
-to reduce religion to a 'reasonable' minimum, and to reject all
-things that savoured of or suggested enthusiasm, fanaticism, and
-superstition. In politics the same one type or system of government
-and laws was aimed at, more or less, in all advancing states. National
-peculiarities and patriotism were looked at askance, as unworthy of
-the free 'humanity' which was set forward as the end of all training.
-To simplify, to level, to render intelligible, and self-consistent was
-the task of enlightenment in dealing with all institutions. To remove
-all anomalies and inequalities, to give security for liberty and to
-facilitate the right to pursue happiness[1], was the chief watchword
-of this movement. Its questions were--Is religion, Is art and science,
-Is political organisation, a source of happiness? Are poetry, and a
-belief in divine things, and abstruse knowledge, upon the whole for
-human advantage and benefit? Only such civilisation can be justified
-as, taken all in all, is a blessing; if not (cried some) we may as well
-cling to the happiness of the barbarian.
-
-That these are important questions, and that the purposes
-above-mentioned are in many ways good, is clear. But before we can
-answer the questions, or decide as to the feasibility of the aims,
-there are some things to be brought and to be kept in view. And these
-things were not as a rule brought and kept in view. It was assumed that
-the standard of adjudication was found in the averagely educated and
-generally cultured individual among the class of more or less 'advanced
-thinkers' who asked the questions and set up the aims. That class,
-already denationalised by function, forming a commonwealth or rather a
-friendly fraternity throughout the capitals of Europe, had cut itself
-off from the narrower and the deeper sympathies of the national life.
-Forming a sort of mean or middle stratum in the social organisation,
-they tended to ignore or despise equally the depths below them and
-the heights above. They took themselves as the types of humanity, and
-what _their_ understandings found acceptable they dubbed rational: all
-else was a survival from the ages of darkness. They forgot utterly
-that they were only a part, a class, a member in the social body:
-and that they could only be and do what they were and did, because
-what they were not and did not do was otherwise supplied. It takes
-all sorts of people to make a world: but each class--and the order of
-literature and intelligence is no exception--tends to set itself up as
-the corner-stone (if not something more) of the social edifice. What is
-more: in such a loose aggregate as the intelligent upper-middle class,
-the individual tends more and more to count as something, detached and
-by himself, to be an equal and free unit of judgment and choice, to be
-emancipated from all the bonds which hold in close affinity members
-of a group whose functions are unlike each other's, and yet decidedly
-complementary. Such a class, again--though there are of course
-conspicuous exceptions--is, by the stress of special interests, removed
-from direct contact with nature and reality, and lives what in the main
-may be styled an artificial life.
-
-When such a class asked what were the benefits of art or religion,
-it thought first of itself; and it looked upon art and religion--and
-the same would be true of philosophy and science, or of political
-sanctions--as _merely_ objective and outward entities, foreign to the
-individual, yet by some mechanical influences brought into connexion
-with him,--as one might apply to him a drug or a viand. But clearly
-to a person of practical aims, bent on conveying information and
-enlightenment, bent on making all men as like each other as possible
-in the medium range of cultivation which he thinks desirable, the
-utility of some of these things is questionable and limited. It is
-only a little modicum of religion, of art and of science, which can be
-justified by its obvious pleasure-giving power; and it is easy to point
-the thesis against enthusiasm in these regions, by reference to the
-disastrous wars fanned by religion, to the license that has followed
-the steps of art, and to the lives wasted in the zeal for increasing
-knowledge. In his ideal of human life such a practical reformer
-will tend to suppress all that bears too clear a trace of natural,
-infra-rational, non-intelligent kindred,--all that ties us too closely
-to mother earth and universal nature.
-
-But if this was the dominant tone of the literary teachers who had
-chief audience from the public ear, there was no lack of dissentient
-voices who appealed to nature, who loved the past, who set sentiment
-and imagination above intellect, and who never bowed the knee to
-the great idols of enlightened middle-class utilitarianism. Even
-in the leaders of the enlightening host--amongst the chiefs of the
-_Aufklärung_--there is a breadth and a depth of human interest which
-sets them far above their average followers, and which should prevent
-us from joining without discrimination in the depreciatory judgments
-so often passed on the eighteenth century. The pioneers in the great
-emancipatory movement of modern times should not be allowed to suffer
-from the exaggerations and haste of their more vulgar imitators--still
-less refused the meed of gratitude we owe them. But when their ideas
-were violently translated into reality, when the levelling, unshackling
-process was set at work by vulgar hands, the shortcomings of their
-theories were made to show even greater than they were: and inevitable
-reaction set in. Even the revolutionist himself has come to admit that
-fraternity at that time came badly off in comparison with liberty and
-equality[2]. But these drawbacks were accentuated when the cosmopolitan
-reform-movement, by its haste and intolerance, awakened the spirit
-of national jealousy. The deeper instincts of life rose in protest
-against the supposed superiority of intellect: the heart claimed its
-rights against the head: the man of nature and feeling was roused up to
-meet the man of reasoning and criticism. The spirit of war evoked those
-energies of human nature--some of them not its least valuable--which
-had slumbered in times of easy-going peace. The days of adversity and
-humiliation taught men that the march of literary culture is not the
-all-in-all of life and history.
-
-It was made apparent, practically at least, that intelligence, with
-its hard and fast formulae, its logical principles, its keen analysis,
-was not deep enough or wide enough to justify its claim to the august
-title of reason. To be reasonable implies a more comprehensive,
-patient, many-sided observation than is necessary to prove the claim
-to mere intelligence. To be intelligent is to seize the right means
-to execute a given or accepted end--it is to be quick and correct in
-the practice of life, to carry out in detail what has been determined
-on in general. Understanding plays upon the surface of life and deals
-with the momentary case: and its greatest praise is to be fleet in
-the application of principles, apt to detect the point on which to
-direct action, correct in its estimate of means to ends. Clearsighted,
-prudent, and direct, it is the supreme virtue in a given sphere: but
-the sphere must be given, and its end constituted in the measured round
-of practical life, its system complete: or, understanding is bewildered
-before a hopeless puzzle. Understanding is--the improvident cynic might
-say--a certain animal-like sagacity--(such cynical philosophers were
-perhaps Hobbes and Schopenhauer[3])--a mere power of carrying out a
-given rule in a new but similar case, and of doing so, perhaps, through
-a long chain of intermediate links and means.
-
-But there are more things in heaven and earth than are heard of in
-the philosophy of the logical intellect. The _subtilitas naturae_[4]
-far surpasses the refinements of the practical intellect: and if the
-latter is ever to overcome or be equal to the former, it must, so to
-speak, wait patiently upon it, as a handmaiden upon the hands of her
-mistress. Such a trained and disciplined intellect which has conquered
-nature by obedience is what the philosophers at the beginning of this
-century called _reason_[5]. It is in life as much as in our mind. It
-comes not by self-assertion, by the attempt to force our ends and
-views on nature, but by feeling and thinking ourselves in and along
-with nature. Or, briefly, it breaks down the middle wall of partition
-by which man had treated nature as a mere world of _objects_--things
-to be used and to minister to his pleasure--but always alien to him,
-always mere matter to be manipulated _ab extra._ Yet even to get full
-use and enjoyment out of a thing it is well to be in closer community
-with it, and on terms of friendly acquaintance. The function of this
-fuller reason cannot be performed without something analogous to
-sympathy and imagination. Sympathy, which realises the inner unity
-of the so-called 'thing' with ourselves: imagination, which sets it
-in the full circumstances of those relationships which the practical
-intelligence is inclined to abstract from and to neglect. Yet only
-something _analogous_ to sympathy and imagination: if, as may well be
-the case, we attach to these terms any association of irregular or mere
-emotional operation. The imagination in question is the 'scientific'
-imagination--the power of wide large vision which sets the object fully
-in reality, and is not content with a mere name or abstract face of a
-fact--a name which represents a fact no doubt, but represents it, as
-many such 'agents' or deputies do, in a hard and wooden spirit. The
-sympathy in question is the transcending of the antithesis between
-subjective and objective; not a fantastic or fortuitous choice of one
-or a few out of many on whom to lavish locked-up stores of affection,
-but the full recognition of unity as pervading differences, and
-reducing them to no more than aspects in correlation.
-
-What has been said of sympathy and imagination, as the allies and
-ministers of reason, might be extended and applied to humour,
-to wit, to irony. These also it may be said--and with the same
-qualifications--are essential to a philosopher in the highest
-sense. The humour, viz., which strides over the barriers set up by
-institution and convention between the high and the humble, and
-sees man's superficial distinctions overpowered by a half-grim,
-half-jubilant _Ananke_,--which notes how human proposal is overcome,
-not without grace, by divine and natural disposal, how the deep inner
-identity in all estates breaks triumphantly through the fences of
-custom and deliberate intention. The wit, which upsets the hardened
-fixity of classes and groups, flits from one to another, shows
-glimpses of affinity between remote provinces of idea, and all this,
-without laboured and artificial search for analogies, though to the
-slower-following practical mind, hampered by its solid limits, these
-leaps from province to province seem paradoxical and whimsical.
-The irony, which notes the tragicomedy of life under its apparent
-regularity of prose,--which detects the vanity of all efforts to check
-the flux of vitality and make the volatile permanent; which contrasts
-the apparent with the real, the obviously and officiously meant with
-the truly desired and willed, and shows how diplomatically-close design
-is dissipated in a jest, or the soul bent on many years of enjoyment
-is plunged into torment. Thus, in a way, imagination, sympathy, wit,
-humour, irony and paradox are elements that go to the making of a
-philosopher: but in the serenity of reasoned wisdom they lose their
-frolicsome and fantastic mood, and fill their minor place with sober
-cheer. Wedded to the lord of wisdom, the Muse of poesy and wit loses
-her sprightly laugh and her dancing step, becoming a subdued, yet
-gracious matron, who, with her offspring, sheds gleams of brightness
-and warmth and colour in the somewhat austere household. Yet still the
-free maiden of poesy, in the open fields where the shadow of reflective
-thought has not yet fallen, has the greater charm; and a certain
-jealousy not unfrequently reigns between the married sister and the
-virgin yet untamed.
-
-But though poetry and the allied arts of words were very helpful to
-philosophy--witness the services which, though in widely different
-ways, Goethe and Schiller rendered to the higher thinking of
-Germany--even more stimulative and fruitful was the research into
-nature and history. Nature _and_ history: but they lie closer together
-than the conjunction suggests. It is true that in recent times we have
-been forcibly taught to separate civil from natural history, if we have
-not even been further taught that the latter is an improper application
-of the term. But when Aristotle said that 'Poetry is more philosophical
-than History' he was probably not restricting his remark to the story
-of nations and states; even as when Bacon set history as the field
-of memory beside the fields of imagination and reasoning, he was not
-solely referring to the records of the human past. The distinction
-between natural and civil history is no doubt for practical education
-a distinction of supreme importance. But it is so, because in this
-scholastic phase the conception of both, under these comprehensive
-names, was superficial and abstract. Natural history meant only the
-classificatory description of animals, plants, and minerals: civil
-history the tale composed to string together the succession of human
-actions on the public and national field of life.
-
-We have seen in an earlier chapter the advances which Lessing, Kant,
-and above all Herder, made in this direction[6]. Emphasising in their
-several ways the great dictum of Spinoza that human passions, and the
-whole scheme of human life, are _res naturales, quae communes naturae
-leges sequuntur_, they gave to history a higher, more philosophical,
-more scientific scope than what the name used to connote. Neither in
-Spinoza himself, nor in these his followers, did this insistence on
-the unity of nature at all lead them to neglect the difference--almost
-equivalent, it may be said, in the end to an _Imperium in imperio_--by
-which rational man marks himself off to a special kindred with the
-divine[7]. We have seen too what Schelling did to show that history, if
-in one aspect it be the product of free human volitions, is, in another
-and as he thought a superior aspect, the realm subject to a divine or
-natural necessity. The whole tendency of this epoch of thought--the
-tendency which entitles it above all to the name of speculative--is its
-impulse to over-ride this distinction between Nature and History; to
-over-ride it, however, not in the sense of simply ignoring or denying
-it, but of carrying it up into a unity which would do justice to both,
-without exclusively favouring either, and hardly without clipping
-both of any extravagant claims. The distinction remains,--no longer
-an abrupt division, but now tempered and mellowed by the presence of
-a paramount unity. Nature now has a real history: no longer a mere
-factitious aggregate of classified facts, it is the phenomenon of
-a 'latent process,' due to a 'latent schematism,' and a 'form' or
-principle of organisation. Classification does not cease: but it ceases
-to be an end in itself, and becomes only subordinate or auxiliary to a
-higher scientific end. The main theme is to construe the complete cycle
-of life-change and the complete organisation of life-state from the
-evidence pieced out and put together from the various orders, classes,
-and species of living creatures. And on the other side the mere tale
-or narrative of history, with its gossip of personalities, and its
-accidents of war and intrigue, tends to become insignificant in the
-presence of the great popular life, in its deep and subtle connexion
-with agencies of nature hitherto unsurmised, in its dependence upon
-necessities and uniformities which envelope or rather permeate and
-constitute the human will. It is not indeed that the force of great
-personalities has come to be treated as a quantity we may neglect. The
-force of the great leader, of the genius, of the hero, is not less
-admirable to the wise philosophical historian to-day than it ever was
-to his story-telling predecessor. But he flatters himself that he
-understands better, and can better take account of, the conditions
-which make the genius and the hero possible. Achilles still counts for
-more than a thousand common soldiers, and Homer himself is not merely
-the composite image by which a long tradition has fused into a dim
-pictorial unity the countless bards who sang for ages on the isles of
-Greece and the coasts of Ionia. Yet we feel sure that Achilles did
-what he did, because of the race he sprang from, the inspiration he
-felt around him, the companionship in body and spirit of his peers. We
-feel that the hero derives his strength from earth and air, from the
-spiritual and material substance in which he draws his breath. True,
-we cannot explain him, as if he and his heroisms were a mere product
-of mathematical and mechanical forces. But where we once recognise
-that behind the single visible deed and agent there is a spiritual
-nature--an underlying agency--which, unperceived, keeps the hearth-fire
-of public life burning in the celestial temple of Vesta, we can at
-least see that though genius is a marvel and a mystery, yet it is
-according to law, and no mere will-o'-the-wisp.
-
-But when we say that the actions and sayings even of the foremost
-individuals are to be comprehended only in the light of universal
-forces and laws, there is an error which is only too ready to
-substitute itself for the truth. It soon appears for example that,
-among the general causes which control the development of civilisation
-and the acts of individuals, the economical condition is of great and
-prominent effect. And, above all, it is easily measurable, and subject
-to palpable standards (such as statistics of exports and imports,
-&c.). It was natural therefore that a school of historico-social
-philosophers should arise who maintained that the economical state of
-a given society was the fundamental principle or form of its life,
-of which all other phases of its civilisation, religious, aesthetic,
-&c., were only variable dependent functions. This view, which comes
-out in the socialist theory of Marx, is clearly the exaggeration or
-abstract statement of a partial truth into a pseudo-complete theory.
-The truth is one which found expression as early as Plato. It is this:
-that in the economical system of a society we find the first and
-somewhat external or mechanical suggestion of the organism to which
-the state is yet to grow. In the economic law of reciprocity there is
-a 'certain faint image' of the principle of social organisation or
-political life. But when we go beyond, and interpret this first phase
-to mean the original foundation, we are stating a figment which has a
-plausibility only when by the economic state we mean a great deal more
-than abstractly economic facts include. And this again arises because
-it is really impossible to carry out thoroughly the abstraction of one
-aspect of social life from the others. There are no purely economic
-facts which are independent of other social influences,--of ideals, e.
-g. moral or aesthetic,--ideals which nobody would call economic, though
-they never quite part company from economical conditions.
-
-So again there is occasionally a tendency to magnify the influence of
-what in the narrowest sense may be termed political systems. Forms
-of government, and titles of sovereignty are regarded as forces to
-which individuals--even the highest--must bow. But here again the
-exaggeration of a principle need not tempt us to rush with Tom Paine
-into the opposite extravagance that government and state-power are
-superfluities, or quasi-ornamental additions to a social fabric, which
-can do without them and, like other beasts of low organisation, can,
-when shorn of them, reproduce them with ease. And thus though we may
-dissent from the view that laws and constitutions are omnipotent, we
-may admit that in them the central unity and controlling principle of
-social life finds its dominant expression in great outlines. We shall
-not agree with him who said 'Let who will make the laws of a nation
-if I may make its ballads': because we know that the nation will in
-the end have the chief voice in determining what are to be its ballads
-no less than its laws. We shall not quite accept the dictum that the
-intellectual class which formulates ideas and sets up programmes of
-ideals gives the real lead to the process of civilisation; for we shall
-remember that real ideas are not formed by individuals, but are the
-slow work of concrete experience in the so-called inorganic masses,
-finding at length utterance through the lips of those appointed to that
-end by the natural and divine order. Yet we shall, on the other hand,
-see that the high things of the world are dependent on the lowly: that
-a song-maker is sometimes not less potent than a legislature: that
-pecuniary conditions are effective in the sanctuaries of religion and
-the high places of art: and that the noblest ideas of great thinkers
-draw their strength and life through roots that run unseen through very
-humble ground.
-
-_La Raison_, says Leibniz, _est l'enchainement des vérités._[8] Truth
-linked into truth, and so made truer: truth, with which all things
-harmonise and nothing cries dissent: truth, which is neither the
-prerogative of the mere _demos_, nor of the intellectual aristocracy,
-but of that rarer unity which, when they can exercise several and
-mutually-tendered self-abnegation, is the real spirit of both: truth,
-thus conceived, is that king of life, that sun of Reason which lighteth
-every man. Truth--to use again the language of Leibniz,--which is not
-merely the aggregate of monads,--but the monad of monads, their mutual
-penetration and corrective completion, in that Idea-reality where they
-retain their individuality, but retain it in the fullness and fruition
-of the absolute which each essentially or implicitly is. This kingdom
-of suffering and yet triumphant truth is the true age of Reason--not
-outwardly-critical, individualistically-reforming, mere intellectual
-and abstract intelligence,--but intelligence, charged with emotion,
-full of reverence, reverent above all to the majesty of that divinity
-which, much disguised, and weather-beaten, like Glaucus of the sea,
-resides in common and natural humanity. This is the Reason of German
-idealism at the commencement of the century. To the clear-cut dogmas of
-the abstract intellect it savours of mysticism. If it is friendly to
-distinctions and constantly makes them, it is the pronounced enemy of
-hard and fast separations. Begin where you like, the reason of things,
-if you allow it to work, carries you round till you also see identity
-where you only saw difference, or effects where you only looked for
-causes. You begin, as the inductive logician, with the belief that
-the process is from the known to the unknown. You start with your
-basis of fact, as you called it. The nemesis of things forces you
-to admit that your facts were partly fictions which waited for the
-unknown to give them a truer and fuller reality. You talk at first of
-induction, as if it were a single and simple process, which out of
-facts builds up generalities and uniformities. You learn as you go on
-that the only induction that operates, except in cases which have been
-artificially simplified by supposing half the task done before you
-apply your experimental methods, is an induction of which the major
-part is deductive, and where your conclusion will be recurrently made
-your premiss. Your induction only works on the basis of a hypothesis,
-and must itself be linked in the 'concatenation of truths,'--a
-concatenation which is also a criticism and a correction.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: 'We hold,' says the American Declaration of Independence
-(1776), 'these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created
-equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
-rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
-happiness,' &c.]
-
-[Footnote 2: Louis Blanc, _History of the Revolution_, vol. i.]
-
-[Footnote 3: Hobbes, _Leviathan_, Part I. chaps. 2 and 3; and
-elsewhere. Schopenhauer, _Welt als Wille_, Book I. § 6.]
-
-[Footnote 4: Bacon, _Novum Organum_, i. 10.]
-
-[Footnote 5: See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 400.]
-
-[Footnote 6: See Chapter XII.]
-
-[Footnote 7: Cf. _Ethica,_ iv. 37, Schol. I. contrasting _rerum
-externarum communis constitutio_ with _ipsa hominis natura, in se sola
-considerata._]
-
-[Footnote 8: See the _Discours préliminaire_ to the _Theodicee_.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVI.
-
-
-THE NEW IDEALISM.
-
-
-This new idealism which conjures by the name of Reason is a different
-thing from the pseudo-idealism of Jacobi, as it is from the
-'rationalism,' so-called, of the mere intellectualist. Its ideal is not
-a desperate refuge from the hard and bitter reality, only to be reached
-by the plunge of faith,--which seems rather the leap of despair: not
-a _mere_ other-world,--always _other_, longed for, presaged, beheld
-in dreamy vision, but unperceived by the clear light of intelligence:
-clutched at, but elusive of every effort. It is not won by turning
-the back on reality and flying on the wings of morning faith to the
-better land and the presence of the divine: but by persistence in
-unfolding, expanding, adjusting, re-combining, and fortifying those
-partial glimpses of the unseen which occur in every vision of the seen.
-It is true the ideal is, in a way, always an other world: but not a
-_mere_ other world; it is another, and yet not another, but the same,
-seen, if you like to say, transfigured, idealised. But idealisation,
-if so applied, means not an addition here and a subtraction there
-made in reality, from some source outside--from some indeterminable
-Whence (Whence indeed should such additions come?). It does not mean
-a correction of faults and failures in the real, at the will of an
-artist who is dissatisfied with his subject-model and would mend it
-out of other faces and forms stored up in memory or sketch-book.
-This idealism does not in that sense idealise (so as to falsify). It
-means complete reality; absolute, systematic, unconditioned reality:
-nowhere fragmentary, nowhere referring outside, but completing itself
-in all its members. It means--to quote the Hegelian term--seeing all
-things in the Idea--their notion (or ideality), i. e. their unifying
-'grip,' reflecting itself in their objectivity, and their reality
-completing itself in art, religion, and philosophy to that ideal which
-to the non-artistic, non-religious, non-philosophic mood is only dimly
-suggested and partially supposed. Still less is it an idealism which,
-as popularly understood, turns reality and historic fact into _mere_
-ideas.
-
-But, as perhaps may have been apparent, to call this way of thought
-idealism need not keep us from acknowledging that the same philosophy
-is also realism. If it insists, so to say, on the idealism of--what
-we sometimes call material--nature, it no less insists on the realism
-of--what is supposed immaterial--mind. The mental or spiritual world
-loses its unsubstantial intangibleness, its mere supposedness, its
-'ideal' or _merely_-ideal character. To the older, and we may say
-vulgar, view the mind or soul was a mere 'thought,' something of
-which all that could be seen were certain acts or phenomena. It was
-a _mere idea_, which one could pretty well get on without--so long
-as he kept, as the phrase was, to the phenomena--phenomena without
-reality. How vague and aery again was the subject-matter of morals! A
-few virtues and vices, confessedly general descriptive titles, a talk
-about will and conscience,--all of them merely several predicates of an
-unknown, spoken of, postulated, but unproducible. Compared with this
-mere supposedness the spiritual world in Schelling and Hegel acquires
-the reality of a quasi-organism (really supra-organic), growing
-and constituting itself, and making room in it for a host of human
-relationships. The abstract faculties of mind get reality (not indeed
-sensible): the intangible notions of morals become almost palpable: the
-kingdom of mind becomes a real pendant to the kingdom of nature. And,
-on the other hand, the kingdom of nature gets its ideality recognised:
-its unity and continuity made effective in an Idea which embraces,
-co-ordinated and systematised, its disparate and unconnected portions.
-
-This new Idealism, if it led men back from the historical world to
-nature, was yet hardly in all respects a pupil of Rousseau. Not 'Back
-from civilisation and artificiality to nature and the freedom of the
-woodland,' was its cry: but rather 'Remember that man always rests
-on and grows out of nature, always has his ideals made directly or
-indirectly visible in physical (sensible) structures; and that, when
-culture turns away from sense and nature to some supposed higher, it is
-really entering on a path which leads to abysses,' Its voice, in fact,
-was much like the longing expressed in Schiller's _Gods of Greece;_
-it wished man more godlike and the divine more human. But instead of
-backward,--its motto was forward: or back to nature, only to resume the
-true starting-point, and retreat from a path of civilisation whose end
-is perdition. Man also was nature[1]--if he is never _mere_ nature, i.
-e. the nature unexalted to its truth--but he brought to expression,
-and might bring to ever clearer and fuller expression, a something
-which was in infra-human nature, but which nature elsewhere had
-failed adequately to present. Thus the relation of Man to Nature was
-apparently twofold. On one hand, the physical world was essentially a
-world of reason and intelligence--though of intelligence petrified[2].
-So far Hegel agreed with Schelling. But, on the other hand (and here
-Hegel took up the great paradox of Fichte), man's place in the universe
-is to fulfil the promise and implication of Nature to the full reality
-of Spirit, to fulfil it by law and morality; but (here he completes
-Fichte by the help of Schelling) also in higher measure, by art,
-religion, and science. The world of intelligence and reason which man
-constructs as an ethical, artistic, and religious being, is the full
-truth of the natural world,--the higher meaning, and fuller, more
-consistent, and complete reality of the sensible: and it is so, because
-the lord of Nature is one with the lord of the human soul. The new way
-of philosophy therefore, if it could be ever charged with saying that
-the so-called real things of ordinary life were only ideas, or mental
-images, meant that, as taken by the unthinking or imperfectly thinking
-perception, they were something of which all that could be said was to
-describe their relations to something else, of which in turn the same
-remark might be made; so that--as far as they went--reality was never
-with us, but only an assurance (soon to be proved vain) that it was
-next door[3]. On the contrary--in _its_ use of the term Idea--what this
-idealism asserted rather was that the objects of Nature in their _prima
-facie_ apprehension were not yet an Idea: if, i.e., an Idea is a mental
-or spiritual reality which explains and completes itself, instead of
-sending us on endless fool's errands elsewhere--, is a concept which
-is exactly adequate to reality, and has gathered in it the power of
-reality.
-
-The new idealism is not subversive of realism, but includes it and
-makes it the reality it professed to be. It may therefore, as Schelling
-proposed[4], be called an ideal-realism, or a real-idealism. If any
-body likes, he may even, if he is no Greek scholar, call it Monism;
-but in that case he had better begin by admitting to himself that any
-Monism, which can stand its ground and serve for an explanation of the
-universe, will not exclude Dualism. All is indeed one life, one being,
-one thought; but a life, a being, a thought, which only exists as it
-opposes itself within itself, sets itself apart from itself, projects
-its meaning and relations outwards and upwards, and yet retains and
-carries out the power of reuniting itself. The Absolute may be called
-One: but it is also the All; it is a One which makes and overcomes
-difference: it is, and it essentially is, in the antithesis of Nature
-and Spirit, Object and Subject, Matter and Mind; but under and over the
-antithesis it is fundamental and completed unity. Monism, literally
-understood, is absurd--for it ignores, what cannot be ignored, the
-many: and Dualism, which is offered sometimes as a competitive scheme,
-is not much better; unless we understand the Dualism to be no fixed
-bisection, but an ever-appearing and ever-superseded antithesis which
-is the witness to the power and the freedom of the One,--which is not
-alone, but One and All, One in All, and All in One.
-
-The central or cardinal point of Idealism is its refusal to be kept
-standing at a fixed disruption between Subject and Object, between
-Spirit and Nature. Its _Idea_ is the identity or unity (not without the
-difference) of both. In its purely logical or epistemological aspect
-one can easily see that, as Schopenhauer was so fond of repeating,
-There is no Object without a Subject and no Subject without an
-Object[5]. The difficulty arises in remembering these excellent truisms
-when one of the correlatives is out of sight, and the other seems
-to be independent and to come before us with a title to recognition
-apparently all its own. When the Subject figures as the individual
-consciousness, encased, it may perhaps be added, in an individual body,
-and the Object as a thing apparently out there in a world beyond all
-by itself, then the lapse from this rudimentary idealism becomes easy.
-In the practice of life and business, each of us, self-conscious and
-autonomous _subject_ as he may be, comes to rank in the estimate of
-others, and ere long to some extent in his own, as also a part of the
-aggregate of objects. All reality and substance seem as it were to
-slide over into the object-side. The conscious subject counts as a mere
-onlooker or the passive spectator of a performance that goes on in an
-outside field of event,--yet that outside is his own object-mind; his
-mind counts as a mere idea, or rather as a succession of ideas, i. e.
-of mental pictures with a certain meaning in them. A little step more
-and the very subject-mind itself is turned into an object. There stands
-indeed--according to the ordinary introspective psychology--as it
-were in one corner, or at one loop-hole of vision, a mind looking on,
-observing and criticising another thing which is also called a mind;
-but the mind observing can only reflect or register, and the mind which
-is observed is very much thing-like, apparently acted upon by other
-things, and acting upon them in turn. This object-mind, a real among
-other reals, in relations of cause and effect with them, does not,
-if we can trust the _words_ of those who tell about it, see itself,
-but lies open to the inspection of this other mind, represented by the
-psychological observer, who is good enough to report to us something
-of its blind and dark estate. Its re-actions, he informs us, exhibit a
-remarkable peculiarity. They are equivalent to states of consciousness:
-and even to acts of will and knowledge. As when a violin is touched in
-certain ways by the bow, you get a musical note, so when certain agents
-come in contact with this peculiar real, they elicit a re-action,
-termed sense or idea.
-
-To distinguish in this manner between mental passivity and activity is
-natural and right. The basis of all consciousness and mental activity
-is an original division, a 'judgment' or dijudication of self from
-self. But, once the dijudication made for such ends, it is a mistake
-to forget its initiation and lose sight entirely of the fact that
-the observing mind is also the active, and that the object-self is
-not merely in relation to the subject-self, but in a higher unity is
-identifiable therewith. Still the thing is done, habitually done. We
-all profess this faith of ordinary realism in our first reflections
-upon ourselves. And the effect of the oblivion is that we seek
-elsewhere for the initial activity, which we have abstracted from and
-lost sight of. The receptive passive mind,--called subject still, but
-now become a subject in the sense of the anatomist,--has to be set in
-motion, to be impinged upon or impressed. The psychical event which you
-_call_ knowledge, and which no doubt _means_ knowledge,--the mental
-'state' which you observe--or, it may even, if your authority is a
-particularly obstinate and _intransigcant_ realist, be the molecular
-change in brain cells,--requires an antecedent event to account for
-it. The origin of the movement which issued in the given psychical
-or molecular change is sought in a self-subsistent thing which _out
-there_ gives rise to a series of movements which _in here_ result
-in a sensation. Or, a thing somehow produces an attenuated image of
-itself in the brain, or in the mind; for, in this mythological tale
-of psychical occurrence, accuracy is unattainable, and one must not
-seek to be too precise. In any case the relationship between thing
-and idea is conceived after the analogy of the nexus of cause and
-effect, or original and copy; and the verbal imagination of the
-analogical reasoner is satisfied. What Hegel, after Schelling, teaches,
-on the other side, is that the process of sense-impression and the
-manipulations to which it is subjected by intellect presuppose, for
-their existence and their objective truth, a Reason which is the unity
-of subject and object, an original identity uniting knowledge to being.
-
-But the same defect of unphilosophic consciousness has another
-phase which philosophy has to remember. Popular language speaks of
-_things_,--of things here and things there, which act upon each other
-and upon the so-called mind: i. e. on this imagined and supposed
-passive mind. For things, a more 'scientific' conception has been
-substituted--that of _forces_; which, whether attached to atoms or not,
-are asserted to be the real sources of the change and event which fill
-the world of our experience. And as, according to some psychologists,
-the mind is only a vacant ground or space with more or less narrow
-limits of room, on which the entities called ideas are for that reason
-forced into more or less close relationships, without any nearer or
-more essential tie; so, too, the mind is apt to be treated by others
-only as a battle-field or wrestling-ground of opposing forces. Here
-the atom-forces, as in the other case the atom-ideas, are, it is
-assumed, merely and purely independent: and yet such is the force of
-a limited environment--shall we say, in more popular language, the
-force of space and time?--that they must meet with one another, must,
-as it were, form associations, connexions, relationships. Great,
-verily, is the force of juxtaposition. Space and time, because they are
-essentially limiting, correlating, defining, weld links which the great
-prophet of this empirical school has not scrupled to call insoluble,
-ineradicable, inseparable. Space and time, says his great successor,
-are infinite. But they are infinite only in the sense that they can
-never be exhausted: they are everywhere, and for ever: but as real they
-are only here and now. Time can precede time, and space fade away into
-remoter space: but every space and every time is finite, defining,
-limiting, relative, and synthetic. And, if we look closer, space and
-time may come to seem the visible, ghostly, abstract outline--on one
-hand stiffening and bodying-out the ideal synthesis of thought and
-intelligence, on the other, faintly reproducing or fore-casting the
-real synthesis of organisation and living nature.
-
-In saying this we give the reasonable interpretation of
-'association':--so far at least as association is supposed to be
-brought about by juxtaposition in time and space. Time and space, as
-Kant might say, give the schema--the sensible and visible reflex of the
-eternal and universal thought-relation: they are _a priori_ because
-they are in the physical world the _primitive_, the first phase and the
-lowest manifestation of that unity which as we know it in nature and
-mind always blends with sense, or displays itself in sensible forms.
-They are the first stamp of reality, of real Nature: with them we are
-in Nature, but it is an abstract shadowy nature. They mark the ascent
-(which only from the mere logician's standpoint shall we call the
-descent) of the abstract (pure) idea into the element of multiplicity,
-of opposition, of life and consciousness. In the psychical and
-intellectual world, again, as it rises to more perfect ideality (as it
-elicits more _meaning_ from crude _fact_) they lose their prominence;
-they sink into the powers of memory and imagination, which build up
-past and future into the unity of the ever present, until in their
-consummation they leave as their residual product the abstract element
-of pure thought: a thought which claims the attributes of universality
-and eternity, which claims, i. e., to merge or submerge in it all space
-and all time[6].
-
-It is evident therefore that if an associationist theory, like that of
-Hume, proposes to explain the actual field of mental life by elements
-given in it, and by no other, it can only do so on certain assumptions,
-which may be summed up in the proposition that the mind--the real
-mental space and time even (and not its supposed 'image')--is at once
-subjective and objective, at once real and ideal, at once the field
-of operation, the force which directs operations, and the mind which
-is aware of itself and its acts. To say, as Hume appears to do, that
-an unintermittent long-established custom breeds _in us_ certain
-irresistible and essential habits of thought, can only refer to an
-unexplained and unnoticed duplication of the self. There is here, one
-self, which is only a bundle of fragments, of ideas intrinsically
-separate and only incidentally connected by outside pressure, which
-enter into ties, peradventure necessary or indissoluble, though not
-due to inner affinity. And there is another self which is a self-same
-unity, dividing and growing, or assimilating, acted upon but only
-because it solicits action, and in a way controlling the process going
-on within it. The difficulty for the investigator is to realise that
-these two selves are one. No amount of ingenuity will ever succeed in
-honestly showing unity to be the mere resultant--even should it be
-a fictitious or phenomenal unity--of the collisions and fortuitous
-attachments or detachments of different and independent reals. The
-reals which behave in such a way as to engender unities, to cause
-syntheses, are reals in a mind; and the mind must not merely, as it
-were, flow around them, but have them fluid members of itself. If they
-are reals, they are ideal-reals. You must begin with an ideal-unity
-which is also a real-unity, in which variety can play and by which it
-is controlled.
-
-'Forces,' no less than 'things,' are terms of thought, names of reality
-indeed, but inadequate because due to an abstraction and leaving
-their correlatives out of sight--names of momentary elements seized
-in the flux, and made with more or less success to indicate 'moments'
-and 'factors' or 'aspects' in the total sum and power of reality.
-Explanation by permanent and separate forces labours under the same
-disadvantages as that by things. Science, grown more self-critical,
-begins to see that in forces, &c., it has names and formulae which
-are not the full reality, but only useful (_if_ useful) abstractions.
-Neither things nor forces, though called real, are so in the full
-sense. Hume said,--and said not untruly, though with some relish of
-paradox,--that we never had any real impression or idea of power
-and force. The statement should be taken along with another that
-what we mistake for power in things is only our own want of power to
-overcome a suggested association, or to break a customary train of
-ideas. Lotze, again, has remarked that the supposed consciousness of
-power exerted in voluntary movement is confused with a feeling of
-work done, or inertia overcome. Whatever may be the truth about the
-psychological experience, there can be no doubt for the epistemologist
-that the so-called perception of force is an interpretation of one
-aspect of experience which, with a certain amount of arbitrary arrest
-and simplification, renders it intelligible and real by means of an
-antithesis and correlation. Force in fact only exists, or arises, in
-relation or opposition to a counter-force: action and re-action are
-always equal and opposite, says the mathematical formula. Two forces
-are as little independent as an up and a down, or as a west and a
-north; force solicits force, and force only _is_ in so far as it is
-solicited. The soliciting can only solicit because it is solicited.
-In other words, it is not enough to say that the forces which thus
-confront each other are correlatives. The relationship must be carried
-up a stage higher: the forces themselves get their pseudo-real
-character, only so long as they are kept apart forcibly or by inertia.
-Carry out their implications: and they re-unite (not however to the
-loss of all distinction) in a higher idea, an intelligible unity which,
-by its division and return to unity, makes possible and real their
-contention. It is this carrying-out of implications to their explicit
-truth which is at the root of Schopenhauer's playing fast and loose
-with the distinction between force and will. But with him the two terms
-are taken up vague and indefinite, in the haze of popular conception or
-want of conception, and are without effort or justification identified:
-whereas in Hegel, there is, on the lowest estimate, an _attempt_ made
-to trace the somewhat intricate steps which mediate the metamorphosis.
-
-The new idealism thus maintains the organic and even supra-organic
-nature of thought and being. The world of experience, when taken in its
-reality and fullness, is an organism which lives and knows and wills,
-and which is life, action, knowledge; its own means and its own end.
-The subject acting, living, knowing is action, knowledge, life. In the
-ordinary organism there is a subject of functions, a being in relation
-to an inorganic world. In the world-organism (if the inadequate name
-is still to be retained) there is no outside world, no inorganic
-or extra-organic thing. In the world-organism the organ and its
-environment is combined in one, re-united: the plant or animal is not
-without its place, and its place is not without plant or animal. They
-are not merely in correlation, but essentially and actually one. _Quid
-prosunt leges sine moribus?_ asks the moralist: but in the Absolute or
-the supra-organic Idea, law and morality are not apart: the necessity
-is also freedom: the law is not severed from its phenomenon. Such an
-organism which is life, thinking, will, is what Hegel calls the Idea:
-an organism which is completely organic, with no mere matter: and that
-Idea is the foundation of his Idealism. Conceived under its conditions,
-the forces which are sometimes represented as struggling with each
-other on the field of man's life, are no longer independent; still less
-completely separable forces. They are the inner division by which the
-spirit re-establishes and makes secure its unity: their antagonisms
-are the breath of life. And they have their relations in their common
-service, building up one life. They form a certain hierarchy of
-organisation; in which however the higher or more developed does not
-merely supervene upon the cruder, but in a way supersedes it, and yet
-contrives to retain its worth and its real truth.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Cf. Spinoza's remark on Body, _Eth._ III. pr. 2 Schol.:
-'Etenim quod corpus possit, nemo hucusque determinavit; hoc est neminem
-hucusque experientia docuit quid corpus ex solis legibus naturae
-quatenus corporea tantum consideratur possit agere,' &c.]
-
-[Footnote 2: See vol. ii, notes and illustrations, p. 392.]
-
-[Footnote 3: Schopenhauers well-known description of this recurrent
-throwing back of the responsibility of reality on something else is
-here suggested ('World as Will and Idea,' § 17).]
-
-[Footnote 4: See p. 157 (chap. xiii).]
-
-[Footnote 5: _Satz vom Grunde,_ § 16: _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung:
-Ergänzungen._ Cap. i.]
-
-[Footnote 6: See later, chapter xxvi.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVII.
-
-
-METHODS, ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL.
-
-
-When modern philosophy took its first steps, it was disdainful and
-depreciatory to the past, both Medieval and Old-Greek. Bacon and
-Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza,--be their other differences what they
-may--all echo the same disparagement. Like Wordsworth's _Rob Roy_, they
-cry--
-
-                    'What need of books?
-    Burn all the statutes and their shelves.
-
-    We'll show that we can help to frame
-           A world of other stuff.'
-
-On this iconoclastic age supervenes the attempt of Leibniz to combine
-in one all that was good in the new corpuscular philosophy with
-all that was precious in the old Platonic idealism as expanded by
-Aristotle. So, at the later philosophic crisis towards the close of
-the eighteenth century, the somewhat destructive and revolutionary
-tendencies of Kant and Fichte lead up by a natural revulsion and
-complement to the reconstructive systems of Schelling and Hegel. In
-them the conservative instinct comes to supplement the defects of
-the radical go-ahead. Instead of tossing the past away to the winds,
-and crying out _Écrasez l'infâme_,--instead of throwing medievalism
-behind, breaking all the restrictions on individual liberty which
-feudal Europe had created to secure and safeguard the communities that
-housed its early freedom, the new spirit of the time saw that the
-problems of modern life were not solved by merely throwing overboard
-as encumbrances and refuse all checks and forms. On the contrary, the
-reflective mind saw that forms and checks so-called there must be, and
-that the art of statesmanship, though it could not entirely consist in
-copying the old, had still to work in some way after the analogy of the
-old methods: i. e. to do under new circumstances what would solve the
-same requisites, as the old constitution had done for its time. The
-change is well illustrated by the attitude towards state organisation
-shown by William von Humboldt at different epochs of his life.
-
-People talk glibly of the Historical Method, and what it has done for
-us. To hear what is sometimes said it might be supposed that this was
-the method that had been always habitual in history, but which in
-these latter days had been applied to other topics, and had proved its
-value on the new ground by achieving results that had hitherto been
-mere desiderata. This however is pretty nearly to reverse the true
-state of the case. It was long till history came to have any method
-worthy of the name. In most of those who figure as great historians
-the object had been to tell a good tale, to keep the thread of events
-distinct, to subordinate incidents to the main issue, to portray
-personal and public character and its influence on events. History was
-practised--we may even say--more as an art than as a science. If it
-dealt with causes, it dealt with individual, concrete, living causes,
-not with cold, dead abstractions of forces, laws, or tendencies. If it
-did not altogether ignore the suggestions of a quest for principles to
-be found in Thucydides and Polybius, it was much more enamoured of the
-art of Livy and Tacitus, or even of the naïveté of Herodotus. Of such
-history who has not felt the power; who has not admired the genius that
-reconstructs the men and circumstances of the past, and makes them
-live over again their deeds, and again in the end yield the palm to
-inevitable fate! But it was not from such history that the historical
-method arose.
-
-The historical method was the product of the new conception of nature
-and mind in their mutual relations which has been already noted. To
-estimate the labours of thinkers towards this view of history would
-be an interesting but complex inquiry. Leibniz in particular by
-his principles of development, of continuity, of general analogy,
-should have made two things for ever clear. And these two results
-that might have been supposed secure were, first, that the present
-existence (which at first seems to be alone real) is only a narrow
-transition line between a past and a future,--a line of points
-intersecting a complex movement or development; and secondly, that
-all development is of something which is essentially infinite, which
-requires nothing external, no fillip from circumstances or from an
-external providence, to set it going, but is in itself a synthesis of
-active and passive force in a something at least analogous to an Ego.
-The first principle is embalmed in Leibniz's maxim: 'The present is
-laden with the past, and full of the future': and the second, in the
-maxim 'the Monads have no doors or windows.' In virtue of the first,
-the existent (of this instant) is only a stage or grade, rooted in
-what has been, and insignificant unless in reference to what is to
-come. In virtue of the second, all development is from within, and
-presupposes therefore that the developing individual includes within
-it a great deal which a cursory view would at first sight assume to
-be without it, and only accidentally in contact with it. It might
-indeed be well to add a third principle--what Leibniz has sometimes
-called the Law of Continuity--the law that, as he says, distinct and
-noticeable perceptions are the resultants of an infinite number of
-insensible or little perceptions. But continuity proper is not this:
-continuity proper or identity is a pure idea. The visible or sensible
-discontinuity reposes on, and is to be explained by, an invisible or
-ideal continuity. Each body, for instance, in nature, appearing to have
-a separate existence of its own, is only a stage isolated or insulated
-in a continuing process: and that process, binding, as it does, past
-to future, is the process of a Mind. _Omne Corpus_, wrote Leibniz in
-1671, _est mens momentanea seu carens recordatione._ Every physical
-and material object is an intelligence, but an intelligence which
-neither looks before nor after, but is limited _for itself_ to the mere
-instant: an intelligence which has no history. Yet to the intelligent
-observer it has a past,--it has a memory, it bears in it the traces
-of its antecedent. Yet to read that book of memory, to decipher the
-'insensible perceptions' which are buried beneath the momentary
-present, beneath its unspiritual reality, and to knit present with past
-and future, is the work of an intelligence, in and to whom the material
-discloses its store of meaning, or in whom it is re-spiritualised. In
-other words, the presupposition of this historical method is the ideal
-continuity of being, transcending and absorbing the differences of time.
-
-But the teaching of Leibniz--even more perhaps than that of
-Spinoza--fell on an evil age: if it was not actually choked with
-thorns, it found a soil with little depth, and its brief verdure was
-soon followed by a fearful withering. Anxious as Leibniz was to commend
-his theories to all men,--and not least perhaps to win the suffrages
-of some illustrious and intelligent women--he was led to present them
-under forms and phrases which were to each correspondent specially
-familiar. And the natural consequence was not absent. The forms of
-accommodation were what told: they stuck, and the truth they were
-meant to convey slipped away: the Leibnitian theory was re-interpreted
-into the doctrines it had been meant to supersede. As with Spinoza,
-so with Leibniz, a keen apprehension of his meaning came first to the
-thinkers on the borderland of literature and philosophy, to Lessing and
-Herder, and found an appreciative welcome in the more academic systems
-first from Schelling and Hegel. Above all, this theory of 'petites
-perceptions' so closely bound up (as was to be expected) with his
-mathematical discoveries in the Calculus, is what marks him as having a
-finer ear for the secret harmonies and principles of existence than the
-coarser organs of popular philosophy could catch up or appreciate.
-
-'In order,' says Leibniz, 'to get a clearer idea of the little
-perceptions which we cannot distinguish in the crowd, I am accustomed
-to employ the example of the roar or noise of the sea which strikes
-us upon the shore. To hear this sound, as we do hear it, we must hear
-the parts which compose this total, i. e. the sounds of each wave,
-though each of these little sounds only makes itself perceptible in the
-confused assemblage of all the others together, (that is to say, in
-that same roar,) and would not be noticed if this wave which causes it
-were alone. For we must be a little affected by the movement of that
-wave, and we must have some perception of each of these sounds, however
-small they may be; otherwise we should never have the perception of
-a hundred thousand waves, since a hundred thousand zeros would never
-make anything.... These little perceptions are of greater efficiency by
-their consequences than we suppose. It is they which form that _Je ne
-sais quoi_, those tastes, those images of sensible qualities, clear in
-the assemblage, but confused in the parts; those impressions made upon
-us by surrounding bodies which envelop the infinite, that _nexus_ which
-each being has with all the rest of the universe. It may even be said
-that in virtue of these little perceptions the present is big with the
-future and laden with the past, that everything conspires together: and
-that in the least of substances, eyes as piercing as those of God could
-read the whole sequel of the things of the universe.
-
-'These insensible perceptions, further, mark and constitute the
-same individual, who is characterised by the traces or expressions
-which they preserve of the preceding states of that individual, thus
-forming the connexion with his present state. These may be known by
-a superior spirit, though that individual himself should not feel
-them, i. e. though express memory should no longer be there. But these
-perceptions also supply the means of rediscovering that memory, at
-need, by periodic developments, which may one day happen.... It is
-also by these insensible perceptions that I explain that admirable
-pre-established harmony of mind and body, and even of all monads or
-simple substances,--which takes the place of the impossible influence
-of one upon another.... After this, I should add but little if I
-said that it is these small perceptions which _determine_ us in many
-conjunctures without our thinking of it, and which deceive the vulgar
-by the appearance of an _indifference of equilibrium_, as if we were
-entirely indifferent whether we turned, e. g., to right or to left.
-
-'I have remarked also that in virtue of insensible variations two
-individual things could never be perfectly alike, and that they ought
-always to differ more than _numero._ And with this we have done once
-for all with the empty tablets of the mind, a soul without thought,
-a substance without action, the void of space, the atoms, and even
-parcels not actually divided in matter; we have done with pure repose,
-entire uniformity in a portion of time, of place or of matter,...
-and a thousand other fictions of philosophers which come from their
-incomplete notions, fictions which the nature of things does not
-suffer, and which our ignorance and the little attention we have for
-the insensible lets pass, but which could never be rendered tolerable,
-unless we confine them to abstractions of the mind which protests that
-it does not deny what it puts aside and considers out of place in any
-present consideration. Otherwise, if we took it quite in earnest, to
-mean that things which we do not perceive do not exist in the soul or
-body, we should fail in philosophy as in politics by neglecting τὀ
-μικρόν, insensible steps of progress:--whereas an abstraction is not an
-error provided we know that what we put out of sight is still there.'
-
-This was the conception which Bacon had shadowed out, which Leibniz
-had presented under many names and with many applications, as the
-olive-branch between Plato and Democritus; it now became through
-philosophical and extra-philosophic acceptance a current maxim in the
-general field of knowledge. Nature assimilated to history, and history
-assimilated to nature: freedom built upon necessity, and efficient
-causes rounded off, though not entirely merged, in final. It is the
-recognition of law, order, causality in the psychical world, yet not
-of _mere_ so-called natural law; and therefore without reducing it to
-a merely physical and material world. It is in fact the new method
-which is inevitable and necessary, as soon as it is manifest that
-life, organisation, development is the underlying truth and central
-notion of things. You look at the world at first, let us say, as a mere
-collection of separate things in varying degrees of juxtaposition:
-and all that you think of doing to them, either by way of theory or
-practice, is to put them together, to link them closer, or separate
-them more widely. You do so from outside by an arranging force; for
-they are assumed to be purely passive, waiting to be touched, each set
-in its place--from which it can only be moved by a push or a pull.
-This is the method of mathematics or mechanics. It shows the dexterity
-of the agent or of the expositor: but you feel that it is artificial,
-and arbitrary. It is analytic or synthetic--but not auto-analysis
-or auto-synthesis. The director of the movement (we may call it
-'construction') may no doubt have the real secret: he may work the
-things well and fairly, and unite or divide them according to inner
-affinities; but we cannot, as matters stand, be sure of this. The
-things, in fact, he deals with have been already emptied of all life
-and peculiarity of their own: they are alike in quality, only differing
-by a more or less,--a difference which at any moment may be altered by
-an act of subtraction or addition. No doubt you can build up what are
-_called_ systems--compounds of a kind--in this way: but they do not
-really hang and grow together; they are only prevented from breaking
-up by the absence of any empty place to which the parts may withdraw.
-Bit holds up bit; but how all the bits have found themselves so caged
-up without exit is a mystery. Absolute neutrality or indifference of
-each part to others, and yet absolute equilibrium[1] in the total
-composite,--such is the situation.
-
-The chemical method (taking chemistry as a type of the sciences
-like optics, electricity, &c.) is a revelation of a different state
-of affairs. The elements of things are here seen to be unique and
-incomparable; yet in each there is a latent sympathy ready to break out
-when the proper occasion arrives. Bring two things together, and their
-affinity suddenly, in the proper circumstances, leads to their complete
-fusion: a product arises which, when formed, hardly betrays its origin
-and composition. In a way this is the converse of the mechanical or
-mathematical method. In it was no fusion, no inner mixture: each part
-after composition lay beside the other, and their union was only in the
-ideas of the onlooker. It was mere juxtaposition still,--though now
-closer: an abnormally keen eye would still have been able to descry the
-dividing lines and measure the gaps. At least mere mechanical physics
-tends so to conceive it. Here, on the contrary, there is union--but
-only at the moment of fusion: once that is accomplished, the result is
-apparently simple, and bears no suggestion of being a compound. In the
-mechanical union the result is exactly equal to the sum of the elements
-which go to make it: in the chemical there is something positively new,
-something, i. e., of which the premises gave no indication and made no
-promise.
-
-Either of these methods,--of these conceptions of existence--works
-well in a certain region. But both of them only do their work on a
-certain hypothesis, or with a certain abstraction. The mechanical
-method supposes that objects are all qualitatively alike, differing
-only in quantity or weight: all therefore entirely comparable with
-each other, and capable of being substituted for each other in an
-equation. Where this assumption holds good, the method of addition and
-division, the method of the calculus does its work[2]. The chemical
-method works on another assumption,--the assumption of a number of
-qualitatively-differenced elements, of elements which also are, so to
-speak, set on edge against some, and ready to leap into the arms of
-others. If the observer in the first case had the game entirely in his
-own hand,--could build up and separate at his pleasure, could determine
-results _a priori_: he is here baffled by the unexpected, and can only
-wait and watch to learn _a posteriori_ the behaviour of the bodies
-possessed of this occult and non-predictable affinity. At the best he
-can only formulate what he observes, try to classify it, ascertain
-any common principles running through it, any serial recurrences,
-or the like: and that is all that chemical philosophy can achieve.
-Chemical affinity--the fact that certain elements combine in certain
-ways, and refuse to enter into certain alliances--is a great fact:
-but to _a priori_ reasoning or abstract syllogising it is an entire
-inexplicability, one of the accidents in the universe which must be
-reckoned with, but cannot be understood.
-
-It is probably evident that, if we want to get a comprehension of
-the life and concrete reality of things, neither of these methods
-will quite answer the purpose. With the first alone, if it could be
-universally carried out, the universe would be thoroughly explained:
-everything would be exactly equivalent to some sum or multiple of
-every other: there would be no mystery, nothing unique, and strictly
-individual. Given time, we could find a formula for every reality,
-and a predicate exactly fitted to any subject. Yet even mathematics
-has to confess the existence of irrationals, surds, infinite series,
-and the like. For our unities and standards are always arbitrary,
-artificial, and one-sided, and fall short of the subtlety of nature.
-Even our simpler types of surfaces--the circle and the square--remain
-irreducible to each other: and we only avoid the collision by the
-remark that practically and with any required amount of exactness
-the discrepancy between the two can be adjusted. If we turn to the
-chemical method, again, there is a nearer approach to actuality in the
-recognition of the presence of something more than mere composition
-and juxtaposition. It is not that there is something which is _not_
-juxtaposition: but rather it is much _more than mere_ juxtaposition.
-There may be degrees of this something more: but it is only to a gross
-or abstract view that it is not present at all. Mere cohesion even
-shows a unity in things juxta-posed. Mere contact is contagious: it
-infects. 'When a violin has been played on frequently by a tyro,' says
-G. H. Lewes, 'its tone deteriorates, its molecules become re-arranged,
-so that one mode of vibration is more ready than another[3].' 'Toute
-impression,' he quotes from Delboeuf, 'laisse une certaine trace
-ineffaçable.' So-called chemical composition is only a conspicuous
-instance, with peculiarities, of this alteration in state produced
-by what, from the mechanical standpoint, are called inner molecular
-displacements. But to recognise a fact is one thing: to give its
-explanation is another. Yet, on the other hand, to recognise the fact
-is to note an important point which had been omitted by the mechanical
-construction of things. There the result could hardly be called new:
-it was exactly equal to its constituent elements: and the equation was
-transparent. And it was transparent because the whole process, analysis
-and synthesis, was not a work or process of the observed thing, but
-the work of the observing mind: it makes the (artificial) unities,
-numbers them, and adds them or subtracts. But with the chemical result,
-though it also is equal to its elements, there is something new.
-Water, no doubt, is oxygen and hydrogen, but here, at least, there
-is no doubt that the _plus_ sign unduly simplifies the relationship,
-and rather indicates or represents a nexus than accurately defines
-it. And yet, there is nothing in water which was not, in some--shall
-we say mysterious?--way, in the oxygen and the hydrogen. Chemical
-physics, therefore, brings out clearly, or comparatively clearly,
-something which the ordinary and coarser simplicity-loving theory is
-obliged and is able to neglect: it realises the virtue that lies in
-juxtaposition, and shows that the mere outer change of quantity goes
-with a deeper inward and qualitative one. The result does more than
-sum up and condense what was spread out in extension and dispersed
-in parts before: it brings out or reveals something which previously
-was unsurmised. Always, in a liberal interpretation of the maxim, it
-is true that _Ex nihilo nihil fit:_ but here, especially, the effect
-actually discloses what was--but was latent or unperceived--in the
-premises. The maxim, to be fairly treated, must be read backwards as
-well as forwards.
-
-But we must go a step further if we wish the full explanation. If the
-premises are to be adequate to support the conclusion, they must be
-restated in terms which hint at the conclusion--which in a way contain
-it, but contain it in potentiality and promise, not in act. This is
-the method of development, which is the method that is applicable to
-full concrete reality, not like the others to parts abstracted from
-or insulated in reality. So long as you deal with these selected
-bits of fact--abstracted from their surroundings, subject to strict
-observation or strict experiment, you can apply a comparatively simple
-and straightforward method. You are dealing with abstracted, mutilated,
-prepared fact. You are guided in these cases by the canons of identity
-and difference: you add and subtract, or subtract and add; and that
-is all. You use what are called the rules of experimental method. But
-these canons do not directly apply--except by happy accident--to the
-real world, where antecedent and consequents are not separate and
-tabulated, as the logical canons, the rules of formal logic, require.
-In dealing with this concrete reality, a much more complex method is
-needed, a method which has to blend induction with deduction, and
-to start from both ends in the series of causation at once. You can
-apply observation or experiment, only when the issues have already
-been extremely simplified and narrowed down: when the question has
-been rendered so definite that it is next-door to the answer, and the
-removal of a slight partition-wall will as it were make the two one
-clear space. Where observation and experiment are available, indeed, is
-where the general outlines and principles of the subject are settled,
-where the scheme of reality is defined in large, but a variety of minor
-issues still remains to be settled. Unless this general framework is
-fixed, neither observation nor experiment, with their canon of identity
-and difference, are of any avail. These methods, therefore, only apply
-in sciences which are in principle or substantially complete, though
-admitting of possibly infinite extension in details and particulars.
-Where the science is yet to constitute, i. e. in dealing with the
-kinds of real things in their completeness, and not as viewed in
-some definite aspect, induction and deduction must go hand in hand
-and help each other at every step: and if they, as they must, have
-recourse to experiment and observation, it will be at first in a very
-unsatisfactory and tentative way.
-
-Such is the way the contrast between the simplicity belonging to an
-artificial method dealing with picked instances, and the complexity
-that real concrete organic nature demands, presented itself to J. S.
-Mill as he advanced in his inquiry. The only complete method for the
-investigation of unsophisticated nature, not yet mapped out and defined
-in general departments, is the deductive-inductive method in which
-induction and deduction separately have a subordinate place,--using
-induction in the narrow sense the term has been hitherto allowed to
-bear. And that sense, it may be added, is, as in some passages of
-Aristotle, little else than a reverse of syllogism, or to speak more
-accurately, it is a syllogism which goes up to generals instead of
-descending from them. It is like the syllogistic deduction formal and
-abstract in character. The (deductive) syllogism assumes the existence
-of major premises--of general propositions which in the last resort,
-if they are real bases, must be primary and true, or self-evident
-facts. But a critic, like Mill, had little difficulty in showing
-that a general truth rests upon and presupposes the very particular
-conclusions which it is used to establish. Unless every singular is
-true, the universal which embraces or unifies them cannot really be
-true. Therefore the conclusion is really implied and presupposed in
-the principles of its premises. But, unfortunately for the application
-and supposed sequel of this not unjust remark, a similar remark may
-be made on the ordinary exposition of the inductive method. Induction,
-it is said, infers from or on a basis of single facts. But if a single
-truth is really, i. e. unconditionally true, it is indistinguishable
-from the universal. If it is really true once, it is true for ever.
-The assertion of the individual proposition as true, if it can be
-supported--(and unless it be true, what basis can it afford for
-the general conclusion?)--implies the truth of the universal it is
-sometimes used to establish. The inductive logician tells us to build
-on singular and definite facts, on truths of definite and individual
-experience: but a definite or determinate truth rests upon universality
-(indeed is a universal), and cannot be found unless we have already
-found the special total or organism of truth in which it forms a part.
-Individuals and universals presuppose each other, and do not, as the
-first impression leads us to think, stand apart as two unconnected
-termini, from either of which, if we happen to be so located, we can
-without road or railway make a legitimate passage to the other.
-
-If it be urged, as it may naturally be, that on this showing there is
-no solid or 'absolute' starting-point at all, the contention may be
-conceded. The only fixed and steady points in knowledge are points
-hypothetically fixed,--certified, that is, for the time and in the
-circumstances we employ them. But in the open field--or rather in
-the wilderness--of knowledge, where the ground of fact is not staked
-off, and the unexpected may always turn up, the only test of truth is
-the corroboration given by the consilience of paths initiated from
-different points: it is only by an undesigned coincidence in the
-results of independent operations that you can succeed in orienting
-yourself. You begin your road at two ends, and you meet: you locate
-or fix your point by drawing its co-ordinates to two direction-lines
-taken anyhow at first, and only in formed science diverging at a fixed
-angle. And in the absolute your direction-lines cannot be supposed
-fixed: you can only gradually adjust them to each other as you
-proceed. Intelligence, says Aristotle, is a principle, a beginning;
-and intelligence, he says again, supplies beginnings[4]. Science, in
-the technical sense, only comes into operation,--or, in other words,
-deduction and (in the narrower sense used by Mill, and proceeding by
-_pure_ observation and experiment) induction only find a way,--where
-beginnings and principles have been set up, where an approximate order
-or provisional system has been established. And if logic, in its
-stricter sense, is the method of sciences already made and in their
-essentials constituted, then logic can be asked to do no more than
-to provide a theory of such formal processes. If it traces the path
-which leads 'from the known to the unknown,' if it always proceeds on
-the hypothesis of a given knowledge, then such induction or deduction
-(from certain and approved singular facts, or from certain and approved
-general truths) fully satisfies the practical need of the scientific
-reasoner. But if Logic be, as it sometimes is, and may very reasonably
-be, taken in the wider sense of an epistemology,--a theory of the
-nature and origin of knowledge as a whole, and not of mere inference
-or syllogism;--if it does not merely ask how we can satisfactorily
-get from one piece of knowledge (we are supposed to have) to another
-(not yet supposed to be), but how we come to have knowledge at all;
-then its problem must go behind the rudiments of vulgar induction and
-deduction. It must ask--what, so far as one can see, Mill and his
-mere followers have never seriously asked at all--what induction
-is, what are its relations with deduction, and what is the place of
-either in the process of knowledge. And as the process of knowledge
-is the path to reality, it must also ask about the nature of this
-goal,--reality and truth. It is all very well for the narrower Logic
-to formulate in terms the methods actually employed in sciences: to
-state in abstract canons what is there seen in life and action. But
-a _Science of Logic_--an epistemology--(and a genuine epistemology
-cannot claim to be anything short of an ontology) must face the fact of
-science itself--must ask how the ideas of the knower must--or otherwise
-they are not knowledge--embrace and contain the reality of the known.
-The other and narrower Logic is and will remain a theory of forms of
-reasoning-a transcript in fainter terms of the procedure of science in
-any given step it takes upward to generals or downward to particulars:
-but the logic which deals with knowledge as such, in its systematic
-entirety,--the transcendental Logic, in short, must have a real value,
-an invincible relation to reality. The formal Logic--the logic of Mill
-and Hamilton--must be carried back to its principles, to its first
-step: and that first step which will also be the last step, and the
-inspiring principle of every intermediate step, is that of Intelligence
-(Aristotle's Νοῡς), of which the products or manifestations are λόγοι,
-i. e. definite conceptions, categories, formulations of rules and
-principles of definite range,--determinations or special types of unity.
-
-Mill really faced the problem of method to better effect when he came
-to deal with a class of questions in which he was really interested,
-and which moreover have for epistemological purposes the advantage of
-being as yet unreduced into the rank and file of disciplined science.
-These questions are those dealing with man, his mental and moral
-nature, and history. Even its advocates or patrons occasionally admit
-that there is no accepted idea of what Sociology is or does. Its name
-at least expresses a longing towards a unity, or a presentiment that
-there is some underlying unity and common method in the group of what
-are loosely called the moral, or the historical, or the social and
-political sciences. But sociology is, as most people will allow, the
-name of a science unrealised--the felt and consciously-apprehended
-need of a science, and the dissatisfaction with the existing state of
-knowledge in certain departments. And undoubtedly it was with problems
-of social science,--problems of politico-economic and socio-ethical or
-socio-religious matters, that Mill's interests were mainly engaged.
-Like his master in this department, Auguste Comte, he wanted to carry
-into the topics which he was chiefly bent upon that 'scientific'
-precision which they by pretty general admission lacked, and which
-revolutionary movements had shown they greatly needed. But he could
-not help seeing that the 'induction' of dynamics and physics was not
-exactly the instrument he was in search of. Theory and hypothesis
-here demanded a much larger share in the process than in the more
-mathematical sciences. Causes and effects in reality here rolled round
-into each other, instead of remaining calmly fixed, one set here, and
-the other there. Of course even here--i. e. in organic and concrete
-sciences--it is possible to introduce observation and experiment,--no
-doubt, with greater effort and constraint, but still not altogether
-impracticable. But the artificial and mutilative character of such
-experimentation is felt here in a way different from its pressure in
-other cases. And what is more important, to institute an experiment or
-set on foot a scientific observation (and to observe means to _watch_
-a definitely restricted natural process with a view to answer some
-question about it), presupposes--as we have already seen--a tolerably
-definite provisional theory as to the general lie of the country to be
-investigated. Only when the country has been reasonably well mapped out
-in provinces and provided with some system of roads, can these problems
-of detail--questions to be answered Yes or No--be profitably put. And
-it is--in some parts of the historical sciences at least--somewhat
-premature to put questions requiring a categorical reply. There is
-only the vague _malaise_ of felt difficulty to guide us. We do not,
-in many cases, know what it is that we want to know; for, it demands
-a good deal of wisdom and trained art to put the proper or reasonable
-question,--so much so, indeed, that to succeed in formulating your
-question fully is equivalent or nearly equivalent to being able to
-answer it. The value of observations and experiments--which are ways of
-putting nature to the question and it may be to the torture--depends
-entirely upon the knowledge and the command of general ideas possessed
-by the observer and experimenter. And the same may be said of the
-reduced and tabulated conspectuses of the results of many observations
-and experiments which are called Statistics. Their value depends on
-the truth and breadth of view which presided at their collection and
-arrangement[5].
-
-The historical or genetic method is the method of Science in general,
-but considered and employed under a limited aspect. And under its
-more comprehensive aspect it may be called--though no name is
-unimpeachable--the method of development. Now the essence of the idea
-of development--as was clearly shown by Leibniz--is the refusal to
-admit external interference, and the resolve to let a thing explain
-itself by itself. It does not, like the mechanical method, manipulate
-the thing from outside--try to add it up out of factors or items
-fashioned and fabricated after some external standard. Nor does it,
-like the chemical, look at the result as an inexplicable alteration,
-due apparently to a mere stroke of combination or disintegration--yet
-not obviously reducible to a mere equivalent of its elements. On
-the contrary, it recognises in the object a certain independence or
-originality, yet also the presence of an immanent law which does not
-wait for the outsider to put it together, but constructs itself, as it
-were, after a plan of its own. There is in the so-called object, though
-we do not at first sight recognise it, the same originative principle
-both analytic and synthetic, as we own in thought. The object is--in
-a true logic--a process, a self-completing process, and not merely an
-object, mechanical, or other object. It changes, grows or decays, while
-we observe, unless for brief instants we cut it off from its connexions
-and arrest its development. And our observation, if truly scientific,
-must be sympathetic with its process of change. It is neither a mere
-thing to be explained and construed _ab extra_: nor a mystery of sudden
-transformation to be passively accepted; but a growth, a history, to be
-sympathetically watched and understood,--understood, because it follows
-the same order as the movement of our own thought in the process of
-knowledge. _Similia similibus cognoscuntur_[6].
-
-One sometimes hears it asked by paradoxical critics at which end
-a history should begin. And to ordinary dogmatic recklessness,
-paradoxical the question may well seem. Begin at the beginning, no
-doubt, is the vulgar reply; which in this case is understood to
-mean from the earliest point in date (that, of course, being easily
-ascertained, and a thing known to all men). But,--so Plato long ago
-well raised the difficulty which will always confront us,--are we to go
-from the beginnings, or towards the beginnings? And it does not quite
-solve the question to say that we are to begin with what is known:
-for under that word the same difficulty re-appears. Can you really
-know one end without the other? To the vulgar partisan of historical
-method, its precept means Go to the earlier, if you wish to understand
-the meaning, the value, and the elements constitutive of the later and
-subsequent. Begin with origins, with the earliest elements, the phases
-that first appear; and thus you will get light to see the later as they
-really stand. That this is a common interpretation of the historical
-method is notorious. To explain _Homo sapiens_, one is told to study
-the ape,--the nearest analogue of his lost or missing progenitor: to
-understand the contemporary horse, go to eohippus, or hipparion, or
-however his early prototype may be at present named and recognised.
-And in all this there is a truth--or least a half-truth. But let us
-equally recognise the other half of the truth. If past throws light on
-present, present throws not less light on past. You propose, let us
-say, to write a history of Greece. A wordy philosophy, wise in its own
-conceit and in fine phrases, will advise you to approach the subject
-without prepossession or prejudice. So far, good. But what is meant
-by the absence of prepossession or prejudice? Not a blank openness
-to impression, not a mere passivity; but if passivity at all, a wise
-passivity: if openness, the openness of the trained judge.
-
-The advice, so often associated with Francis Bacon, to get rid of all
-false pre-conceptions, of all _idola,_ is one which it is easy to
-mistake in an over-zeal to follow it. That mere negation of prejudices
-which we call childish innocence is no match for the craft by which
-Nature seeks to keep or disguise her secrets. The free consciousness,
-the unbiassed mind, is not the easy result of one great act of
-renunciation, but the work of continued self-discipline, self-conquest,
-self-realisation. If you are not to impose upon the thing a
-pre-conception alien to it, neither must you rashly give yourself away
-to the thing, or to the first whims which accident puts upon you as the
-thing. What seems a fact or thing is only a candidate for the post of
-thing or fact: and its credentials need to be examined, and compared
-with other evidences. To detect a fact, therefore, is only possible for
-a tried and tested consciousness which by patience and self-mastery has
-won the key of interpretation. What Bacon apparently meant--though,
-as often happens, in his eagerness to combat a prevailing folly, he
-sometimes overshot himself in statement--was to insist on the eternal
-wedlock of the mind and things, of things and the mind, as the sole
-and sufficient condition for the reality of knowledge and truth. The
-mind may not presume to do without things, or things to domineer the
-mind;--or the result is a windy and frothy vanity. And the wedlock
-is eternal: in his own eloquent words, 'the mind itself is but an
-accident to knowledge[7],' and he might have added, so also are things:
-for, as he says, 'the truth of being and the truth of knowing is all
-one': only in the bond of knowledge are things true and real,--being
-otherwise only 'permanent possibilities,' or possibilities barely even
-permanent--or not even possibilities. Yet he scarcely realised that
-his 'due rejections and exclusions' and negations were a fundamental
-_constitutive_ element in those facts of which he habitually emphasises
-only the positive side.
-
-He therefore who would understand--or would write--the history of
-Greece must really in his studies begin at both ends--both at the
-Greece of to-day, and at the Greece of Solon, or what earlier period
-may be taken as the start of Greek history. With perhaps the least
-qualified dogmatism, one may assert that he will begin with the
-Greece of to-day; or if he deals solely with Ancient Greece he will
-begin with the full blaze of Hellenic civilisation which still has a
-pale reflection in the modern world, and gradually work back to the
-beginnings. It is no doubt customary to begin Greek history, say, with
-the Homeric Age, and work downwards, as it is customary to begin a
-formal treatise on geography with the general features of the earth's
-shape and surface. But that beginning represents really the temporarily
-accredited and accepted result of a process which, starting from the
-other end, has worked backwards to commencements or origins. And the
-teacher, in particular, will do well not to imitate too slavishly the
-method of the formal treatise. A day may come--or may have come--for
-example, for Greek history to start from periods long anterior to the
-supposed or traditional date of the wars around the wall of Troy. But
-when it does so, it will have done so by more thoroughly ransacking
-the Greece of to-day: and so disclosing the secrets of what is termed
-pre-historic Greece. Then, conversely, when modern diggings on Greek
-soil reveal the features of an earlier than what was erewhile to older
-historians its earliest past, the reconstruction of that early people's
-life reflects a new light on the directions and the limitations of
-its subsequent civilisation. We see better into the reality of Homer,
-and even of Demosthenes--into their ideal glory and their historical
-limitations, when we explore the cradle in which their race's life was
-erst fostered, and the rock out of which they and nature hewed them.
-And this is no peculiarity of Greece. The deepest research into the
-social institutions which control the England of to-day is the best
-propaedeutic for the study of Anglo-Saxon times; and the same is true
-_vice versa_.
-
-Nor, again, is the truth of the proposition confined to what we
-ordinarily mean by history. The Greek poet has said 'Art had to wait on
-and welcome chance, and chance to wait on Art': or as we may paraphrase
-it, if every invention and discovery is in a measure a lucky chance,
-it is a luck that only falls to the wisely prepared head and hand. The
-casual event falls as a germ of new construction or theory only on an
-intelligence ready to welcome it,--prepared with its complement in the
-spirit of an idea, eager to take shape. The means again, in the arts
-and crafts, is not only a means to something else; it is also a means
-to its own end, to realise or perfect itself. The rude tool of the
-savage, for instance, is not merely a means to supply his wants: it
-is also a means towards completing and improving itself, and towards
-perfecting itself by constructing an ampler tool, which supersedes it,
-because it can do all and more than all the work of the earlier, or
-can do it more economically. All progress that deserves the name is
-an incessant and continuous revision of a first step: a re-adaptation
-of an old instrument: a repeated and unending self-correction. It
-is only a partially-true symbol of human advance to speak of it as
-a line: unless we add, by another piece of symbolism, that the line
-is only the protracted or extended phase in which the form of time
-drags out for us the magnified and organised point-nucleus. It is a
-truth--which we are only too ready to forget or discount--that the
-savage (and he bears with justice both epithets, 'the noble savage,'
-and 'the brute barbarian') is not something left happily behind us, in
-the onward march of civilisation; but that he is, however much we may
-fancy him suppressed and superseded, still present, at least 'ideally'
-in the finest products of humanity, and may hap only too likely--as
-the Russian is said, when scratched, to betray his original Tartar
-breed--to burst put on provocation into a grim reality. The Pullman
-car of to-day retains within it for the archaeologically-trained eye
-the rudiments of the primitive wain of the primitive nomade: and
-the careful study of either end of the scale will not merely throw
-a marvellous light on the excellencies or the defects of the other,
-but will probably also tend in the impartial observer to moderate the
-self-gratulations of modern advance. For it is only those whose view
-ranges within narrow limits that are over-impressed by the magnitude of
-the advance made in the 'last new thing.'
-
-If progress were but the addition of bit to bit, of new bits to what
-is already there, or if we could change _this,_ and leave _that_
-unchanged,--as the word perhaps verbally means, and as many people at
-any rate seem to understand it, progress might indeed seem an easy
-thing, and to be undertaken with a light heart. For, it would appear
-as if we could lose nothing, and might probably (indeed, as enthusiasm
-and forgetfulness of the merits of the past are in certain periods
-ready to urge, must certainly) gain. But it is a more serious matter
-when we realise that we must move altogether, if we really are to move
-at all; i. e. really are to make progress, and not merely change, so
-to speak, from one foot to rest on another. For progress,--if it be
-what it is expected to be, and what it must be if it does what it is
-expected to do--is an organic, and not merely a mechanical or chemical
-change. A mechanical change is only a nominal or formal change: a
-chemical is more than change; but in organic change, that which changes
-also abides, and the new is not merely other than the old, and not
-merely a re-arrangement of the old, but the old transmuted,--the same
-yet not the _mere_ same[8]. Progress in short is always the unity of
-differentiation and integration. It must not be an externality, nor a
-mere dead product of a transformation scene, but a continuous growth,
-inwardly digested, made part and parcel of the collective life, which
-it has thereby rendered more full, real, and not merely made less
-intense at the cost of some extension. In true progress, which is only
-another name for true growth, nothing is quite lost, but only changed,
-retained in a richer shape and a fuller reality. How far such progress
-is possible, except in limited and finite spheres: how far progress in
-one involves necessarily deterioration in another and how, therefore,
-progress is not attributable to the Absolute, are questions we need not
-here discuss. But so far at least we may go as to say that a progress
-which does not follow the natural law of development and carry on into
-the future the worth and substance of the past, is not a progress which
-any general enthusiasm ought to be spent upon.
-
-Development then has two faces, one to the future and another
-to the past. And what is called the historical method is apt to
-emphasise only one of the two aspects, just as, it may be added,
-practical considerations are often likely to produce an opposite but
-equally partial bias in favour of the future. The historical method
-in incapable hands is liable to lead to unprofitable sighs,--not
-unaccompanied by a certain luxury of tears--over the lowly hole of
-the pit--it may even be the filth and brutishness, out of which so
-much of noble humanity (for thither the interest of development
-always reverts) has been dug; and in empty heads the practical,
-the vulgarly-utilitarian satisfaction is liable to equally vain
-fits of self-applause on our magnificent progress. But both the
-self-depreciation of him who loiters regretfully round the beggarly
-rudiments, and the self-laudation of glorious 'improvements' looking
-derisively on less glorious days, are unworthy of the reasonable and
-scientific spirit. The philosophical method does not allow itself to
-be imposed upon by the lapse of time, and insists that in a sense
-the past contained the present--that, as the poet says, the child
-is father of the man. Not indeed contained in any grosser or more
-delicate mechanical way. The coming development does not necessarily
-lie prefigured--if we had the proper microscope to see it--as a germ
-in the first and original state. That may be, or may not be. Yet
-prefigured it is by the law of its structure, or in the intelligible
-unity by which only can its existence be understood and construed.
-
-But if this be the method of real development, in the growth of nature,
-and the progress of history, it is also the method of that supreme
-product of historical progress, the spirit and system of philosophy.
-Thought, also, the culminating stage in which the spirit of man becomes
-conscious of itself and of its universe, will move or grow on the same
-lines as that of which it is the comprehension and theory. It will
-begin at the two ends, and each beginning will complete and presuppose
-the other. Nature will suppose and yet lead up to Spirit or Mind:
-Spirit or Mind will throw light on the mystery of Nature: Being will
-point to knowledge or Idea; and Idea show itself the basis of Being.
-Or, if we consider the triple division of the philosophic system, as it
-runs in Hegel's _Encyclopaedia_, we can see how misleading it may be to
-take that one order as absolute. To understand it thoroughly we must
-begin with each of the three in turn: so as thus to realise that each
-does not except figuratively succeed the other, but that in each an
-aspect of the whole truth is presented which had been put by the other
-parts somewhat in the background. In each part there is a definition
-and a revelation of the Absolute. But each is also, as it were, a
-projection, a perspective view, a condensed or expanded image of the
-other. In each the Absolute is one and whole, in some more veiled,
-more restricted, and more meagre than in others; but the veil, and the
-restriction, and the emptying, are self-imposed: and for that reason
-the veil is really transparent, the restriction is negatived, and the
-emptying is not only a self-humiliating but a self-ennobling irony--the
-irony of the Absolute.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Of course the term 'equilibrium' may be used loosely to
-mean a great deal more than this,--how much will depend on the context.
-These quasi-mathematical analyses have great fascination: their
-apparent simplicity imposes upon us.]
-
-[Footnote 2: The distinction, it will be observed, lies between the
-method of mathematical physics and that of physics which has learned
-something from the researches of electricity or chemistry. If the
-method or principles of chemistry are thus said to be reduced to those
-of physics, this is because the conceptions of physics have been
-revolutionised from the side of chemistry, &c., and even of biology.
-This tendency of modern science is precisely in the line indicated by
-Schelling and Hegel.]
-
-[Footnote 3: _Problems of Life and Mind_, iii. p. 58.]
-
-[Footnote 4: _Eth._ vii. 7 ὁ νοῡς ἀρχή: 6. 6 νοῡς ἐστι τῶν ἀρχῶν.]
-
-[Footnote 5: Statistics only define--and primarily for the
-imagination--the general laws and principles on which they rest. The
-clear-cut mathematical form strikes and 'catches on,' where a more
-universal statement sounds vague and glides off. Hence, as one says,
-they may prove _anything._ The fact is, they prove _nothing._ They only
-illustrate in diagrammatic form the theory which presided at their
-collection. To emphasise the fundamental nature of ethics for human
-development you need only say that conduct is three-fourths or (as to
-some minds the precision rises with the denominator of the fraction
-17/20) of human life.]
-
-[Footnote 6: The resolute misinterpretation--as it often seems--of
-the maxim that like is known by like,--is a curious chapter in the
-history of Logic. All knowledge is based upon,--or, to speak more
-simply, _is_--the identity of differents: of differents, which in
-knowledge are identified,--of identity which in knowledge is put under
-difference. And yet the ordinary meaningless talk on this matter seems
-to assimilate knower and known to two separate things (or persons),
-who casually and, we may add, inexplicably know each other: which is
-mythology, perhaps, but not epistemology.]
-
-[Footnote 7: Bacon: 'In Praise of Knowledge' (a mere leaflet of much
-significance towards estimating his true grandeur). On the _Conjugium_
-of _Mens_ and _Universus_ see _Novum Organum_, distrib. op.]
-
-[Footnote 8: The said _mere_ same is not really the same at all.
-Nobody in his senses predicates sameness except where he also sees
-differences: or, the term always implies relation.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XVIII.
-
-
-THE RANGE OF PERSONALITY.
-
-
-The difference between the conceptions of reality held by Aristotle and
-Plato respectively is that where Plato said Being, Essence or Substance
-(οὐσία), Aristotle said Activity (ἐνέργεια). To be is to act, to be
-active. To the outsider--the plain man of philosophic legend, it seems
-at first that a thing must _be_ before it can _do_: that you must have
-an agent before you get an action. And, in a way, Aristotle admits
-this not quite satisfactory criticism. Every activity presupposes, he
-allows, a power to act, a potentiality: every actual presupposes an
-implicit or a mere possibility. Existence seems, as it were, to be
-doubled; or the mere surface-being is turned into a subject which has
-a predicate. But if the existence is to be real, it has to include
-both elements, and with the latter or the actuality, as its crown.
-Nor is this all. The possibility which issues forth in action may be
-fairly called self-realisation. That is to say: A--the hypothetical
-agent--acts, does something: and in so doing, seems to go forth and
-beyond itself, to externalise itself. Or, A is acted upon, and thus
-seems to be diminished. But what it externalises, or puts forth, is
-after all what it _is_: it puts forth itself: and, on the other hand,
-if it be a patient, it is no less an agent and self-limitative. What a
-thing really is, is what it _makes_ itself be: what it allows itself to
-be made, that it really is. Yet further, if the word self-realisation
-be taken in its fullness of meaning,--if there be really a _self,_
-and it be realised, then this self-realisation, which is the truth
-or more developed conception of being, seems to imply or postulate
-in it a self-consciousness, an awareness of the process of completed
-being,--completed in its return from utterance of possibility to
-self-fruition or in its re-assumption of itself.
-
-To us, of course, as beings aware of what we do and achieve, this
-is simple enough: but it is also true of _things,_ that we only
-understand them, in so far as we put them in, or invest them with, the
-same activity and apperception of activity as we are familiar with
-in our own experience. The veriest materialist cannot help speaking
-of things as agents, as behaving, as having a function. He would, no
-doubt, if he were to be cross-examined, refuse to identify himself
-with the primitive anthropomorphism, or at least zoömorphism of the
-natural man who sees the river run and the clouds sweep the sky; and
-he would probably mutter something referring to people who cannot see
-when they ride a metaphor to death. Still less, perhaps, would he
-be inclined to adopt the spiritualistic or animistic hypothesis of
-philosophising physicists, like Fechner, who would accredit even the
-plants at our feet, and the stars in the sky, with souls, or soul-like
-centres of their life. But, however he may shrink from what we may call
-the ontological consequences of his language, there is no doubt that
-for him the meaning of the world, its reality and truth, is obtained
-by an interpretation in terms which, rigidly employed, imply their
-environment by a self-consciousness to which they are relative. Take
-from him the tacit assumption (which he often finds it difficult to
-realise just because it is the foundation of all his language) that
-reality is in the last resort a self-conscious reality, and his words
-become meaningless, or what he might think worse, metaphorical.
-
-To Bacon, who, though not without a strong speculative impulse,
-approached philosophic dicta from the standpoint of an average
-intelligent Englishman (and it is on that account that his remarks are
-often so instructive), it seemed a grave fault of the Stagirite to
-define the soul, that 'most noble substance,' by words of the second
-intention. Without substance--a solid something as basis of act and
-event--the reality of the soul seemed likely to fare badly. Behind
-consciousness he, like many others, felt there must be a something of
-which consciousness is the state, act, or predicate and attribute. The
-thinking must come from a thinker. There must be a permanent subject of
-thought--a persistent substance which does not disappear when thinking
-for the nonce stops. And thinking is according to common experience
-very liable to stops and interruptions. Both Bacon and Locke felt that
-without this refuge to fall back upon, personal identity was in a bad
-way, or personality itself little better than a delusion. And therefore
-when Aristotle, and his modern followers, treated soul and mind as
-essentially definable by the terms activity, self-realisation, it has
-been freely urged against them that they are tampering with the pearl
-of great price which all our hopes and aspirations fondly guard.
-
-And this is a subject on which there is inevitably a good deal of
-misunderstanding. And the misunderstanding will probably last so long
-as one set of writers flaunts over it that blessed word Personality
-as a holy, a sacrosanct thing, like the visionary cross with its
-inscription _In hoc signo vinces_: and as another set treats it as a
-mere fetish, under which is hidden nothing better than stock or stone,
-or a heap of old bones. Perhaps some concessions might well be made
-on both sides. And the first of them would be to try to come to some
-clearer understanding what the term in question means. And, on that
-point, if we follow the example of Aristotle and examine popular usage,
-to see if it can help us to any consistent use of the term, we shall
-find that by personal as opposed to real we mean something peculiarly
-attached to the individual, of which he cannot divest himself as
-of other outward things, though it also is an outward thing[1] The
-person in this narrowest sense means the body; and if the epithet
-is further extended it still expresses what is directly manipulated
-through the members of the living agent, and is more or less closely
-attached to it. Yet if it means the body, we must be careful to add
-that it is the body, regarded not as such but as the representative,
-the outward manifestation, the inseparable sign or symbol of a spirit,
-an intelligence and a will. The person is the visible or tangible
-phenomenon of something inward,--the phase or function by which
-an individual agent takes his place in the common world of human
-intercourse and interaction--his peculiar and definite part in the
-general or universal world and field.
-
-Personality thus mingles or unifies in it an universal and an
-individual aspect or element: it hints that the universal work always
-has in reality an individually-determinate tone,--that nothing in
-the world, even if it be called the same, is really and actively
-the same. _Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem quod faciunt._ Thus,
-what separates personality from individuality is simply that in the
-narrower or abstracter use of the latter term there is an absence
-of the due subordination of all individuality to universality, and
-of all universality to individuality. Personality, in short, is an
-individuality which is not a mere freak, not merely different from
-other things, but also in itself charged with a universal meaning
-or function. Yet even this is not enough to describe it. It is the
-individuality of an intelligence: the flesh and blood, and, in a
-secondary degree, the outward things, stamped with intelligence.
-Every member of a kind, every natural existence, has this double
-character; this convergence or union of universal and individual. In
-being this individual object, it is at the same time a universal, and
-_vice versa._ But in the attribution of personality there is involved
-something beyond what is common to all creatures. And that something,
-we may first of all say, is this. Whereas in the case of other _things_
-the individuality is distinctly subordinate, and each is reckoned
-primarily by its kind, in the case of _persons_ we can almost declare
-that the universality is subordinate to the individuality. This
-union of individuality and universality in a single manifestation,
-with the implication that the individuality is the essential and
-permanent element to which the universality is almost in the nature
-of an accident, is what forms the cardinal point in Personality. And
-one can understand, when the distinction is thus put, the obvious and
-palpable antagonism in which the view stands to the central principles
-of Spinoza[2] We speak of a man as a Personality when we wish to note
-the fact that he is no mere manufactured article, the representative
-of a common type, with nothing to choose between him and a thousand
-others, but that he is, as it were, one of a thousand, one 'Whom
-nature printed and then broke the type,' that he has in the highest
-sense 'distinction,' the nobility of nature's own patent. Other things
-exist, so to speak, for the sake of their kind, and for the sake of
-other things; a person, in the strictest sense, is never a mere means
-to something beyond, but always at the same time an end in itself
-or himself. Other things are mere examples in illustration of a law
-that rides superior to them and overrules them: the person is a law
-unto himself. He has the royal and divine right of creating law--of
-starting by his exception a new law which shall henceforth be a canon
-and a standard. For in such a personality when he claims his full
-rights there is the visible immanence of the divine and universal--or
-there is the visible unity of the eternal and the temporal. He rules
-as the natural king, the great ruler whose judgment and authority are
-better than the complex code of common laws: he guides as the artistic
-genius who sees truth steadily in a single intuition and in that single
-picture sees it whole[3].
-
-But when we ask if such a personality is found in the field of
-actual experience and history, there arises a divergence of
-opinions. It is at any rate matter of common experience that there
-is a good deal of unjustified identification of the self with the
-universal--identification in which the universal suffers violence and
-is taken by force. There are only too often cases where the personal
-interest is allowed to disguise itself under a semblance of zeal for
-the common good, and that even without conscious intent or act of
-deception. No good and noble deed, Hegel has said, can ever be done
-without faith in its goodness, and zeal for its attainment: without a
-holy passion and fervour of devotion, which exceeds the cold service of
-duty rendered for duty's sake[4]. But it is equally true and equally
-to be remembered that this interference of personal passion and
-disinterested interest has defaced the noblest causes and made flow
-endless torrents of fanaticism and persecution. A personality in which
-the universal was perfectly incarnated in the individual would be in
-truth a God amongst men. And it is probably a more likely occurrence
-that where the individual as such arrogates to himself the privilege of
-the universal, there should be seen not the deeds of the god, but the
-ebullitions of the beast that is in man.
-
-A personality, then, in popular language, and perhaps also in popular
-philosophy, is the living and conscious individual in whom general
-forces, truths, or ideas become real, active, efficient forces,
-truths, and ideas. And the importance of the conception resides in the
-safeguard thus supposed to arise, which will prevent the realities of
-the world from being dissipated away into the endless and restless
-flux of the terms of thought,
-
-    'La bufera infernal che mai non resta.'
-
-To such a common frame of mind ideas, truths, forces are vacant,
-ghostly forms, devoid of true life and reality: to get such they need
-blood and flesh to clothe them, to give them substance and power. Now
-Hegel, no less than those who offer this criticism, regards ideas
-(in the ordinary sense of that term), truths and forces, also as
-abstractions which need something to make them powers in the real
-world of nature and the ideal world of mind. Hegel, like Schelling,
-has a sublime contempt for mere universals. But as to the something
-else, there is a divergence of view. Two well-known answers are given
-by the popular philosophy known as materialism or spiritualism: two
-systems which are probably not so wide apart as the contrast of
-their names might imply. According to the former, thinking, ideas,
-truths, goodness and beauty are special functions (the grosser
-materialists say secretions) of a special kind of matter--of something
-which is accessible to ordinary mechanical and chemical tests, but
-which exhibits also, in certain cases, the exceptional phenomena of
-consciousness. Here the essential reality is a something, permanent
-and essentially indestructible,--something which no man has seen,
-nor indeed can see,--but which is called Matter. The spiritualistic
-philosopher (as distinguished from the _idealist_) regards as the
-essential realities in the universe what he calls spirits. What these
-are, also, nobody has as yet (any more than in Kant's time[5]) given
-any very authoritative account, but so far as the quasi-scientific
-expositions in regard to them throw any general light on the subject,
-we may say that they suggest only a differently-constituted matter, a
-matter e. g. of less or more dimensions than that we are most familiar
-with.
-
-Now the advocate of spiritual reality, who protests most strongly
-against the injury done to personality by reducing it to something
-fluid and not fixed, something in process and not in persistent
-substance, seems mostly to lean to a quasi-spiritualistic hypothesis,
-or to the--so-called--higher materialism. He is an advocate of what we
-may describe as the soul-thing, of a permanent, (he would even hold,
-an absolutely permanent) substance or substratum of psychical reality
-which, no doubt, exhibits certain properties, but is always more than
-any one, or any mere series of its phenomena. It has been said, indeed,
-by one who spoke with authority that he that will save his soul shall
-lose it, and he that will lose it shall find it. But this has always
-been a hard saying, which has been as far as possible explained away
-by exegesis. Yet its moral import is not so very far removed from its
-philosophical equivalent. The true life is not that of self-seeking
-pleasure, but the life spent in the service of truth and love, the
-life dedicated to impersonal interests, and ideal good. So also the
-reality of the human soul as we first know it lies not in itself, but
-in its transfiguration, its purification, and liberation to higher
-forms of being. The Soul, in its first avatar in each of us, is after
-all of the earth, earthy, unless it continue on that path of growth
-and development on which it has entered. It is as Aristotle said, and
-said well, the first actualisation[6]--the proximate ideality of an
-organic body. In soul organic body carries out its promise: in soul we,
-the observers, or untrained psychologists, note our first awareness of
-mental life in its organic environment. But there are other grades,
-other heights of achievement, yet set before the principle of life,
-which is more than mere life and mere soul: or soul contains a germ
-which must bear higher fruit. To be itself, or to become all that it in
-promise and potency contains, it must dispossess itself of what clings
-to it and possess itself of what is its own; and so transmute its first
-phase into one more adequate. The soul is, as Hegel has said, the
-awakening of mind from the sleep of nature[7]: it is nature gathering
-itself out of its absorption in its dispersion, the breath of life and
-feeling striving through the scattered members of the material world,
-and finding itself at first half-asleep, a pervading, unifying current
-that flows through and makes continuous the various portions of the
-universe. It is the earliest real, felt unity in which the logical or
-synthetic pulse--as yet purely potential in Nature, and only surmised
-by science--re-appears in the actual concrete world. And as the
-earliest, it is, like first loves, what one clings to hardest as our
-prime and fundamental _differentia._ Here at least we are something--a
-centre of being, and not a mere centreless expanse of extension:
-something emerging from the world of silence and of night--something in
-which each feels
-
-    'I am not what I see,
-    And other than the things I touch.'
-
-And that something we would not lose, at any cost.--But the only way
-not to lose it, is to use it as a stepping-stone to higher things. The
-metaphor, indeed, like metaphors in general, must not be pressed too
-far. For it is more than a stepping-stone and it is never left behind
-as a mere dead self: there is
-
-    'Nothing of it that doth fade
-    But doth suffer a sea-change
-    Into something rich and strange.'
-
-And that richer result into which it is transformed is the
-consciousness of a self, and the intelligence which wills and knows.
-
-If it be asked in what respects the result is richer, the answer is
-as follows. The soul,--this 'first entelechy--is exclusive, and it
-is immersed in its natural limits of organic life. It has yet to go
-through the school of self-detachment, the process of 'erecting itself
-above itself'; and of thus extending its view and its range of control
-over a wider field of objects. Gradually it attains to the rank of a
-consciousness before which is unrolled the spectacle of a world of
-objects set over against it, and even of a world within it; itself as
-an object deposed to the rank of something to be surveyed. As such,
-it seems almost to have left all immersion in corporeity completely
-behind, and to have completely divested itself of any limitation. It
-floats freely above the real psychical life out of which it emerged--a
-detached but somewhat shadowy self, not burdened by any restrictions
-of nature or circumstance. As such a mere Ego, or logical self--as the
-mere theatre on which the play of ideas takes place, it surveys its
-real psychical self far below; it finds itself as a strange sort of
-thing, and says _This was me_ (which however is not exactly the same
-as _I am I_, I = I). Yet it was a great step to have thus ceased to be
-absorbed in its qualities, to be the mere breath of life and feeling,
-stirring in its several affections and modifications. In order to
-get forward, it was necessary to recoil a little: to save itself--and
-that must mean to get itself in fuller and richer being--the mind had,
-as it were, to measure and realise the full depth of its nonentity,
-and to surrender all that it had hitherto clung to as its own. In an
-attitude of reflection upon itself it fancies that it is the empty
-room, the _tabula rasa_, on which experience is to write itself: but
-in its secret heart it retains the faith and acts upon it, that it is
-the power of intelligent and intelligible unity which makes the writing
-intelligible, if it does not even itself play the writer. What it now
-seems to find--what fills up its consciousness, presumed empty and
-merely receptive,--it gradually recognises to be its very and original
-own. Through labour and experiment it fills up the vacant form (the
-passive half of itself to which it deposed itself) of consciousness;
-and thus, as an intelligent self, a true mind, it has for itself and
-realises as in itself all the life and reality which in its earlier
-stage of soul it only was and felt itself naturally to be. But on this
-stage of free intelligence it is no longer bound up with its natural
-being in such a way as to feel itself a fixed and restricted centre,
-sunk in the living environment so as to see no further, and to deem
-itself in its seclusion the permanent reality, the exclusive fact.
-It is no longer exclusive and self-concentrated, but inclusive and
-all-embracing. It is no longer a mere consciousness--a mere receptive
-and synthetic unity of apperception--but a reason and a mind. And a
-reason and a mind already refuse to be narrowed and confined by the
-same limits as seem appropriate to the soul. In the province of free
-self-realised intelligence we at least seem to occupy a ground on
-which others can equally come,--to have nothing peculiar or merely
-individual. In Knowledge, which is reasoned perception, and in Will,
-which is reasoned impulse, there is a king's highway, a public forum,
-where souls meet and converse and perform a collective work;--and
-in both _mere_, i. e. essentially restricted, individuality is at a
-discount[8].
-
-Such would be the course of development if we looked at it only in the
-inwardness or subjectivity of psychical, conscious, and intelligent
-life. But an analogous or parallel development may be observed if we
-look at man as an active, i. e. a practical and moral being, a being
-who makes Nature his own, stamps it with his title of possession, and
-who gives to his fellowship with other souls an objective, outward
-existence in the forms and institutions of social life. Here too
-his first achievement is the affirmation of his individuality, the
-distinction in outward and tangible shape of the Mine from the Thine:
-the creation of property, and the projection of himself in a world of
-mutually-recognised personalities. As the individual soul in the inner
-life, so the personal being with its property is the solid, insoluble
-basis of the life in public--the field of social ethics. The same
-instinct, which in its dread of dissolution clings to the perpetuity
-of the inner nucleus of soul, upholds the other as containing the
-stable and eternal security of all social well-being. The immortality
-of soul in the inner world: the sacro-sanctity of property in the
-outer. But if these postulates are to be permitted, if individuality
-and personality are to abide, they must, in the one case as in the
-other, bow to the law of development, the law of history and of life.
-They must correct themselves, re-adjust themselves,--include what they
-excluded, and re-combine their elements, transmute themselves into
-what we have, after Hegel, called their _truth_: must redintegrate
-themselves with suppressed correlatives, and carry out their
-implications of larger unity. The soul, exclusive and fast-clad in
-its mere organic vestment, in which it is as yet only the name and
-form of intellectual life, has first of all to retract itself into
-the bare abstract consciousness, or mere self, on which the masses
-of reality stream, to fill its vacant rooms and empty forms up with
-ideas. So too the person--that close concretion or coalescence of mind
-with material--that identification of self with its 'clothes,' its
-property and all it can vulgarly be said to _own,_ is only an aspect
-of truth which tends to be over-estimated when it is reflected upon,
-and must notwithstanding be over-ridden and merged. Withdrawing itself
-from its clothing of earth and water, and even perhaps from its inner
-mansion of flesh and bone, personality floats in the free air as the
-impersonal personality of conscience,--the ethereal realm where pure
-practical reason rules. In that ether where morals reign absolutely is
-the home of the categorical imperative, of the Stoical law of duty,
-of the conscience which, here at least, has might as it has right. It
-too, like its parallel, consciousness, in the inner mental life, has,
-or seems to have, all its fulfilment from without. As even Kant admits,
-it is itself a vacant form; yet a form of such influence as to impress
-on whatever comes within its range an obligation to be universal and to
-be uniform. Here too, as in the parallel stage, it was of inestimable
-importance that mind should, in the socio-ethical sphere, see itself
-supreme in its innermost dignity and personality,--the personality
-which lies within,--even though that supremacy were at first no better
-than as a law, a form, a category, recognised as authoritative and
-imperative. For conscience, like the field of consciousness, is after
-all only a quasi-passive self--a remarkable property or endowment,
-a sort of innate principle or idea by which the mind was seen to be
-distinguished in a unique way from all things else. To realise once
-for all the fact that consciousness and conscience form an absolute
-tribunal from which there can be no appeal: that the 'synthetic unity
-of apperception' in the theoretical, and the 'autonomy of the rational
-will' in the practical sphere, are the ultimate and final _a priori_:
-this is a great thing to do,--even though it only expands and defines
-the Cartesian principle of clear and distinct ideas, and will remain as
-Kant's title of honour in the history of philosophy. He thus fenced off
-or consecrated the sanctuary of the mental and moral life.
-
-But it was not enough to set apart the sacred principle, the central
-hearth-fire of truth and goodness. If at an earlier stage,--earlier,
-i.e. in this logical analysis,--the formal was wholly sunk in the
-material, if i. e. the mere series of legal formulae in their hard
-and brittle outlines were absolutely identified--without doubt or
-hesitation--with the morally and socially good; the formal side, or
-mere spirit and will of good, the abstract principle of morality,
-is now invested with an equally undue prominence. The actual or
-concrete ethical community--be it family or state, or other social
-organisation--is animated and maintained by a spirit which transcends
-and includes alike the outward shell of civil law and the inward law
-of conscience. For, curiously enough, as it may seem at first, both
-conscience and civil legislation assume the form of imperative and
-definite commands--laws political or civil, and laws moral. Both fall
-therefore into an inflexibility, a rigorous and mechanical hardness in
-their enouncements. Both worship the lord of what men call logic, i.
-e. of formal consistency and formal uniformity, to an excess which
-sometimes issues in fantastic irregularities. Their several maxims of
-legal conformity and of duty for duty's sake are in first appearance
-excellent: but a further reflection shows that the Law covers a good
-many inconsistent or at least unrelated laws within its code, and Duty
-is often sadly to seek in presence of the collisions between what offer
-themselves as _prima facie_ duties in any given case. The amplest code
-of laws that ever existed will always leave lots of loop-holes for
-negligence and villainy, and would never work for an instant, were it
-not for ever supplemented by the spirit of faith and love, by social
-piety and political loyalty, by the thousand ties of sentiment and
-feeling which really vivify its dry bones. So too the abstractions
-of the conscientious imperative, of the law of duty, of the moral
-tribunal, of the man within the breast, and of the dignity and beauty
-of human nature, would effect nothing unless they could always tacitly
-count on the support of recognised and authoritative social law and
-usage. Outward rests upon inward; and rules direct feelings.
-
-Here, again, as in the purely intellectual or cognitive sphere, it
-is evident that the spirit of man has its source of life neither in
-its abstract self-hood (in consciousness and conscience) nor in its
-mere natural environment and organic endowment (in sense-affections,
-and social law and usage), but in the unity of both,--a unity which
-transcends either. Both individual and society live and grow, because
-they are continuous and one: because they presuppose an ideal unity
-or a living Idea at the root of their being, as their inner and
-essential guiding-principle, at once constitutive and regulative of
-their action. The machinery of language supplies to the intellectual
-sphere a sort of sensible meeting-ground and common field in which
-the development of knowledge becomes possible: and the same purpose
-is subserved in the social sphere by the machinery of ethical and
-political forms and institutions. These are the field, the home of
-freedom, as the other are of knowledge. It is in these collective and
-objective structures that we get the expression of the law of human
-development: the visible sign, viz. of the essentially universal nature
-of the individual. The individual in these attains his relative truth:
-for they show the weakness of the individuality of the mere individual.
-They show that his exclusiveness, his quasi-originality, is only an
-appearance:--confronted, no doubt, by an appearance of an opposite
-character, as if the originality and the reality lay in the environment
-and the collective body. They point therefore beyond and behind both
-foci to a common centre or inclusive unity of life.
-
-But they do not destroy personality and individuality: they only
-transform it and made it a more adequate and consistent representation
-of reality, by giving in it a place to factors or 'moments' which,
-though always effective, were not recognised as constitutive elements,
-and treated only as externally interfering agencies. It may be a
-question, of course, how far it is wise to retain the term after
-its meaning has thus been altered by expansion and redistribution
-of elements. On the whole it seems impracticable--and it would be
-undesirable, perhaps, even if it were more feasible--to be too hard
-and fast in our use of denotations. It is hardly the province of
-philosophy to coin new terms in which to deposit the results of her
-researches. A term no doubt--particularly if, as the phrase runs, it be
-luckily discovered, or judiciously selected--may save the expenditure
-of thought. But it is hardly the business of philosophy to encourage
-economy in this direction. Much more is it the perpetual task of
-philosophy to counteract the ossification that sets in in terms,--to
-reinterpret the meaning which is absorbed in these 'counters of
-thought,' and make them once more sterling money for the market of
-life. What, for instance, is the work of Aristotle's Ethics, but to
-set free the genii which the black magic of every-day intercourse has
-incarcerated in the non-significant Greek term Εὐδαιμονία? Like our own
-Happiness, it flits from lip to lip, little better than a mere name,
-which is still prized, but--except for a few synonyms that are equally
-vague with itself--is attached to things which a little reflection
-shows it cannot truly denote. Aristotle seeks--we may say--to define
-it. But the phrase 'definition' seems barely applicable to the complex
-process thus implied,--a process of which definition, as ordinarily
-understood, is only one small portion. For to define happiness, is to
-reconstruct the conception. Or, to be more accurate, it is really to
-construct it or reproduce in consciousness its construction. As it
-stands, the thing to be defined is a name and a thing, of which certain
-relations to other things soon begin to show themselves, which is more
-or less similar to one thing, and more or less to be distinguished from
-another. To mark it off from these co-terminous things, and to show how
-they are related to it on different sides,--this would be what we may
-perhaps call strict, or formal, or nominal, or _mere_ definition.
-
-Now whatever be the other uses of such definitions--and they are
-serviceable at the outgoing in any branch of enquiry,--they are
-not precisely the work we expect a philosopher to do for us. And
-assuredly it is not Aristotle who would stop short at that sort of
-definitions. We find accordingly that for the purpose of realising
-what happiness--the common name for human good--means, he is obliged
-to bring into the field the whole system of his thought in its
-cardinal notions of Energy, Soul, &c. Aristotle here as elsewhere
-retraces the path of thought which carries us from mere, vulgar,
-inadequately-apprehended happiness (he follows the same process in his
-treatment of pleasure, friendship &c.--to take only ethical examples)
-to true, essential and completely-apprehended happiness,--or, to use
-Hegel's technical phrases, from happiness as it is _an-sich_ (in or
-at itself) or as it is _für-sich_ (for or to itself), to happiness as
-it is _an-und-für-sich._ In so 'defining' happiness Aristotle is thus
-obliged to bring in his conceptions of man and of society, of human
-life and its powers, of natural and acquired faculty, of mind in its
-relations to nature; and if not to expound, at least to employ, his
-fundamental categories of philosophical thought. Such a machinery can
-hardly be called less than a construction, i. e. a re-construction by
-conscious effort of the latent but actual concatenation of the elements
-in the fact.
-
-In this case we traverse the distance which separates mere happiness
-from true happiness, from happiness imperfectly or abstractly conceived
-to happiness adequately and concretely conceived. Of course when we say
-real or true happiness, we use these terms as they are used within the
-ordinary range of human speech. An ultimate and absolute in truth and
-reality is for us at any given time only a comparatively or relatively
-ultimate and absolute. It is that which, so far as we can see and
-think (all philosophising presumably goes on under this stipulation,
-tacit or express), gives an expression, an interpretation, a meaning
-and a construction to reality which leaves no feature unrecognised, no
-contradiction unsolved, no discord unreconciled, which leaves nothing
-outside and alien to it, and suppresses without acknowledgment nothing
-that has ever been recognised within it. It is, if you like so to
-call it, the completest, or (if you are really in earnest with your
-philosophising and have carried it on to what for you is the end) the
-complete formula of the Absolute--of that which in a transcendent sense
-_is,_ is _all,_ is the infinite and eternal _one._ Yet, after all, it
-is a formula. But here that undying adversary of all thought steps
-in and says A _mere_ formula. And to that we must here as elsewhere
-rejoin: No, not a mere formula. A mere formula would be not even a
-formula,--a formula only in name--and with no reality which it served
-to formulate. It is a real and true formula, if it be a formula at all,
-and not something which merely swaggers about under that title. Nay
-more, if it be a true and real formula, it is the truth and the reality
-in its day and generation, until at least a truer truth and a more real
-reality shall have been discovered. Let us by all means be modest: but
-there is a false humility which becomes no man and is the guise of
-hypocrisy or insincere sincerity. Let us--in other words--never assume
-that 'we are the men, and that wisdom will die with us': but equally
-let us hold fast the faith of reason that what we know as true and
-real can never be false, i. e. utterly false, however much it may turn
-out one day to be surmounted. And, on the other hand, let us equally
-remember that in the mere and abstract commencement--the unreal and
-the untrue, as we must perforce style it by contrast with the (_pro
-tempore_) truth and reality--there is no utter and sheer error or
-unreality. It has always been felt to be one of the most loveable sides
-of Aristotelianism--this recognition of the reasonableness of all
-actual fact, or of the truth latent in the honest, though narrow and
-ill-defined judgments of the mass.
-
-Thus, coming back to personality, let us admit that the _mere_
-personality which at first sight seemed only worth rejecting, is
-an element, at least, in true personality,--or is a part which,
-because an organic member and no mere mechanical part, is full of
-traces and indications which involve and postulate the whole. The
-true personality and the true individuality of being is something
-which presupposes for its completeness the social state--the organic
-community. It is no doubt familiar to us that, according to an old
-but never quite dormant view, the collective community is but the
-aggregate or congeries of individuals. But the individuals whose
-aggregation makes the community are themselves products of the social
-union. Complete, all-round, harmonious personality, it is sometimes
-said, is the highest fruit to be yielded by social development. Or,
-as the last century would have preferred to put it, the main or sole
-aim of the State is furtherance towards Humanity--to the stature of
-the perfect man. And these are true sayings,--but perhaps only half
-true. If all must grow so that one and each may grow, so and not less
-must each one grow so that the all--the commonwealth of reason and
-the kingdom of God--may be more and more present, 'may come.' And
-that kingdom only comes when All is in Each, and Each is in All: and
-when, without loss or diminution, each is each and all is all. Then
-and not till then does personality become true and infinite, free and
-harmonious individuality, which is in the same instant universality.
-The monad--to use the language of the great Idealist who did not find
-individuality at all incompatible with universality--never ceases to
-be a monad: it is eternal and indestructible, an absolute centre of
-being. The monad in its individual measure 'expresses' or 'envelops'
-the Infinite or Absolute: it is, i. e. under a subjective limitation,
-identical with the absolute, a concentration or condensation of it
-into an impenetrable, i. e. literally an individual, point,--but a
-point which is in the psychical or intellectual world never entirely
-_carens recordatione,_ or oblivious of its essential totality. But if
-the monad 'expresses' the Absolute, it no less concords or sympathises
-in harmonious development with all its congeners, the other monads: so
-that while it neither interferes with them, nor suffers violence from
-them, it yet exists and acts in an ideal identity, that is, in a real
-fellowship, with them. Again, the monad has what may be called its
-side of passivity, but passivity here does not mean _mere_ passivity,
-but rather the essential limitation due to its special and peculiar
-stand-point--a limitation which in the higher orders of being becomes
-transparent or is transcended. How far Leibniz succeeds in reconciling
-this apparent contradiction--how far even any one can reveal the mystic
-indwelling of universal and individual in each other, this is a serious
-question in its place: but it is only bare justice to Leibniz to say
-that he at least never failed to emphasise both aspects of reality,
-and that if one 'moment' is predominant and fundamental in his work it
-is not the monad, but the Monad of Monads. If necessity be the right
-word to express the relation of the Universal Law to the individual
-being and to affirm that the individual is not a loose self-supporting
-unit (and Leibniz, far from thinking so, always uses in its stead the
-phrase _inclinat, non necessitat_[9], to emphasise the immanence of
-law, or the autonomy of every completed being), then Leibniz is not
-less, but more necessitarian than Spinoza. His difference from Spinoza,
-in fact, lies mainly, if not solely, in his clearer recognition of
-the transcendence, no less than the immanence, of the Absolute, which
-Spinoza has somewhat veiled under the apparent insignificance of the
-difference between _natura naturans_ and _natura naturata._ Yet the
-Monad of Monads is no supra-mundane, or _merely_ transcendent God.
-
-But if we further ask whether such personality is attainable in the
-world of experience and describable in terms of thought--whether there
-be any actual and visible agent possessed of this true personality,
-as we have agreed to call it, we are in face with a higher stage of
-the problem of personality. And that question in other words brings
-us back to where we began. A true and real personality, a complete
-individuality is something which so transmutes all that we are most
-accustomed to call by that name that it is hardly any use clinging to
-it, unless to protest against the danger of mistaking such expansion
-and transmutation to be only a blank negation. Yet to cling to it too
-much involves a danger for the true recognition of that transcendent's
-universality. All human personality, all natural individuality is, as
-Lotze has eloquently pointed out[10], something which falls far short
-of what it professes to be. But in the general failure to unite the
-universal with the particular, or the fact with the idea, there are
-degrees; and we can at least affirm so much as this that the truest
-individuality and the most real personality is not that which is least
-permeated by thought, but that in which thought has had the largest
-share. Individuality is something more than a mere sum of general
-qualities;--that is certainly the fact; but it is not less the fact,
-that for us an individuality and personality is more perfect and true
-in proportion as more general function and universal character coalesce
-into harmony and power in it. Assert then the initial presence and
-virtue of individuality and personality in the human soul: but remember
-that it has this virtue, not for what it is, but for what it promises
-and may reasonably be expected to be, and that, to realise the promise,
-it has to behave inclusively, rather than exclusively, gather up into
-itself and make its own all content, rather than set itself up in
-reserve and isolation.
-
-We have seen that the social organisation, animated as it is by the
-moral idea, is rather the arena on which the true union of mind and
-matter, of idea and nature, of thought and fact may be worked for, than
-itself the fruition of such an effort. All-important is the State;
-all-important the ethical idea which pervades it. But the world of
-freedom--the ideal world so far made actual--is not what it promised
-to be. 'Is it not,' said Plato, 'the nature of things that the actual
-should always lack the perfection of theory?' In the visible world the
-State, indeed, rules supreme: 'it is,' as Hegel might say in the words
-of his great predecessor in political theory, 'that Leviathan or mortal
-God to whom under the immortal God we owe our welfare and safety.' But
-there is something in the State which the State in its palpable reality
-cannot adequately express. If it is highest in the hierarchy of this
-world, the lowest in the ideal kingdom of the Absolute is higher than
-it. Above the State as the embodiment and the guarantee of the moral
-life, there is the realm of Art, Religion, and Philosophy. In them
-man's craving for individuality and personality finds a satisfaction it
-could never hope for below them: they at least restore the truth and
-reality of man's life and of the universe in a measure far exceeding
-what even morality could do. If we ask then what Art, Religion, and
-Science have to show of Personality or true realised individuality,
-the answer is briefly as follows. Had it not been that august names
-have spoken of imitation as the essence of Art-work, we should hardly
-have deemed it possible that men should speak of Realistic Art. Yet
-here, as in Religion and in Science, the epithet is introduced to guard
-against a misconception of the province of Idealism. All Art, all
-Religion, all Science, are and must be idealistic: but they can never
-be--as the familiar phrase puts it--merely idealistic, i. e. visionary,
-fantastic, unreal. All of them, in other words, may be said to show
-us 'the light that never was on sea or land'--the heavenly city--the
-eternal truth of things. But they must, on their peril, show it here
-and now, and not in a pretended or other world. They must--no less than
-law and morality--work in terrestrial materials, and not with superfine
-celestialities. _Mentem mortalia tangunt._ It is out of the oldest and
-commonest realities of life and death that the poet and the painter
-make the melodies of heaven sound in our ears, and gladden us with
-the rays of the empyrean. It is out of the hard rock of the real that
-the artist's rod must strike the well-spring of the ideal. So too, in
-like manner, a religion must show the Divine, but show Him immanent:
-an immanence which, on one hand, shall not drag Godhead down to the
-level of casual reality, nor on the other set Him far off in lonely
-transcendence.
-
-The aesthetic faculty, awakened as it is by the natural response of
-man's perceptions to the harmonies of existence, to the spontaneous
-coherency of its many parts in a united whole, and stimulated by the
-creative work of human art, which moulds even the naturally discordant
-or unconnected into a concordant expression (sometimes it may be,
-as in handicraft, only to satisfy human needs), lifts us above the
-imperfections and fragmentariness of things, above our selfish interest
-in them, into a frame of mind where they are seen whole and perfect,
-and yet one and veritably individual. In its supreme or comprehensive
-phase it does not deal merely with the beautiful, nor merely with
-the beautiful and sublime. All true art, whether it awakes awe or
-admiration, laughter or tears, whether it melts the soul, or steels it
-to endurance, has a common characteristic; and that is to raise the
-single instance, the prosaic or commonplace fact, into its universal,
-eternal, infinite significance. It frees the fact from the limitations
-which our distractions, our practicality, our temporary hopes and
-fears, have deeply stamped upon it. It is still, after art has dealt
-with it, to all appearance a single fact: but it now has the universe
-behind it and within it. It carries us away from the incompleteness,
-the pressure of externals, the solicitude for the future and the
-regrets for the past, into a self-contained, self-satisfying totality,
-into freedom and leisure, rest which is not stolid, and action which
-involves no toil. Such a result is partly, as was said, the gift
-of common nature, which speaks peace, comfort, joy, self-possessed
-fruition for all her children when their sense is open and free: partly
-it comes through those select ones among these children who have a
-larger perception of the meaning and inner truth of her works, and who
-can by a sensible reconstruction, which if it is fair and successful
-will only bring out more clearly the unity and harmony which deeper
-insight detects, help others to see and enjoy what they have felt and
-rejoiced over. Such are the poets--in the widest sense--the makers, the
-seers, who in verse, in music, in picture and sculpture--who, in human
-lives, it may be even in the conduct of their own, show us how divine a
-thing is nature and humanity: show us the secret and unheard harmonies
-that to the full-opened ear absorb and transmute the lower discords of
-life and vulgar reality. It is they who give immortality and divinity,
-who make heroes and demigods[11]. Or, if they may not be said to make
-them, they half-reveal and half-construct the ideal figures which stand
-high and beneficent in the history of the world. And by those who
-thus half-construct, and half-reveal, are meant not merely the single
-artists in whom the process culminates to final outline and publicity,
-but the many-voiced poesy of the collective human heart which out of
-its myriad elemental springs constitutes the total figure, the august
-image of the hero, and the saint, lending him from its plenitude all
-that his abstract self seemed to want. It is on the tide of national
-and human enthusiasm that the individual artist is lifted up to realise
-the full significance of his ideal figure, and his imaginative craft
-can only be inspired by the vigour and warmth of the collective passion
-for noble ends and high action.
-
-Nowhere it would seem is the ideal of personality and many-sided
-individuality more adequately realised. Here, at last, the whole truth
-of life, the indwelling of individual and universal in one body, seems
-to be realised. But it is realised in an ideal. It is--if we analyse
-it--a synthesis of three elements; partly in the material reality which
-serves as bodily vehicle; partly in the conception and technique of the
-artist; partly in the general mind which inspires both the material
-and the form with its own larger life. It is--as its name implies--an
-artificial product--a synthesis of elements which tend to fall apart.
-Technique varies, conceptions lose their interest, the tone of general
-culture alters, and materials are dependent on locality. When that
-happens, the work of art is left high and dry: no longer a living
-God, but a dead idol, still wondrous, but speaking no more its human
-language.
-
-So it is with the heroic figures who rise into the purer air of
-universal history. They also--so far as they live with a personal
-power--are works of art: works of real-idealism. For all history which
-deserves the name, and is not mere abstract dry-as-dust chronicle (as
-to the possibility of which utter aridity there may be legitimate
-doubts), is a work of fiction or invention, of reconstruction. It
-seeks to understand its characters. But to understand them it is not
-(and as historical art cannot be) content with a mere reference to
-motives acting on them from outside. It seeks to understand them with
-and in their times--to see in them the full measure of contemporary
-life and thought which elsewhere has found so meagre expression. Such
-is the artistic completion of personality in the ideal,--whether in
-what is called history, or what is called art. It exaggerates a truth,
-because it loses sight of the background. And that background, which
-helps to constitute such ideal personality, is no constant element.
-The centuries and generations as they roll contribute their varying
-quota to set, as they say, the historical character in its true light,
-in its fulness and truth of reality. And thus this personality of
-the great leaders of human life is only an image and a sign--a fruit
-of development, no bare fact which remains unchanged and always the
-same. It is rather a personification than a personality. It incarnates
-the living spirit who is universal and eternal in the limits of a
-sensuously-defined individual, and indeed incarnates there only so much
-as the generation it speaks to can see of complete truth. It is only
-after all a vehicle of truth; though a nobler vehicle than social and
-personal ethics can afford.
-
-As it is felt that the treasure of the idea--that the full power of
-spiritual life--cannot be adequately stored in the earthen vessels
-of mortality, the consummation of personality is forced to recede
-into the invisible if it would be still conceived as attainable.
-'True personality,' says Lotze, 'is with the Infinite,' What here is
-fragmentary, is there a rounded total, a perfect unity: He alone is
-absolutely self-determining, self-explaining: is all that He means to
-be, and means all that He is. In a sense, philosophy does not hesitate
-to countersign all this. But, in adopting it, philosophy must reserve
-the right of noting the danger and the ambiguity of such language.
-Religion does well, philosophy may say, in thus insisting upon the
-dependence of all appearance on one Absolute reality; but it is well
-also not to forget that all appearance is also the appearance of that
-reality or Absolute. And in so saying, be it added, philosophy assumes
-no essential superiority to religion. Religion in its fulness, and
-apart from any theories that may grow up under its wing, is more than
-theory, more than mere philosophy: it is the consummating unity of
-life--the enthusiasm and supreme power of life, its consecration and
-divinisation by its assured immanence in the eternal and universal.
-It is, in short, as was long ago said of it, the true life, the light
-which is the light and life of men; and its inspiring principles are
-faith, hope, and love. But when unassisted religion proceeds to set
-before itself the meaning and lesson of its life, when it proceeds to
-formulate a theory of the world and set out a scheme of world-history,
-it trespasses on the field of knowledge, and is amenable to the
-criticisms of the reflective spirit--the spirit of philosophy. And
-that criticism briefly is to the effect that the religious theory
-in its ordinary form is an imperfect interpretation of the religious
-experience. Nor is this to derogate from the prerogative of the friends
-of God. It is only to criticise the formulae and phrases of dogmatic
-theology--a theology, however, which is as old as religion itself,
-and which takes different forms from age to age, and from one level
-of thought to another, always in its measure translating religious
-reality, truth, or experience into the categories, naive or artificial,
-simple or complex, of the science (it may be the pseudo-science) of
-the time. Philosophy, therefore, is the criticism of the science of
-God--that is of theology--as it is the criticism of other sciences.
-For criticism philosophy always is: always the reflection upon fixed
-dogma, and the discussion of it till it becomes sensible of its
-defects, and stands upon another and higher plane. And to some it may
-seem that this is the sole function which philosophy can legitimately
-undertake. 'Yet,' as Aristotle remarked, 'the good critic must know
-what he criticises.' He must not merely reflect upon it from outside,
-but deal with it from the plenitude of experience, from the abundance
-of the heart. If he be a critic then, he cannot be a mere critic, but
-also an agent in the work of reconstruction. Or, if we put the thing
-otherwise; though, as Fichte said (p. 28), philosophy is a different
-thing from life, the true philosopher can never be a mere philosopher,
-but must, if he is to reach the height of his vocation, have also
-entered into the full experience of reality, into the whole truth of
-life. His philosophy will then not be outside of religion and aesthetic
-perception. In its comprehension of all grades and forms of reality and
-truth, goodness, holiness, beauty, will have their place. He also will
-be among the theologians.
-
-And when the philosopher deals with personality in this high, this
-supreme sphere, he will submit that the truth of personality is
-subordinate to the truth of spirituality. He will argue that by
-sticking too closely and fixedly to personality we are running a risk
-of bringing down the divine to the level of the human. If, with Dante,
-he can say that in its very heart the Light Eternal
-
-    'Mi parve pinta della nostra effige;'
-
-he will undoubtedly add with Dante
-
-    'Oh quanto è corto 'l dire e come fioco
-         Al mio concetto;'
-
-or, with the first philosophical theologian who interpreted the
-experience of Christian life, he will rise from the historical Jesus to
-the inward witness of the Spirit.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: The legal use of the distinction between 'real' and
-'personal' is only partly 'logical,' and largely retains traces of
-the larger logic of life and history. Yet, roughly speaking, personal
-property is what we can, so to speak, carry on our backs or in our
-pockets.]
-
-
-[Footnote 2: See Spinoza, _Cogitata Metaph_., Pars II. cap. 8: 'Nec
-fugit nos vocabulum (_Personalitatis_ scilicet) quod theologi passim
-usurpant ad rem explicandam: verum quamvis vocabulum non ignoremus
-eius tamen significationem ignoramus: quamvis constanter credamus, in
-visione Dei beatissima Deum hoc suis revelaturum.' For Hegel, it may be
-noted, Person, so far as he uses the term at all, bears its restricted
-legal and juridical sense. A person is a free intelligence, which
-realises that independence by appropriating an external thing as its
-sign and property. It probably belongs therefore to a world in which
-people count rather by what they _have_ than by what they _are_; the
-world of law where rights and duties tend to oppose each other. This is
-not the highest kind of world for human beings.]
-
-[Footnote 3: This one may call the Platonic ideal of the State, where
-Equity rules supreme in the incarnate spirit of wisdom,--a guide
-adapting its measures to circumstances, not tied down to the inflexible
-letter of one law in an incoherent and imperfect code. See the
-_Politicus_, p. 294; _Phaedrus,_ p. 275; and compare Aristotle's Wise
-man whose conduct is not κατὰ λόγον but μετὰ λόγου.]
-
-[Footnote 4: See e. g. _Encyclopaedia_, § 475.]
-
-[Footnote 5: See his 'Dreams of a Spirit-seer, illustrated by Dreams of
-Metaphysics.' (_Werke,_ ed. Ros. und Schub. Bd. VII. p. 38 sqq.)]
-
-[Footnote 6: It is perilous and misleading (said the ancient Graiae,
-who dwell on the way to the Hesperides of philosophy) to interpret an
-old system by the language of modern (and especially German) idealism.
-It is much worse, replied Perseus, not to interpret it at all, but to
-repeat its magic _ipsissima verba_,--carefully Latinised, as if they
-belonged to a cabinet of fossils.]
-
-[Footnote 7: _Encyclopaedia_, §§ 387, 389.]
-
-[Footnote 8: The above is an attempt to give a very condensed synopsis
-of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (_Encyclopaedia_).]
-
-[Footnote 9: See especially in the _Theodicee,_ part I. § 43 seqq. Cf.
-Nouv. Ess. II. § 9, _incline sans necessiter:_ I. § 13, _La nécessité
-ne doit pas être confondue avec la détermination._]
-
-[Footnote 10: _Microcosmus_, Book IX. chap. 4.]
-
-[Footnote 11: See the well-known passage in _Wilhelm Meisters
-Lehrjahre__,_ Book II. chap. a.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIX.
-
-
-GENESIS IN MENTAL LIFE.
-
-
-Aristotle, who saw into the nature of abstract entities, remarked that
-the mind was nothing before it exercised itself[1]. The mind,--and
-the same will turn out true of many things else where it is at first
-unsurmised,--is not a fixed thing, a sort of exceedingly refined
-substance, which we can lay hold of without further trouble. It is what
-it has become, or what it makes itself to be. This point, that 'To be'
-= 'To have become,' or rather to have made itself, is an axiom never
-to be lost sight of in dealing with the mind. It is easy to talk of
-and about conscience and freewill, as if these were existing things
-in a sort of mental space, as hard to miss or mistake as a stone and
-an orange, or as if they were palpable organs of mind, as separately
-observable as the eye or ear. One asks if the will is free or not, as
-glibly as one might ask whether an orange is sweet; and the answer can
-be given with equal ease, affirmatively or negatively, in both cases.
-Everything in these cases depends on whether the will has made itself
-free or not, whether indeed we are speaking of the will at all, and
-on what we mean by freedom. To ask the question in an abstract way,
-taking no account of circumstances, is one of those temptations which
-lead the intellect astray and produce only confusion and wordy war--as
-a good deal of so-called popular metaphysics has done. The mind and
-its phenomena, as they are called, cannot be dissected with the same
-calmness of analysis as other substances which adapt themselves to the
-scalpel: nor is dissection after all more than a part of the scientific
-process, subject to the control of the synthesis in physiology.
-
-The ordinary metaphysician makes his own task easy and his thoughtful
-reader's a burden, by plunging too lightly _in medias res._ He wants
-patience--often, perhaps, because he thinks too much of his reader's
-impatience at analysis--to unravel the tangled mass which human
-experience, when first looked at, presents. He is apt to catch at any
-end which promises to effect a temporary clearance. True philosophy,
-on the contrary, must show that it has got hold of what it means to
-discuss: it has to construct its subject-matter: and it constructs it
-by tracing every step and movement in its construction shown in actual
-history. The mind is what it has been made and has made itself; and
-to see what it is we must consider it not as an Alpha and Omega of
-research, as popular conception and language tend to represent it,
-but in the stages constituting its process, in the fluidity of its
-development, in the elements out of which it results. We must penetrate
-the apparent fixity and simplicity under which it comes forward,
-and see through it into the process which bears it into being. For,
-otherwise, the object of our investigation is taken, as if it were
-the most unmistakable thing of sense and fancy,--as if everybody were
-agreed that this and no other were the point in question.
-
-But in this matter of stability and the reverse, there is a broad
-distinction between the natural and the spiritual world. In Nature
-every step in the organisation, by which the Cosmos is developed,
-has an independent existence of its own: and the lowest formation
-confronts the highest, each standing by itself beside the other.
-Matter and motion, for example, are not merely found as subordinate
-elements entering into the making of a plant or an animal. They have
-a free existence of their own: and the free existence of matter in
-motion is seen in the shape of the planetary system. So, too, chemical
-or electrical phenomena can be observed by themselves, operating in
-spheres where they are untrammeled by the influence of biological
-conditions. It seems, at least at first sight, to be different in
-the case of mind. There the specific types or several stages in the
-integrating process of mental development seem to have no substantive
-existence in the earlier part of the range, and to appear only as
-states or factors entering into, and merged in, the higher grades
-of development. This causes a peculiar difficulty in the study of
-mind. We cannot seize a formation in an independent shape of its
-own: we must trace it in the growth of the whole. Mental fusion and
-coalescence of elements is peculiarly close, and hardly leaves any
-traces of its constituent factors[2]. Sensation, for instance, in its
-purity, as mere sensation, is apparently something which we can never
-study in isolation. All the sensation which we can, in the strictly
-psychological (as opposed to the physiological) mode of study, examine,
-i. e. which we can reproduce in ourselves, is more than mere sensation:
-it includes elements of thought, and probably of desire and will.
-This, of course, makes the difficulties of so-called introspection:
-difficulties so great and real that they have provoked in natural
-reaction a set against introspection altogether, and the adoption of
-the external observation (physiological or so-called psycho-physical)
-employed in the 'objective' sciences. And hence when we accept the
-name, such as intellect, conscience, will, &c., as if it expressed
-something specially existent in a detached shape of its own, we make
-an assumption which it is impossible to justify. We are reckoning
-with paper-money which belongs to no recognised currency, and may be
-stamped as the dealer wills. The consequence is that the thing with
-which we begin our examination is an opaque point,--a mere _terminus a
-quo_, from which we start on our journey of explication, leaving the
-_terminus_ itself behind us unexplained.
-
-The constituents of mind do not lie side by side tranquilly
-co-existent, like the sheep beside the herbage on which it browses.
-Their existence is maintained in an inward movement, by which, while
-they differentiate themselves, they still keep up an identity. In
-our investigations we cannot begin with what is to be defined. The
-botanist, if he is to give us a science of the plant, must begin with
-something whose indwelling aim it is to be itself and to realise its
-own possibility. He must begin with what is not the plant, and end
-with what is; begin, let us say, with the germ which has the tendency
-to pass into the plant. The speculative science of biology begins with
-a cell, and builds these cells up into the tissues and structures out
-of which vegetables and animals are constituted. The object of the
-science appears as the result of the scientific process: or, _a science
-is the ideal construction of its object_. As in these cases, so in the
-case of thought. We must see it grow up from its simplest element, from
-the bare point of being, the mere speck of being which, if actually no
-better than nothing, is yet a germ which in the air of thought will
-grow and spread; and see it appear as a result due to the ingrowing and
-outgrowing union of many elements, none of which satisfies by itself,
-but leads onward from abstractions to the meeting of abstractions in
-what is more and more concrete. The will and conscience, understanding
-and reason, of man are not matter-of-fact units to be picked up and
-examined. You must, first of all, make sure what you have in hand: and
-to be sure of that is to see that the mind is the necessary outcome
-of a course of development. The mind is not an immediate _datum,_
-with nothing behind it, coming upon the field of mental vision with
-a divinely-bestowed array of faculties; but a mediated unity, i. e.
-a unity which has grown up through a complex interaction of forces,
-and which lives in differences through comprehending and reconciling
-antagonisms.
-
-If the mind be not thus exhibited in its process, in the sum and
-context of its relations, we may mean what we like with each mental
-object that comes under our observation: but with as much right another
-observer may mean something else. We may, of course, define as we
-please: we may build up successive definitions into a consistent total:
-but such a successful arrangement is not a real science. Unless we
-show how this special form of mind is constituted, we are dealing with
-abstractions, with names which we may analyse, but which remain as they
-were when _our_ analysis is over, and which seem like unsubstantial
-ghosts defying our coarse engines of dissection. They are not
-destroyed: like immaterial and aery beings they elude the sword which
-smites them, and part but to re-unite. The name, and the conception
-bodied forth in it, is indeed stagnant, and will to all appearance
-become the ready prey of analysis: but there is something behind
-this materialised and solidified conception, this worn-out counter
-or sign, which mere analysis cannot even reach. And that underlying
-nature is a process or movement, a meeting of elements, which it is
-the business of philosophy to unfold. The analyst in this case has
-dealt with ideas as if they were a finer sort of material product, a
-fixed and assailable point: and this is perhaps the character of the
-generalised images, which take the place of thoughts in our customary
-habits of mind. But ideas, when they have real force and life, are
-not hard and solid, but, as it were, fluid and transparent, and can
-easily escape the divisions and lines which the analytical intellect
-would impose. Perhaps some may think that it is unwise to fight with
-ghosts like these, and that the best plan would be to disregard this
-war of words altogether. But, on the other hand, it may be urged that
-such unsubstantial forms have a decided reality in life: that men will
-talk of them and conjure by their means, with or without intelligence;
-and that the best course is to understand them. It will then be seen
-that it is our proper work as philosophers to watch the process, by
-which the spiritual unity divides and yet retains its divided members
-in unity. Even in the first steps we take to get a real hold of an
-object we see this. To understand it, we must deprive it of its seeming
-independence. Every individual object is declared by the logician to
-be the meeting of two currents, the coincidence of two movements. It
-concentrates into an undecompounded unit,--at least such it appears to
-representative or material thought,--two elements, each of which it is
-in turn identifiable with. The one of these elements has been called
-the self-same (or identity), the universal, the genus, the whole: while
-the second is called the difference, the particular, the part. And by
-these two points of reference it is fixed,--by two points which are
-for the moment accepted as stationary. What has thus been stated in
-the technical language of Logic is often repeated in the scientific
-parlance of the day, but with more materialised conceptions and in
-more concrete cases. The dynamic theory of matter represents it as a
-unity of attraction and repulsion. A distinguished Darwinian remarks
-that 'all the various forms of organisms are the necessary products
-of the unconscious action and reaction between the two properties of
-adaptability and heredity, reducible as these are to the functions of
-nutrition and reproduction[3]. The terms 'action and reaction' are
-hardly sufficient, it may be, to express the sort of unity which is
-called for: but the statement at least shows the reduction of an actual
-fact to the interaction of two forces, the meeting of two currents.
-The one of these is the power of the kind, or universal, which tends
-to keep things always the same: the other the power of localised
-circumstances and particular conditions, which tends to render things
-more and more diversified. The one may be called a centripetal, the
-other a centrifugal force. If the one be synthetic, the other is
-analytic. But such names are of little value, save for temporary
-distinction, and must never be treated as permanent differences which
-explain themselves. The centre is relative, and so is the totality.
-
-Thus it is that the so-called Evolutionist explains the origin of
-natural kinds. They are what they severally are by reason of a process,
-a struggle, by alliances and divisions, by re-unions and selections.
-They are not independent of the inorganic world around them: it has
-entered into their blood and structure, and made them what they are.
-To understand them we must learn all we can of the simpler and earlier
-forms, which have left traces in their structure: traces which,
-without the existence of such more primitive forms, we might have
-misunderstood, or have passed by unperceived. And, again, we learn
-that our hard and fast distinctions are barely justified by Nature.
-There, kind in its extreme examples seems to run into kind, and we do
-not find the logically-exact type accurately embodied anywhere. Our
-classifications into genera and species turn out to be in the first
-instance prompted by a practical need to embrace the variety in a
-simple shape. But though perfectly valid, so far as we use them for
-such ends, they tend to lead us false, if we press them too far.
-
-And when we have seen so much, we may learn the further lesson that
-the variety of organisation, animal and vegetable, is only the
-exhibition in an endless detail by single pictures, more or less
-complementary, more or less inclusive of each other, of that one
-vital organisation in principle and construction which we could not
-otherwise have had presented to us. In a million lessons from the vast
-ranges of contemporary and of extinct life there is impressed upon
-the biological observer the idea of that system of life-function and
-life-structure which is the goal of biological science. The interest
-in the mere variety whether of modern or of primeval forms of life is
-as such merely historical; its truer use is to enable the scientific
-imagination to rise above local or temporary limitations. And thus in
-the end the records and guesses of evolution in time and place serve
-to build up a theory of the timeless universal nature of life and
-organisation.
-
-And what is true of Nature is equally true of the Mind. For these
-two, as we have already seen, are not isolable from each other.
-Neither the mind nor the so-called external world are either of them
-self-subsistent existences, issuing at once and ready-made out of
-nothing. The mind does not come forth, either equipped or un-equipped,
-to conquer the world: the world is not a prey prepared for the spider,
-waiting for the mind to comprehend and appropriate it. The mind and
-the world, the so-called 'subject' and so-called 'object,' are equally
-the results of a process: and it is only when we isolate the terminal
-aspects of that process, and in the practical business of life forget
-the higher theoretical point of view, that we lose sight of their
-origin, and have two worlds facing each other. As the one side or
-aspect of the process gathers feature and form, so does the other. As
-the depth and intensity of the intellect increases, the limits of the
-external world extend also. For the psychical life is just the power
-which maintains a continuing correlation between the body and its
-environment, and between the various elements in that environment. It
-is the unity in which that correlation lives and is aware of itself.
-It is the subject-object, which sets one element against another, and
-gives it quasi-independence. The mind of the savage is exactly measured
-by the world he has around him. The dull, almost animal, sensation
-and feeling, which is what we may call his mental action, is just the
-obverse of the narrow circumference that girdles his external world.
-The beauty and interest of the grander phenomena of terrestrial nature,
-and of the celestial movements, are ideally non-existent for a being,
-whose whole soul is swallowed up in the craving for food, the fear of
-attack, and the lower enjoyments of sense. In the course of history we
-can see the intellect growing deeper and broader, and the limits of the
-world recede simultaneously with the advance of the mind. This process
-or movement of culture takes place in the sequence of generations, and
-in the variety of races and civilisations spread over the face of the
-world. But here too, the higher science, not resting in the merely
-historical inquiry, takes no interest in the medium of time, and merely
-uses it to supply material for the rational sequence of ideas[4].
-
-The objective world of knowledge is really at one with the subjective
-world: they spring from a common source, what Kant called the 'original
-synthetic unity of apperception.' The distinction between them flows
-from abstraction, from failure to keep in view the whole round of
-life and experience. The subjective world--the mind of man--is really
-constituted by the same force as the objective world of nature: the
-latter has been translated from the world of extension, with its
-externality of parts in time and space, into an inner world of thought
-where unity, the fusion or coalescence of all types and forms, is the
-leading feature. The difficulty of passing from the world of being to
-the world of thoughts, from notion to thing, from subject to object,
-from Ego to Non-ego, is a difficulty which men have unduly allowed to
-grow upon them. It grows by talking of and analysing _mere_ being,
-_mere_ thought, _mere_ notion, or _mere_ thing. And it will be
-dispelled when it is seen that there is no _mere_ being, and no _mere_
-thought: that these two halves of the unity of experience--the unity
-we divide and the division we unify in every judgment we make--are
-continually leaning out of themselves, each towards the other. But
-men, beginning as they must from themselves, and failing to revise and
-correct their stand-point till it became an _ἀρχὴ ἀνυπόθετος,_ argued
-from a belief that the individual mind was a fixed and absolute centre,
-from which the universe had to be evaluated. In Hegel's words, they
-made man and not God the object of their philosophy[5]. So that Kant
-really showed the outcome of a system which acted on the hypothesis
-that man in his individual capacity was all in all. Hegel, on his own
-showing, came to prove that the real scope of philosophy was God;--that
-the Absolute is the 'original synthetic unity' from which the external
-world and the Ego have issued by differentiation, and in which they
-return to unity.
-
-If this be so, then there is behind the external world and behind the
-mind an organism of pure types or forms of thought,--an organism which
-presents itself, in a long array of fragments, to the senses in the
-world of nature, where all things lie outside of one another, and which
-then is, as it were, reflected back into itself so as to constitute the
-mind, or spiritual world, where all parts tend to coalesce in a more
-than organic unity. The deepest craving of thought, and the fundamental
-problem of philosophy, will accordingly be to discover the nature and
-law of that totality or primeval unity,--the totality which we see
-appearing in the double aspect of nature and mind, and which we first
-become acquainted with as it is manifested in this state of dis-union.
-To satisfy this want is what the Logic of Hegel seeks. It lays bare
-the kingdom of those potent shades,--the phases of the Idea--which
-embodies itself more concretely in the external world of body, and the
-inward world of mind. The psychological or individualist conditions,
-which even in the Kantian criticism sometimes seem to set up mind as an
-entity parallel to the objects of nature, and antithetic to nature as
-a whole, have fallen away. Reason has to be taken in the whole of its
-actualisation as a world of reason, not in its bare possibility, not in
-the narrow ground of an individual's level of development, but in the
-realised formations of reasonable knowledge and action, as shown in Art
-and Life, Science and Religion. In this way we come to a reason which
-might be in us or in the world, but which, being to a certain extent
-different from either, was the focus of two orders of manifestations.
-
-To ascertain that ultimate basis of the world and mind was the chief
-thing philosophy had to see to. But in order to do this, a good deal
-of preliminary work was necessary. The work of Logic, as understood
-by Hegel, involves a stand-point which is not that of every-day life
-or reflection on experience. It presupposes the whole process from
-the provisional starting-point which seems at first sight simplest
-and universally acceptable, upwards to the unhypothetical principle
-which--though at a long distance--it involves and leads up to, or
-presupposes. We all know Aristotle's dictum ᾽Εν τοῐς αὶσθητοῐς τὰ
-νοητά ἐστιν: _Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu._ The fact
-of sense and feeling _is_ the fact of experience: or rather the fact
-and reality of experience is the underlying truth which the expression
-of it in terms of sense and perception inadequately interprets. Even
-in the principles of sensation there is judgment, thought, reasoning:
-but it needs eliciting, re-statement, opening up, and explanation.
-The Phenomenology of Mind is, as Hegel himself has said, his voyage of
-discovery. It traces the path, and justifies the work of traversing
-it, from the ill-founded and imperfect certainties of sense and
-common-sense, up through various scientific, moral, and religious modes
-of interpreting experience and expressing its net sum of reality,
-till it culminates in the stand-point of 'pure thought,' of supreme
-or 'absolute' consciousness. It is certainly not a history of the
-individual mind: and equally little is it a history of the process of
-the intellectual development of the race. In a way it mixes up both.
-For its main interest is not on the purely historical side. It indulges
-in bold transitions, in sudden changes of scene from ancient Greece
-and Rome to modern Germany, from public facts and phases of national
-life to works of fiction (compare its use of Goethe's _Faust_ and his
-version of _Rameau's Nephew)._ It lingers--for historical accuracy and
-proportion unduly--over the period of Kant and Fichte, and reads Seneca
-by the light of the _Sorrows of Werther._ For its aim is to gather from
-the inspection of all ways in which men have attempted to reach reality
-the indication of their several content of truth, and of the several
-defects from it, so as to show the one necessary path on which even all
-their errors converge and which they serve to set out in clearer light.
-
-Hegel's philosophy is undoubtedly the outcome of a vast amount of
-historical experience, particularly in the ancient world, and implies
-a somewhat exhaustive study of the products of art, science, politics,
-and religion. By experience he was led to his philosophy, not by
-what is called _a priori_ reasoning. It is curious indeed to observe
-the prevalent delusion that German philosophy is the 'high _priori_
-road,'--to hear its profundity admired, but its audacity and neglect of
-obvious facts deplored. The fact is that without experience neither
-Hegel nor anybody else will come to anything. But, on the other hand,
-experience is in one sense only the yet undeciphered mass of feeling
-and reality, the yet unexpounded psychical content of his life; or,
-taken in another acceptation, it is only a form which in one man's case
-means a certain power of vision, and in another a different degree. One
-man sees the idea which explains and unifies experience as actuality:
-to the other man it is only a subjective notion. And even when it is
-seen, there are differences in the subsequent development. One man
-sees it, asserts it on all hands, and then closes. Another sees it,
-and asks if this is all, or if it is only part of a system. An appeal
-to 'my experience' is very much like an appeal to 'my sentiments' or
-'my feelings': it may prove as much or as little as can be imagined:
-in other words, it can prove nothing. The same is true of the appeal
-to consciousness, that oracle on whose dicta it has sometimes been
-proposed to found a system of philosophy. By that name seems meant the
-deliverances of some primal and unerring nucleus of mind, some real
-and central self, whose voice can be clearly distinguished from the
-mere divergent cries of self-interest and casual opinion. That such
-discernment is possible no philosophy will seek to deny: but it is a
-discernment which involves comparison, examination, and reasoning.
-And in that case the appeal to consciousness is the exhortation to
-clear and deliberate thinking. While, on another side, it hints that
-philosophy does not--in the end--deal with mere abstractions, but with
-the real concrete life of mind. And if an appeal to other people's
-experience is meant, that is only an argument from authority. What
-other people experience is their business, not mine. Experience
-_means_ a great deal for which it is not the right name: and to give
-an explanation of what it is, and what it does, would render a great
-service to English methodologists.
-
-There are, however, two modes in which these studies to discover the
-truth may appear. In the one case they are reproduced in all their
-fragmentary and patch-work character. They are supposed to possess a
-value of their own, and are enunciated with all the detail of historic
-incident. The common-place books of a man are, as it were, published
-to instruct the world and give some hint of the extent of his reading.
-But, in the other case, the scaffolding of incident and externality
-may be removed. The single facts, which gave the persuasion of the
-idea, are dismissed, as interesting only for the individual student on
-his way to truth: or, if the historical vehicle of truth be retained
-at all, it is translated into another and intellectual medium. Such a
-history, the quintessence of extensive and deep research, is presented
-in the Phenomenology. The names of persons and places have faded from
-the record, as if they had been written in evanescent inks,--dates
-are wanting,--individualities and their biographies yield up their
-place to universal and timeless principles. Such typical forms are
-the concentrated essence of endless histories. They remind one of the
-descriptions which Plato in his Republic gives of the several forms
-of temporal government. Or, to take a modern instance, the Hegelian
-panorama of thought which presents only the universal evolution of
-thought,--that evolution in which the whole mind of the world takes the
-place of all his children, whether they belong to the common level,
-or stand amongst representative heroes,--may be paralleled to English
-readers by Browning's poem of _Sordello._ There can be no question
-that such a method is exposed to criticism, and likely to excite
-misconception. If it tend to give artistic completeness to the work,
-it also tantalises the outsider who has a desire to reach his familiar
-standing-ground. He wishes a background of time and space, where the
-forms of the abstract ideas may be embodied to his mind's eye. In most
-ages, and with good ground, the world has been sceptical, when it
-perceived no reference to authorities, no foot-notes, no details of
-experiments made: nor is it better disposed to accept provisorily, and
-find, as the process goes on, that it verifies itself to intelligence.
-
-
-
-[Footnote 1: _De Anima,_ iii. 4.]
-
-[Footnote 2: A philological parallel may make this clearer. 'The
-Indo-German,' says Misteli _(__Typen des Sprachbaues,_ p. 363),
-'embraces or condenses several categories in a single idea in a
-way which though less logical is more fruitful; for in this way he
-procures graspable totals with which he can work further, and not
-patch-work which would crumble away in his hands. Our _He_ includes
-four grammatical categories, which work not separately, but as a
-whole:--third person, masculine gender, singular, nominative; whereas
-the Magyar _ö_ is the vehicle only of one category, the third person,
-which is either determined as singular by the context, or as plural
-by the addition of _k_: gender in these languages does not exist: and
-as subject again _ö_ is specially interpreted from the context. The
-unification of the four categories makes _He_ an individual and a word;
-the generality and isolation of one category makes _ö_ an abstract and
-a stem.']
-
-[Footnote 3: Häckel, _Natürliche Schöpfungs-Geschichte_, p. 157.]
-
-[Footnote 4: See above, pp. 155, 198.]
-
-[Footnote 5: Hegel's _Werke,_ vol. i. p. 15.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XX.
-
-
-GENERAL LAW OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.
-
-
-'The order and concatenation of ideas,' says Spinoza, 'is the same as
-the order and concatenation of things[1].' The objective world at least
-of acts and institutions develops parallel with the growth and system
-of men's ideas. In the tangled skein which human life and reality
-present to the observer, the only promising clue is to be found in the
-process by which in history the past throws light on the present and
-gets light in return. There in the stream of time and in the expanses
-of space the condensed results, the hard knots, which present life
-offers for explanation, are broken up into a vast number of problems,
-each presenting a different aspect, and one helping towards a fairer
-and clearer appreciation of another.
-
-The present medium of general intelligence and theory in which we live
-embraces in a way the results of all that has preceded it, of all the
-steps of culture through which the world has risen. But in this body of
-intellectual beliefs and ideas with which our single soul is clad,--in
-this common soil of thought,--the several contributions of the past
-have been half or even wholly obliterated, and are only the shadows of
-their old selves. What in a former day was a question of all-engrossing
-interest has left but a trace: the complete and detailed formations
-of ancient thought have lost their distinctness of outline, and have
-shrunk into mere shadings in the contour of our intellectual world.
-Questions, from which the ancient philosophers could never shake
-themselves loose, are now only a barely perceptible _nuance_ in the
-complex questions of the present day. Discussions about the bearings of
-the 'one' and the 'many,' puzzles like those of Zeno, and the casuistry
-of statesmanship such as is found in the Politics of Aristotle, have
-for most people little else than an antiquarian interest. We scarcely
-detect the faint traces they have left in the 'burning questions'
-of our own age. We are too ready to forget that the past is never
-altogether annihilated, and that every step, however slight it may
-seem, which has once been taken in the movement of intellect, must be
-traversed again in order to understand the constitution of our present
-intellectual world. To outward appearance the life and work of past
-generations have so completely lost their organic nature, with its
-unified and vital variety, that in their present phase they have turned
-into hard and opaque atoms of thought. The living forces of growth,
-as geologists tell us, which pulsed through the vegetables of one
-period are suspended and put in abeyance: and these vegetables turn
-into what we call the inorganic and inanimate strata of the earth.
-Similarly, when all vitality has been quenched or rendered torpid in
-the structures of thought, they sink into the material from which
-individuals draw their means of intellectual support. This inorganic
-material of thought stands to the mind, almost in the same way as the
-earth and its products stand to the body of a man. If the one is our
-material, the other is our spiritual _substance_. In the one our mind,
-as in the other our body, lives, moves, and has its being.
-
-But in each case besides the practical need, which bids us consume the
-substance as dead matter, and apply it to use, there is the theoretical
-bent which seeks to reproduce ideally the past as a living and fully
-developed organism. 'This past,' says Hegel, 'is traversed by the
-individual, in the same way as one who begins to study a more advanced
-science repeats the preliminary lessons with which he had long been
-acquainted, in order to bring their information once more before his
-mind. He recalls them: but his interest and study are devoted to other
-things. In the same way the individual must go through all that is
-contained in the several stages in the growth of the universal mind:
-but all the while he feels that they are forms of which the mind has
-divested itself,--that they are steps on a road which has been long
-ago completed and levelled. Thus, points of learning, which in former
-times tasked the mature intellects of men, are now reduced to the level
-of exercises, lessons, and even games of boyhood: and in the progress
-of the schoolroom we may recognise the course of the education of the
-world, drawn, as it were, in shadowy outline[2].'
-
-The scope of historical investigation therefore is this. It shows
-how every shading in the present world of thought, which makes our
-spiritual environment, has been once living and actual with an
-independent being of its own. But it also reveals the presence of
-shades and elements in the present which if our eyes had looked on the
-present alone we should scarcely have suspected: and it thus enables us
-to interpolate stages in development of which the result preserves only
-rudimentary traces. And, when carried out in a philosophical spirit,
-it shows further, that in those formations, which are produced in
-each period of the structural development of reason, the universe of
-thought, or the Idea, is always whole and complete, but characterised
-in some special mode which for that period seems absolute and final.
-Each form or 'dimension' of thought, in which the totality is grasped
-and unified, is therefore not so simple or elementary as it may seem
-to casual observers regarding only the simplicity of language: it is
-a total, embracing more or less of simpler elements, each of which
-was once an inferior total, though in this larger sphere they are
-reduced to unity. Thus each term or period in the process is really
-an individualised whole, with a complex interconnexion and contrast
-included in it: it is _concrete._ No single word or phrase explains it:
-yet it is one totality,--a rounded life, from which its several spheres
-of life must be explained. But when that period is passing away, the
-form of its idea is separated, and retained, apart from the life and
-mass of the elements which constituted it a real totality; and then the
-mere shading or shell, with only part of its context of thought, is
-left _abstract._ When that time has come, a special form, a whole act
-in the drama, of humanity has been transformed into an empty husk, and
-is only a name.
-
-The sensuous reality of life, as it is limited in space and time, and
-made palpable in matter and motion, is however the earliest cradle
-of humanity. The environment of sense is prior in the order of time
-to the environment of thought. Who, it may be asked, first wrought
-their way out of that atmosphere of sense into an ether of pure
-thought? Who first saw that in sense there was yet present something
-more than sensation,--that the deliverances of sense-perception rest
-upon and involve relations, ties, distinctions, which contradict its
-self-confidence and carry us beyond its simple indications?. Who laid
-the first foundations of that world of reason in which the civilised
-nations of the modern period live and move? The answer is, the Greek
-philosophers: and in the first place the philosophers of Elea. For
-Hegel the history of thought begins with Greece. All that preceded the
-beginnings of Greek speculation, and most that lies outside it, has
-only a secondary interest for the culture of the West.
-
-But 'many heroes lived before the days of Agamemnon,' The records of
-culture no longer begin with Greece. Even in Hegel's own day, voices,
-like those of the poet Rückert (in his 'habilitation'-exercise), were
-heard declaring that the true fountain of European thought, the real
-philosophy, was to be sought in the remoter East. Since the time of
-Hegel, the study of primitive life, and of the rise of primitive ideas
-in morals and religion, has enabled us to some extent to trace the
-early gropings of barbarian fancy and reason. The comparative study
-of languages has, on the other hand, partly revealed the contrivances
-by which human reason has risen from one grade of consciousness to
-another. The sciences of language and of primitive culture have
-revealed new depths in the development of thought, where thought is
-still enveloped in nature and sense and symbols,--depths which were
-scarcely dreamed of in the earlier part of the present century. Here
-and there, investigators have even supposed that they had found the
-cradle of some elements in art, religion, and society, or, it may be,
-of humanity itself.
-
-These researches have accomplished much, and they promise to accomplish
-more. They help us perhaps to take a juster view of the early Greek
-thinkers, and show how much they still laboured under conditions
-of thought and speech from which their struggles have partly freed
-us. But for the present, and with certain explanations to be given
-later, it may still be said that the birthday of our modern world
-is the moment when the Greek sages began to construe the facts of
-the universe. Before their time the world lay, as it were, in a
-dream-life. Unconsciously in the womb of time the spirit of the world
-was growing,--its faculties forming in secresy and silence,--until
-the day of birth when the preparations were completed, and the young
-spirit drew its first breath in the air of thought. A new and to us
-all-important epoch in the history of thought begins with the Greeks:
-and the utterances of Parmenides mark the first hard, and still
-somewhat material, outlines of the spiritual world in which we live.
-Other nations of an older day had gathered the materials: in their
-languages, customs, religions, &c., there was an unconscious deposit of
-reason. It was reserved for the Greeks to recognise that reason: and
-thus in them reason became conscious.
-
-For us, then, it was the Greek philosophers who distinctly drew the
-distinction between sense and thought, and who first translated the
-actual forms of our natural life into their abbreviated equivalents in
-terms of logic. The struggle to carry through this transition, this
-elevation into pure thought, is what gives the dramatic interest to
-the Dialogues of Plato and keeps the sympathy of his readers always
-fresh. Socrates, we are told, first taught men to seek a general
-definition: not to be content with having--like Pythagoreans--their
-meaning wrapped up inseparably in psychical images and quasi-material
-symbols. He taught them to refer word to fellow word, to elicit the
-underlying idea by the collision and comparison of instances, to get
-at the 'content' which was identical in all the multiplicity of forms.
-He taught them, in--brief, to think: and Plato carried out widely and
-deeply the lesson. The endeavour to create an ideal world, which, at
-its very creation, seems often to be transformed into a refined and
-attenuated copy of the sense-world, meets us in almost every page of
-his Dialogues. In Aristotle this effort, with its concomitant tendency
-to give 'sensible' form to the ideal, is so far over and past; and
-some sort of intellectual world, perhaps narrow and inadequate,
-is reached,--the logical scheme in which immediate experience was
-expressed and codified. What these thinkers began, succeeding ages have
-inherited and promoted.
-
-In the environment of reason, therefore, which encompasses the
-consciousness of our age, are contained under a generalised form and
-with elimination of all the particular circumstances, the results won
-in the development of mind and morals. These results now constitute
-the familiar joints and supports in the framework of ordinary thought:
-around and upon them cluster our beliefs and imaginations. During each
-epoch of history, the consciousness of the world, at first by the mouth
-of its great men, its illustrious statesmen, artists, and philosophers,
-has explicitly recognised, and translated into terms of thought,--into
-logical language,--that synthesis of the world which the period had
-practically secured by the action of its children. That activity went
-on, as is the way of natural activities, spontaneously, through the
-pressure of need, by an immanent adaptation of means to ends, not in
-conscious straining after a result. For the conscious or reflective
-effort of large bodies of men is often in a direction contrary to
-the Spirit of the Time. This Spirit of the Time, the absolute mind,
-which is neither religious nor irreligious, but infinite and absolute
-in its season, is the real motive principle of the world. But that
-Spirit of the Time is not always the voice that is most effective at
-the poll, or rings loudest in public rhetoric. It is often a still
-small voice, which only the wise, the self-restrained, the unselfish
-hear. And he who hears it and obeys it, not he who follows the blatant
-crowd, is the hero. It is only to a mistaken or an exaggerated
-hero-worship, therefore, that Hegel can be said to be a foe. Great
-men are great: but the Spirit of the Time is greater: their greatness
-lies in understanding it and bringing it to consciousness. The man,
-who would act independently of his time and in antagonism to it, is
-only the exponent of its latent tendencies. Nor need the synthesis
-be always formulated by a philosopher in order to leaven the minds
-of the next generation. The whole system of thought,--the theory of
-the time,--its world, in short, influences minds, although it is not
-explicitly formulated and stated: it becomes the nursery of future
-thought and speculation. Philosophy in its articulate utterances only
-gives expression to the silent and half-conscious grasp of reason over
-its objects. But when the adaptation is not merely reached but seen and
-felt, when the synthesis or world of that time is made an object of
-self-consciousness, the exposition has made an advance upon the period
-which preceded. For that period started in its growth from the last
-exposition, the preceding system of philosophy, after it had become
-the common property of the age, and taken its place in their mental
-equipment.
-
-Each exposition or perception of the synthesis by the philosopher
-restores or re-affirms the unity which in the divided energies of
-the period, in its progressive, reforming, and reactionary aspects,
-in its differentiating time, had to a great extent been lost. By the
-reforming, progressive, and scientific movement of which each period
-is full, the unity or totality with which it began is shown to be
-defective. The value of the initial synthesis is impaired; its formula
-is found inadequate to comprehend the totality: and the differences
-which that unity involved, or which were implicitly in it, are now
-explicitly affirmed. But the bent towards unity is a natural law
-making itself felt even in the period of differentiation. And it
-makes itself felt in the pain of contradiction, of discord, of broken
-harmony. And that pain--which is the sign of an ever-present life that
-refuses to succumb to the encroaching elements--is the stimulus to
-re-construction. Only so far as pain ceases to be pain, as it benumbs,
-and deadens, does it involve stagnation: as pain proper, felt as
-resistance to an inner implicitly victorious principle, it stimulates
-and quickens to efforts to make life whole again. The integrating
-principle is present and active. There is then an effort, a re-action;
-the feeling has to do something to make itself outwardly felt: the
-implicit has to be actually put in its place, forced as it were into
-action and set forth[3]: and the existing contrasts and differences
-which the re-forming agency has called into vigorous life are lifted
-from their isolation, and show of independence, and kept, as it were,
-suspended in the unity[4]. The differences are not lost or annihilated:
-but they come back to a centre, they find themselves, as it were,
-at home: they lose their unfair prominence and self-assertion, and
-sink into their places as constituents in the embracing organism[5].
-The unity which comes is not however the same as the unity which
-disappeared, however much it may seem so. The mere _notion_--the
-inner sense and inner unity--has put itself forward into the real
-world: it is no longer a mere subjective principle, but as moulded
-into actuality, into the objective world, it has become an Idea.
-(_Begriff_ is now _Idee._) For the Idea is always more than a notion:
-it is a notion translated into objectivity, and yet in objectivity
-not sinking into a mere congeries of independent parts, but retaining
-them 'ideally'--united by links of thought and service--in its larger
-ideal-reality. It is all that the object ought to be (and which in a
-sense it must be, if it is at all), and all that the subject sought to
-be and looked forward to.
-
-The mind of the world moves, as it were, in cycles, but with each new
-cycle a difference supervenes, a new tone is perceptible. History,
-which reflects the changing aspects of reality, does and does not
-repeat itself. The distinctions and the unity are neither of them the
-same after each step as they were before it: they have both suffered a
-change: it is a new scene that comes above the horizon, however like
-the last it may seem to the casual observer. Thus when the process
-of differentiation is repeated anew, it is repeated in higher terms,
-multiplied, and with a higher power or wider range of meaning[6]. Each
-unification however is a perfect world, a complete whole: it is the
-same sum of being; but in each successive level of advance it receives
-a fuller expression, and a more complexly-grouped type of features[7].
-Such is the rhythmic movement,--the ebb and flow of the world, always
-recurring with the same burden but, as we cannot but hope, with richer
-variety of tones, and fuller sense of itself. The sum of actuality, the
-Absolute, is neither increased nor diminished. The world, the ultimate
-reality of experience and life, was as much a rounded total to the
-Hebrew Patriarchs as it is to us: without advancing, it has been, we
-may say, in its expression deepened, developed, and organised. In one
-part of the sway of thought, however, there is a harder, narrower,
-insistance (by practical and business minds) on the sufficiency of
-a definite principle to satisfy all wants and to make all mysteries
-plain, and a disposition to ignore all other elements of life: at
-another, there is a fuller recognition of the differences, gaps, and
-contradictions, involved in the last synthesis,--which recognition
-it is the tendency of scientific inquiry, of reforming efforts, of
-innovation, to produce: and in the last period of the sway, there is
-a stronger and more extended grasp taken by the unity pervading these
-differences,--which is the work appointed to philosophy gathering up
-the results of science and practical amendments.
-
-To this rhythmical movement Hegel has appropriated the name of
-Dialectic. The name came in the first instance from Kant, but
-ultimately from Plato, where it denotes the process which brings the
-'many' under the 'one,' and divides the 'one' into the 'many.' But how,
-it may be asked, does difference spring up, if we begin with unity, and
-how do the differences return into the unity? In other words, given a
-universal, how are we ever to get at particulars, and how will these
-particulars ever give rise to a real individual? Such is the problem,
-in the technical language of the Logic of the 'Notion.' And we may
-answer, that the unity or universal in question is either a true and
-adequate or an imperfect unity. In the latter case it is a mere unit,
-amid other units, bound to them and serving to recall them by relations
-of contrast, complement, similarity. It is one of many,--a subordinate
-member in a congeries, and not _the One_. If, on the contrary, it be
-a true Unity, it is a concrete universal,--the parent of perpetual
-variety. The unity, if it be its genuine shape which is formulated by
-philosophers, is not mere monotony without differences. If it is a
-living and real Idea, containing a complex inter-action of principles:
-it is not a single line of action, but the organic confluence of
-several. No one single principle by itself is enough to state a life,
-a character, or a period. But as the unity comes before the eye of the
-single thinker, it is seldom or never grasped with all its fulness of
-life and difference. The whole synthesis, although it is implicitly
-present and underlies experience and life as its essential basis,
-is not consciously apprehended, but for the most part taken on one
-side only, one emphatic aspect into which it has concentrated itself.
-And even if the master could grasp the whole, could see the unity of
-actuality in all its differences, (and we may doubt whether any man
-or any philosopher can thus incarnate the prerogative of reason,) his
-followers and the popular mind would not imitate him. While his grasp
-of comprehension may possibly have been thorough, though he may have
-seen life whole through all its differences, inequalities, and schisms,
-and with all these reduced or idealised to their due proportions,
-into the unity beyond, the crowd who follow him are soon compelled
-to lay exclusive stress on some one side of his theory. Some of them
-see the totality from one aspect, some from another. It is indeed the
-whole which in a certain sense they see: but it is the whole narrowed
-down to a point. While _his_ theory was a comprehensive and concrete
-grasp, including and harmonising many things which seem otherwise wide
-apart, theirs is abstract and inadequate: it fixes on a single point,
-which is thus withdrawn from its living and meaning-giving context,
-and left as an empty name. Now it is the very nature of popular
-reasoning to tend to abstractions, in this sense of the word. Popular
-thought wants the time and perseverance necessary to retain a whole
-truth, and so is contented with a partial image. It seeks for simple
-and sharp precision: it likes to have something distinctly before
-it, visible to the eye of imagination, and capable of being stated
-in a clear and unambiguous formula for the intellect. And popular
-thought--the dogmatic insistence on one-sided truth--is not confined
-to the so-called non-philosophic world: just as, on the other hand,
-the inclusive and comprehensive unity of life and reality is seen and
-felt and recognised by many--and felt by them first--who have no claim
-to the technical rank of philosophers. Popular thought is the thought
-which skims the surface of reality, which addresses itself to the level
-of opinion prevalent in all members of the mass as such, and does not
-go beyond that into the ultimate and complex depths of experience.
-
-Thus it comes about that the concrete or adequate synthesis which
-should have appeared in the self-conscious thought of the period,
-when it reflected upon what it was, has been replaced by a narrow
-and one-sided formula, an abstract and formal universal, a universal
-which does not express all the particulars. One predominant side of
-the synthesis steals the place of the total: what should have been
-a comprehensive universal has lowered itself into a particular. Not
-indeed the same particular as existed before the union: because it has
-been influenced by the synthesis, so as to issue with a new colouring,
-as if it had been steeped in a fresh liquid. But still it is really
-a particular: and as such, it evokes a new particular in antagonism
-to it and exhibiting an element latent in the synthesis. If the
-first side of the antithesis which claims unduly to be the total, or
-universal, be called Conservative, the second must be called Reforming
-or Progressive. If the first step is Dogmatic, the second is Sceptical.
-If the one side assumes to be the whole, the other practically refutes
-the assumption. If the one agency clings blindly to the unity,--as
-when pious men rally round the central idea of religion, the other as
-tenaciously and narrowly holds to the difference,--as when science
-displays the struggle for existence and the empire of chance among
-the myriads of aimless organisms. They are two warring abstractions,
-each in a different direction. But as they are the offspring of one
-parent,--as they have each in their own way narrowed the whole down to
-a point, it cannot but be that when they evolve or develop all that
-is in them, they will ultimately coincide, and complete each other.
-The contradiction will not disappear until it has been persistently
-worked out,--when each opposing member which was potentially a total
-has become what it was by its own nature destined to be. And this
-disappearance of the antithesis is the reappearance of the unity in all
-its strength, reinforced with all the wealth of new distinctions.
-
-Thus on a large scale we have seen the law of growth, of development,
-of life. It may be called growth by antagonism. But the antagonism
-here is over-ruled, and subject to the guidance of an indwelling
-unity. _Mere_ antagonism--if there be such a thing--would lead to
-nothing. A mere positive or affirmative point of being would lead
-to no antithesis, were it not, so to speak, a point floating in an
-ether of larger life and being, whence it draws an outside element
-which it overcomes, assimilates and absorbs. A bare national mind
-only grows to richer culture, because it lives in a universal human
-life, and can say _Nihil humani a me alienum puto._ So too the mere
-unit is always tainted with a dependence on outside: or it is always
-implicitly more than a mere unit: and what seems to come upon it from
-outside, is really an enemy from within, and it falls because there is
-treason within its walls. The revolution succeeds because the party
-of conservative order is not so hard and homogeneous as it appears.
-So, too, it is the immanent presence of the complete thought, of the
-Idea, which is the heart and moving spring that sets going the pulse
-of the universal movement of thought, and which reappears in every one
-of these categories to which the actualised thought of an age has been
-reduced. In every term of thought there are three stages or elements:
-the original narrow definiteness, claiming to be self-sufficient,--the
-antagonism and criticism to which this gives rise,--and the union which
-results when the two supplement and modify each other. In the full life
-and organic unity of every notion there is a definite kernel, with
-rigid outlines as if it were immovable: there is a revulsion against
-such exclusiveness, a questioning and critical attitude: and there is
-the complete notion, where the two first stages interpenetrate.
-
-
-
-[Footnote 1: _Eth._ ii 7.]
-
-[Footnote 2: _Phenomenologie__des Geistes_, p. 22.]
-
-[Footnote 3: Gesetzt.]
-
-[Footnote 4: Aufgehoben.]
-
-[Footnote 5: Idee: Ideeller Weise.]
-
-[Footnote 6: Potenz.]
-
-[Footnote 7: 'Nicht nur die Einsicht in die Abhängigkeit des Einzelnen
-vom Ganzen ist allein das Wesentliche; ebenso dass jedes Moment selbst
-unabhängig vom Ganzen das Ganze ist, und dies ist das Vertiefen in die
-Sache.' (Hegels _Leben_, p. 548.)]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXI.
-
-
-ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE I AND THE ORDINARY LOGIC.
-
-
-The ordinary logic-books have made us all familiar with the popular
-distinction between Abstract and Concrete. By a concrete term they mean
-the name of an existence or reality which is obvious to the senses, and
-is found in time and place;--or they mean the name of an attribute when
-we expressly or tacitly recognise its dependence upon such a thing of
-the senses. When, on the contrary, the attribute is forcibly withdrawn
-from its context and made an independent entity in the mind, the term
-expressing it becomes in the usual phraseology abstract. Any term
-therefore which denotes a non-sensible or intelligible object would
-probably be called abstract. And there is something to be said for the
-distinction, which, though unsuccessful in its expression, has some
-feeling of the radical antithesis between mere being and mere thought.
-It is true, that in the totality of sense and feeling, in the full
-sense-experience, there is a concrete fulness, as it were, an infinite
-store of features and phases waiting for subsequent analysis to detect.
-In the real kind of actual nature there is an inexhaustible mine of
-properties, which no artificial classification and description can
-ever come to the end of. Every quality which we state, every relation
-which we predicate, is a partial and incomplete element in this
-presupposed reality, this implicit concrete; and as such is abstract,
-and comparatively unreal. It is something forcibly torn out of and held
-apart from its context. But on the other hand the concrete reality is
-not at first real, but implicit: it becomes really concrete only as it
-re-embraces, and re-constitutes in its totality the elements detected
-by analysis. But the popular distinction forgets this, and gives the
-title and rank of concrete to what very poorly deserves the name, viz.
-to the yet undiscerned reality denoted by a substantive name. Yet
-there can be little doubt that the popular use of these terms, or the
-popular apprehension of what constitutes reality,--for that is what it
-comes to,--is sufficiently represented by the ordinary logic-books.
-So that, if the whole business of the logician lies in formulating
-the distinctions prevalent in popular thought, the ordinary logic is
-correct.
-
-Now the popular logic of the day,--the logic which has long been
-taught in our schools and universities--has three sources.--In the
-first place, but in a slight degree, it trenches upon the province
-of psychology, and gives some account of the operation by which
-concepts or general ideas are supposed to be formed, and of the errors
-or fallacies which naturally creep into the process of reasoning.
-This is the more strictly modern, the descriptive part of our
-logic-books.--But, secondly, the logic of our youth rests in a much
-higher degree upon the venerable authority of Aristotle. That logic,
-within its own compass, was a masterpiece of analysis, and for many
-centuries maintained an ascendency over the minds of men, which it
-well deserved. But it was not an analysis of thought or knowledge as a
-whole, and it treated its subject in fragments. It gave in one place
-an analysis of science and in another an analysis of certain methods,
-which could be observed in popular discussions and practical oratory.
-As Lord Bacon remarked, it did little else than state and, it may be,
-exaggerate the _rationale_ of argumentation. A high level of popular
-thought it unquestionably was, which Aristotle had to investigate,--a
-level which many generations of less favoured races were unable to
-reach. But there were defects in this Logic which fatally marred its
-general usefulness, when the limited scope of its original intention
-had been lost sight of. The thoughts of Greece, it has been said, were
-greatest and most active in the line of popular action for the city and
-the public interest, in the discussions, the quibbles, the fallacies,
-and rhetorical arts of the barber's shop and the 'agora.' The aim
-of such exercises was to convince, to demonstrate, to persuade, to
-overcome;--it might be for good and truth, but also it might not. And
-accordingly the Logic of Aristotle has been said to have for its end
-and canon the power to convince and to give demonstrative certainty.
-There is some ground, it may be, for this charge. The ancient logician
-seems to luxuriate in a rank growth of forms of sophism, and in an
-almost childlike fondness for variety of argumentative method. He
-seems resolved to trace the wayward tricks of thought and its phases
-through every nook and cranny, to exhaust all the permutations and
-complications of its elements. But let us be just, and remember that
-all this was in the main a speculative inquiry--for the sake of theory.
-It developed the powers of judgment and inference, just as the modern
-research for new metals, new plants, or new planets, develops the
-powers of observation. Both have some value in the material results
-they discover: but, after all, the mental culture they give is the main
-thing. And the talents quickened by deductive research are no whit
-less valuable than those owed to the other. Forms are essential, even
-if it be possible to make the terrible mistake of regarding them as
-all-important to the exclusion of matter.
-
-And then, this is not the whole truth. There is a perfectly serious
-Greek science--Mathematics--a science of many branches: a science
-which, from Plato downwards, always stood in alliance with the studies
-of philosophy. Now, it might be said, perhaps with ground, that the
-conception of mathematical method too much dominated all attempts to
-get at the rationale of science, and led to the supremacy of syllogism.
-It would be fairer perhaps to put this objection in another shape.
-We should then say that the logic of Aristotle,--the _Analytics_--is
-too much restricted to dealing with the most general and elementary
-principles of reasoning. But this is not in itself a fault. It
-becomes a fault only where there is no growth in philosophy--when
-it is merely handed on from master to pupil; and where there is a
-tendency to put philosophic doctrine to immediate use. To expend the
-whole energy of intellect in laying bare the general principles, the
-fundamental method, of knowledge and inference, is precisely what the
-founder of a science has a duty to do. But the beginning thus made
-requires development--and development which is fruitful must proceed
-by correction and antithesis, no less than by positive additions. It
-was not given to Aristotle's logic to be so carried on. His logic,
-like his system in general, had no real successor to carry it on in
-the following generation: and when in the less original ages of early
-Byzantine rule it again found students, it had become a quasi-sacred
-text which could only be commented on, not modified and developed. From
-the great _Exegetai_ of Greece it passed westward to Boethius and
-eastward to the Syrian and Persian commentators in the early centuries
-of the Caliphate. From these, and from other intermediaries, it may be,
-it finally culminated in the work of the Latin Schoolmen of the later
-Middle Ages. But the very reverence which all these expositors felt for
-the text of _the_ Philosopher rendered true development impossible.
-
-Then, on the other hand, the lust of practical utility caused a
-grave misconception of what logic can do. For Aristotle, logic
-is a scientific analysis of the modes of inference; its uses are
-those which follow intrinsically from all noble activity freely and
-zealously prosecuted. But with the death of Aristotle the great days
-of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and divine wisdom were over.
-The Stoics into whose hands the chief sceptre of philosophy, directly
-or indirectly, passed never rose above the conception of life as a
-task and a duty, and of all other things, literature, science, and
-art, as subservient to the performance of that task. The conception is
-an ennobling one: but only with a relative or comparative nobility.
-It ennobles, if it is set beside and against the view that life is a
-frivolous play, a sport of caprice and selfishness. But it darkens and
-narrows the outlook of humanity, when it loses sight of life as a joy,
-a self-enlarging and self-realising freedom, of life as in its supreme
-phase _θεωρία_--or the enjoyment of God. To the Stoic, therefore,--and
-to the dominant Christian theory which entered to some extent on the
-Stoic inheritance--logic, like the rest of philosophy, was something
-only valuable because ultimately it helped to save the soul.
-
-It thus sunk into the position of an Organon or instrument. To the
-Stoic,--for instance to Epictetus--its value was its use to establish
-the doctrines of the Stoic faith, by confuting the ill-arranged and
-futile inferences on which were founded the aims and approvals of
-ordinary worldly life. To the Christian, again, it served as a method
-for putting into systematic shape (under the guidance of certain
-supreme categories or principles also borrowed from Greek thought) the
-variety of fundamental and derivative aspects which successive minds,
-pondering on the power and mystery of the Christian faith, had set
-forward as its essential dogmas. It thus helped to build up (out of
-the leading ideas of Greek metaphysics, and the principles emerging in
-the earliest attempts to formulate the law of Christ) that amalgam of
-the power of a divine life with the reflective thought of the teachers
-of successive generations, which constitutes the dogmatic creed of
-Christendom. Such a reconstruction in thought of the reality which
-underlies experience--(in this case the experience of the Christian
-life), is inevitable if man is to be man, a free intelligence, and
-not a mere animal-like feeling. But its success is largely, if not
-entirely, dependent on the value of the logic and metaphysics which it
-employs: and it would be a bold thing to say that the subtle, abstract,
-and unreal system of Neo-Platonist and Neo-Aristotelian thought was an
-organon adequate to cope with the breadth and depth, latent if not very
-explicit, in the fulness and reality of the religious life.
-
-Yet even as an Organon, Logic had to sink to a lower rank. As
-traditionalism grew supreme, and religion ossified into a stereotyped
-form of belief and practice, logic had less to do as an organiser
-of dogma. It sank, or seemed to sink (for it would be rash to speak
-too categorically of an epoch of thought so far removed from modern
-sympathy and understanding as the age of the Schoolmen), into a futile
-(and as it seems occasionally almost a viciously-despairing) play with
-_pro_ and _contra_,--into a lust of argumentation which in masters
-like Ockam comes perilously close to scepticism or agnosticism. More
-and more, Scholastic thought, which, at one time, had been in the
-centre of such intellectual life as there was, came to be stranded on
-the shore, while the onward-flowing tide spread in other directions.
-These were the great days of logical sway, when it seemed as if logic
-could create new truth: as if forms could beget matter. So at least
-ran an outside rumour, which was probably based on some amount of real
-folly. But the more important point was that the old logic had lost
-touch with reality. New problems were arising, which it was--without
-a profound reconstruction--quite incapable of solving. Of these there
-were obviously two--not unconnected perhaps, but arising in different
-spheres of life. There was the revival of religious experience, growing
-especially since the thirteenth century with an ever-swelling stream
-in the souls of men and women, till it burst through all bounds of
-outward organisation in the catastrophe of the Reformation. Luther may
-have been historically unjust (as Bacon afterwards was) to the 'blind
-heathen master,' as he called Aristotle: but he was governed by a true
-instinct when (unlike the compromise-loving Melanchthon) he found the
-traditional system of logic and metaphysics no proper organon for
-the new phase of faith and theory. So, too, the new attempts at an
-inception and instauration of the sciences grew up outside the walls
-of old tradition, and were at first perhaps discouraged and persecuted
-as infidel and heretical, and were, even without that burden, pursued
-at much hap-hazard and with much ignorance both in aims and methods.
-Intelligent onlookers,--especially if inspired by an enthusiasm for
-the signs of an age happier for human welfare--could not but sec how
-needful it was to come to some understanding on the aims and methods of
-the rising sciences.
-
-This want, which he keenly felt, Francis Bacon tried to satisfy. He
-pointed out, vaguely, but zealously and in a noble spirit, the end
-which that new logic had to accomplish. Bacon, however, could not do
-more than state these bold suggestions: he had not the power to execute
-them. He imagined indeed that he could display a method, by which
-science would make incredible advances, and the kingdom of truth in a
-few years come into the world. But this is a sort of thing which no
-man can do. Plato, if we take his _Republic_ for a political pamphlet,
-had tried to do it for the social life of Athens. What Plato could
-not do for the political world of Greece, Bacon could not do for the
-intellectual world in his time: for as the Athenian worked under the
-shadow of his own state, over-mastered even without his knowledge by
-the ordinances of Athens, so the Englishman was evidently enthralled
-by the medieval conceptions and by the logic which he condemned. What
-Aristotle had for ages been supposed to do, no philosopher could do for
-the new spirit of inquiry which had risen in and before the days of
-Bacon. That spirit, as exhibited in his great contemporaries, Bacon,
-as he has himself shown, could not rightly understand or appreciate.
-He failed, above all, to recognise the self-corrective, tentative,
-and hypothetical nature, of all open inquiry. But one need not for
-this disparage his work. It showed a new sense of the magnitude of the
-modern problem: it set prominently forward the comprehensive aim of
-human welfare: and by its conception of the 'forma' it kept science
-pledged to a high ideal. But Bacon could only play the part of the
-guide-post: he could not himself lay down the road. And negatively he
-could warn against the belief that mathematics could _generate_ or do
-more indeed than _define_ the sciences. The spirit of free science, of
-critical investigation, of inductive inquiry, must and did constitute
-its forms, legislation, and methods for itself. For no philosopher can
-lay down laws or methods beforehand which the sciences must follow.
-The logician only comes after, and, appreciating and discovering the
-not always conspicuous methods of knowledge, endeavours to gather
-them up and give them their proper place in the grand total of human
-thought, correcting its inadequacies by their aid, and completing their
-divisions by its larger unities. Or rather this is a picture of what
-English logic might have done. But it does not do so in the ordinary
-and accepted text-books on the subject. What it does do, is rather as
-follows. To the second and fundamental part which it subjects to a few
-unimportant alterations,--i. e. to the doctrine of terms, propositions,
-and reasonings,--it subjoins an enumeration of the methods used in the
-sciences.
-
-To the rude minds of the Teutonic peoples the logical system of
-Aristotle had seemed almost a divine revelation. From the brilliant
-intellect of Greece a hand was stretched to help them in the
-arrangement of their religious beliefs. The Church accepted the aid of
-logic, foreign though logic was to its natural bent, as eagerly as the
-young society tried for a while to draw support from the ancient forms
-of the Roman Empire. So with the advance of the Sciences in modern
-times some hopeful spirits looked upon the Inductive Logic of Mill in
-the light of a new revelation. The vigorous action of the sciences
-hailed a systematic account of its methods almost as eagerly as the
-strong, but untaught intellect of the barbarian world welcomed the
-lessons of ancient philosophy. For the first time the sciences, which
-had been working blindly or instinctively, but with excellent success,
-found their procedure stated clearly and definitely, yet without
-any attempt to reduce their varied life to the Procrustean bed of
-mathematics, which had once been held to possess a monopoly of method.
-The enormous influence of the physical sciences saw itself reflected
-in a distinct logical outline: and the new logic became the dominant
-philosophy. Such for a while was the proud position of the Inductive
-Logic. Enthusiastic students of science in all countries, who were not
-inaccessible to wider culture, used quotations from Mill to adorn and
-authorise their attempts at generalisation and theory. A period of
-speculation in the scientific world succeeded the period of experiment,
-in which facts had been collected and registered. A chapter on Method
-became a necessary introduction to all higher scientific treatises. In
-our universities methodology was prodigally applied to the study of
-ancient philosophy. And so long as the scientific epoch lasts in its
-one-sided prominence, so long the theory of inductive and experimental
-methods may dominate the intellectual world.
-
-But the Inductive Logic hardly rose to the due sense of its situation.
-It has not held to the same high ideal as Bacon set before it. It has
-planted itself beside what it was good enough to call the Deductive
-Logic, and given the latter a certain toleration as a harmless lunatic,
-or an old pauper who had seen better days. Retaining the latter with
-certain modifications, although it has now lost its meaning in the
-changed outlines of the intellectual world, Inductive Logic adds a
-methodology of the sciences, without however founding this methodology
-upon a comprehensive analysis of knowledge as a whole, when
-enlarged and enlightened by the work of the sciences. Hence the two
-portions,--the old logic, mutilated and severed from the Greek world it
-grew out of, and the new Inductive or specially-scientific logic, not
-going beyond a mere classification of methods,--can never combine, any
-more than oil and water. And the little psychology, which is sometimes
-added, does not facilitate the harmony.
-
-But Inductive Logic should have adopted a more thorough policy. There
-can only be one Logic, which must be both inductive and deductive, but
-exclusively, and in parts, neither. To achieve that task however Logic
-must not turn its back indifferently on what it calls metaphysics, and
-it must rise to a higher conception of the problems of what it calls
-psychology.
-
-In these circumstances the ordinary logic, in its fundamental terms,
-is more on the level of popular thought, than in a strictly scientific
-region, and does not attempt to unite the two regions, and examine the
-fundamental basis of thought on which scientific methods rest. The case
-of Concrete and Abstract will illustrate what has been said. To popular
-thought the sense-world is concrete: the intellectual world abstract.
-And so it is in the ordinary logic. To Hegel, on the contrary, the
-intellectual interpretation of the world of reality and experience
-is a truer and thus a more concrete description of it than that
-contained in a series of sense-terms. Now the difference between the
-two uses of the term is not a mere arbitrary change of names. When the
-philosopher denies the concreteness of the sense-world, and declares
-that it, as merely sensible, is only a mass of excluding elements, a
-'manifold,' and in the second instance a series of abstractions, drawn
-out of this _congeries_ by perception, the change of language marks
-the total change of position between the philosophic and the popular
-consciousness. Reality and concreteness as estimated by the one line of
-thought are the very reverse of those of the other. A mere sense-world
-to the philosopher is a world which wants unity, which is made up of
-bits imperfectly adjusted to each other, and always leading us to look
-for an explanation of them in sources outside them. The single things
-we say we perceive,--the here and the now we perceive them in--are
-found, upon reflection and analysis, to depend upon general laws, on
-relations that go beyond the single,--on what is neither here nor
-now, but everywhere and timeless. The reality of the thing is found
-to imply a general system of relations which make it what it is.
-Sense-perception in short is the beginning of knowledge: and it begins
-by taking up its task piecemeal. It rests upon a felt totality: and to
-raise this to an intelligible totality, it must at first only isolate
-one attribute at a time.
-
-The apprehension of a thing from one side or aspect,--the apprehension
-of one thing apart from its connexions,--the retention of a term or
-formula apart from its context,--is what Hegel terms 'abstract.'
-Ordinary terms are essentially abstract. They spring from the
-analysis of something which would, in the first stage of the process,
-in strictness be described not as concrete, but as chaos:--as the
-indefinite or 'manifold' of sensation. But the first conceptions, which
-spring from this group when it is analysed, are abstract: they are
-each severed from the continuity of their reality. To interpret our
-feeling, our experience as felt, we must break it up. But the first
-face that presents itself is apt to impress us unduly, and seems more
-real, because nearer feeling: on the other it is more unreal, because
-less adequate as a total expression of the felt unity. In the same
-sense we call Political Economy an abstract science, because it looks
-upon man as a money-making and money-distributing creature, and keeps
-out of sight his other qualities. Our notions in this way are more
-abstract or more concrete, according as our grasp of thought extends
-to less or more of the relations which are necessarily pre-supposed by
-them. On the other hand, when a term of thought owns and emphasises
-its solidarity with others, when it is not circumscribed to a single
-relation, but becomes a focus in which a variety of relations converge,
-when it is placed in its right post in the organism of thought,
-its limits and qualifications as it were recognised and its degree
-ascertained,--then that thought is rendered 'concrete.' A concrete
-notion is a notion in its totality, looking before and after, connected
-indissolubly with others: a unity of elements, a meeting-point of
-opposites. An abstract notion is one withdrawn from everything that
-naturally goes along with it, and enters into its constitution. All
-this is no disparagement of abstraction. To abstract is a necessary
-stage in the process of knowledge. But it is equally necessary to
-insist on the danger of clinging, as to an ultimate truth, to the
-pseudo-simplicity of abstraction, which forgets altogether what it is
-in certain situations desirable for a time to overlook.
-
-In a short essay, with much grim humour and quaint illustrations,
-Hegel tried to show what was meant by the name 'abstract,' which in
-his use of it denotes the cardinal vice of the 'practical' habit of
-mind. From this essay, entitled 'Who is the Abstract Thinker[1]?'
-it may be interesting to quote a few lines. A murderer is, we may
-suppose, led to the scaffold. In the eyes of the multitude he is a
-murderer and nothing more. The ladies perhaps may make the remark that
-he is a strong, handsome, and interesting man. At such a remark the
-populace is horrified. "What! a murderer handsome? Can anybody's mind
-be so low as to call a murderer handsome? You must be little better
-yourselves." And perhaps a priest who sees into the heart, and knows
-the reasons of things, will point to this remark, as evidence of the
-corruption of morals prevailing among the upper classes. A student
-of character, again, inquires into the antecedents of the criminal's
-up-bringing: he finds that he owes his existence to ill-assorted
-parents; or he discovers that this man has suffered severely for some
-trifling offence, and that under the bitter feelings thus produced
-he has spurned the rules of society, and cannot support himself
-otherwise than by crime. No doubt there will be people who when they
-hear this explanation will say "Does this person then mean to excuse
-the murderer?" In my youth I remember hearing a city magistrate
-complain that book-writers were going too far, and trying to root out
-Christianity and good morals altogether. Some one, it appeared, had
-written a defence of suicide. It was horrible! too horrible! On further
-inquiry it turned out that the book in question was the _Sorrows of
-Werther._
-
-'By abstract thinking, then, is meant that in the murderer we see
-nothing but the simple fact that he is a murderer, and by this single
-quality annihilate all the human nature which is in him. The polished
-and sentimental world of Leipsic thought otherwise. They threw their
-bouquets, and twined their flowers round the wheel and the criminal
-who was fastened to it.--But this also is the opposite pole of
-abstraction.--It was in a different strain that I once heard a poor
-old woman, an inmate of the workhouse, rise above the abstraction
-of the murderer. The sun shone, as the severed head was laid upon
-the scaffold. "How finely," said the woman, "does God's gracious sun
-lighten up Binder's head!" We often say of a poor creature who excites
-our anger that he is not worth the sun shining on him. That woman saw
-that the murderer's head was in the sunlight, and that it had not
-become quite worthless. She raised him from the punishment of the
-scaffold into the sunlit grace of God. It was not by wreaths of violets
-or by sentimental fancies that she brought about the reconciliation:
-she saw him in the sun above received into grace.'
-
-
-[Footnote 1: 'Wer denkt abstrakt!' (_Vermischte Schriften_, vol. ii. p.
-402.)]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXII.
-
-
-FROM SENSE TO THOUGHT.
-
-
-Induction and Experience are names to which is often assigned the
-honour of being the source of all our knowledge. But what induction
-and experience consist in, is what we are supposed to be already
-aware of; and that is--it may be briefly said--the concentration
-of the felt and sense-given fragments into an intimate unity. The
-accidents and fortunes that have befallen us in lapses of time, the
-scenes that have been set before and around us in breadths of space,
-are condensed into a mood of mind, a habitual shading of judgment,
-or frame of thought. The details of fact re-arrange themselves into
-a general concept; their essence gets distilled into a concentrated
-form. Their meaning disengages itself from its embodiment, and floats
-as a self-sustaining form in an ideal world. Thus if we look at the
-larger process of history, we see every period trying to translate the
-sensuous fact of its life into a formula of thought, and to fix it in
-definite characters. The various parts of existence, and existence as
-a whole, are stripped of their sensible or factual nature, in which we
-originally feel and come into contact with them, and are reduced to
-their simple equivalents in terms of thought. From sense and immediate
-feeling there is, in the first place, generated an image or idea which
-at least represents and stands for reality; and from that, in the
-second place, comes a thought or notion proper, which holds the facts
-in unity.
-
-The phenomenon may, perhaps, be illustrated by the case of numbers. To
-the adult European, numbers and numbering are an obvious and essential
-part of our scheme of things that seems to need no special explanation.
-But the experience of children suggests its artificiality, and the
-evidence from the history of language corroborates that surmise. If
-number be in a way describable as part of the sense-experience, or
-total impression, it certainly does not come upon us with the same
-passivity on our part as the perception of taste or colour, or even
-of shape. It postulates a higher grade of activity. As Plato says, it
-'awakes the intelligence': it implies a question and looks forward
-to an answer: it is thus the first appearance of what in its later
-fullness will be called 'Dialectic,' To put it otherwise: Numbering
-can only proceed where there is a unit, and an identity: it implies a
-one, and it implies an infinite repetibility of that one[1] It thus
-postulates the double mental act, first of reducing the various to
-its basis of identity, and, secondly, of performing a synthesis of
-the identical units thus created. In the highly artificial world in
-which we live all this seems simple enough. The products of machinery,
-articles of furniture, dress, &c., &c., are already uniform items: and
-the strokes of a clock seem almost to invite summation. But in free
-nature this similarity is much less obviously stamped on things: and
-the products of primitive art--of literal _manu_-facture--display an
-individuality, an element of personal taste, even, which is necessarily
-lacking in things turned out by machinery. Thus it was necessary,
-before we could number, to reduce the qualitatively different to
-a quantitative equality or comparability. There are indeed some
-instances, in that nearest of things to us, the human body, which
-might help. There is the obvious similarity of organs and limbs which
-go in pairs, and which might easily suggest a dual, as, so to speak,
-a sensuous fact amongst other facts. Again, there is the hand and its
-five fingers, or the two hands and the ten fingers. The five or ten,
-as a whole naturally given, suggest a grouping of numbers in natural
-aggregates. The fingers, again, (and here we may keep at first to the
-fingers proper, minus the thumb,) may be without much ingenuity said
-to give us a set of four, naturally distinct, yet naturally alike,
-and needing, so to speak, the minimum of intelligence to create the
-numerical scale from one to four. It is by them, indeed, that Plato, it
-may be unconsciously, illustrates the genesis of number. Here in short
-you have the natural abacus of the nations, but one restricted, first,
-perhaps to the group 1-4, secondly to the group 1-10.
-
-We have seen how the dual was, in certain instances, almost a natural
-perceptive fact. But when it is so envisaged, it is hardly recognised
-as number strictly so called. It is only a fresh and peculiar sensuous
-attribute of things: a thing which has the quality of duplication, not
-a thought which is the synthesis of two identical units. It is a sort
-of accident, not part of a regular system or series. So again with
-the plural, which may appear in several shapes before it is assigned
-to its proper place as a systematic function of the singular. If the
-Malay, in order to say 'the king of all apes' has to enumerate one
-after another the several sub-species of ape, or if to express 'houses'
-he has to reduplicate the singular, to insert a word meaning 'all'
-or 'many,' we can see that the conception of number is for him still
-in the bonds of sense. It is not a synthetic category, but only a
-material multitude. But in other cases the plural proper is almost
-confounded with the so-called 'collective.' It is not an unfamiliar
-fact in Greek and Latin that the plural has acquired a meaning of
-its own,--not the mere multiple of its singular; as also that the
-collective term is occasionally used as an abstract, occasionally
-as the more or less indeterminate collection of the individuals.
-Such plurals and such collectives represent a stage of language and
-conception when the aggregate of singulars form a uniquely-qualified
-case of the object. And the peculiarity of them is seen in the way
-the plurality is immersed in and restricted to the special class of
-objects: as e. g. when in English the plurality of a number of ships
-is verbally stereotyped as against the plurality of a number of sheep,
-or of partridges (fleet, flock, covey). In such instances the category
-of number is completely pervaded and modified by the quality of the
-objects it is applied to. So, in the Semitic languages, the so-called
-'broken plural' is a quasi-collective, which grammatically counts as
-a feminine singular (like so many Latin and Greek collectives): and
-whereas the more regular plural is generally shown by separable affix,
-this quasi-collective plural enters the very body of the word by
-vowel-change, indicating as it were by this absorption the constitution
-of a specifically new view of things. On the other hand, it may be
-said, there is in this collective a trace of the emergence of the
-universal and identical element through the generalisation due to the
-conjunction of several similars all acting as one[2]
-
-In a true plural, on the contrary, it is required that the sign of
-number be clearly eliminated from any peculiarities of its special
-object, and be distinctly separated from the collective. And similarly
-the true numeral has to be realised in its abstractness, as a category
-_per se._ And to do this requires some amount of abstraction. In
-Greek, for example, we meet the distinction between numbers in the
-abstract, pure numbers (such as four and six), and bodily or physical
-numbers (such as four men, six trees)[3]. The geometrical aspect
-under which numbers were regarded by the Greeks, e. g. as oblong or
-square numbers, bears in the same direction. But another phenomenon
-in language tells the tale more distinctly[4]. Abundantly in Sanscrit
-and Greek, more rarely in Zend and Teutonic, and here and there in
-the Semitic languages, we meet with what is known as the dual number,
-a special grammatical form intended to express a pair of objects.
-The witty remark of Du Ponceau[5] concerning the Greek dual, that it
-had apparently been invented only for lovers and married people, may
-illustrate its uses, but hardly suffices to explain its existence in
-language. But a comparison of barbarian dialects serves to show that
-the dual is, as it were, a prelude to the plural,--a first attempt to
-grasp the notion of plurality in a definite way, which served its turn
-in primitive society, but afterwards disappeared, when the plural had
-been developed, and the numerals had attained a form of their own. If
-this be so, the dual is what physiologists call a rudimentary organ,
-and tells the same story as these organs do of the processes of nature.
-
-The language of the Melanesian island of Annatom, one of the New
-Hebrides, may be taken as an instance of a state of speech in which
-the dual is natural. That language possesses a fourfold distinction of
-number in its personal pronouns, a different form to mark the singular,
-dual, trial, and plural: and the pronoun of the first person plural
-distinguishes in addition whether the person addressed is or is not
-included in the 'we-two,' 'we-three,' or 'we-many' of the speaker[6].
-The same language however possesses only the first three numerals, and
-in the translation of the Bible into this dialect it was necessary
-to introduce the English words, four, five, &c. The two facts must
-be taken together: the luxuriance of the personal pronouns and the
-scanty development of numerals in such languages are two phenomena
-of the same law. The numeral 'four' to these tribes is said to bear
-the meaning of 'many' or 'several,' Another fact points in the same
-direction. In many languages, such as those of China, Further India and
-Mexico, it is customary in numbering to use what W. von Humboldt has
-called class-words. Here it is felt that an artificial unity has to
-be created, a common denominator found, and all reduced to it, before
-any summation can be carried out. Scholars and officials, in Chinese,
-can only be classed under the rubric of 'jewel' or dignity: and
-animals or fish by 'tails,' as if thereby only could one get a handle
-to hold them and count them. (The idiom still lingers in western
-languages: as in English, heads of cabbage, or of cattle: or German,
-_sechs Mann Soldaten._) So in Malay, instead of 'five boys' the phrase
-used is 'boy five-man': in other words, the numerals are supposed to
-inhere as yet in objects of a special kind or common occurrence[7].
-And among the South Sea Islanders the consciousness of number is
-decidedly personal: that is to say, the distinction between one and
-two is first conceived as a distinction between 'I' and 'we two.' Even
-this amount of simplification surpasses what is found amongst some
-Australian tribes. There we find four duals: one for brothers and
-sisters: one for parents and children: one for husbands and wives: and
-one between brothers-in-law[8]. Each pair has a different form. We
-thus seem to see to what early language is applied: not to designate
-the objects of nature, but the members of the primitive family and
-their interests. The consciousness of numbers was first awakened by the
-need of distinguishing and combining the things that belonged to and
-specially interested men and women in the narrow circle of barbarian
-life[9]. It is not altogether imaginative in principle, though it may
-be occasionally surmise in details, to connect the rise of grammatical
-forms with the temperament and character of the people, and therefore
-with its social organisation. If the Bantoo or Caffir languages of
-Southern Africa instead of a single third personal pronoun and third
-personal termination to the verb use the separate forms corresponding
-to the ten class-prefixes of the nouns, it must be in accordance with
-the general spirit and system of these tribes. The various plural
-forms, if they persist, will reflect contemporary modes of life.
-
-Numbers were at first immersed in the persons, and then, as things
-came to be considered also, in the things numbered. The mind seems to
-have proceeded slowly from the vague one to definite numbers. And the
-first decided step was taken towards an apprehension of numbers when
-two was distinguished from one, and the distinction was made part of
-the personal terminations. The plural was a further step in the same
-direction: the real value of which, however, did not become apparent
-until the numerals had been separately established in forms of their
-own. When that was accomplished, the special form of the dual became
-useless: it had outlived its purpose, and henceforth it ceased to have,
-any but that poetical beauty of old association which often adorns the
-once natural, but now obsolete growths of the past. When the numerals
-were thus emancipated from their material and sensuous environment,
-quantity was translated from outward being in its embodiments into a
-form of thought. At first, indeed, it was placed in an ethereal or
-imaginative space, the counterpart as it were of the sensuous space
-in which it had been previously immersed. It became a denizen of the
-mental region, as it had been before a habitant of the sense-world.
-
-The mind was informed with quantity in the shape of number: but it does
-not follow from this, that the new product was comprehended, or the
-process of its production kept in view. Like all new inventions (and
-numeration may fairly be classed under that head), it was laid hold
-of, and all its consequences, results, and uses estimated and realised
-by the practical and defining intellect. In one direction, it became,
-like many new inventions in the early days of society, a magic charm,
-and was invested with mystery, sacredness, and marvellous powers. But
-the intelligent mind,--the understanding,--resolved to make better use
-of the new instrument: and that in two ways, in practical work and in
-theory. On the one hand it was applied practically in the dealings
-of life,--in commerce, contracts, legislation, and religion. On the
-other hand, the new conception of number, which common sense and the
-instinctive action of men had evolved, was carried out in all its
-theory: it was analysed in all directions, and its elements combined
-in all possible ways. The result was the science of arithmetic,
-and mathematics in general. Such consequences did the reflective
-understanding derive from the analysis of its datum,--the fact of
-quantity freed from its sensuous envelope.
-
-The general action of understanding, and of practical thought, is of
-this kind. It accepts the representative images which have emerged from
-sensation, as they occur: and tries to appreciate them, to give them
-precision, to carry them into details, and to analyse them until their
-utmost limits of meaning are explored. Where they have come from, and
-where they lead to,--the process out of which they spring, and which
-fixes the extent of their validity,--are questions of no interest
-to the understanding[10]. It takes its objects, as given in popular
-conception, as fixed and ultimate entities to be expounded in detail.
-
-We have taken number as one example of the transference of a sensible
-or sense-immersed fact into a form of thought: but a form which is
-still placed in a superior or mental space. One advantage of taking
-number as illustration, is that numbered things are distinguished from
-numbers in an emphatic and recognised way. Nobody will dispute that
-the abstraction, as it is called, has an existence of its own, and
-can be made a legitimate object of independent investigation. But if
-the process be more obvious in the case of the numerals, there must
-have been a similar course of development leading to the pronouns, the
-prepositions, and the auxiliary verbs--to what has been called the
-'formal' or 'pronominal' or 'demonstrative' element, the connective and
-constructive tissue of language. Whether these pronominal 'roots' form
-a special and originally-distinct class of their own, or are derived
-from a transmutation of more material or substantial elements, is a
-question on which linguistic research casts as yet no very certain
-light. It is true that on the one hand etymology is mainly silent on
-the origin of pronouns, numerals, and the more fundamental prepositions
-(i. e. cannot refer them to roots significant of qualitative being):
-and one need not lay much stress on remarks, like that of Gabelenz[11],
-that in the Indo-Chinese languages the words for _I, five, fish_
-have a like sound, as do those for _thou, two, ear_, or that _I am,_
-originally means _I breathe_. In all languages--though with immense
-diversities of degree, this formal element has attained a certain
-independence. And in many instances we can more or less trace the
-process by which there grew up in language an independent world of
-thought: we can see the natural existence passing out of the range of
-the senses into spiritual relations. Before our eyes a world of reason
-is slowly constituting itself in the history of culture: and we, who
-live now, enter upon the inheritance which past ages have laid up for
-us.
-
-There is, however, a difference between the way in which these
-results look to us now, and the way in which they originally
-organised themselves. The child who begins to learn a language in the
-lesson-books and the grammars finds the members of it all, as it were,
-upon one level: adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and verbs confront
-him with the same authority and rank. This appearance is deceptive:
-it may easily suggest that the words are not members in an organism,
-in and out of which they have developed. And this organism of thought
-has its individual types, expressed in the great families of human
-speech. Its generic form (as drawn out in a logical system) appears
-in different grades, with different degrees of fullness, in Altaic
-and Dravidian from what it does in Malay, or in Chinese, and these
-again have their own predominant categories as compared with those
-used in the American or African languages, or in Indo-Germanic and
-Semitic. If the Altaic languages e. g. are wanting in the verb proper,
-and manage with possessive suffixes and nouns; if the Semitic tenses
-display a poverty which contrasts with their wealth in Greek; and
-yet each group performs its function, we may infer that each speech
-has a complete organism, though it does not bring all its parts to
-adequate expression. All this distinction of 'parts of speech,' of
-forms, prefixes and suffixes, &c., is part of the life of language,
-embodying in more or less distinct organs the organisation of thought
-in the individual form it reached in that speech-type. Thus in Chinese
-there are strictly speaking no isolated words, nouns, or verbs: there
-are only abstract parts of a concrete sentence; and grammar in Chinese
-therefore has no accidence (no declensions, conjugations, &c.) but
-only syntax. Yet it is these abstract fragments which exist and seem
-to have independence and inherent meaning: whereas the unity in which
-they cohere to form a concrete context is the fleeting sentence of
-the moment. At the opposite extreme, again, the Mexican family of
-languages tend to incorporate relations to subject and object with
-the verb, in such a degree that the word almost becomes a sentence.
-Facts like these suggest that a science of the forms of language, in
-proportion as it generalises, tends to approach logic; and that logic
-will have a converse tendency to elevate to an unduly typical position
-the grammatical form of the languages with which the logician is best
-acquainted.
-
-If these points were remembered, there would be less absurd employment
-of the grammatical categories of one group of languages to systematise
-another. Greek and Sanscrit grammar plays sad havoc with the organism
-of a Semitic tongue, and it is not less out of place as a schema
-for delineating e. g. South African dialect. Isolated words even in
-an Indo-Germanic language--even, we may say, in such a language as
-English--are still fractional, and do not get life and individuality
-except in their context. And it needs but a little experience to show
-how various that individuality may be. It needs perhaps still more
-meditation to realise that it is in this individuality that the real
-life of language lies: in the words said and written to express the
-thought of a personality. But, first, because language has its material
-and mechanical side, and secondly, because in civilised countries it
-further acquires a more stereotyped mechanism in written and printed
-language, its parts tend to gain a pseudo-independence. It is one aim
-of a philosophical dictionary to restore the organic interconnexion
-which in the mere sequence of vocables in juxtaposition is apt to be
-lost. What we call the meaning of a word is something which carries us
-beyond that mere word,--which restores the connexions which have been
-broken off and forgotten. In the form of a dictionary, of course, this
-can only be done piece-meal: but if each piece is done thoroughly, it
-can hardly fail to bring out certain comprehensive connexions. The mere
-word seems a simple thing; and one is at first disposed to get rid of
-its difficulty by substituting a so-called synonym. But a deeper study
-reveals the fact that an exact synonym is a thing one can no more find
-than two peas which are absolutely indistinguishable. A synonym is only
-a practical _pis aller_. But every word is really as it were a point
-in an infinitely complex organic life, with its essence or meaning
-determined by the currents to and fro which meet in it.
-
-Words as we see them _prima facie_ in a printed page do look separate
-entities. They stand, one here and another there, in a quasi-extension,
-with marks of direction and connexion pointing from one to another,
-but of connexion apparently extraneous to the more solid points which
-are represented by nouns and verbs, or names of substances, actions,
-and attributes. Results, as they are, of that practical analysis which
-the need of writing down language has led to, they are treated as
-complete wholes, which by the speaker are forced into certain temporary
-connexions. But this is an illusion which, because a thing changes
-its relationships, assumes that it can exist out of all relationships
-whatever. Every word of Language is such an abstraction, isolated from
-its context. But amid these contexts there are certain similarities:
-identical elements are detected: and these identical elements are the
-common names of language, the terms of general significance. In all
-cases, however, what an utterance of language describes or expresses
-is a definite individual event or scene, conceived as a concrete
-of several parts. Each separate vocable is a contribution to the
-total: a step towards the real redintegration of the whole out of its
-several parts. But the total itself--the content of fact in any single
-sentence--is only an abstraction,--a part of the universe which human
-interest and need have isolated from the comprehensive scope of things.
-Thus, in two degrees, we may say, the picture produced in the sentence
-falls short of the truth of things. Each statement is an arbitrary or
-accidental cutting out of the totality: each element of the cutting is
-dependent on that abstraction, and relative to it. But--as in a given
-group of speech, the same sets of circumstances will naturally be
-selected, and tend to recur again and again,--the terms which describe
-them will acquire a certain association with the objects, and will come
-to be called the common names of these agents, acts, and qualities.
-They denote or 'represent' the things and acts, conceived however in
-certain aspects and relations, and not in their entirety and totality
-of nature.
-
-In this product of intellectual movement above the limits of sensation
-we have the 'representation'[12] as Hegel calls it, on which the
-Understanding turns its forces. We have one product of the organic
-whole of thought taken by itself as if it were independent, set
-forth as a settled nucleus for further acquaintance: and this one
-point discussed fully and with precision, elaborated in all detail
-and consequence, to the neglect of its context, and the necessary
-limitations involved in the notion. The process of name-giving may
-illustrate this tendency in human thought to touch its objects only in
-one point. The names given to objects do not embrace the whole nature
-of these objects, but give expression only to one striking feature
-in them. Thus the name of the horse points it out as 'the strong' or
-'the swift': the moon is 'the measurer' or 'the shining one'; and so
-in all cases. The object as expressed in these names is viewed from
-one aspect, or in one point: and the name, which originally at least
-corresponds to the conception, meets the object, properly speaking,
-on that side only, or in that relation. The object is not studied in
-its own nature, and in its total world, but as it specially enters the
-range of human interest, and serves human utilities. One can at least
-guess why it should be so: why a name should, in logical language,
-express an 'accidens' and not the 'essentia' of the object. For the
-investigation of primitive language seems to show that words, as we
-know them in separate existence, are a secondary formation: and that
-the first significant speech was an utterance intended to describe a
-scene, an action, a phenomenon, or complex of event. In point of time,
-the primary fact of language is an agglomeration or aggregate,--we
-may call it either word or clause (λόγος in short)--which describes
-in one breath a highly individualised action or phenomenon. The
-spirit or unifying principle in this group might be the accent. Such
-a word-group denotes a highly specialised form of being: and if we
-call it a word, we may say that the earliest words, and the words of
-barbarous tribes, are ingeniously special.[13] But it would be more
-correct to say, that in such a group the elements of the scene enter
-only from a single aspect or in a single relation. Accordingly when
-disintegration begins, the result is as follows. The elements of the
-group, having now become independent words held together by the syntax
-of the sentence, are adopted to denote the several objects which
-entered into the total phenomenon. But these words, or fragments of the
-word-group, 'represent' the objects in question from a certain point
-of view, and not in their integrity. The names of things therefore
-touch them only in one point, and express only one aspect. And thus,
-although different names will arise for the same thing, as it enters
-into different groups, in each case the name will connote only a
-general attribute and not the nature of the thing. These names are in
-the Hegelian sense of the term 'abstract.' In popular phraseology, they
-are only 'signs' of things: i. e. not 'symbols' (though they may have
-been in some cases symbolic in origin), for in a symbol there is a
-_natural_ correspondence or sensible analogy to the thing symbolised,
-but something 'instituted,' due to an 'understanding' or convention.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: See vol. ii. p. 190, (Logic, § 102).]
-
-[Footnote 2: See Max Müller in Mind, vol. i. 345.]
-
-[Footnote 3: Pure number is ἀριθμὸς μοναδικός: applied number is
-ἀριθμὸς φυσικὸς or σωματικός. Aristotle, _Metaph_. N. 5, speaks of
-αριθμὸς πύρινος ἤ γήϊνος. But this is only Greek idiom: as we say
-'Greek history' instead of 'History of Greece:' or vice versa, when we
-translate _Populus Romanus_ by 'people of Rome.' Aristotle is speaking
-of 'proportions' or 'amounts' of fire or earth in the compounds of
-these elements.]
-
-[Footnote 4: See L. Geiger, _Ursprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen
-Sprache und Vernunft_ (vol. i. p. 380). And Gabelenz 'Die melanesischen
-Sprachen' in the _Abhandlungen der Sächsischen Gesellschaft der
-Wissenschaften_ (VIII), 1861, pp. 89-91.]
-
-[Footnote 5: _Mémoire sur le Systeme grammatical_, &c. p. 155.]
-
-[Footnote 6: Cf. _nous_ and _nous autres_. The same distinction is
-found in some American languages. There is a dual in the language of
-the Greenlanders; but it is not, however, used when a natural duality
-seems to call for it, but in cases when, though there might have been
-several things, only two are actually found.]
-
-[Footnote 7: W. von Humboldt, _Verschiedenheit des menschlichen
-Sprachbaues_, p. 423 (ed. 1841); Misteli, _Typen des Sprachbaues_
-(1893).]
-
-[Footnote 8: Capt. Grey, _Vocabulary of the dialects of S. W.
-Australia_, pp. xxi and 104 (1840).]
-
-[Footnote 9: The sharp distinction between the first and second
-personal pronouns and the third: the want of any apparent connexion
-in the Indo-Germanic languages between the first and second persons
-singular and the plural form seems to point in the same direction.]
-
-[Footnote 10: Cf. vol. ii. _Notes and Illustrations_, p. 400.]
-
-[Footnote 11: _Die Sprachwissenschaft_, p. 168.]
-
-[Footnote 12: 'Vorstellung,' as distinguished from 'Begriff.']
-
-[Footnote 13: Thus in Malay, there are about twenty words for
-strike, according as it is done with thick or thin wood, downwards,
-horizontally, or upwards, with the hand, with the fist, with the
-flat hand, with a club, with the sharp edge, with a hammer, &c. (See
-Misteli, _Typen des Sprachbaues_, p. 265.)]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXIII.
-
-
-FIGURATE OR REPRESENTATIVE THOUGHT.
-
-
-The compensating dialectic whereby reason, under the guise of
-imagination, overthrows the narrowness of popular estimates, makes
-itself observed even in the popular use of the terms abstract and
-concrete. Terms like state, mind, wealth, may from one point of view
-be called abstract, from another concrete. At a certain pitch these
-abstractions cease to be abstract, and become even to popular sense
-very concrete realities. In the tendency to personification in language
-we see the same change from abstract to concrete: as when Virtue is
-called a goddess, or Fashion surnamed the despot of womankind. In
-such instances, imagination, more or less in the service of art and
-religion, upsets the narrow vulgar estimates of reality. But it upsets
-them, so to speak, by giving to the abstraction (through its creative
-power) that sensuous concreteness which the mere abstract lacks and
-which the ordinary mind alone recognises as real. It 'stoops to
-conquer.' Such a representation is, as Hegel says[1], 'the synthetic
-combination of the Universal and Individual': 'synthetic,' because not
-their free, spontaneous, and essential unity, but the supreme product
-of the artistic will and hand, which, rather than let the universal
-perish by neglect, build for it, the eternal and omnipresent, 'a
-temple made with hands.' In mythology we can see the same process: by
-which, as it is phrased, an abstract term becomes concrete: by which,
-as we may more correctly say, a thought is transformed into, or rather
-stops short at, a representative picture. The many gods of polytheism
-are the fixed and solidified shapes in which the several degrees of
-religious growth have taken 'a local habitation and a name': or they
-bear witness to the failure of the greater part of the world to grasp
-the idea of Deity in its unity and totality apart from certain local
-and temporary conditions. So, too, terms like force, law, matter,--the
-abstractions of the mere popular mind--are by certain periods reduced
-to the level of sensuous things, and spoken of as real entities,
-somewhere and somehow existent, apart from the thinking medium to
-which they belong. Such terms, again, as property, wealth, truth, are
-popularly identified with the objects in which they are for the time
-and place manifested or embodied.
-
-In these ways the abstract, in the ordinary meaning, becomes in the
-ordinary meaning concrete. The distinction between abstract and
-concrete is turned into a distinction between understanding and sense,
-instead of, as Hegel makes it, a distinction in the adequacy and
-completeness of thought itself. Thought (the Idea), as has been more
-than once pointed out, is the principle of unification or unification
-itself: it is organisation plus the consciousness of organisation:
-it is the unifier, the unity, and the unified,--subject as well as
-object, and eternal copula of both. An attempt is at first made in
-two degrees to represent the thought in terms of the senses as a sort
-of superior or higher-class sensible. When the impossibility of that
-attempt is seen, common sense ends by denying what it has learned to
-call the super-sensible altogether. These three plans may be called
-respectively the mythological, the metaphysical, and the positive or
-nominalist fallacies of thought. In the mythological, or strictly
-anthropomorphic fallacy, thought is conceived under the bodily shape
-and the physical qualities of humanity, as a separate unifying,
-controlling, synthetic agent, through whose interference the several
-things, otherwise dead and motionless, acquire a semblance of life
-and action, though in reality but puppets or marionettes: that is to
-say, it is identified with a subject of like passions with ourselves,
-a repetition of the particular human personality, with its narrowness
-and weakness. The action of the Idea is here replaced by the agency
-of supposed living beings, invested with superhuman powers. In the
-metaphysical or realist fallacy we have a feeble ghostly reproduction
-of the mythological. The living personal deity is replaced by a faint
-scare-crow of abstract deity. The cause of the changes that go on in
-nature is now attributed to indwelling sympathies and animosities,
-to the abhorrence of a vacuum, to selection, affinity, and the like:
-to essences and laws conceived of as somehow existent in a mystic
-space and time. In the positive or nominalist fallacy, the failure of
-these two theories begins to be felt: and the mind, which had only
-heard of unifying reason under these two phases and is meanwhile sure
-of its sense-perceptions, treats the objective synthesis as a dream
-and a delusion. Or, at best, it regards the synthesis as essentially
-subjective--as a complementary idealising activity of ours which
-ekes out the defects of reality, and brings continuity into the
-discontinuous. Our thought--(it is only _our_ thought)--is but an
-instrument, distinct from us and from the reality: yet acting as a
-bridge to connect these two opposing shores--a bridge however which
-does not really reach the other side, but only an artificial image,
-which simulates to us, and will for ever simulate, the inaccessible
-reality. This last view is the utterance of the popular matter-of-fact
-reason, when in weariness and tedium it turns from the attempt to grasp
-thought pure and simple, and instead of reducing the metaphysical
-antitheses to the transparent unity of comprehension, relapses into
-mere acceptance of a given reality.
-
-In some of these cases the full step into pure thought is never
-made. The creations of mythology, for example, display an unfinished
-and baffled attempt to rise from the separation of sense to the
-unity and organisation of thought. The gods of heathenism are only
-individuals--and individuals only _meant to be,_ and by the act of
-faith and devotion set forth as reality before the worshipper: but they
-are individuals in which imagination embodies a unified and centralised
-system of forces or principles. They _mean_ the powers of nature and of
-mind, but the sceptre in their hands is only a sign of power attributed
-by the believer; and far away, encompassing alike them and him, is the
-great relentless necessity. In other cases there is a relapse: when
-the higher stage of thought has been attained, it is instantaneously
-lost. Terms which are really thoughts are again reduced to the level of
-the things of sense, individualised in some object, which, though it
-is only a representation or sign, is allowed to usurp the place of the
-thought which it but partially and by extraneous institution embodies.
-The intuition of the sensuous imagination at every step throws its
-spells on the products of thought, and turns them into a representative
-picture, which in popular use and wont occupies the place of the
-notion. Instead of being retained in their native timelessness, the
-terms of the Idea are brought under the laws of Sense-perception, under
-the conditions of space and time.
-
-The term 'representation,' which Hegel employs to name these
-picture-thoughts or figurate conceptions, corresponds to the facts
-of their nature. A 'representation' is one of two things: either a
-particular thing sent out accredited with general functions, or a
-universal narrowed down into a particular thing. Thus, as it has been
-seen, a general name implies or connotes a universal relation or
-attribute, but confines it to denote a particular object or class.
-'Swift,' for example, was an epithet tied down to express the horse. In
-the first instance we may suppose the name to be a sort of metaphor:
-differing only by its simplicity and frequency of suggestion from those
-endless epithets, which in Norse or Arabic poetry veil and adorn the
-object which they are meant to designate. That is, we conceive the
-object as an embodiment or representation of the quality, as an eagle
-is the emblem of strength: only in the latter case we distinguish
-between the object and its metaphorical signification. In the second
-place, however, the object of experience is allowed completely to
-coincide with the aspect discriminated by the selective epithet, and we
-can no longer in ordinary thought separate the imaging object from the
-general relation which it images forth. This is the level of thought to
-which Hegel appropriates the term 'representation.' It includes under
-it the three fallacies of thought already noted and saves the trouble
-of comprehending the reality. In the Hegelian sense, a representation
-is abstract; because it solidifies, hardens, and isolates the term of
-thought, makes it a particular, and never rises above the single case
-to the general notion embodied in it.
-
-The world of representative thought is a world of independent points
-in juxtaposition, which we arrange as seems best to us. It lies in
-an undefinable borderland between us and things. It is a would-be,
-but not an actual, reality. It is not like a true Idea--the unity of
-subjective and objective: but only a make-believe. We have put it
-there, and yet we credit it with an effective existence. When our mind
-moves amongst these picture-thoughts, it can only institute external
-relations between the terms. A judgment, in that case, is interpreted
-to mean the conjunction of two terms, which at once step into the rank
-of subject and predicate by means of the copula. A sentence is an
-arrangement of words _ab extra_ in conscious or unconscious conformity
-with the rules of grammar. The world of knowledge, or the Idea, as
-a whole is turned into a plane surface with its typical terms,--the
-members of the organism of reason,--like dots put in co-ordination and
-juxtaposition, not spontaneously affected towards each other. Even if
-they are not embodied and reduced to a sensuous level of existence,
-they are held to be originally separate and unconnected. How they
-all came into being, and whether they do not all by gradations and
-differentiation-proceed from one root, are questions neither asked nor
-answered.
-
-The level of representative thinking--thinking i. e. which is not
-the grasp (_Begriff_) of the reality, but only the apprehension of
-something which stands for and represents it--is the level on which we
-all come, more or less, to stand in our non-philosophic moments. It
-is, in essentials, the realm of what Plato called _δόξα_,--the level
-of consciousness which fails to rise to see the unity of essence in
-the many single goods and beauties, which holds its knowledge (such
-at is) at the mercy of accidents, not bound by the conclusions of
-reasoning,--the realm which is not without reality, but an immature
-and uncertain reality. It is, in essentials, the same as what, as
-opposed to _intellectus_, Spinoza styled _imaginatio._ Imagination,
-to Spinoza, is an understanding under the bondage of particular
-passions and temporary interests, which loses sight of the great
-bond of being or _Substantia_, and fixes its glance on the parts in
-subordinate and infra-essential relationships: which is always finite,
-i. e. never really comprehensive and self-sustaining in its view, but
-always limited by a tacit reference to something outside itself. The
-'Representation' is the idea, in the loose and inexact use of that
-word, which goes with the phrase _mere idea_,--i. e. a mere mental
-image, which is not the reality, though it is believed to do duty for
-and to represent it[2]. Yet it is not a mere thought: rather its whole
-aim and meaning is to refer to reality, to suggest it, to bring it
-nearer us. Its fault is that it is an imperfect, partial, one-sided,
-or even one-pointed idea. It is really an instance and phase of
-the _ignava ratio_, to which a date or name serves as a ποῦ στῶ of
-explanation.
-
-    'At Kilne there was no weathercock,
-    And that's the reason why.'
-
-Such 'representation,' according to Hegel, is, e. g., the mode of
-intelligence accessible to those who cling to the mere, or abstractly,
-religious mood, and who cannot or will not rise to the comprehension
-of their creed. Its facts or dogmas present themselves to such a
-restricted conception as the parts of a picture or the stages of a
-history, in visible or imaginatively-construable space, and in a
-succession of times. The essence of religion, of course, for Hegel as
-for other exponents of its inmost nature, is a feeling of certitude
-or faith which transcends the gulfs and separations of the secular
-consciousness, which sees with the believing soul the inner peace,
-the absolute harmony of the true reality. _Pectus facit theologum._
-The sense of utter dependence on God, in complete identity with the
-sense of absolute independence in God--that strength of faith is the
-very life of religion. But when religion seeks to give an intelligent
-expression of her faith, when she tries to give a reason acceptable to
-the outside world, she is apt, unless specially trained in the high
-things of the spirit, to base her creed not on the rock of ages, but
-on the signs and miracles of the times. She has tried to theorise the
-faith: but, although her faith may be sound and true, the religious
-spirit, unless it be also the spirit of wisdom and reasoned truth, runs
-a risk of falling into the fallacy of _Post hoc_, _ergo propter hoc._
-She descends therefore to the region of representation: she uses the
-language of sense and analogy; she presents the spiritual under the
-guise of the natural. Yet in her heart of hearts these things are only
-a parable,--they are but
-
-                    'Flesh and blood
-    To which she links a truth divine.'
-
-Hegel--in the introduction to his lectures on the Philosophy of
-Religion--is reported to have given the following characteristics of
-'representation,' (_a_) It is still trammeled by the senses. Thought
-and sensation strive for the mastery in it. Thought is bound fast to
-an illustration: and of this illustration it cannot as representative
-thought divest itself:--the eternally living idea is chained to the
-transient and perishable form of sense. It is metaphorical and material
-thinking, which is helpless without the metaphor and the matter. (_b_)
-Representative thought envisages what is timeless and infinite under
-the conditions of time and space. It loses sight of the moral and
-spirit of historical development under the semblance of the names,
-incidents, and forms in which it is displayed. The historical and
-philosophical sense is lost under the antiquarian. Representative
-thought keeps the shell, and throws away the kernel. (_c_) The terms
-by which such a materialised thought describes its objects are not
-internally connected: each is independent of the other; and we
-only bring them together for the occasion by an act of subjective
-arrangement[3].
-
-The thing--the so-called _subject_ of the properties, of which it is
-really no more than the _substratum_--affords no sufficient ground
-for the unity of the properties attached to it. The substratum or
-subject of the proposition is given, and we then look around to see
-what other properties accompany the primary characteristic for which
-the name was applied. But the term of popular language is not a real
-unity capable of supporting differences; it is only one aspect of a
-thing, a single point fixed and isolated in the process of language
-by the action of natural selection. And so, to ask how the properties
-are related to the thing, is to ask how one aspect, taken out of its
-setting, is related to another isolated aspect: which is evidently an
-unanswerable question. Science is right in rejecting the 'thing' of
-popular conception. If _a_ is _a,_ and nothing more, as the law of
-Identity informs us, then it is for ever impossible to get on to _b,
-c, d_, and the rest. The union between the thing divided or defined,
-and its divided or defining members, is what is termed extra-logical;
-in other words, it is not evident from what is given or stated in the
-popular conception. That union must be sought elsewhere, and deeper.
-
-And when _we_ step in to overcome the repugnance which the point of
-conception, or what is supposed the subject, shows against admitting
-a diversity of predicates,--when _we_ force it into union with these
-properties: or when we try to remove the separation which leaves
-the cause and effect as two independent things to fall apart; our
-action, by which we effect a unification of differences, may, from
-another and a universal point of view, be said to be the notion, or
-grasp of thought, coming to the consciousness of itself. Thought,
-as it were, recognises itself and its image in those objects of
-representative conception, which seem to be given and imposed upon
-the intellect. The two worlds, which the understanding accepts
-as each solid and independent,--the world of external objects or
-conceptions, and the world of self,--meet and coincide in the free
-agency of thought, developing itself under a double aspect. It is
-the 'original synthetical unity of apperception' (to quote Kant's
-words), from which the Ego or thinking subject, and the 'manifold'
-or body and world, are simultaneously differentiated. Thus, on the
-one hand, we ourselves no longer remain a rigid unity, existing in
-antithesis to the objects presupposed or referred to by representative
-thought: and on the other hand the so-called thing loses its hardness
-and fragmentary independence, as distinguished from our apprehension
-of it. _Our_ action, as we incline to call it, which mends the
-inadequacies of terms, is from a philosophic point of view, the notion
-itself coming to the front and claiming recognition. The process of
-thought is then seen to be a totality, of which our faculties, on
-the one hand, and the existing thing, on the other, are isolated
-abstractions, supposed habitually to exist on their own account.
-To view either of these systems, the mental, on the one hand, and
-the objective world, on the other, as self-subsistent, has been the
-error in much of our metaphysics, and in the popular conceptions of
-what constitutes reality. The idealism of metaphysicians has been
-often as narrow and insufficient as the realism of common sense. An
-adequate philosophy, on the contrary, recognises the presence of both
-elements, in a subordinate and formative position. Representations
-may be compared to the little pools left here and there by the sea
-amongst the rocks and sand: the notion, or grasp of thought, is the
-tidal wave, which left them there to stagnate, but comes back again to
-restore their continuity with the great sea. In our thinking we are
-only the ministers and interpreters of the Idea,--of the organic and
-self-developing system of thought.
-
-The difference between a representative conception and a thought proper
-may be illustrated by the case of the term 'Money.' Money may be
-either a materialised thought, i. e. a Representative Conception, or
-a Notion Proper. In the former case, money is identified with a piece
-of money. It is probably, in the first instance, embodied in coins of
-gold, silver, and bronze. In the second place, a wide gulf is placed
-between it and the other articles for which it is given in exchange.
-If other things are regarded as money, they are generally treated on
-the assumption that they can in case of need be reduced to coinage. The
-conception of money by the unscientific vulgar considers it separately
-from other commodities: and the laws which forbade its exportation
-gave a vigorous expression to the belief that it was something _sui
-generis_, and subject to conditions of its own. The scientific notion
-of money modifies this belief in the peculiarity and fixity of money.
-Science does so historically, when it can point to a time and a race
-where money in our sense of the word does not exist, and where barter
-takes the place of buying and selling. Science does so philosophically,
-when it expounds what may be called the _process_ of money,--the
-inter-action or meeting of conditions to which the existence of money
-is due. The notion of money, as given in the _Ethics_ of Aristotle,
-says that it is the common measure of utility or demand. When we leave
-out of sight the specific quality of an object, and consider only its
-capacity of satisfying human wants, we have what is called its worth
-or value. This value of the thing,--the psychological fact which is
-left, when all the qualities marking the objective thing are reduced
-to their social efficiency--is the notion, of which the currency is
-the representation, reducing thought to the level of the senses, and
-embodying the 'ideality' of value in a tangible and visible object.
-So long as this 'idea' of value is kept in view, the currency is
-comprehended: but when the perception of the notion disappears, money
-is left a mere piece of currency, the general notion being narrowed
-down to the coinage. Thus the notion of money, like other notions in
-their ideal truth, is not in us, nor in the things merely: it is what
-from a minor point of view, when we and the things are regarded under
-the head of want or need, may be called the _truth_ of both, the unity
-of the two sides. Thus considered, money falls into its proper place in
-the order of things.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: _Werke,_ ii. 529, 555.]
-
-[Footnote 2: Hegel's _Werke_, ii. 431: '_Wobei das Selbst nur
-repräsentirt_ und vorgestellt ist, da ist es nicht wirklich: we es
-vertreten ist, ist es nicht.' Cf. _ib._ 416.]
-
-[Footnote 3: _Philosophie der Religion,_ i. p. 137 seqq.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXIV.
-
-
-FROM SUBSTANCE TO SUBJECT.
-
-
-'It is, in my view, all important,' says Hegel[1], 'to apprehend and
-express the True not as _Substance,_ but equally much as _Subject_.'
-Substance, as Spinoza defines it, is that which is in itself and
-which is conceived through itself, something which does not need the
-conception of something else by which its concept may be formed[2].
-Substance, in other words, is something which serves to explain
-itself, which is _causa sui._ The mind, looking out on the wide world
-of mutable and manifold objects, finds its rest in the great calm of
-a something at their base, the eternal nature which, itself unmoved,
-is the one foundation, complete and sufficient, of all things,--a
-_res aeterna et infinita,_ which can feed the mind with joy alone[3].
-These words suggest only an object--a transcendent object--the basis
-of an objective order. They seem to leave little for the contemplating
-subject to do save to discern it and, so discerning, to rest in it
-and to love. They seem to leave substance a mere datum, a far-off
-all-embracing end in which the variety of human effort can find a
-central object and a final close. Yet, in the end it appears[4] that
-this _Res aeterna_ loves himself with an intellectual love, and
-this love is identified with the love of man to God, so far at least
-as man's mind, considered _sub specie aeternitatis_, can be said to
-'explicate' Deity. From this conclusion it might be said that Spinoza
-rises above the mere category of substance: God is no longer the mere
-foundation of things--the absolute object of all objects. He rises in
-human spirit (regarded in its eternal significance) to the rank of
-a true subject. He is not merely known as the True; but He himself,
-living and moving in the essential spirit of man, knows himself and
-acquiesces in his infinite beatitude. But if this be the legitimate
-inference to be drawn from the closing sections of the _Ethics_, it is
-not the view ordinarily suggested by the mention of Spinoza's doctrine.
-That doctrine, on the contrary, seems, as it first confronts us, and
-as it has taken its place in history, to omit the subjectivity which
-had found so decided a recognition in the commencement of Cartesianism.
-In the _cogito ergo sum_ so much at least is clearly stated: true
-being--the true--is not merely known, but itself knows; not a mere
-object, but a subject: a subject-object, or, an Idea. It is to be
-admitted, indeed, that Descartes hardly remains at this altitude, but
-he touches it for a moment. Even when he finds in the conception of God
-a security for truth and reality, and thus seems to base these on a
-one-sidedly objective standard, he regards God as, on the other hand,
-the truth and reality postulated and presupposed by the structural
-system of our ideas. God--such seems the tendency of his so-called
-'proof'--is the inevitable prius and presupposition of our thought and
-being: He makes us know, as much as He is ultimately the object known:
-He is the unity and the creator of subject and object.
-
-But it is hardly possible to get in philosophy the full recognition of
-the antithesis between subject and substance and the inclusion of both
-in the fuller Idea, till after the time of Kant. Kant himself is, in
-essentials, the antithesis of Spinoza, but it is not till Fichte that
-the full force of that antithesis is expressly recognised. With Hegel,
-the two opposite points of view are equally insisted on: the immanence
-and the transcendence of the True, the Real, the Absolute: or, in
-other words, the unity in it of subject and object, or of thought and
-existence. Or, in the words of the religious spirit, though heaven and
-the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him, He dwells in the spirit of
-the righteous, and is not far from any one of us. The truth is not the
-correspondence or agreement of an idea with a further reality which it
-represents. Such an idea or 'representation' is a projection which has
-escaped from our hands, which has slipped from our grip, and which,
-while owning its mere vicarious character, at the same time beckons
-us on to seek a reality we can never find. The 'representation' is in
-a way objective--it is set over against us: but yet it is not truly
-objective, not self-subsistent and self-possessed. Its objectivity is
-the objectivity of a name: a quasi-objectivity, which requires to be
-dipped in the living waters of intelligence before it can really exist
-and act. It seems, to the untrained observer, to point only outwards to
-the real object which it copies or designates: to a deeper reflection,
-it is seen to point equally inward to the mind which informed it and
-projected it. Thus the knowing subject, and the known object, with the
-representation which acts as a perpetual mediator to connect and yet
-not unify the one of these terms with the other,--all at last take
-their place, reduced and transfigured, in the unity of the Idea.
-
-According to the Spinozist point of view, thought, it might seem by
-a sort of miracle, dispels the mists that envelop and bewilder it,
-sees through the multeity of modes, and the isolated pictures of
-imagination, to the true reality, one, infinite and eternal. Before
-that august vision of absolute wholeness the only attitude of a finite
-mind would seem to be resignation, worship, reverence,--deeply shading
-into the submission of absorption. For in it intellect and will are
-declared to have no place[5]. With such a statement, we get that first
-aspect of religion which has found its most imposing representative
-in the faith of Islam. In every religion there must, however, be more
-than this: or it would fail to do what all religion essentially does.
-Sheer dependence_--Schlechthinnige Abhängigkeit_ (as Schleiermacher
-has named it)--can never be the whole burden of a religious teacher's
-message. Always--at least in the background--there is a contradictory
-element--in apparent discrepancy with the first--the deification of the
-worshipper. And as the Ethics of Spinoza--like every complete system
-of speculative truth--deals with a problem parallel to, if not even
-identical with, that of religion, its initial definitions and main
-programme must never let us forget the tacit presuppositions worked out
-to explicitness, as they are partly, in its conclusion. When Intellect
-and Will are denied to the _Deus = Natura = Substantia,_ it is meant
-that the Absolute is and has more than intellect and will can well
-name, and that in Him (or Her, or It, for the pronominal distinctions
-of gender matter nothing here), the separation of will from intellect
-is a fallacy which can have no place. What Spinoza casts out are the
-lower passions, the affections of weakness; these _as such,_ i. e. as
-elements of weakness, can have no place in Him. But in God, as in the
-free man who most resembles God, and in whose love He loves himself,
-there is--but that also in terms we cannot fathom--abundance of
-joy--the joy of infinite self-realisation.
-
-Partly by the complementary theory of Leibniz, partly by the antagonist
-theories of Kant, the way had been prepared for setting forth, and
-in fuller outline, the implications so tardily admitted by Spinoza.
-It was only by a misuse or mal-extension of a word that Herder's
-God--a God who is Force--and the Force of Forces--could be supposed
-an advance upon Spinoza. There is in Force an analogue of Life; but
-it is life in dependence, life not self-centred, always going forth,
-and when it goes forth dissipated. It is as it were pushed from
-behind, and is lost in what comes after it. If a Force of Forces means
-anything, it means something more than Force: it means a master of
-force, a force-controller and force-adjuster, a unity and principle
-of forces. And Substance, as Spinoza understood it, is more than
-this variability, this deification of instability. It is the unity
-in which the variety and disparity of existence, the multiplicity of
-vicissitude, is merged and lost, only again to issue from it, and yet
-not leave it behind, in the infinitely-various modes of its two great
-and conspicuous attributes of consciousness and extensionality. If
-Hegel then sought to go beyond Spinoza, he sought to find a formula
-which would lose nothing that Spinoza had reached, but would at the
-same time bring out what Spinoza had left an implication, or noted in
-a partial rectification. As in religion, besides the utter dependence
-on God (so that, God failing, I perish), there must be also an absolute
-union, complete reconciliation--complete as culminating in unity and
-identity (so that God shall not be God, unless I am I): so it is in
-philosophy. The Absolute cannot merely _be_, and be far away--the last
-goal in which the variety of life is made one, and the turmoil of the
-passionate existences laid to rest. The Soul which is (as some of the
-medieval Christians would say) still _in itinere_, a wayfarer, is such
-because its glance is turned on outward circumstances: but country is
-no accident: the soul even here carries with it that _patria_, 'which
-is the heavenly,' in its longings, and has it, even while yet on
-pilgrimage, in that strong possession of all things by itself, which
-the theologian styles Faith. This goal determines the pilgrimage, fixes
-its direction, gives progress to its steps.
-
-In the myth-loving language of Plato (and of Wordsworth in his Platonic
-ode) the Soul has in other spheres of being dwelt with the gods and
-seen the secret of the world: it is itself one of the immortals, and
-as it is here and now, is in a land of exile. At the morning of birth,
-the living sample of humanity has left his original glory behind; and
-a deep forgetfulness--only short of absolute--cuts it off from his
-every-day consciousness. In his present reality he finds himself in a
-land of darkness, fast bound in a hollow of the rock, looking out only
-on the ghostly images that flit across his prison wall, cast there by
-the objects that move between his back and the light of a mysterious
-fire behind him and them. Such is his natural estate, as it meets the
-bodily eye: the estate of the lowly savage, whom superstition and
-ignorance seem to hold as their captive for ever. But, though his
-high home and his glory of other days have left no conscious memory
-in the soul, asleep and imbruted in its fleshly house, they have not
-departed without leaving a trace behind. For forgetfulness is not
-blank non-existence. The sample of humanity inherits the birthright
-of his fathers--he has hopes and fears, duties and rights, which are
-his, if he can mature himself to take possession of them. He suffers
-from the pains of growth, from the sense of disparity between what
-he is and what he may and should be--from the noble uneasiness and
-dissatisfaction of a being who feels--if he does not know--his infinite
-potentialities. For these potentialities--otherwise they have no title
-even to that name--are also actualities, yet actualities which protest
-their own incompleteness, and crave imperiously for what they lack.
-What he has is his right, but his right only in so far as it is also
-his duty. It is as such, and only as such, that he still retains the
-soul in all its prerogatives: as the right, which is the duty, of
-knowledge. Such a pre-figured and promised, but yet to be realised,
-possession is what Plato has called _Eros_, or Love. But it is a Love
-whose wings are at first invisible, and who often seems rather to crawl
-among ignoble things than to soar in the free fresh air.
-
-The process of experience has been by Plato called Anamnesis or
-Recollection. But Recollection is not always an easy, and never a
-merely passive, process; and sometimes the forgetfulness seems so deep
-that no extraneous stimulus can at all move it. We have seen already
-one of these stimuli which rouse the sleeping sense--the mystery of
-numbers: and there are many others. But, we have also learned, that
-in the psychical sphere items of memory are not, as reckless fancy
-puts it, stored up in compartments, sorted and arranged, ready to be
-pulled out. The process of recollection is a complicated affair: an
-affair of give and take, of comparison and selection and rejection,
-of construction and reconstruction. You cannot haul up ready-made
-memories from the mine. And this perhaps was sometimes forgotten by
-Plato; it certainly has been by more than one of his commentators.
-You may, no doubt, call up ideas from the vasty deep: but they come
-by laws and principles of their own. Even when they come, which they
-sometimes do unexpectedly, they come as an echo of the calling mind.
-Recollection involves intellectual process: as Kant said, the synthesis
-of imagination reposes upon the synthesis in the concept. Yet--and this
-is the point which Plato's title of _Anamnesis_ accentuates--unless
-'the soul had been such as to be affected in this way' (the words are
-those of Aristotle), unless the soul had been implicitly intellectual
-in tone and faculty, it would not have grasped the presented universe
-under the categories which it uses. There is, says Aristotle, in the
-barest act of sensation a congenital power of judgment; there is, says
-Plato, an eye of the soul--a natural virtue of intelligence, which can
-never be put into it, and must always be presupposed in any theory of
-its processes.
-
-There are, therefore, no innate ideas, says Cudworth in explanation of
-Plato, if these ideas mean formed and completed products of knowledge.
-All ideas in this sense begin and grow within the range of experience,
-and the history of their growth or development in literature and art
-can be at least approximately traced. We can trace, that is, the
-successions and connexions of the various types of beauty, or goodness:
-can show how the idea at one time dwelt in one of its aspects, at
-another in a different one. We can observe the variation, and it may
-be the progress, in men's conception of God. But it is another matter
-when we seek to explain these ideas themselves out of other elements,
-heterogeneous to them. When that question is asked, then with Plato we
-seem, in the absence of any theory of origins, obliged to own that it
-is by the Beautiful that beautiful things come to be beautiful. The
-μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένοs--the crossing of essential boundaries--which
-Aristotle forbids to science, still raises its eternal barrier in
-the logical, if it cease to hold good (as has been suggested) in the
-physical sphere. In the totality which we call the world and experience
-of reality there are, so to say, ultimate and irreducible provinces.
-The utmost that philosophy, i. e. science, can do with these is to
-co-ordinate them,--to show their mutual filiations, adaptations, and
-harmonies,--to note their inadequacies and discrepancies. They are
-not all of equal rank, perhaps; they have to yield to each other, it
-may be in turn: but none of them can be arbitrarily expunged from
-the totality, and none of them shown to be a mere phase of others.
-To do that is to strip the universe of its variety and--it may be
-added--of its beauty and its interest. If it be a false philosophy
-that does it, there is a good deal of false philosophy abroad. There
-is a lust of explanation which is never content till it has found an
-equation for everything, till it has expressed everything in terms of
-the common-place, till it has emptied everything of all that made it
-individual and real, and turned it into an abstract, identical (as
-only abstracts can be) with some other abstract. Such abstractions
-are of course useful, and therefore need no excuse, when restricted
-to a special sphere. So long, that is, as we remember that it is an
-abstraction we are making, and that we are arbitrarily simplifying
-the real natural problem, no harm is done by these artificial
-constructions; and they are important steps in a larger process. But
-what is correct and useful within a range whose limits we can define,
-becomes dangerous when carried beyond all bounds. Its approximate truth
-then becomes misleading error.
-
-It is these irreducible elements--these great provinces in human
-experience, in reality, in the system of reason--that correspond to
-the more important of what are known as Platonic ideas. As ultimate
-constituents of the actual world they are in the narrower sense
-inexplicable. One does not amount to an exact sum of some others, nor
-is one got from another by the simple process of subtraction. But
-if they cannot be explained, by being reduced to multiples of some
-one basis, they can be comprehended in the respective implication
-and explication they exhibit with their co-realities. They can be
-correlated, reduced, and unified: we may even say, they can be
-identified; but if we use such a term, we must mean that there is
-some totality beyond and above them in which they all find a place
-and all are harmonious; in which all when brought to their Truth are
-really one and the same. This birthright of human nature in all ages
-and countries--this central essence of man's spirit--is the realm of
-Platonic ideas. They are the great elements, or constituent members, of
-humanity and of reality: the framework of his mind and of the world.
-How in each case they may be wrought out in detail, to what degree
-they may here be evolved, and there stunted, is a matter of historical
-research. And, in a sense, even it is not wrong to try to trace them
-one to another: to explain them, as the phrase is, one by another. For
-they are essentially connected: they are members of one system: they
-are unified and harmonised in a way for which even the word 'organism'
-is wholly insufficient. They are the poles and lines on which the tent
-of human life, of intelligent life, is stretched: but they are also the
-invisible ties which bind together the earth and heavens, and all that
-is therein.
-
-These ideas therefore are immanent in man: for they are the basis
-of human nature. But to name, to disentangle them, to measure out
-their bounds and describe their connexions--that is no easy work.
-And that is the work of Platonic recollection. That is the process
-of historical experience. But it is a small thing for Plato to say
-that these ideas are innate in man. What he is more concerned to make
-clear is that in the possession or vision of these eternal forms, the
-human soul is a partner of the gods, a citizen of the heavens. In
-less mythical language, man, as an intelligent, artistic, moral, and
-religious being, is not a mere accidental on-looker on the surface of
-things, but near their central and abiding truth. The forms of his
-mind, to speak after the manner of Kant, are the objective essences of
-the real world of experience. Degrees there may be in the reality which
-they possess--less or larger measures of truth to full experience--but
-true and real they are: never mere falsity or emptiness. To estimate
-the amounts of that reality is a problem Plato often tried. At one time
-it seems as if the Good were in his estimate the form of forms, the
-real of reals: but when we look closely, we see that it is a goodness
-which is synonymous with real reality or perfect being. At another time
-truth, i. e. reality, seems to be lord of all: at another, beauty:
-and again he seems to confess his inability to lay down the order
-of precedence in this hierarchy. Of one thing only he is perfectly
-clear: and that is the unreality, the non-entity of the sense-world
-as merely perceived, and the true being of the world of reason. But
-he has no doubts as to the central truth that in the good, the true,
-and the beautiful, there is a higher reality--a more far-reaching and
-deep-piercing influence than in all the mere variety of sensation, the
-mere multitude of sensible fact.
-
-What Plato has sometimes called the act of reminiscence, what he has
-sometimes called the instinct of Love, is also known to him as the
-process of Dialectic. For reminiscence has to watch and wrestle with
-the inertia of oblivion, has to set the imagined beside the real, and
-to correct percepts by concepts, concepts by percepts, has to brace
-up its energies, and to advance not by mere pressing onward, but by
-tacking and zigzagging through contrary difficulties finally realise
-itself. And love too is a battle, where the craving for union has to
-measure its force with the instinct of independence, where selfishness
-and self-surrender seek a reconciliation, and where in the close, if
-the close be love, each is self-retained only as self-abandoned, and
-each rises to a higher union in which lower selfhoods are absorbed.
-Even so in the course of Dialectic. It is the art which divides
-and conjoins, which unifies and distinguishes: the art of asking
-and answering. To Plato it appears in the main as an action of the
-intelligent subject: but an action which, as he hints, is almost a
-natural instinct, which through discipline has become an art. In the
-hands of its typical artist, it proceeds, or seems to proceed, as if
-unconscious of its principle and end. Socrates has, as he professes,
-no overt conception of the result: he has no knowledge of the positive
-conclusion to be reached. It is the Logos--the logic of reality--which
-sustains the movement. Abandoning any subjective humour of carrying
-the argument to a preconceived end, one is swept on by the current of
-real logic--the reason in things. The dogma we have set up and seemed
-to see before us, will, if we are dispassionate, carry us on beyond
-itself, and suggest aspects calling for recognition and acceptance. If
-only we refrain from arresting the movement of criticism,--a course
-to which prudence, ease, custom, and every form of the _ignava ratio_
-counsel us,--truth will reveal itself in us, and by us. It is because
-other aims, personal and particular, are so ever-present with us, that
-speculative free inquiry seems so hard. It is we who insist on closing
-up the door, not the truth that is reluctant to show itself.
-
-Truth, then, is self-revelation or development. Not a result which is
-to be accepted, bowed to, and reverenced: but the result issuing (and
-only valuable as issuing) from a process in which we and objectivity
-are fellow-workers. The truth may no doubt be presented--as Spinoza
-does present it--in definitions, stating the net result as fundamental
-fact. Fundamental fact it is; but as so stated, as Substance, it comes
-as a stranger, almost as an enemy: the great vision, suddenly offered
-to untrained eyes, overwhelms and alarms the living sense of self, of
-personality. Hegel wishes to show it as a friend, as our very own,--as
-Subject (but not merely subject). It is for this that philosophy runs
-through its cycle and returns into itself. Man points to nature and
-nature to man: universal to individual: thought to things: the self to
-God, and God to the human soul.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Hegel, _Werke_, ii. 14.]
-
-[Footnote 2: Spinoza, _Eth._ Def. 3.]
-
-[Footnote 3: Spin. _De inteil. Em._ i. 10.]
-
-[Footnote 4: Spin. _Eth._ v. 35.]
-
-[Footnote 5: _Eth._ i. 17 schol.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXV.
-
-
-REASON AND THE DIALECTIC OF UNDERSTANDING.
-
-
-Representative conceptions, besides being the burden of our ordinary
-materialising consciousness, are also the data of science, accepted
-and developed in their consequences. Because they are so accepted,
-as given into our hand, scientific reasoning can only institute
-relations between them. Its business as thus conceived is progressive
-unification, comparing objects with one another, demonstrating the
-similarities which exist between them, and combining them with each
-other. The exercise of thought which deals with such objects is limited
-by their existence: it is only formal. It is finite thought, because
-it is only subjective: it begins at a given point and stops somewhere,
-and never gets quite round its materials so as to call them truly its
-own. Each of the objects on which it is turned seems to be outside
-of it, and independent of it. Each point of fact, again, when it is
-carried out to its utmost, meets with other thoughts which limit it,
-and claim to be equally self-centred. Such knowledge creeps on from
-point to point. To this thinking German philosophy from the time of
-Kant and Jacobi applied a name, which since the days of Coleridge has
-been translated by 'Understanding'[1]. This degree or mode of thinking
---not a faculty of thought--is the systematised and thorough exercise
-of what in England is called 'Common Sense.' In the first place, it is
-synonymous with practical intelligence. It takes what it calls facts,
-or things, as given, and aims only at arranging and combining them and
-drawing from them counsels of prudence or rules of art. Seeing things
-on a superficies, as it were so many unconnected points, here itself
-and there the various things of the world, it tries to bring them into
-connexion. It accepts existing distinctions, and seeks to render them
-more precise by pointing out and sifting the elements of sameness.
-Its greatest merit is an abhorrence of vagueness, inconsistency, and
-what it stigmatises as mysticism: it wishes to be clear, distinct, and
-practical. In its proper sphere,--and it has an indispensable function
-to perform even in philosophy: wherever, that is, it is unnecessary
-to go into the essential truth of things, and one has only to do good
-work in a clearly defined sphere,--the understanding has an independent
-value of its own[2] Nor is this true merely of practical life, where
-a man must accommodate himself to facts: it is equally applicable
-in the higher theoretic life,--in art, religion, and philosophy. If
-intelligent definiteness does not make itself apparent in these, there
-is something wrong about them.
-
-It is only when this exercise of thought is regarded as a _ne plus
-ultra,_ and its mandates to restrict investigation by the limits of
-foregone conclusions find obedience, that understanding deserves
-the reproachful language which was lavished upon it by the German
-philosophers at the close of the last century. The understanding is
-abstract: this sums up its offences in one word. Its objects, that
-is the things it deals with and believes utterly real, are only
-partly so, and when that incompleteness is unrecognised, are only
-abstractions. Both in its contracted forms, such as faith and common
-sense, and in its systematic form, the logical or narrowly-consistent
-intellect, it is partial and liable to be tenacious of half-truths.
-Only that whereas in feeling and common-sense there is often a great
-deal which they cannot express,--whereas the heart is often more
-liberal than its interpreting mind will allow--the reverse is true of
-the logically-consistent intellect. The narrowness of the latter is,
-in its own opinion, exactly equal to the truth of things: and whatever
-it expresses is asserted without qualification to be the absolute
-fact. Its business is, given the initial point (which is assumed to be
-certain and perspicuous), to see all which that point will necessarily
-involve or lead to. For example, Order may be supposed to be the chief
-end of the State. Let us consider, says the intelligent arguer (without
-wasting time on abstruse inquiries as to what Order is or means, and
-what sort of Order we want), to what consequences and institutions
-this conception will lead us. Or, again, the chief end of the State
-is assumed to be Liberty. To what special forms of organisation will
-this hypothesis (also assumed a self-evident conception) lead? Or we
-may go a step further. It is evident, some will say, that in a State
-there must be a certain admixture of Order and Liberty. How are we to
-proceed--what laws and ordinances will be necessary, to secure the
-proper equilibrium of these two principles? The two must be blended,
-and each have its legitimate influence.
-
-These are examples of the operation of Understanding. It can only reach
-a synthesis (or conjunction), never a real unity, because it believes
-in the omnipotence of the abstractions with which it began: but must
-either carry out one partial principle to its consequences, or allow
-an alternate and combined force to two opposite principles. Its canon
-is identity: given something, let us see what follows when we keep the
-same point always in view, and compare other points with the one which
-we are supposed to know. Its method is analytic: given a conception
-in which popular thought supposes itself at home, and let us see all
-the elements of truth which can be deduced from it. Its statements are
-abstract and narrow: or, in the words of Anaxagoras, one thing is cut
-off from another with a hatchet[3]. In its excess it degenerates into
-dogmatism, whether that dogmatism be theological or naturalistic.
-
-The fact is that the Understanding, as this analytic, abstract, and
-finite action of mind is called,--the thought which holds objective
-ideas distinct from one another, and from the subjective faculties of
-thought as a whole,--that this Understanding is, when it claims to be
-heard and obeyed in science, not sufficiently thorough-going. It begins
-at a point which is not so isolated as it seems, but is a member of a
-body of thought: nor is it aware that the whole of this body of thought
-is in organic, and even more than organic, union. It errs in taking too
-much for granted: and in not seeing how this given point is the result
-of a process,--that in it, in any thought or idea, several tendencies
-or elements converge and are held in union, but with the possibility
-of working their way into a new independence. In other words, the
-Understanding requires, as the organon and method of philosophy, to
-be replaced by the Reason[4],--by infinite thought, concrete, at
-once analytic and synthetic. How then, it may be asked, can we make
-the passage from the inadequate to the adequate? To that question the
-answer may be given that it is our act of arbitrary arrest which halts
-at the inadequate: that in complete Reason, which is the constituent
-nature both of us and of things, the Understanding is only a grade
-which points beyond itself, and therefore presupposes and struggles up
-to the adequate thought. In other words, it is Reason which creates or
-lays down for behoof of its own organisation the aims, conditions, and
-fixed entities,--the objects, by which it is bound and limited in its
-analytic exercise as understanding. Reason, therefore, is the implicit
-tendency to correct its own inadequacy: and we have only to check
-self-will and prejudice so far that the process may be accomplished.
-
-The movement is not at one step: it has a middle term or mean which
-often seems as if it were a step backward. Progress in knowledge is
-usually described as produced by the mode of demonstration or the
-mode of experience. Formal Logic prefers the first mode of describing
-it: Applied Logic prefers the second. Either mode may serve, if we
-properly comprehend what demonstration and experience mean. And that
-will not be done unless we keep equally before us the affirmative and
-the negative element in the process. The law of rational progress in
-knowledge, of the dialectical movement of consciousness, or in one
-word of experience, is not simple movement in a straight line, but
-movement by negation and absorption of the premisses. The conclusion
-or the new object of knowledge is a product into which the preceding
-object is reduced or absorbed. Thus the movement from faith (which
-is concentrated and wholly personal knowledge) to open and universal
-knowledge, which is capable of becoming the possession of a
-community,--truth and not merely conviction, must pass through doubt.
-The premisses from which we start, and the original object with which
-we begin, are not left _in statu quo_: they are destroyed in their
-own shape, and become only materials to build up a new object and a
-conclusion. It is on the stepping-stones of discarded ideas that we
-rise to higher truth: and it is on the abrogation of the old objects
-of knowledge that the new objects are founded. Not merely does a new
-object come in to supplement the old, and correct its inadequacies by
-the new presence: not merely do _we_ add new ranges to _our_ powers of
-vision, retaining the old faculties and subjoining others. The whole
-world--alike inward and outward,--the consciousness and its object--is
-subjected to a thorough renovation: every feature is modified, and
-the system re-created. The old perishes: but in perishing contributes
-to constitute the new. Thus the new is at once the affirmation and
-negation of the old. And such is the invariable nature of intelligent
-progress, of which the old and not a few modern logicians failed to
-render a right account, because they missed the negative element, and
-did not see that the immediate premisses must be abolished in order to
-secure a conclusion,--even as the grapes must be crushed before the
-wine can be obtained.
-
-This is the real meaning of Experience, when it is called the teacher
-of humanity: and it was for this reason that Bacon described it as
-'far the best demonstration.'[5] Experience is that absolute process,
-embracing both us and things, which displays the nullity of what is
-immediately given, or baldly and nakedly accepted, and completes it
-by the rough remedy of contradiction. The change comes over both
-us and the things: neither the one side nor the other is left as it
-was before. And it is here that the advantage of Experience over
-demonstration consists. Demonstration tends to be looked upon as
-subjective only (_constringit assensum, non res_): whereas Experience
-is also objective. But Experience is more than merely objective: it
-is the absolute process of thought pure and entire; and as such it
-is described by Hegel as Dialectic, or Dialectical movement. This
-Dialectic covers the ground of demonstration,--a fragment of it
-especially described and emphasised in the Formal Logic,--and of
-Experience,--under which name it is better known in actual life, and in
-the philosophy of the sciences[6].
-
-Dialectic is the negative or destructive aspect of reason, as
-preparatory to its affirmative or constructive aspect. It is the spirit
-of dissent and criticism: the outgoing as opposed to the indwelling:
-the restless as distinguished from the quiet: the reproductive as
-opposed to the nutritive instinct: the centrifugal as opposed to the
-centripetal force: the radical and progressive tendency as opposed
-to the conservative. But no one of these examples sufficiently or
-accurately describes it. For it is the utterance of an implicit
-contradiction,--the recognition of an existing and felt, but hitherto
-unrecognised and unformulated want. Dialectic does not supervene from
-without upon the fixed ideas of understanding: it is the evidence of
-the higher nature which lies behind them, of the dependence on a larger
-unity which understanding implicitly or explicitly denies. That higher
-nature, the notion or grasp of reasonable thought, comes forward, and
-has at first, in opposition to the one-sided products of understanding,
-the look of a destructive agent. If we regard the understanding and
-its object, as ultimate and final,--and they are so regarded in the
-ordinary estimation of the world,--then this negative action of reason
-seems utterly pernicious, and tends to end in the subversion of all
-fixity whatever, of everything definite. In this light Dialectic
-is what is commonly known as Scepticism; just as the understanding
-in its excess is known as Dogmatism. But in the total grasp of the
-rational or speculative notion, Dialectic ceases to be Scepticism, and
-Understanding ceases to be Dogmatism.
-
-Still there can be no doubt that the Dialectic of reason is dangerous,
-if taken abstractly and as if it were a whole truth. For the thoughts
-of ordinary men tend to be more abstract than their materials warrant.
-Men seek to formulate their feelings, faith, and conduct: but the
-_rationale_ of their inmost belief,--their creed,--is generally
-narrower than it might be. Out of the undecomposed and massive
-'substance,' on which their life and conduct is founded, they extract
-one or two ingredients: they emphasise with undue stress one or two
-features in their world, and attach to these partial formulae a value
-which would be deserved only if they really represented the whole
-facts. Hence when the narrow outlines of their creed are submitted
-to dialectic,--when the inlying contradictions are exposed, men feel
-as if the system of the world had sunk beneath them. But it is not
-the massive structure of their world, the organic unity in which they
-live, that is struck by dialectic: it is only those luminous points,
-the representative terms of material thought, which float before their
-consciousness, and which have been formulated in hard and fast outlines
-by the understanding. These points, as so defined and exaggerated, are
-what dialectic shakes. Not an alien force, but the inherent power of
-thought, destroys the temporary constructions of the understanding. The
-infinite comes to show the inadequacy of the finite which it has made.
-
-In philosophy this second stage is as essential as the first.
-The one-sidedness of the first abstraction is corrected by the
-one-sidedness of the other. In the Philosophy of Plato, as has been
-noted, the dialectical energy of thought is sometimes spoken of
-under the analogy of sexual passion--the Love which, in the words of
-Sophocles, 'falls upon possessions' and makes all fixed ordinance of
-no account, and finds no obstacles insuperable to its strong desire.
-But Love, as the speaker explains, is a child of Wealth and Want:
-he is never poor, and never rich: he is in a mean between ignorance
-and knowledge[7]. Thus is described the active unrest of growth, the
-'_inquietude poussante_,' as Leibniz called it,--the quickening force
-of the negative and of contradiction.
-
-At the word 'contradiction' there is heard a murmur of objection,
-partly on technical, partly on material grounds. There are, it is said,
-other ways of getting from one idea to another than by contradiction:
-and it is not right to give the title to mere cases of contrast and
-correlation. Now it may be the case that the relations of ideas are
-many and various. In particular there is to many people a decided
-pleasure in the mere accumulation of bits of knowledge. In their mental
-stock there are only aggregates,--conjunctions due to accidents of
-time and place,--associations and fusions which do not reach organised
-unity. In all of us, perhaps, there are more or less miscellaneous
-collections of beliefs, perceptions, hopes, and wishes, in no very
-obvious connexion with one another. An united self, one, harmonious,
-and complete, is probably rather an ideal of development than a fact
-realised. There are in each two or three discordant selves,--among
-which it might sometimes be difficult to select the right and true
-one (for that will depend on the momentary point of view). The deeper
-consciousness may go on entirely independent of the train of the more
-superficial ideas: the world of reality may glide past without touching
-the world of dream or of fiction: our business part may live in a
-region parted off from our religion by gulfs inscrutable. In all these
-cases there cannot be said to be any contradiction.
-
-But Hegel speaks of the essential progress of knowledge, and of that
-true self or real mind which has attained complete harmony--the self
-and mind that is implicitly or explicitly Absolute. In such a mind
-where the finite has passed or is passing into the infinite, in a mind
-that is really becoming one and total, its parts must meet and modify
-each other. At each phase, if that phase is earnest, self-certain, and
-real, it claims to be complete, and can brook no rival. The bringer
-of new things must appear as an enemy: for the old system, however
-imperfect as a mere form, has behind it the strength of an infinite
-and perfect content: it is more than it has explicated: but as it
-(from its imperfection and honesty) identifies itself with its form,
-it is resolved to resist change. Progress then must be by antagonism:
-it cannot be real progress otherwise, but only the mere shifting of
-dilettante doubt and dilettante toleration. Both new and old are worth
-something, and they must prove their value by neither being lost, but
-both recognised, in a completer scheme of things.
-
-Yet there is a difference in the measure of contradiction at different
-stages of thought. It is always greatest when there is least to be
-opposed about. The more meagre an idea, a creed, a term of thought,
-the more violent the antitheses to it. The more abstractly we hold a
-doctrine, the more readily are we disposed to sniff opposition. And as
-in more concrete belief, so in the more abstract terms of thought. They
-seem so wide apart--like 'Is' and 'Is not'--and yet, taken alone, they
-are really so ready to recoil into one another. As thought deepens,
-contradiction takes a more modified form. The relativity of things
-becomes apparent: and what were erewhile opposed as contradictory,
-turn out as pairs of correlatives, neither of which is fully what it
-professed to be, unless it also is all that seemed reserved for the
-other. Lastly, and in the full truth of development, progress is seen
-to be not merely a sudden recoil from one abstraction to another,
-nor merely a continual reference to an underlying correlative, but
-the movement of one totality which advances by self-opposition,
-self-reconciliation, and self-reconstruction. In this stage, the
-weight and bulk of unity keeps the contradiction in its place of due
-subordination. But both elements are equally essential, and if the
-unity is less palpable in the abstract beginnings, and the divergence
-less wide at the close, at neither beginning nor close can either be
-absent.
-
-But if we merely look at the differentiation or negation involved
-in the action of reason, we miss the half of its meaning: and the
-new statement is as one-sided as the old. We have not grasped the
-full meaning until we see that what, as understanding, affirmed a
-finite, denies, as dialectic, the absoluteness or adequacy of that
-finite. Both the partial views have a right to exist, because each
-gives its contribution to the science of truth.[8] If we penetrate
-behind the surface,--if we do not look at the two steps in the process
-abstractly and in separation,--it will be seen that these two elements
-coincide and unite. But we must be careful here. This coincidence or
-identification of opposites has not annihilated their opposition or
-difference. That difference subsists, but in abeyance, reduced to an
-element or 'moment' in the unity. Each of the two elements has been
-modified by the union: and thus when each issues from the unity it
-has a richer significance than it had before. This unity, in which
-difference is lost and found, is the rational notion,--the speculative
-grasp of thought. It is the product of experience,--the ampler
-affirmative which is founded upon an inclusion of negatives.
-
-We began with the bare unit, or simple and unanalysed point,
-which satisfied popular language and popular imagination as its
-_nucleus_:--the representation which had caught and half-idealised a
-point, moment, or aspect in the range of feeling and sensation. In this
-stage the notion or thought proper is yet latent. In the first place,
-the _nucleus_ of imagination was analysed, defined, and, as we may
-surmise, narrowed in the Intellect. And this grade of thought is known
-as the Understanding. In the second place, the definite and precise
-term, as understanding supposes it, was subjected to criticism: its
-contradictions displayed; and the very opposite of the first definition
-established in its place. This is the action of Dialectic. In the third
-place, by means of this second stage, the real nature or truth was seen
-to lie in a union where the opposites interpenetrate and mould each
-other. Thus we have as a conscious unity,--conscious because it, as
-unity, yet embraces a difference as difference--what we started with
-as an unconscious unity, the truth of feeling, faith, and inspiration.
-The first was an immediate unity:--that is to say, we were in the midst
-of the unity, sunk in it, and making a part of it: the second is a
-mediated unity, which has been reached by a process of reflection, and
-which as a conscious unity involves that process.
-
-Reason, then, is infinite, as opposed to understanding, which is finite
-thinking. The limits which are found and accepted by the analytic
-intellect, are limits which reason has imposed, and which it can
-take away: the limits are in it, and not over it. The larger reason
-has been laying down those limits, which our little minds at first
-tend to suppose absolute. Let us put the same law in more concrete
-terms. It is reason,--the Idea,--or, to give it an inadequate and
-abstract name, Natural Selection--which has created the several forms
-of the animal and vegetable world: it is reason, again, which in
-the struggle for existence contradicts the very inadequacies which
-it has brought into being: and it is reason, finally, which affirms
-both these actions,--the hereditary descent, and the adaptation--in
-the provisionally permanent and adequate forms which result from the
-struggle.
-
-The three stages thus enumerated are therefore not merely stages
-in our human reason as subjective. They state the law of rational
-development in pure thought, in Nature, and in the world of Mind,--the
-world of Art, Morals, and Science. They represent the law of thought
-or reason in its most general or abstract terms. They state, mainly
-in reference to the method or form of thought, that Triplicity, which
-will be seen in those real formations or phases to which thought
-moulds itself,--the typical species of reason. They reappear hundreds
-of times, in different multiples, in the system of philosophy. The
-abstract point of the Notion which parts asunder in the Judgment, and
-returns to a unity including difference in the Syllogism:--the mere
-generality of the Universal, which, by a disruption into Particulars
-and detail, gives rise to the real and actual Individual:--the Identity
-which has to be combined with Difference in order to furnish a possible
-Ground for Existence:--the baldness and nakedness of an Immediate
-belief, which comes to the full and direct certainty of itself, to
-true immediacy, only by gathering up the full sense of the antithesis
-which can separate conviction from truth, or by realising the Mediation
-connecting them:--all these are illustrations of the same law really
-applied which has been formally stated as the necessity for a defining,
-a dialectical, and a speculative element in thought. The three parts
-of Logic are an instance of the same thing: and when the Idea, or
-organism of thought, appears developed in the series of Natural forms,
-it is only to prepare the kingdom of reason actualised in the world of
-Mind. The Understanding, on the field of the world, corresponds, says
-Hegel[9], to the conception of Divine Goodness. The life of nature
-goes on in the independence and self-possession of all its parts, each
-as fixed and proud of its own, as if its share of earth were for ever
-assured. The finite being then has his season of self-satisfied ease:
-while the gods live in quiet, away from the sight of man's doings.
-The dialectical stage, again, corresponds to the conception of God as
-an omnipotent Lord: when the Power of the universe waxes terrific,
-destroying the complacency of the creatures and making them feel their
-insufficiency,--when the once beneficent appears jealous and cruel, and
-the joyous equanimity of human life is oppressed by the terrors of the
-inscrutable hand of fate. The easy-minded Greek lived for the most part
-in the former world: the uneasy Hebrew to a great extent in the latter.
-But the truth lay neither in the placid wisdom of Zeus, leaving the
-world to its own devices, nor in the jealous Jehovah of Mount Sinai:
-the true speculative union is found in the mystical unity of Godhead
-with human nature. In this comprehensive spirit did Hegel treat Logic.
-
-This Triplicity runs through Hegel's works. If you open one, the main
-divisions are marked with the capitals A, B, C. One of these, it may
-be, is broken up into chapters headed by the Roman numerals I, II, III.
-Under one or more of these probably come severally the Arabic numerals
-1, 2, 3. Any one of these again may be subdivided, and gives rise to
-sections, headed by the small letters a, b, c. And, lastly, any one
-of these may be treated to a distribution under the three titles α,
-β, γ. Of course the division is not in each case carried equally far:
-nor does the subject always permit it: nor is Hegel's knowledge alike
-vigorous, or his interest in all directions the same.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: 'Verstand,']
-
-[Footnote 2: 'Die Vernunft ohne Verstand ist Nichts; der Verstand doch
-Etwas ohne Vernunft.' Hegel's _Leben_, p. 546.]
-
-[Footnote 3: Ὃτι οὐ κεχώρισται ἀλλήλων τὰ ἐv τῷ ἑvi κόσμῳ ἀὐδὲ
-ἀποκέκοπται πελέκεϊ. Simplic. Phys. fol. 38 a (ed. Diels, p. 176).]
-
-[Footnote 4: 'Vernunft.']
-
-[Footnote 5: _Novum Organum_, Book I. 70.]
-
-[Footnote 6: _Phenomenologie des Geistes_, p. 67.]
-
-[Footnote 7: Plato, _Symposion,_ 203.]
-
-[Footnote 8: Cf. Dante, _Parad._ iv. 130.]
-
-[Footnote 9: See in the _Logic_ (vol. ii. p. 145).]
-
-
-
-
-PROLEGOMENA
-
-BOOK III
-
-_LOGICAL OUTLINES_
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXVI.
-
-
-THOUGHT PURE AND ENTIRE.
-
-
-The English reader may probably be taken to be familiar with the
-conception of Logic as the Science of the _Form_ of Thought. He may
-also have heard this explained as equivalent to the Science of Thought
-as Thought, or of Thought as Form, or of Formal Thought. But, probably,
-also, he brings to the lesson no very high estimate of _form_ as
-such. In the old language of Greek philosophy, transmitted through
-the Schoolmen of the West, and still lingering in the phraseology of
-Bacon and Shakespeare[1], Forms and substantial forms were powers in
-the world of reality. But a generation arose which knew them not: to
-which they were only belated survivals of the past. The forms had lost
-connexion with matter and content, and had come to seem something
-occult, transcendent, and therefore, to a practical and realistic age,
-something fantastic and superfluous. Yet it may be well to recall
-that the same author who has put on record his view that forms are
-only mental figments, unless they be fully 'determinate in matter,'
-has equally laid it down that the so-called 'causes' of vulgar
-philosophy--the matter and the agent--are only 'vehicles of the form,'
-Thus spontaneously did Bacon reconstruct the Aristotelian theory of the
-interdependence of form and matter, that form is always form _of_ (or
-_in_) matter, and that matter is always _for_ form.
-
-The relativity of form and matter, or of form and content, is indeed
-almost a commonplace of popular discussion on logical subjects.
-But like other uncritical applications of great truths, this is
-both carried beyond its proper bounds, and is not carried out with
-sufficient thoroughness. There cannot--it is said--be a formal logic,
-because every exercise of thought is internally affected or modified by
-the material--the subject-matter--with which it deals. It is implied
-in such an argument that the 'subject-matter' finds no difficulty
-in existing by itself, but that the 'thought' is a mere vacuity or
-un-characterised something which owes its every character to the
-said matter. But a subject-matter which has content and character
-has therefore form: it is already known, already thought. And as to
-this thought, which is said to approach its matter with a self so
-blank, so impartial, so neutral--what is it? It is a thought or a
-thinking which has never as yet thought,--which is only named 'thought'
-by right of expectation, but is itself nothing actual. Of such
---fictitious--thought there can hardly be a science.
-
-On the other hand, that may be easily called a formal logic, which is
-much more than formal: and that may be called material, which is only
-a species of formal. Great indeed is the virtue of names, to suppress
-and to replace thought. When forms hang on as mysterious names after
-their day is passed--when they are retained in a certain honour, while
-the real working methods have assumed other titles; then these forms
-become purely formal and antiquated. Thus the Logic of Aristotle seemed
-in its unfamiliar language to a later generation to be purely formal
-and superfluous. It was only another side of the same mistake when
-the new forms--the forms efficient and active in matter,--were not
-recognised as formal, but were boldly styled material: and the Logic
-which discussed such matter-marked forms was called a material Logic.
-
-The phrase Matter of Thought, like its many congeners, is a fruitful
-mother of misconceptions. Caught up by the pictorial imagination, which
-is always at hand to anticipate thought, it suggests a matter, which is
-not thought, but is _there,_ all the same, lying in expectation of it.
-It suggests two things--(for are there not two words, and a preposition
-or term of relation between them?). But there are not two things.
-This _matter_ is just as much a nonentity as the aforesaid _thought_:
-a matter of thought is a thought matter,--matter, thought once, and
-possibly to be thought again.
-
-All this talk about the Relativity of form and matter is insincere,
-and semi-conventional. It is (like the well-known antithesis between
-Matter and Mind, of which indeed it is only a variation) a halting
-between two views. That which it chiefly leans to, is that there can
-be no form without matter, though there may well be matter which is
-not yet formed. At the best it goes no further than to admit or assert
-that _besides_ the one there is _also_ the other. It establishes a
-see-saw, and is proud of it. This is Dualism. Its maxim is, Don't
-forget that there is an Other. You have explored the One: you have
-perhaps done well. But there is also and always the Other. The second
-view is not the mere negation of this dualism. That there is a
-dualism is a fact which it acknowledges.[2] All life and reality is
-manifested in dualism--in antithesis: but the life and the reality
-is one. Mind--_Geist_--actualised and intelligent experience--is
-the one ultimate and essential reality.[3] In the face of its unity,
-mere matter is only a half-truth, and mere thought is only another.
-The reality, the unity, and the truth, is matter as formed, nature as
-reflected in mind. In the reality of experience there is always the
-presence of thought: and thought is only real when it is wedded with
-nature in the truth of man's mind. So far Bacon and Hegel coincide.
-Man--in so far as he is Mind--and of course Mind in its fullness is not
-merely subjective nor merely objective, but absolute--is the measure of
-all things, the central and comprehensive reality. Such a man--and such
-a mind--is, we need hardly add, not the man in the street, nor the man
-in the study: but the infinite, universal, eternal mind in whom these
-and all others essentially have their being. Such truth of Man--such
-Mind--is the Absolute: it is sometimes named God: it is the ideal of
-all aspiration, and the fountain of all truth.
-
-'Logic,' says Hegel[4], 'is the science of the Idea in the medium of
-mere thought.' It exhibits the truth in one partial aspect, or shows
-one appearance of the total unity of the world,--the aspect it would
-wear if we could for a moment suppose the reality of Nature to vanish
-out of sight, and the ideality of Mind reduced to a ghost. It dissects
-the underlying organisation--the scheme of unification--which the world
-of mental or spiritual experience presents in all its concreteness.
-And it does so because it exhibits the last result of the ever clearer
-and clearer experience which Mind achieves as it comes to see and
-realise itself. The logical skeleton is the sublimated product of
-a rich concrete experience. It has been a curious delusion of some
-who were probably satisfied by a casual glance at Hegel's _Logic_,
-especially in its earlier chapters, to suppose that the Logic was
-meant to be the absolute beginning: and that pure or mere thought was
-the congenital endowment of the heaven-born philosopher[5]. To Hegel,
-on the contrary, Logic was an abstraction from a fuller, more concrete
-reality. He did not indeed suppose that the symbolical conception of
-Movement--in its popular pictorialness--would be an adequate substitute
-or representative for thought; but he knew that the energy of mental
-development was the fact, and the truth, of which 'becoming' is a
-meagre, abstract phase.
-
-Logic, then, is not the Science of mere or pure thought, but of the
-Idea (which is co-terminous with reality)--of the Mind's synthetic
-unity of experience--looked at, however, abstractly, in the medium
-of pure thought. Just so, Nature-philosophy is the same Idea, as it
-turns up bit after bit distracted, fragmentary, and more or less
-mutilated, in the multiplication, the time and space division, of
-physical phenomena. But as science requires us to go from the simple
-to the more complex, as the truth has to prove itself true, by serving
-in its conclusion as the corroboration of all its premisses or
-presuppositions; so the system of philosophy begins with the Logic.
-Yet it can only begin there, because it has already apprehended itself
-in its completeness: and it can only move onward because it is the
-concentrated essence--the implicit being--of all that it actually and
-explicitly is. It may appear to emerge from a point: but that point
-has at its back the intellectual unity of a philosophy which embraces
-the world. It presupposes the complete philosopher who shall be the
-complete organ of absolute intelligence, of universal and eternal
-Spirit.
-
-A satisfactory Logic then presupposes or implies a complete system of
-philosophy. No doubt, for a logic which deals with the minor problems
-of ratiocination or formal induction, all that is needed is a certain
-general acquaintance with popular conceptions, and with the results or
-methods of physical science. But if logic takes its business seriously,
-it must go behind these presuppositions. It must trace back reasoning
-to its roots, fibres, and first principles. And to do that it is not
-enough to put at the front a psychological chapter. Far from helping,
-psychology in these matters is much more in need of being helped
-itself. Till it has learned a little of the puzzle of the one and the
-many, the same and the diverse, being, quality, and essence, psychology
-will be as little use to Logic as blind guides generally are. Nor need
-this prevent us from saying that when psychology has thoroughly learned
-these mysteries, it will give fresh life and reality to the logic which
-it touches upon. The principles of Logic lie in another field,[6] and
-are deeper in the ground, than obvious psychological gossip.
-
-If Logic then deals with form, it deals with a form of forms--the
-form of the world, of life, and of reality. It is a form, which
-is a unity in diversity, an organism,--a form which is infinitely
-manifold, and yet in all its multiplicity one. Logic is the morphology
-of thought,--of that thought which in Nature is concealed under
-the variety and divisions of things, and which in the theory of
-mental and spiritual life is resumed into a complete biology of the
-world-organism. The problem of Logic then demands an abstraction--an
-effort of self-concentration--an effort by which the whole machinery
-of the sensible universe shall be left behind, and the accustomed
-clothing of our thoughts be removed. To move in this ether of pure
-thought is clearly one of the hardest of problems.
-
-Like Plato, we may occasionally feel that we have caught a glimpse of
-the super-sensible world unveiled; but it disappears as the senses
-regain their hold. We can probably fix a firm eye on one term of
-reason, and criticise its value: but it is less easy to survey the
-Bacchic dance from term to term[7], and allow them to criticise
-themselves. The distracting influence of our associations, or of
-outside things, is always leading us astray. Either we incline to treat
-thoughts as psychological products or species, the outcome of a mental
-process, which are (_a_) given to us from the beginning, and so _a
-priori_ or innate, or which (_b_) spring up in the course of experience
-by mutual friction between our mind and the outside world, and so are
-_a posteriori_ or derivative. Or disregarding the subjective side of
-thoughts, we act as if they were more correctly called things: we
-speak of relations between phenomena: we suppose things, and causes,
-and quantities to form part of the so-called external universe, which
-science explores. The one estimate of thought, like the other, keeps in
-view, though at some distance, and so as not to interfere with their
-practical discussions, the separate and equal existence of thoughts
-and things. The psychologists or subjectivists of logic scrutinise the
-world within us first of all, and purpose to accomplish what can be
-done for the mind as possessing a faculty of thought, before they turn
-to the world of things. The realists or objectivists of logic think it
-better for practical work to allow thought only the formal or outside
-labour of surveying and analysing the laws of phenomena out of the
-phenomena which contain them. Neither of them examines thought--'the
-original synthetic unity'--in its own integrity as a movement in its
-own self, an inner organisation, of which subject and object, the
-mind and the things called external, are the vehicles, or, in logical
-language, the accidents.
-
-If it is possible to treat the history of the English Constitution as
-an object of inquiry in itself and for its own sake, without reference
-to the individuals who in course of time marred and mended it, or
-to the setting of events in which its advance is exhibited, why not
-treat the thought, which is the universal element of all things, of
-English Constitution, and Italian Art, and Greek Philosophy, in the
-same way,--absolutely, i. e. in itself and for its own sake? When
-that is done, distinctions rigidly sustained between _a priori_ and
-_a posteriori_ become meaningless because now seen to belong to a
-distinction of earlier and later in the history of the individual
-consciousness. There is at best only a modified justification for such
-mottoes and cries, as 'Art for Art's sake,' or 'Science must be left
-free and unchecked,' or 'The rights of the religious conscience ought
-always to be respected': but there can be no demur or limitation to the
-cry that Thought must be studied in Thought by Thought and for the sake
-of Thought. For Art, and Science, and Religion are specialised modes
-in which the totality or truth of things presents itself to mankind,
-and none of them can claim an unconditioned sway: their claims clash,
-and each must be admitted to be after all a partial interpretation, a
-more or less one-sided interpretation of the true reality of the world.
-Thought on the other hand is unlimited: for it exists not merely in
-its own abstract modes, but interpenetrates and rules all the other
-concrete forms of experience, manifesting itself in Art and Religion,
-not less than in Science. And thus when we study Thought, we study that
-which is in itself and for itself,--we study Absolute Being. On the
-other side it must be noted that in Logic it is Absolute Being, only
-when and as it is _thought,_ which we study. The two sides, Being and
-Thought, must both come forward: and come in unity, although in some
-phases of the Idea the thought-element, in others the being-element is
-more pronounced.
-
-Thought, too, is Being. An old distinction of the Stoics, which not
-inaptly represents popular views on this matter, set on one side ὄντα,
-existences (which were always corporeal, whether they were the things
-we touch and feel, or the words and breathings by which we utter them),
-and on the other side the meanings or thoughts proper or σημαινόμενα
-(which were incorporeal). These λεκτά, as they were otherwise called,
-were to the Stoics the proper sphere of Logic. In the sense therefore
-which the Stoics and popular consciousness give to being, the object of
-logic does not possess being. It is not corporeal. It cannot however
-be said to be in the sphere of non-being. It is rather a part of
-reality--of concrete being--which can be considered apart, as if it
-stood alone. Alone it does not stand. And yet it holds a position so
-fundamental,--is the same theme again and again repeated under endless
-variations,--is so obviously the universal of things--that it may
-properly form the subject of independent study.
-
-It is, moreover, a part of Reality, which may well claim to stand for
-the whole. It is, so to say, the score of the musical composition,
-rolled up in its bare, silent, unadorned lineaments; the articulated
-theme, besides, and not the mere germinal concept, of all the variety
-of melody. But it is only laid up there _in abstracto_, because in
-the soul of the composer it had already taken concrete form, due to
-his capacity and training, his mental force, his art and science. It
-is there that the score has its source. But secondly, the musical work
-exists in the performance of the orchestra: in the manipulations of the
-several instruments, in the notes of the singers, in all the diversity
-of parts which make up the mechanism for unfolding the meaning or
-theme--that unreality, that mere thought, which to the stricter Stoic
-might be said to have no ὔπαρξις, or bodily subsistence. And there are
-still people who will be disposed to assert that it is only in the
-multitude of notes of violin, trombone, flute, &c., that the music is
-real:--though perhaps these hardy realists do not quite mean what they
-say. For what they probably mean, and what is the fact, is that the
-music exists as a complete reality in those who have ears and minds
-capable of comprehending and enjoying it: in those who can reunite
-meaning and theme to execution and orchestration: and we may even add
-that it is more and more real, in proportion to the greater power with
-which they can bring these two into one.
-
-We shall rather say then that thought points to reality, and that mere
-nature seeks for interpretation: that mere thought and mere being both
-seek for reunion. Yet if in the complete reality we thus distinguish
-two elements, we may follow Hegel in setting the pure Idea first. It
-is no doubt in a way true that, as has been said, Hegel may be often
-read most easily if we first begin with his concluding paragraphs. In
-psychology and ethics the fundamental principles have assumed a more
-imposing, a larger, a more humanly-interesting shape, than they bear
-in the intangible outlines of Logic. There they are written in blacker
-ink and broader lines than in the grey on grey. But after all, it is
-only for those who have grasped the faint--yet fixed--outlines that the
-full-contoured figure speaks its amplest truth. The true sculptor must
-begin with a thorough study of anatomy. For those therefore who do not
-care merely for results, it is indispensable to begin--or at least to
-turn back to the beginning--to the Logic. No doubt the full tones of
-the heard and sounded harmony are the true and adequate presentation
-of the composer's purpose: but they will be best comprehended and
-appreciated by those who have thoroughly grasped the score.
-
-In Logic, so regarded, thought is no longer merely our thought. It is
-the constructive, relational, unifying element of reality. Without it
-reality would not articulately be anything for us: and such thoughts
-seem to be its net extract, its quintessence, its concentrated meaning.
-But really they are only the potent _form_ of reality. Or, more
-exactly, in its limits, under its phases, must come all reality if it
-is to be part and parcel of our intelligent possession, our certified
-property. Such a thought is the frame-work, the shape-giver of our
-world, of our communicable experience. It is the formative principle of
-our intelligent life, as it is the principle through which things have
-meaning for us, and we have meaning for and fellowship with others.
-It is not so rich as religion and art, perhaps it does not have the
-intensity of feeling and faith: but it is at the very basis of all of
-these, or it is the concentrated essence of what in them is explicated
-and developed. Humanity in these its highest energies is more than mere
-thought--more than mere logic: but it is still at the root thought, and
-it is still governed by the laws and movement of this higher logic. For
-this is a logic which is no mere instrument of technical reasoning,
-for proof or disproof: no mere code of rules for the evaluation of
-testimony. It is a logic which deals with a thought--or an Idea in
-thought-form--which is the principle of all life and reality: the way
-of self-criticism which leads to truth: a thought which is at home in
-all the phases and provinces of experience.
-
-Under the same name, Logic, therefore, we find something quite
-different from what the example of Aristotle and his ancient and modern
-followers had accustomed us to.[8] Under the auspices of Kant and his
-'Transcendental logic' there has emerged the need of something more
-corresponding to the title. For the word itself was not used either by
-Aristotle or the Stoics. Neither the Analytics and Topics of the one,
-nor the Dialectic of the other, exhaust the conception of the science,
-or, to put it more accurately, they are only inceptions of a science,
-the fulfilment of which was reserved for a later time. Bacon and Locke,
-Descartes and Spinoza, all the thinkers of modern Europe call for a
-deeper probing of the logical problem: for a grasp of it which shall
-be more worthy of its conventional name, Logic, the theory of Reason.
-And we may even say that what is wanted is a unification of the problem
-of the Organon with that of the first philosophy, a unification of
-Logic with Metaphysics: a recognition that the problem of reason is
-not merely the method of reasoning, but the whole theory as to the
-correlations of perception and conception, of thinking and reality.
-
-This conception of Logic as the self-developing system of Thought
-pure and entire, is the distinctive achievement of Hegel. 'I cannot
-imagine,' he says, 'that the method which I have followed in this
-system of Logic, or rather the method which this system follows in
-its own self, is otherwise than susceptible of much improvement, and
-many completions of detail: but I know at the same time that it is the
-only genuine method. This is evident from the circumstance that it is
-nothing distinct from its object and subject-matter: for it is the
-subject-matter within itself, or its inherent dialectic, which moves it
-along.'[9]
-
-But how is this universe of thought to be discovered, and its law of
-movement to be described? From times beyond the reach of history,
-from nations and tribes of which we know only by tradition and vague
-conjectures, in all levels of social life and action, the synthetic
-energy of thought has been productive, and its evolution in the field
-of time has been going on. For thousands of years the intellectual city
-has been rearing its walls: and much of the process of its formation
-lies beyond the scope of observation. But fortunately there is a help
-at hand, which will enable us to discover at least the main outlines in
-the system of thought.
-
-The key to the solution was found somewhat in the same way as led
-to the Darwinian theory concerning the Origin of Species. When the
-question touching the causes of variation and persistence in the
-natural kinds of plants and animals seemed so complex as to baffle all
-attempts at an answer, Darwin found what seemed a clue likely to lead
-to a theory of descent. The methods adopted in order to keep up, or to
-vary, a species under domestication were open to anybody's inspection:
-and those principles, which were consciously pursued in artificial
-selection by the breeder, suggested a theory of similar selection
-in free nature. In studying the phenomena of thought, of which the
-species or types were no less numerous and interesting than those in
-organic nature, it was perhaps impossible to survey the whole history
-of humanity. But it was comparatively easy to observe the process of
-thought in those cases where its growth had been fostered consciously
-and distinctly. The history of philosophy records the steps in the
-conscious and artificial manipulation of what for the far greater part
-is transacted in the silent workshops of nature. Philosophy, in short,
-is to the general growth of intelligence what artificial breeding is to
-the variation of species under natural conditions. In the successive
-systems of philosophy, the order and concatenation of ideas was, as it
-were, clarified out of the perturbed medium of real life, and expressed
-in its bare equivalents in terms of thought, and thus first really
-acquired. Half of his task was already performed for the logician,
-and there remained the work, certainly no slight one--of showing the
-unity and organic development which marked the conscious reasoning,
-and of connecting it with the general movement of human thought. The
-logician had to break down the rigid lines which separated one system
-of philosophy from another,--to see what was really involved in the
-contradiction of one system by its successor,--and to show that the
-negation thus given to an antecedent principle was a definite negation,
-ending not in mere zero or vacuity, but in a distinct result, and
-making an advance upon the previous height of intelligence.
-
-To say this was to give a new value to the history of philosophy.
-For it followed that each system was no _mere_ opinion or personal
-view, but was in the main a genuine attempt of the thinker to give
-expression to the tacit or struggling consciousness of his age. Behind
-the individual--who is often unduly regardless of his contemporaries
-and predecessors, and who writes or thinks with little knowledge or
-sympathy for them, there is the general bearing and interest of the
-age, its powerful solidarity of purpose and conception. The philosopher
-is the prophet, because he is in a large part the product of his age.
-He is an organ of the mind of his age and nation; and both he and it
-play a part in the general work of humanity.
-
-On the other hand, it is dangerous to insist too forcibly on the
-rationality of the history of philosophy. For it may be taken to
-mean--probably only by blinded or wooden commentators--that each
-step in the evolution and concatenation of the logical idea is to be
-identified with some historical system, and that these systems must
-have appeared in this precise order. And this would be to expect
-too much from the 'impotence of nature' which plays its part in the
-historical world also: as that on one side forms part of the Natural.
-There is Reason in the world--and in the world of history; but not in
-the pellucid brightness and distinct outlines proper to the Idea in
-the abstract element of thought. It may take several philosophers to
-make one step in thought; and sometimes one philosopher of genius may
-take several steps at once. There may even be co-eval philosophies:
-and there may be philosophies which appear to run on in independent
-or parallel lines of development. It may well be that Hegel has
-underestimated these divergencies, and that he has been too apt to see
-in all history the co-operation to one dominant purpose. But these
-errors in the execution of a philosophy of history, and especially of
-the history of philosophy, should not diminish our estimate of its
-principle.[10]
-
-At first this process was seen in the medium of time. But the
-conditions of time are of practical and particular interest only. The
-day when the first leaves appear, and the season when the fruit ripens
-on a tree, are questions of importance to practical arboriculture. But
-botany deals only with the general theory of the plant's development,
-in which such considerations have to be generalised. So logic leaves
-out of account those points of time and chance which the interests of
-individuals and nations find all-important. And when this element of
-time has been removed, there is left a system of the types of thought
-pure and entire,--embalming the life of generations in mere words. The
-same self-identical thought is set forth from its initial narrowness
-and poverty on to its final amplitude and wealth of differences. At
-each stage it is the Absolute: outside of it there is nothing. It is
-the whole, pure and entire: always the whole. But in its first totality
-it is all but a void: in its last a fully-formed and articulated
-world,--because it holds all that it ever threw out of itself resumed
-into its grasp.
-
-In these circumstances nothing can sound higher and nobler than the
-Theory of Logic. It presents the Truth unveiled in its proper form and
-absolute nature. If the philosopher may call this absolute totality
-of thought ever staying the same in its eternal development,--this
-adequacy of thought to its own requirements--by the name of God, then
-we may say with Hegel that Logic exhibits God as He is in His eternal
-Being before the creation of Nature and a finite Mind.[11] But the
-logical Idea is only a phantom Deity--the bare possibility of a God
-or of absolute reality in all the development of its details.
-
-The first acquaintance with the abstract theory is likely to dash
-cold water on the enthusiasm thus awakened, and may sober our views
-of the magic efficacy of Logic. 'The student on his first approach
-to the Science,' says Hegel, 'sees in Logic at first only one system
-of abstractions apart and limited to itself, not extending so as
-to include other facts and sciences. On the contrary, when it is
-contrasted with the variety abounding in our generalised picture of
-the world, and with the tangible realities embraced in the other
-sciences,--when it is compared with the promise of the Absolute Science
-to lay bare the essence of that variety, the inner nature of the mind
-and the world, or, in one word, the Truth,--this science of Logic
-in its abstract outline, in the colourless cold simplicity of its
-mere terms of thought, seems as if it would perform anything sooner
-than this promise, and in the face of that variety seems very empty
-indeed. A first introduction to the study of Logic leads us to suppose
-that its significance is restricted to itself. Its doctrines are not
-believed to be more than one separate branch of study engaged with the
-terms or dimensions of thought, besides which the other scientific
-occupations have a proper material and body of their own. Upon these
-occupations, it is assumed, Logic may exert a formal influence, but
-it is the influence of a natural and spontaneous logic for which the
-scientific form and its study may be in case of need dispensed with.
-The other sciences have upon the whole rejected the regulation-method,
-which made them a series of definitions, axioms, and theorems, with the
-demonstration of these theorems. What is called Natural Logic rules
-in the sciences with full sway, and gets along without any special
-investigation in the direction of thought itself. The entire materials
-and facts of these sciences have detached themselves completely
-from Logic. Besides they are more attractive for sense, feeling, or
-imagination, and for practical interests of every description.
-
-And so it comes about that Logic has to be learned at first, as
-something which is perhaps understood and seen into, but of which the
-compass, the depth, and further import are in the earliest stages
-unperceived. It is only after a deeper study of the other sciences that
-logical theory rises before the mind of the student into a universal,
-which is not merely abstract, but embraces within it the variety
-of particulars.--The same moral truth on the lips of a youth, who
-understands it quite correctly, does not possess the significance or
-the burden of meaning which it has in the mind of the veteran, in whom
-the experience of a lifetime has made it express the whole force of its
-import. In the same way, Logic is not appreciated at its right value
-until it has grown to be the result of scientific experience. It is
-then seen to be the universal truth,--not a special study beside other
-matters and other realities, but the essence of all these other facts
-together.[12]
-
-
-[Footnote 1: E. g. 'formal' in _Hamlet_, iv. 5. 215; 'informal' in
-_Measure for Measure,_ v. 236.]
-
-[Footnote 2: _Encycl._ § 574 (_Philosophy of Mind,_ p. 196).]
-
-[Footnote 3: _Encycl._ § 377.]
-
-[Footnote 4: _Logic_, vol. ii. p. 30.]
-
-[Footnote 5: The criticisms of A. Trendelenburg, in his _Logische
-Untersuchungen,_ rest on such assumptions. 'Trendelenburg,' says
-Hartmann, 'means low-water mark in German philosophy.']
-
-[Footnote 6: See above all Bradley's _Principles of Logic_, and
-Bosanquet's _Logic_, &c.]
-
-[Footnote 7: 'Das Wahre ist der bacchantische Taumel, an dem kein Glied
-nicht trunken ist; und weil jedes, indem es sich absondert, ebenso
-unmittelbar sich auflöst,--ist es ebenso die durchsichtige und einfache
-Ruhe.' _Phenom. des Geistes,_ p 35.]
-
-[Footnote 8: Prantl, _Geschichte der Logik,_ i. 87.]
-
-[Footnote 9: _Wissenschaft der Logik_, i. p. 39.]
-
-[Footnote 10: See _Encyclop._ § 549 _(Philosophy of Mind_, pp. 148
-seqq.). It is, of course, quite another question--to be answered by
-intelligent research--how far in particular cases Hegel has accurately
-studied a thinker, and faithfully interpreted him. Some of his critics
-in this line appear to mistake philology--which is a highly important
-authority in its own field--for philosophy: and will no doubt go on
-doing so.]
-
-[Footnote 11: Hegel's _Werke_, iii., 33.]
-
-[Footnote 12: _Wissenschaft der Logik_, i. p. 43.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXVII.
-
-
-ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE: OR THE CATEGORIES.
-
-
-According to the strict reasonings of Kant in his _Criticism of Pure
-Reason_, and the somewhat looser discussions of Mr. Spencer in his
-_First Principles_ a science of Metaphysics or theory of the Infinite,
-Absolute, or Unconditioned is impossible. As a result of the criticism
-by Kant, Jacobi claimed the Absolute for Faith: and Spencer banishes
-the Absolute or Unknowable to the sphere of Religion to be worshipped
-or ignored, but in either case blindly. As we have already seen, Hegel
-does not accept this distribution of provinces between religion and
-philosophy. There is only one world, one reality: but it is known more
-or less fully, more or less truly and adequately. It is presented in
-one way to the sensuous imagination: in another to the scientific
-analyst: in a third to the philosopher. To the first it is a mere
-succession or expanse of pictures, facts, appearances: and outside
-it--somewhere, but not here,--there is a land, a being of perfect
-wholeness and harmony. To the second it is an unending chain of causes
-and effects, of one thing simplified by being referred to another till
-at last a mighty all-explaining nullity, called an 'Ultimate Cause,'
-is presumed to linger, eternally unperceived at the infinitely-distant
-end of the series. To the third everything is seen in connexion, but
-not a mere uni-linear connexion: each, when studied, more and more
-completes itself by including those relations which seemed to stand
-outside: each fully realised, or completely invested with its ideal
-implications, is seen no longer to be an incident or isolated fact, but
-an implicit infinite, and a vice-gerent of the eternal. Philosophy thus
-releases both ordinary and scientific knowledge from their limitations;
-it shows the finite passing into the infinite. And Hegel, accordingly,
-purposes to show that this unfathomable Absolute is very near us, and
-at our very door: in our hands, as it were, and especially present
-in our every-day language. If we are ever to gain the Absolute, we
-must be careful not to lose one jot or tittle of the Relative[1]. The
-Absolute--this term, which is to some so offensive and to others so
-precious--always presents itself to us in Relatives: and when we have
-persistently traced the Proteus through all its manifestations,--when
-we have, so to speak, seen the Absolute Relativity of Relation, there
-is very little more needed in order to apprehend the Absolute pure and
-entire. One may say of the Absolute what Goethe[2] says of Nature: 'She
-lives entirely in her children: and the mother, where is she?'
-
-It is a great step, when we have detected the Relativity of what had
-hitherto seemed Absolute,--when a new aspect of the infinite fullness
-of the world, the truth of things, dawns upon us. But it is even a
-greater step when we see that the Relativity which we have thus
-discovered is itself Relative. And this is one advantage of first
-studying the value of the categories of ethics and physics on Logical
-ground. On the concreter region of Nature and Mind, the several grades
-and species into which reality is divided have a portentous firmness
-and grandeur about them, and the intrinsic dialectic seems scarcely
-adequate to shaking the foundations of their stability. They severally
-stand as independent self-sustaining entities, separate from each
-other, and stereotyped in their several formations. But in the ether of
-abstract Idea, in the fluid and transparent form of mere thoughts, the
-several stages in the development of the Absolute, the various grades
-of category, clearly betray their Relativity, and by the negation of
-this Relativity lead on to a higher Absolute.
-
-To the practical man,--so long as his reflection does not go deep,--the
-concepts on which his knowledge and faith are built seem eternal,
-unshifting rock, parts of the inmost fabric of things. He accepts them
-as ultimate validities. To him matter and force, cause and effect,
-distinctions between form and content, whole and part, quantity and
-quality, belong to the final constitution of the world. (And so, in a
-sense, they do.) If he ever overcome the absoluteness which popular
-thought attributes to the individual things of sense and imagination,
-and show their relativity, he does so only to fall under the glamour
-of a new deception. Causes and matters, forces and atoms, become new
-ultimates, new absolutes, of another order. Fictions or postulates of
-the understanding take the place of the figments of imagination. The
-ordinary scientific man labours especially under the 'metaphysical'
-fallacy: he realises abstractions in their abstractness. As against
-this it is the business of the logician to show how such terms are to
-be interpreted as steps in a process of interpretation--containing so
-much that others of simpler structure have handed on, and themselves
-presupposing by implication a great deal they fail properly to
-explicate. Thus, the logician evinces at one blow the relativity of
-each term in its mereness, abstractness, or false absoluteness, and the
-ideal absoluteness which always carries it beyond itself, and makes it
-mean more than it says.
-
-The natural mind always hastens to substantiate the terms it employs.
-It makes them a fixed, solid foundation, an hypostasis, on which
-further building may be raised. If such pseudo-absolutising of concepts
-is to be called metaphysics, then logic has to free us from the
-illusions of metaphysics, to de-absolutise them, to disabuse us of a
-false Absolute. The false Absolute is what Hegel calls the Abstract:
-it is the part which, because it succeeded in losing sight of its
-dependence, had believed itself to be a whole. Logic shows--in the
-phrase of Hegel--that each such term or concept is only an attempt
-to express, explicate, or define the Absolute[3]: a predicate of the
-Absolute, but falling short of its subject, or only uttering part of
-the whole truth of reality. But while Logic shows it only to be an
-attempt, and therefore in an aspect relative, it equally shows its
-ingrained tendency to complete itself, to carry out to realisation
-its ideal implication,--shows, in short, that e. g. force is more
-than _mere_ force, that thing-in-itself is not properly even a thing;
-that a veritable notion (_Begriff_) or grasp of a thing is more than
-a _mere_ (subjective) notion, &c. Thus the true Absolute is not the
-emptiest and most meagre of abstractions,--what is left as a residual
-after the relative in all its breadth and length has been cut out
-of it; it is the concretest of all being, the whole which includes
-without destroying all partial aspects. Yet as it includes them, it
-shows itself their master and more than master: making each lose and
-win in the other, till all are satisfied in unity, and no shade of
-individuality is utterly lost in the totality of the Universal.
-
-Accordingly, Metaphysics and Logic tend to form one body. For the
-distant and transcendent Absolute, which was the object of older
-Metaphysics, was substituted an Absolute, self-revealing in the terms
-of thought. Being is deposed from its absoluteness, and made the
-first postulate of thought. Former Metaphysics had dashed itself in
-vain against the reefs that girdle the island of the supersensible
-and noümenal, the supposed world of true Being: and the struggle at
-last grew so disastrous that Kant gave the signal to retreat, and to
-leave the world of true Being, the impregnable Thing-in-itself, to its
-repose. His advice to metaphysicians[4] was that, while scientific
-research continued to concentrate the attack of analysis upon single
-experiences conforming to certain conditions, they should investigate
-these' conditions of possible experience or foundations of objectivity.
-In other words, he turned observation to what he called Transcendental
-Logic. It was by means of this suggestion, understood in the widest
-sense, that Hegel was led to treat Logic as the science of ultimate
-reality. He had to show how these conditions when carried out in
-full gave the Unconditioned. He attacked the Absolute, if we may say
-so, in detail. The Absolute, as the totality, universe or system of
-Relativity, lays itself open to observation by deposing itself to a
-Relative. It possesses the differentiating power of separating itself
-as an object in passivity, from itself as a subject in action,--of
-deposing itself to appearance, of being _for_ itself, and also _in_
-and _for_ itself. And thus Thought is the active universal,--which
-actualises itself more and more out of abstraction into concreteness.
-
-Hegel, then, solved the problem of Metaphysics by turning it into
-Logic. The same principle, Thought, appeared in both: in the former
-as a fixed and passive result, showing no traces of spontaneity,--in
-the latter as an activity, with a mere power of passing from object
-to object, discovering and establishing connexions and relations. The
-two sciences were fragments, unintelligible and untenable, when taken
-in abstract isolation. This is the justification, if justification
-be required, for Hegel's unification of Logic and Metaphysics. The
-Hegelian Logic falls into three parts: the theory of Transitory Being:
-the theory of Relative Being: and the theory of the Notion. The first
-and second of these in his Science of Logic are called Objective Logic;
-they also might be described as Metaphysics. The third part is more
-strictly on Logical ground. Or perhaps it is best to describe the whole
-as the Metaphysics of Logic.
-
-The Logic of Hegel is the Science of Thought as an organic system of
-its characteristic forms, which in their entirety constitute the Idea.
-These forms or types of thought, the moulds in which the Idea confines
-itself in its evolution, are not unlike what have been otherwise called
-the Categories. (Of course the foreign word 'Categories' does not
-commend itself to Hegel).[5] They are the modifications or definite
-forms, the articulated and distinct shapes, in which the process of
-Thought ever and anon culminates in the course of its movement. The
-Infinite and Absolute at these points conditions itself, and as so
-conditioned or differentiated is apprehended and stamped with a name.
-They specify the unspecified, and give utterance to the ineffable.
-They are the names by which reason grasps the totality of things,--the
-names by which the truth (or God) reveals itself, however inadequately.
-From one point of view they constitute a series, each evolved from
-the other, a more completely detailed term or utterance of thought
-resulting by innate contradiction from a less detailed. From another
-point of view the total remains perpetually the same; and the change
-seems only on the surface. The one aspect of the movement conceals the
-Absolute: the other puts the Relative into the background.
-
-What then are the Categories? We may answer: They are the ways in
-which expression is given to the unifying influence of thought: and we
-have to consider them as points or stations in the progress of this
-unification, and in the light of this influence. These Categories are
-the typical structures marking the definite grades in the growth of
-thought,--the moulds or forms which thought assumes and places itself
-in,--those instants when the process of thought takes a determinate
-form, and admits of being grasped. The growth of thought, like
-other growths, is often imperceptible and impalpable. And then,
-unexpectedly, a condensation takes place, a form is precipitated out of
-the transparent medium. A new concept, a new grasp of reality, emerges
-from the solution of elements: and a name is created to realise the
-new shade of the Idea. These thought-terms are the world of Platonic
-forms, if we consider his 'form of Good' as corresponding to the 'Idea'
-of Hegel. For if we look carefully into this mystic word 'Good' which
-plays so brilliant a part in ancient philosophy, we shall see that it
-only expresses in a more concrete and less analytic form, as ancient
-thought often does, the same thing as so many moderns love to speak
-of as Relativity, and which is also implied in Aristotle's conception
-of an End. To see things _sub specie boni_--which Plato describes
-as the supreme quality of the truth-seeker who is to guide men into
-uprightness, or into conformity with the true nature of things,--is
-to see them elevated above their partial self-subsistence into the
-harmony and totality of that which is always and unvaryingly its real
-self. The Good is the sun-light in which things lose their earlier
-character (which they had in the days of our bondage and ignorance) of
-mysterious and perplexing spectres of the night. In the light of the
-Good, things are shorn of their false pretence of self-subsistence and
-substantiality, deposed by comparison with the perfect and unspotted,
-and as it were stung into seeking a higher form of being by struggle.
-And this is the abstract moral way of looking. But to see them in the
-form of Good means also that they are seen to be more and better than
-we thought, that they are not condemned to inadequacy, but bear in them
-the witness and revelation of infinity and absoluteness. And this is
-rather the faith of religion and the vision of art. And the 'form of
-Good' is only a brief and undeveloped vision of an Absolute, which is
-the 'form of Relativity,'--Relativity elevated into an Absolute.
-
-A Category is often spoken of as if it were the highest extreme of
-generalisation, the most abstract and most widely applicable term
-possible. If we climb sufficiently far and high up the Porphyry's tree
-of thought, we may expect, thought the old logicians, to reach the
-'_summa genera_' or highest species of human thought. Nor have modern
-logicians always refrained from this byway. But these quantitative
-distinctions of greater and less, in which the Formal Logic revels,
-are not very suitable to any of the terms or processes of thought,
-and they certainly give an imperfect description of the Categories.
-The essential function which the Categories perform in the fabric
-of thought and language is, in the first place, to combine, affirm,
-demonstrate, relate, and unify,--and _not_ to generalise.[6] Their
-action may be better compared to that fulfilled by those symbols in
-an algebraical expression, which like _plus_ and _minus_ denote an
-operation to be performed in the way of combining or relating, than
-to the office of the symbols which in these expressions denote the
-magnitudes themselves.
-
-To the student of language the Categories sometimes present themselves
-as pronominal, or formal roots,--those roots which, as it is said, do
-not denote things, but relations between things. He meets them in the
-inflections of nouns and verbs; in the signs of number, gender, case,
-and person: but, as thus presented, their influence is subordinate to
-the things of which they are, as it were, the accidents. He meets them
-in a more independent and tangible shape in the articles, pronouns,
-prepositions, conjunctions, and numerals, and in what are called the
-auxiliary verbs. In these apparently trifling, and in some languages
-almost non-existent words or parts of words, we have the symbols of
-relations,--the means of connexion between single words,--the cement
-which binds significant speech together. There are languages, such as
-the older and classical forms of Chinese, where these categorising
-terms are, as it were, in the air: where they are only felt in accent
-and position, and have no separate existence of their own. But in
-the languages of the Indo-European family they gradually appear, at
-first in combination, perhaps, with the more material roots, and only
-in the course of time asserting an independent form. Originally they
-appear to denote the relations of space and time,--the generalised or
-typical links between the parts of our sense-perceptions: but from
-there they are afterwards, and in a little while, transferred into
-the service of intellect. These little words are the very life-blood
-of a language,--its spirit and force. It is in these categories,
-as they show themselves in the different linguistic families, that
-a nation betrays its mode and tone of thought. The language of the
-Altaic races, e. g., expresses activity only as a piece of property,
-an appropriation of a substance, and knows no true distinction of noun
-and verb: the Semitic Tongues in their tense-system perhaps betray the
-intense inwardness of the race: whereas the immense inflectionalism of
-the Indo-European seems not unconnected with his greater versatility
-and energy. Complete mastery in the manipulation of these particles
-and forms is what makes an idiomatic knowledge of a language, as
-distinct from a mere remembrance of the vocabulary. And philosophy
-is the recognition of their import and significance. Thus in Greek
-philosophy the central questions turn upon such words as Being and
-not-Being: Becoming: that out of which: that for the sake of which: the
-what-was-being: the what is: the other: the one: the great and small:
-that which is upon the whole: what is according to each: this somewhat:
-&c.[7] And again in Modern Philosophy, how often has the battle raged
-about the meaning of such words as I: will: can: must: because: same
-and different: self: &c.!
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Cf. Herbart's maxim, 'Wie viel Schein, so viel Hindeutung
-auf Sein.' (_Hauptpunkte der Metaphysik._)]
-
-[Footnote 2: _Die Natur_ (1780): 'Sie lebt in lauter Kindern: und die
-Mutter, wo ist sie?.... Sie ist ganz und doch immer unvollendet.... Sie
-verbirgt sich in tausend Namen und Termen, und ist immer dieselbe.']
-
-[Footnote 3: _Logic (Encyclop.)_ §§ 85, 87, 112, 194, &c.]
-
-[Footnote 4: Metaphysic is, in Kant's usage, ambiguous. It means (_a_)
-a supposed science of the supersensible or unconditioned reality;
-(_b_) a study of the conditions or presuppositions--the Kantian _a
-priori_--of some aspect of Experience, e. g. a Metaphysic of Moral
-rules.]
-
-[Footnote 5: His usual term is _Denkbestimmungen,_ the several
-expressions or specific forms of the unification which thought is.
-The term Categories has been identified by Kant with his list of
-_Stammbegriffe._ and by Mill with his classes of nameable things,--with
-some critical remarks on Aristotle's use of the word. That use--to
-denote the elements of predicable reality, what Grote called _ens_--is
-probably not so 'rhapsodical' as Kant, with his new-born zeal for the
-contrast of sensibility and intellect, was inclined to suppose. A real
-history of the Category-theory would be almost a history of philosophy.
-Perhaps the name might be more sparingly used.]
-
-[Footnote 6: Generalisation is only one small aspect of thought, with
-specialisation as its, at least as important, pendant. To read certain
-logics, one might think the all-comprehensive virtue of truths were to
-be general,--not to be true.]
-
-[Footnote 7: ὅν and μὴ ὅν: τὸ γιγνόμενον: τὸ ἐξ οὗ: τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα: τὸ τί
-ἦν εἶναι: τὸ τί ἐστι: θάτερον: ἕν: τὸ μέγα καὶ τὸ μικρόν: τὸ καθ' ὅλου:
-τὸ καθ' ἔκαστον: τόδε τί.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXVIII.
-
-
-THE THREE PARTS OF LOGIC.
-
-
-Logic, as it is understood in these pages, is the critical history
-of the terms of thought by which reality, the sum of experience, the
-world, is described or expressed. It is the philosophical criticism
-of the concepts, or elements of conception, by which we define or
-develop the Totality, the Absolute. It describes the constitution
-of the intellectual realm, by and in which we give body, coherence,
-unity, and system to reality. It is the self-developing organisation
-of the thoughts by which we think things, and by which things are
-what they are. It is the ripe fruit of the experience of the ages of
-humanity, and it therefore bears in itself a principle of growth. But
-if it be a fruit, it is a fruit which can watch its own growth, which
-reflects upon its own life. Its three parts show the main stages of its
-development, beginning with the least adequate and most abstract or
-general description of reality.
-
-The first part of Logic, the theory of Being[1], may be called the
-theory of unsupported and freely-floating Being. We do not mean
-something which _is,_ but the mere 'is,' the bare fact of Being,
-without any substratum. The degree of condensation or development,
-where substantive and attribute, or noun and verb, co-exist, has not
-yet come. The terms or forms of Being float as it were freely in the
-air, and we go from one to another, or--to put it more correctly--one
-passes into another. The terms in question are Is and Not: Become:
-There is: Some and Other: Each: One: Many: and so on through the
-terms of number to degree and numerical specificality. This Being is
-immediate: i.e. it contains no reference binding it with anything
-beyond itself, but stands forward baldly and nakedly, as if alone;
-and, if hard pressed, it turns over into something else. It includes
-the three stages of Quality, Quantity, and Measure. The ether of
-'Is' presumes no substratum, or further connexion with anything: and
-we only meet a series of points as we travel along the surface of
-thought. To _name,_ to _number_, to _measure_, are the three grades
-of our ordinary and natural thought: so simple, that one is scarcely
-disposed to look upon them as grades of thought at all. And yet if
-thought is self-specification, what more obvious forms of specifying
-it are there than to name (so pointing it out, or qualifying it), to
-number (so quantifying it, or stating its dimensions), and to measure
-it? These are the three primary specificates by which we think,--the
-three primary dimensions of thought. Thought, in so determining,
-plays upon the surface, and has no sense of the interdependence of
-its terms. And if we could imagine a natural state of consciousness
-in which sensations had not yet hardened into permanent things, and
-into connexions between things, we should have something like the
-range of Immediate Being. Colours and sounds, a series of floating
-qualities, pass before the eye and the ear: these colours and sounds
-are in course of time counted: and then, by applying the numbers to
-these qualities, we get the proportions or limits ascertained. When
-this process in actual life,--the advance from the vague feelings
-which tell us of sweet, cold, &c., by means of a definite enumeration
-of their phenomena, to the rules guiding their operation,--is reduced
-to its most abstract terms, we have the process of Being. It would
-be the period when a distinction between things and their actions
-or properties has not arisen. The demonstrative pronouns and the
-numerals are among the linguistic expressions of Being in its several
-stages. Perhaps too we may illustrate it by the so-called 'impersonal'
-verb--which has hardly reached the stage of verb proper, having no
-subject: or by the name which still fluctuates between the stage of
-substantive or adjective.
-
-The first sphere was that of Being directly confronting us, and using
-the demonstrative pronouns first of all. The second is Relative or
-Reflective Being: and in this we have to deal with the relative
-pronouns. The surface of Being is now seen to exhibit a secondary
-formation, to involve a sort of permanent standard in itself, and to
-be essentially relative. The mere quality, when reduced to number, is
-seen to be subjected to a certain measure, rule, sort, or standard:
-and this reflex of itself always haunts it, modifying and determining
-it. Thus instead of qualities, we begin to speak of the properties of
-a thing: we have, as it were, two levels of Being, in intimate and
-necessary connexion, where there was only one before. At first it was
-but a mere surface-picture, one thing here and another there: a this
-and a that; one, _now,_ and another, _then. This,_ it might be, was
-round, and _that_ square: _now,_ it was bright, and _then,_ it was
-dull: _here_ was a head, and _there_ was a limb. But the comparison of
-quality with quantity, measuring one by the other, gave rise to the
-conception of something permanent, a true nucleus amid the changes. The
-fact, previously single, is now become double: the mere event is now a
-phenomenon, a temporary and outward manifestation of something inner.
-We now see each that _is,_ in the halo of what it _has been,_ or will
-be: the passing modification in the light of the permanent type. But as
-yet the permanent and the passing are separate, and only throw light
-on each other: A explaining itself by B and B by A. We have apparently
-two facts; neither of which can however stand by itself and therefore
-refers us to the other. But to get a real rest in this incessant round
-of mutual reference of one to another we must take a higher stand-point.
-
-In this sphere of Relativity the terms expressive of things come in
-pairs: such as Same and Different, Like and Unlike: True Being and Show
-or Semblance: Cause and Effect: Substance and Accident: Matter and
-Form: and the like. If we compare mere Being to the cell in its simple
-state, we may say that in the second sphere of Logic a nucleus has been
-formed,--that a distinction has sprung up between two elements, which
-are still in closest interconnexion. We have penetrated behind the
-seeming simplicity of the surface: and in fact discovered it to be mere
-seeming in the light of the substratum, cause, or essence, upon which
-it is now reflected. In immediate Being one category, or specificate,
-or dimension of thought passes over into another, and then disappears:
-but in mediated Being one category has a meaning only by its relation
-to another,--only by its reflection on another,--only by the light
-which another casts upon it. Thus a cause has no meaning except in
-connexion with its effect: a force implies or postulates an exertion
-of that force: an essence is constituted by the existence which issues
-from it. Instead of 'is,' therefore, which denotes resting-upon-self,
-or connexion-with-self, the verb of the second sphere is 'has,'
-denoting reference, or connexion-with-something-else: e.g. the cause
-_has_ an effect: the thing _has_ properties. Instead of numerals,
-come the prepositions and pronouns of relation, such as which, same,
-like, as, by, because. The only conjunction in the first stage or
-Being was 'And,'--mere juxtaposition; and even that conjunction was
-perhaps premature, and due to reflective thought, going beyond what was
-immediately before it, and tracing out connexions with other things.
-The first stage, as we have seen, treated of the terms of natural
-thought present in the action of the senses: the second stage--that of
-Essential Being--deals with scientific, reflective, or mediate thought.
-What, why, are the questions: comparison and connexion the methods: the
-establishment of relations of similarity, causation, and co-existence,
-the purpose in this range of logical method. Its categories are those
-most familiar to science in its reflective and comparative stage. It
-is the peculiar home of what are known as Metaphysical subtleties. The
-natural but delusive tendency of reasoning is to throw the emphasis
-on one side of the relation, and to regard the other as accessary and
-secondary. Contrasts between _essentia_ and _existentia: substantia_
-and _modi_: cause and effect: real and apparent: constantly occur.
-
-If the first branch of Logic was the sphere of simple Being in a point
-or series of points, the second is that of difference and discordant
-Being, broken up in itself. The progress in this second sphere--of
-_Essentia_ or Relative being--consists in gradually overcoming the
-antithesis and discrepancy between the two sides in it--the Permanent
-and the Phenomenal. At first the stress rests upon the Permanent
-and true Being which lies behind the seeming--upon the essence or
-substratum in the background, on which the show of immediate Being has
-been proved by the process in the first sphere really to rest. Then,
-secondly, Existence comes to the front, and Appearances or Phenomena
-are regarded as the only realities with which science can deal. And
-yet even in this case we cannot but distinguish between matter and
-form, between the phenomena and their laws, between force and its
-exercises: and thus repeat the relativity, though both terms in it are
-now on the whole transferred into the range of the Phenomenal world.
-The third range of Essential Being is known as Actuality, where the
-two elements in relation rise to the level of independent existences,
-essences in phenomenal guise--bound together, and deriving their very
-characteristics from that close union. Relativity or correlation is
-now clearly apparent in actual form, and comprises the three heads of
-Substantial Relation, Causal Relation, and Reciprocal Relation. In
-this case while the two members of the relation are now indissolubly
-linked together, they are no more submitted to each other than they
-are independent. According to Reciprocity everything actual is at once
-cause and effect: it is the meeting-point of relations: a whole with
-independent elements in mutual interconnexion. Such a total is the
-Notion.
-
-This brings us to the third branch of Logic,--the theory of the
-Notion, or Grasp of Thought.[2] The theory of Causality, with which
-the second branch closed, continued to let the thought fall asunder
-into two unequal halves--always however in relation or connexion with
-each other. But in the present part of the Logic the two halves are
-re-united, or in their difference their identity is also recognised.
-Instead of a cause of a thing (which is separate from it in order), we
-have a concept which is its principle of unity, its universal in which
-it is individualised. Instead of incessant and endless Relativity,
-we have Development. By development is meant self-specification, or
-self-actualisation: the thing is what it becomes, or while it changes
-it remains identical with itself. The Category or Development is the
-category or method of philosophic or speculative science: just as
-Being corresponded to natural thought, and Relativity or Reflection to
-metaphysical and realistic science. According to the law of Development
-diversity and unity both receive their due. Mere unity or Being
-reappears now as Universality or Generality. Mere diversity, or the
-relativity of essence, re-appears as Particularity, or the speciality
-of details. And the union of the two is seen in the Individualised
-notion or real object. In other words, the true thought which really
-grasps and gets all round its object, which is a real whole, is a
-Triplicity: it is first seen all as the ground or self-same, the
-possibility--secondly, all as the existence in details, and difference,
-the actuality or contingency--and thirdly, all as the self-same in
-difference, and the possible in actuality. Every object in its full
-reality is an innate movement; and to grasp it wholly we must apprehend
-it as such a self-evolving and self-involving unity of elements, in
-each of which however it is whole and entire. Thus the Notion embraces
-the three elements or factors of universal, particular and individual.
-These three elements first rise to independence and get their full
-significance or explication in the syllogism, with its three terms
-and judgments, exhibiting the various ways in which any two of these
-elements in thought are brought into unity by means of the third. This
-adequate form is a system or organic unity which contains in itself the
-premisses of its conclusion or the means to its realisation,--which is
-a process within itself, and when complete and self-supporting perforce
-gives itself reality.
-
-The Notion or _Begriff_ is where Hegel makes his special mark on
-Logic. Schelling, even, following on Kant, had (like Schopenhauer
-after him) lauded the merit of the Intuition at the expense of the
-mere notion[3] and expressed himself surprised at Hegel's use of the
-word. But what Hegel wants first to insist upon is that the Intuition
-or Perception (_Anschauung_) is built upon the Notion--that it is
-only because there is a universal principle in its details that the
-individual reality of the percept is assured. That we can elicit a
-notion from a perception is only possible because it is implicitly
-dominated by a universal. Secondly, Hegel wishes to note (as elsewhere)
-that the full adequate notion, the notion as self-explaining and
-self-constituting, is all that is meant by the object. Thus the Notion
-or Subject_--Causa Sui_--when it is fully realised in the plenitude
-of its elements or differences,--when each element has scope of its
-own, is the Object--the actual and individualised total of thought, or
-syllogism in reality. This objective world or Object appears in three
-forms. An Object is either a mechanical, a chemical, or a teleological
-object. The terms mechanical and chemical are not to be understood in
-the narrow sense of a machine or chemical compound. They are to be
-taken in an analogical sense, just as J. S. Mill speaks of a chemical
-or geometrical method of treating social problems. The object or
-realised notion is mechanical, when the unification of the members in
-the totality comes or seems to come from without, so that the whole
-or universal they form is external and almost indifferent to the
-particulars, and only arranges them. An object is chemical, when the
-connexion or genesis of the compound from its factors is not evident:
-when the elements are as it were lost, and only give rise to a fresh
-particular. An object is teleological, when the universal is, though
-not distinctly conceived as realised, still always as tending to be
-realised by the particulars. And in each of these grades the object
-comes more and more to be seen to be a self-enacting, self-legislating
-being; more and more a due pendant to the subject-notion. Modern
-science is a vehement opponent of teleology: and with justice, so
-far as in teleology, means and end fall apart. But it is mistaken in
-supposing itself to return to the mechanical point of view. On the
-contrary its success is most generally secured by rising to the point
-of view given by the Idea of Life, and by looking upon the objective
-world as an Organism, that is, as the notion in objectivity, soul
-indissolubly united with body. But even the Idea of Life, in which we
-enter the third stage of the notion, is defective as a representation
-of the truth of Objectivity: for body and soul must part. The
-conception of an Organism or living being is too crude. Reality is no
-doubt well described as alive: the Absolute well defined as Life. But
-here again Life is taken in a higher than its sense of _mere_ Life:
-it is life as intelligent and volitional energy. If the universe--the
-Absolute--can be said to be living, it must be said also that it is
-more than Living. Such a life--such existence--is what Aristotle has
-called _θεωρία_ and ἐνέργεια of the highest in man. It is mental and
-spiritual life. In its consummation it is the Idea--the absolute
-Idea--the totality which is and is aware of itself,--the developed
-unity of the Notion with Objectivity. This unity thus presented is
-what lies implicit to our perception in Nature: and thus the Idea,
-as developed in Logic, forms the prologue and presupposition to the
-Philosophy of Nature.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Being (_das Seyn_) probably conveys much more to an
-English reader than is here meant or wanted. It is Being, where the
-distinction between essence and appearance has not yet emerged or been
-thought of. If being = τὸ ὄν, then essence (_Wesen_) = _τὸ ὄντως_ ὄν,
-the being which underlies and yet includes appearance. _Wesen_ has more
-right to the substantival vocable of Being: _Seyn_ is little better
-than an 'Is' or 'Be.'
-
-In writers of Locke's time, 'Being seems to mean a reality, an actually
-existing object, e.g. Clarke: 'There has existed from eternity some one
-unchangeable and independent Being.' 'What the substance or _essence_
-of that Being is, we have no idea.' 'Essence,' says Locke, 'may be
-taken for the very being of anything, whereby it is what it is.' Of
-course Aristotle long ago noted Being as one of the terms with variety
-of implication; and his own fluctuation about _οὐσία_ is an obvious
-illustration of this.
-
-In the translation of the _Logic_, _Wesen_ is occasionally rendered by
-Being (e. g. Supreme Being); _Seyn,_ by existence. _Seyn_ here means
-so little that one can hardly find any word of sufficiently minimal
-content for it.]
-
-[Footnote 2: No doubt, as Dr. W. T. Harris remarks, _Notion_ (used
-by Dr. Stirling) is a quite insignificant rendering of Hegel's
-_Begriff_:--for which he proposes Self-activity. But, as he admits,
-that is just Hegel's way: he coins brand-new the old terms, and forces
-us, if we will follow him, to think full meaning into them.]
-
-[Footnote 3: See vol. ii, Notes and Illustrations, p. 408.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXIX.
-
-
-THE SEARCH FOR A FIRST PRINCIPLE.
-
-
-If there be one thing which, more than another, distinguishes Modern
-Philosophers from the Ancient Philosophy of Athens, it is the desire
-to discover a First Principle of certainty, a handle by which they
-may get hold of and set in due order the perplexed mass of reality.
-They find themselves born to an inheritance of tradition, a mass of
-belief and lore which overwhelms where it does not support. The long
-watches of the Middle Ages had been a time of preparation--even if
-the 'cerebration' had been somewhat unconscious. The mind had been
-by discipline trained to freedom. As it worked amid the material and
-tried to order it and defend it, the intellect grew to recognise its
-lordship over the load of authority. Overt revolts indeed against
-coercion by decrees and by canons of dogma had never been wanting even
-in the quietest of the so-called 'ages of faith.' But it is not in the
-loudest outcry or the most rampant dissent that progress shows its most
-effective course. The 'catholic' and 'orthodox' tradition equally bears
-witness to a movement to emancipation, to self-centred intelligence.
-Such an emancipation however cannot be complete and self-realised
-without a sharp and painful wrench at the moment of mental birth.
-The great word of disruption, of self-assertion, of defiance to the
-past and to the dominant, must be said: and, as human beings are
-constituted, it will be said in a tone of acerbity for which neither
-the revolutionist nor the reactionary are severally alone responsible.
-
-Thus to hear the brave words and the bold defiance hurled out by
-the thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one might
-fancy they, like Archimedes, sought a supernal vantage-ground from
-which they could move the world. Yet, unlike the material earth,
-the intellectual globe is a burden we each carry with us,--which we
-find upon us when--if ever--we begin to shake ourselves out of the
-slothful unconsciousness of our merely vegetative life. For though
-we all carry it, we do not all feel its weight. In some individuals
-and in some ages there is so accurate a proportion between the inner
-power and the outer pressure that the load of belief and custom is
-but a well-fitting garb, almost a second nature. To others there
-is a felt disproportion, a sense of superincumbent clothes and
-uncongenial, unnatural trappings. Out of such struggles to be free,
-grow, occasionally, philosophers, and reformers. To the former the
-burden is the burden of the unintelligible: to the latter the burden of
-the unbearable and intolerable. To the philosopher the removal of the
-burden consists in such a re-adjustment of the intellectual world that
-it shall be no longer a foreign thing, but bone of his bone and flesh
-of his flesh. But, to re-adjust and to re-organise, one must stand
-back from the objective: one must cast it forth, and look about for a
-clue to an exit from the maze of confusion. The given and subsistent
-is put on probation: not rejected, but for the moment declined: not
-denied, but asked to present its credentials.[1] This is the ἐποχή
-of the sceptical schools of later Greece; the invitation to doubt
-addressed by Descartes to his own soul. It is the protest against that
-vulgar precipitancy which in primitive and modern credulity is ready to
-give itself away to any doctrine which has the voice and the garb of
-outward authority. Or is it the assertion! of the royal and inalienable
-sovereignty of the Subjectivity to be _certain_ of whatever claims to
-be objective and _true_: the assertion that what is true must be seen
-and experienced to be true. Or it is, in another way, the principle of
-Socrates: that the beginning of knowledge, the first step in the way
-of wisdom, is to know that you know nothing--to realise the absolute
-supremacy of self-consciousness.
-
-It is in short the same demand as Augustine's. There is indeed a wide
-gulf of temperament and circumstances dividing the bishop of Hippo from
-the mathematician Descartes and the rationalist Spinoza. But in the cry
-for the knowledge of 'God and my Soul' as the first, the indispensable,
-the sole knowledge: as the _one_ knowledge which binds the finite and
-the infinite together,--the knowledge on which turns the truth of
-science, and the reality of experience, the great thinkers of these
-diverse ages are at one.[2] They turn their backs upon the external
-that they may find rest in the truly internal, on the inner certainty,
-which is not a mere subjective but a very objective also: not a mere
-_anima mea,_ but in close unity therewith _Deus meus._ This is perhaps
-more explicit in Spinoza, in some points, than in Descartes, and in
-many respects more decisively put by Augustine than by either. But this
-is what is really meant by the initial concentration of suspense: this
-is what is sought when a Principle is sought. Nothing short of this
-unity of subjective and objective in an Absolute--we may say--Ego, is a
-principle.
-
-But 'principles' like other terms are sometimes lightly taken; and can
-be in the plural--just as in lower levels of religion and society there
-can be gods many and lords many. Nor in a way wrongly. For, as has been
-before pointed out, a principle is the unity of beginning and end: it
-is only caught hold of by approaching from different directions: it
-loses its life and power when cut off from the many organs by which it
-distributes itself so as to grasp reality. If it be essentially one,
-it is not a bare unit: it cannot, without injury, be reduced to utter
-simplicity, and accepted in the shape of a single term. And yet this is
-what almost inevitably happens to every so-called principle.
-
-Like a _deus ex machina_, or a trick of the trade, it is applied to
-unloose every knot, and to clear any difficulties that arise. But a
-principle of this stamp possesses no intimate connexion or organic
-solidarity with the theory which it helps to prop. It is always at
-hand as a ready-made schema or heading, and can be attached to the
-most incongruous orders of fact. Thus in the works of Aristotle, the
-principle of 'End' or 'Activity' has sometimes seemed to be applied
-to whatever subject comes forward, and like a hereditary official
-vestment to suit all its wearers equally well or equally ill. What is
-true 'on the whole' is not always true 'of each': the _καθόλον_ never
-quite equals the _καθ' ἔκαστον._ The modern principle of Utility is
-equally flexible in its application to the problems of moral and social
-life. It costs no trouble to pronounce the magic word, and even 'such
-as are of weaker capacity' may make something out of such a formula.
-But an abstract formula, which is equally applicable to everything,
-is not particularly applicable to anything. While it seems to save
-trouble, and is so plain as to be almost tautological (as when the
-worth of a thing or act is explained to mean its utility), it really
-suggests fresh questions in every case, and multiplies the difficulty.
-Having an outward adaptability to every kind of fact, the principle
-has no true sympathy with any: it becomes a mere form, which we use as
-we do a measuring-rod, moving it along from one thing to another. We
-are always reverting to first principles as our last principles also.
-Even Aristotle, when he remarked that an object had to be criticised
-from its own principles and not from general formulae, saw through the
-fallacy of this style of argument.
-
-This is like asking for bread and getting a stone. The philosopher,
-who ought to take us through the shut chambers of the world, merely
-hands us a key at the gate, telling us that it will unlock every door,
-and then the insides will speak for themselves. But we would have our
-philosopher do a little more than this. Not being ourselves omniscient,
-we should be glad of a guide-book at the least, and perhaps even of
-the services of an interpreter to explain some peculiarities, some
-startling phenomena, and sights even more unpleasant than those which
-appalled the spouse of the notorious Bluebeard. Or, dropping metaphor,
-we wish the formula to be applied systematically and thoroughly.
-When that is done the formula loses its abstractness; it gains those
-necessary amplifications and qualifications, as we call them, without
-which no theory explains much or gives much information. And thus,
-instead of fancying that our initial formula contains the truth in a
-nutshell, we shall find that it is only one step to be taken on the
-way to truth, and that its narrow statement sinks more and more into
-insignificance, as its amplified theory gains in significance.
-
-But an adequate principle must have other qualities.[3] What has been
-said up to this point, only amounts to a condition, that our principle
-must cease to be abstract and formal, and must become concrete and
-real. What we want, it may be said, is a Beginning. But a beginning is
-not exactly the same thing as a principle: a beginning is to a large
-extent a matter of choice and convenience,--a matter depending on the
-state and prospects of the beginner; and the main point is not where we
-should begin, but that we should be thorough in our treatment. It is
-otherwise, however, in the present case. For the skill of the expositor
-simply lies in the exactitude with which he reproduces the spontaneous
-movement of growth in his object. His art is _celare artem:_ to
-retire, as it were, into the background, and seem to leave the object
-to expound itself. In a dramatic work it is no doubt the hand of the
-dramatist that seems to set the whole of the characters in motion, that
-weaves destinies and snips the thread of life. And yet in a perfect
-work of dramatic art everything must seem to flow on by a necessity of
-character, a consecution of inner fate. The true artist dare not act or
-allow the _deus ex machina._ So every genuine work of science--which
-is more than a compilation, a school-book, a bundle of notes, and
-contributions toward a subject--must be a self-determined unity--a
-self-justifying scheme in which the personality of the worker enters
-into and is absorbed in the system of his work.
-
-If this is generally true, it is above all a canon to rule the
-logician. He at least must follow the Logos and the Logos alone. His
-theme must be a law unto itself: all its movements must be freely
-and nobly objective. For his subject-matter is at least an organism,
-and develops according to an inward law. But it is even more than an
-organism: it must not merely develop, as organisms do,--not merely
-live and grow--but _know_ that it develops and as it were _will_ its
-own development--and in that harmony of being, willing, and knowing,
-be essentially one. In Hegelian language it must not merely be
-implicit_--an sich_ or _für uns_--the subject of a change which it
-undergoes and feels, but without definitely realising,--the subject
-of a change which we (the historians) perceive. It must also be _für
-sich_: aware of its modifications, an agent in bringing them about:
-and yet withal in so looking forth and willing, be self-possessed, and
-self-enjoying.
-
-The principle of Hegelianism is the principle of Development, the
-principle of the Notion--but a Notion which is objective as well as
-subjective--the Idea. That principle then determines the beginning
-of Logic. We must know the whole course of growth and history before
-we can say where is the true commencement. It must be that out of
-which the end can obviously and spontaneously issue. In a sense, it
-must implicitly contain the end. It must show us the very beginning
-of thought, before it has yet come to the full consciousness of
-itself,--when the truth of what it is still lurks in the background and
-has to be developed. We must see thought in its first and fundamental
-calling. As the biologist, when he describes the structure of a plant,
-rests upon the assumption of a previous development of parts, in an
-existing plant, which has resulted in a seed,--but begins with the seed
-from which the plant is derived: so the logician must begin with a
-point which in a way presupposes the system to which it leads. But in
-its beginning this presupposition is not apparent: and in fact, the
-presupposition will only appear when the development of the system
-is complete. The first step in a process, just because it is a step,
-may be said to presuppose the completed process. Thus the beginning
-of Logic presumes the fullest realisation of Mind, as the beginning
-of botany can only be told by one who knows the whole story of the
-plant. It is from this circumstance that Hegel describes philosophy as
-a circle rounded in itself, where the end meets with the beginning, or
-says that philosophy has to grasp its original grasp or conceive its
-concept. In other words, it is not till we reach the conclusion that
-we see, in the light thus shed upon the beginning, what that beginning
-really was. From the general analogy of the sciences we should not
-expect that the beginning of thought would be full-grown thought, or
-indeed seem to the undiscerning eye to be thought at all. In many
-cases, the embryonic organism shows but little similarity to the adult,
-and occasionally a violent abruptness seems, on cursory glance, to
-mark off one stage of a creation's growth from the next. Who that knew
-not the result could in the seed prefigure to himself the tree? The
-beginning is not usually identifiable with the final issue, except by
-some effort to trace the process of connexion. The object of science
-only appears in its truth when the science has done its work.
-
-The beginning of philosophy must hold a germ of development, however
-dead and motionless it may seem. But it must also to some extent
-be a result,--the result of the development or concentration of
-consciousness;--of the other forms of which it is the hypothetical
-foundation, or, of which it is (otherwise viewed) the first
-appearance. The variety of imaginative conception, and the chaos
-of sense, must vanish in a point, by an act of abstraction, which
-leaves out all the variety and the chaos,--or rather by an act
-of distillation, which draws out of them their real essence and
-concentrated virtue. This variety, when thoroughly examined and tested,
-shrivels up into a point:--it only _is._ Everything definite as we call
-it, the endless repetitions of existence, have disappeared, and have
-left only the energy of concentration, the unitary point of Being.
-
-We may describe the process in two ways. We may say that we have left
-out of sight all existing differences,--that we have stripped off
-every vestige of empirical conceptions, and left a residue of pure
-thought. The thought is pure, perhaps, but it is not entire. In this
-way of describing it, pure thought is the most abstract thought,--the
-last outcome of those operations which have divested our conceptions
-of everything real and concrete about them. But thus to speak of the
-process as Abstraction would be to express half of the truth only:
-and would really leave us a mere zero, or gulf of vacuity. In the
-beginning there would then be nothing--the mere annihilation of all
-possible and actual existence. And it is certainly true that in the
-beginning there can be nothing.--On the other hand, and secondly, there
-is affirmation as well as negation involved in the ultimate action
-by which sense and imagination pass into thought. They are not left
-behind, and the emptiness only retained: they are carried into their
-primary consequence, or into their proximate truth. They are reduced
-to their simplest equivalent or their lowest term in the vocabulary
-of thought: which is Being. The process which creates the initial
-point of pure thought is at once an abstraction from everything, and a
-concentration upon itself in a point:-- which point, accordingly, is
-a unity or inter-penetration of positive and negative. This absolute
-self-concentration into a point is the primary step by which Mind
-comes to know itself,--the first step in the Absolute's process of
-self-cognition--that process which it is the purpose of Logic to trace,
-so far as it is conducted in the range of mere thought.
-
-The bare point of Being and nothing more is the beginning in the
-process of the Absolute's self-cognition: it is, in other words, our
-first and rudimentary apprehension of reality,--the narrow edge by
-which we come in contact with the universe of Reason. For these are two
-aspects of the same. The process of the self-cognition or manifestation
-of the Absolute Idea is the very process by which philosophers (not
-philosophers only) have built up the edifice of thought. What the
-one statement views from the universal side or the totality, the
-other views in connexion with the several achievements of individual
-thinkers. Of course the evolution of the system of thought, as it
-is brought about by individuals, leaves plenty of room for the play
-of what is known as Chance. The Natural History of Thought or the
-History of Philosophers has to regard the action of national character
-upon individual minds, and the reciprocal action of these minds upon
-one another. The History of Organic Nature similarly presents the
-dependence of the species upon their surroundings, and of one species
-upon another in the medium of its conditions. Gradually Physical
-Science reduces these conditions to their universal forms, and may
-try to exhibit the evolution of the animal through its species in all
-grades of development. So in the Science of the development of this
-Idea the accidents, as we may call them, disappear: and the temporary
-and local questions, which once engrossed the deepest attention, fade
-away into generalised forms of universal application. Philosophy, as
-it historically presents itself in the world, is not an accidental
-production, or dependent on the arbitrary choice of men. The accident,
-if such there be, is that these particular men should have been the
-philosophers, and not that such should have been their philosophy.
-They were, according to their several capacity for utterance, only
-the mouth-pieces of the Spirit of the Times,--of the absolute mind
-under the superficial limitations of their period. They saw the
-Idea of their world more clearly and distinctly than other men; and
-therein lies their title to fame: but really their words were only
-a reflex,--an almost involuntary and necessary movement, due to the
-pressure of the cosmical reason. The great philosophers are, like all
-men in all estates, and according to their measure, the ministers of
-the Truth,--apostles charged to bring about that consummation of the
-times in which reality is more fully apprehended and more adequately
-estimated. Necessity is laid upon them to consecrate themselves to the
-service of the Idea, and to devote their lives to the noble but austere
-work of speculation--the work which seeks _sine ira et studio_ to
-reconstruct that city of God which is the permanent, if it often be the
-hidden, foundation of human life.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: Cf. p. 90.]
-
-[Footnote 2: Augustin. _Soliloq._ i. 7. 'Deum et animam scire cupio.
-Nihilne plus? Nihil omnino.']
-
-[Footnote 3: 'A Principle,' says Herbart (_Psychologie als
-Wissenschaft,_ Einl.) 'should have the double property of having
-originally a certainty of its own, and of generating other certainty.
-The way and manner in which the second comes about is the Method.']
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXX.
-
-
-THE LOGIC OF DESCRIPTION: NATURAL REALISM: BEING.
-
-
-The antithesis between thought and being, between idea and actuality,
-between notion and object, is almost a commonplace of criticism.
-Between the ideas of the subject and objectivity a great gulf seems
-to yawn fixed and impassable. Thinkers, like Anselm and Descartes,
-have (it is asserted) attempted by a trick which cheated themselves
-to get from the notion to the object. But--as Kant is supposed to
-have for ever shown--these _decepti deceptores_ are now universally
-discredited.[1] Yet the same Kant had shown that the 'things' of
-ordinary experience are only ideas or appearances in consciousness.
-These latter ideas, however, were verified by the necessity of
-interdependence in which they stood, as given by sense. From the
-notions which Anselm and Descartes proposed to invest with objectivity,
-there was absent the feature of sense-perception. They were not limited
-and real ideas, but synthetic laws, general and abstract aspects of
-reality, modes of conception. They were not definite and individualised
-things, but terms or conditions for all concepts and realities. They
-were forms,--forms essential to the explication of reality--and never
-mere parts of reality.
-
-With such 'forms' or 'thought-terms,' such abstractions, Logic (_à
-la mode de Hegel_) has to deal. And in dealing with them it has to
-counteract this popular distinction (which Kant inclines toward) which
-sets up an insuperable division between thought and being, between
-reality and syllogism, between is and is known. Certain of these
-denominators which thinking employs to describe reality the popular
-mind wholly identifies with reality. That being is a thought, that
-force and thing are only modes of conception, sounds to the untrained
-intellect only a verbal quibble. Things, beings, are there_--out
-there_, it says: force is 'ultimate reality.' It is perhaps ready
-to allow that _substances_ are only mental figments: but it is more
-doubtful about causes, and inclines to assume them to be in outside
-nature, and to generate a real necessity in things. On the other hand,
-it has little doubt that concepts and syllogism are only our ways of
-looking at reality,--the reality of substances and phenomena, with
-quality and quantity: that 'final cause' is a mere subjective principle
-of explanation: and that ideas and knowledge are altogether additions
-superinduced on a real world.
-
-Now what the Logic shows is that, on one hand, all these terms are
-ideal and regulative; and on the other that they are real, because
-constitutive of reality. Showing--or shall we say, reminding us--that
-being is after all a form of thought, it shows us that knowledge, at
-the other end, contains or implies reality. It is the business of logic
-as a fundamental philosophy to dispel the illusion that sensations are
-fixed reality: that causes and effects are an absolutely real order;
-whereas concepts and sciences and still more aesthetic and moral
-principles are not. Its doctrine is that all Our thought-terms, the
-most vulgar and the most delicate, are, as we may put it, symbolical of
-reality: explications and manifestations of it. Absolutely real--if
-that means utterly unideal--none of them are. On the other hand,
-absolutely ideal,--if that means utterly unreal--none of them are
-either. If you call them real, their reality is that of thought. If you
-call them ideal, it is an ideality of a real. Being is not a fixed and
-solid substratum, a hard rock of reality, on which we may build our
-relations and further determinations. It also is a thought: it also
-lives in relation, and becomes more real by further determination.[2]
-But the habit comes natural to the majority to attribute essential
-and independent reality (total reality) to the thought-modes it is
-familiar with in practice: whereas the modes familiar to more advanced
-intelligence are put aside as merely ideal.
-
-Thus in proportion as Logic insists on the reality of idea, it insists
-also on the ideality of being. Being is after all a thought: when
-separate from the relations of experience, a very poor thought. A
-'supreme being' even is a thought. And the question of questions for
-Logic is what degree of reality, what amount of truth does each result
-of unification express. Is it self-consistent and complete, or does it
-imply further elements, and if so, in what direction does it suggest
-and receive completion? But at the best the reality of a logical
-term is an abstract or formal reality, and consists in its power to
-interpret, to expound, to define the Absolute. Its more concrete and
-material reality it has in Nature and in Mind. There however Philosophy
-has in a further measure to repeat its earlier lesson and show that
-Nature is not without its ideal aspect, and that Mind is founded on
-physical reality.
-
-All science tends to carry us over the hard lines of separation which
-practical interests treat as if ultimate disruptions. The sciences of
-Nature, for instance, in their completed circle must carry us from
-the inorganic to the organic: must in some way make a path from the
-lifeless to the alive. The science of thought has a corresponding task.
-It has to show that the incommensurability between thought and being,
-or between the idea and actuality, disappears on closer examination.
-When we trace the development of thought sufficiently far, we see that
-Being is an imperfect or inadequate thought,--certainly not adequate
-to the Idea, but not for that reason generically differing from it.
-The fixity of Being as more than, and superior to, mere Thought is a
-habit of mind, due to the same worldly-minded immobility as leads us
-all to believe (and, within the limited practical range, to believe
-rightly) that the earth is solidly at rest, notwithstanding all the
-demonstrations of the Copernicans. But Thought has not deposited all
-its burden, or uttered all its meaning in Being. Being is the veriest
-abstraction,--the very rudiment of thought--meagre as meagre can be.
-It is on one side the bare position or affirmation of thought: on the
-other hand it is the very negation of thought,--if thought be only
-possible under difference. For a mere 'Is' is a mere indescribable
-without-difference. There is no such thing as mere Being: or mere Being
-is mere nothing: _mere_ Being is not.
-
-The first category of Ontology is that of Being. It is the merest
-simplicity and meagreness, with nothing definite in it at all: and
-for that very reason constantly liable to be confused with categories
-of more concrete burden. It denotes all things, and connotes next
-to nothing. It does not however mean something which has being; it
-does not mean definite being: still less does it mean permanent and
-substantial being. Ordinary language certainly uses being in all these
-senses. But if we are to be logical, we must not mix up categories with
-one another: we must take terms at their precise value. Mere Being then
-is the mere 'Is,' which can give no explanation or analysis of itself:
-which indescribable in itself: which is an 'Is' and nothing more. The
-simplest answer to those who invest Being with so much signification,
-is to ask them to consider the logical _copula_. 'Every school-boy
-knows' that the 'Is' of the copula disappears in several languages:
-that it is far from indispensable in Latin: that in Greek e. g. the
-demonstrative article serves the same purpose. In Hebrew too the
-pronouns officiate for the so-called substantive verb: and the same
-verb probably does not exist in the Polynesian family of languages,
-where its place is supplied by what we call the demonstrative
-pronoun.[3] In the copula, which according to M. Laromiguiere, as
-quoted by Mr. Mill, expresses only '_un rapport spécial entre le sujet
-et l'attribut_,' we encounter the mere undeveloped and unexplained
-unifying of thought, the very abstraction of relativity[4].
-
-In the beginning, then, there is nothing and yet that nothing is. Such
-is the fundamental antithesis of thought: or the discrepancy which
-makes itself felt between each several term of thought and the whole
-Idea of which they are the expression. Being is the term emphasised
-as absolute by understanding: then the dialectical power, or the
-consciousness of the whole, steps in to counteract the one-sided
-element. In other words, thought, the total thought, asks what is
-Being, mere and simple; and answers mere nothing.[5] The one aspect
-of the point is as justifiable as the other. In other words the two
-aspects are indissoluble: they are in one. The term 'Unity,' applied to
-the relation of Being and Not, may perhaps mislead: and it is therefore
-better to say that the two points of view are (as Mr. Spencer puts
-it) at once 'antithetical and inseparable,' An unrelated being, an
-'absolute' (i. e. separate and transcendent) reality is an Unknowable,
-i. e. an ineffable, an unspeakable of which we can legitimately
-predicate a not- , leaving imagination to fill up the blank after the
-hyphen. A mere Not, with no substratum which it negatives, is mere
-Being: and a mere Being, which has no substratum, is a mere Not. The
-movement upward and the movement downward are here illustrated: and
-it is evident that they are the same movement[6],--the same unrest,
-only differentiated as up and down by some _termini_ not yet explicitly
-brought into view. Each--Is and Not--as it seeks to differentiate
-itself, to make itself clear, passes into the other. In fact, the very
-vocation, calling, or notion of Being and Nothing, is not Being and
-Nothing, but the tendency of each to pass into the other. Their truth,
-in short, is not in themselves, but in their process,--and that process
-by which the one passes into the other is 'To become.' Try to get at
-mere Being and you are left with Nought: of mere Nought you can only
-say it is. The two abstractions have no truth except in the passage
-into one another: and this passage or transition is 'To become.' Take
-reality apart from what it leads on to, and from what it has come from,
-apart from its end or purpose and from its cause, take it as mere
-being: then this being in its supposed singleness and self-subsistence
-is really annihilated: _stat magni nominis umbra_: but it is the name
-of nothing. True being is always on the way to or from being: to stop
-is fatal.
-
-This unity or inseparability of opposite elements in a truth or
-real notion is the stumbling-block to the incipient Hegelian. The
-respectable citizens of Germany were amazed, says Heine, at the
-shamelessness of J. G. Fichte, when he proclaimed that the Ego produced
-the world, as if that had cast doubts on their reality; and the ladies
-were curious to know whether Madame Fichte was included in the general
-denial of substantial existence[7]. If easy-going critics treated
-Fichte in this way, they had even better source for amusement in Hegel.
-That Being and Nothing is the same was a perpetual fund for jokes,
-too tempting to be missed. Now, in the baldness, and occasionally
-paradoxical style, of Hegel's statements, there is some excuse for such
-exaggerations. Being and Nothing are not merely the same: they are also
-different: they at least tend to pass into each other. In the technical
-language of logicians, the question is not what being denotes, but what
-it connotes. The word 'is' had, it may be, originally a 'demonstrative'
-meaning, a 'pronominal' force, which in course of time passed from
-a local or sensuous meaning to express a thought. No doubt 'is' and
-'is not' are wide enough apart in our application of them as copula
-of a proposition: but if we subtract the two terms and leave only
-the copula standing, the difference of the two becomes inexpressible
-and unanalysable. In both there is the same statement of immediacy
-or face-to-faceness: that two things are brought to confront each
-other,--united, as it were, without producing any real or specific sort
-of union. If Thought be unifying, Being is the minimum of unification:
-if Thought be relating, Being is the most abstract of relations. So
-abstract, indeed, that its relativity is completely lost sight of: so
-utterly one, that it vanishes in a point. And just because it _is_
-(as it seems) out of relations, it must be nothing. No doubt, between
-the two terms Being and not-Being a difference is meant; when they
-are employed, a difference is thrown into them; and then they are not
-the same: but if we keep out of sight what is meant, and stick to the
-ultimate point which is said, we shall find that mere being and mere
-nothing are alike inapprehensible by themselves, and that to institute
-a difference we must go out of and beyond them. Perhaps some approach
-to the right point of comprehension may be made, if we note that when
-two people quarrel and can give no reason or further development to
-their opposite assertions, the one person's 'is' is exactly equal
-(apart from subsequent explanations) to the other's 'is not.' The mere
-'Is' and 'Is not' have precisely the same amount of content: a mere
-affirmation or assertion, which is mere nothing,--because connecting,
-where there is nothing to connect.
-
-The truth of 'is' then turns out 'become': nothing _is_: all things are
-coming to be and passing out of being. This illustrates the meaning of
-the word 'truth' in Hegel. It is partly synonymous with 'concrete,'
-partly with the 'notion.' With concrete: because to get at the truth,
-we must take into account a new element, kept out of sight in the mere
-affirmation of being. With notion: because if we wish to comprehend
-being, we must grasp it as 'becoming.' For truth lies in transcending
-the first or merely given. We have to go forward, and to go backward,
-as it were: forward from being, backward to being: we look before and
-after. The attempt to isolate the mere point of being is impossible
-in thought: it would only lead to the 'representation' of being,--i.
-e. the notion of being would be arrested in its development, and
-identified probably with a sensible thing, i. e. with _something_, and
-some concrete thing said to be.
-
-If being, however, is truly apprehended as a passage from the unknown
-to the known, or as emergence from bare vacuity, then it implies a
-definiteness, which we missed before. Somewhat has become: or the
-indeterminate being has been invested with definiteness and distinct
-character. Mere being (mere _Is)_ is nothing: to be something is
-must be not something else. The second step in the process to
-self-realisation therefore is reached: Being has become Somewhat; which
-is more, because it professes less. The fluid unity or movement from
-'is' to 'is not,' and _vice versa_, has crystallised: and 'There is'
-is the still imperfectly unified result precipitated. By this term we
-imply the _finitude_ of being,--imply that a portion has been cut off
-from the vague, and contrasted with something else. In the ordinary
-application of the word, Being is especially employed to denote this
-stage of definite being[8]. Thus we speak of bringing something into
-being: by which we mean, not mere being, but a definite being, or,
-in short, reality. Reality is determinateness, as opposite to mere
-vagueness. To be real, it is necessary to be somewhat,--to limit and
-define. Whatever is anything or is real, is _eo facto_ finite. Even an
-infinite therefore to be real must submit to self-limitation. This is
-the necessity of finitude: in order to be anything more and higher,
-there must come, first of all, a determinate being and reality. But
-reality, as we have seen, implies negation: it implies limiting,
-distinction, and dependence. Everything finite, every 'somewhat,' has
-somewhat else to counteract, narrow, and thwart it. To be somewhat
-_(esse aliquid)_ is an object of ambition, as Juvenal implies: but it
-is only an unsatisfactory goal after all. For somewhat always implies
-something else, by which it is limited: whereas mere being, just
-because it is nothing, is free from the check of an other.
-
-This, then, is the price to be paid for rising into reality, and coming
-to be somewhat: there is always somewhat else to be minded. The very
-point which makes a 'somewhat,' as above a mere 'nothing,' is its
-determinateness: and determinateness, as at first determinateness from
-outside, a given and passive determinateness, is also a negation and
-limit. Now the limit of a thing is that point where it begins to be
-somewhat else: where it passes out of itself and yields to another.
-Accordingly in the very act of being determined, somewhat is passing
-over into another: it is altering, and becoming somewhat else. Thus a
-some-thing' implies for its being the being of somewhat else: its being
-is as it were only to be beside something else,--it is finite, and
-alterable, a _this_ with a _that_ always in the neighbourhood. Such is
-the character of determinate being. It leads to an endless series from
-some to an other, and so on _ad infinitum:_ everything as a somewhat,
-as a determinate being, in reality, presupposes a something else, and
-that again has some third thing; and so the chain is extended with
-its everlasting _And,_ And, And, (as in the children's way of telling
-a story). Somewhat-ness is always vexed by the fact that it is not
-somewhat else: and for that very reason, ceasing to be the primary
-object, it becomes somewhat else itself; and the other term becomes the
-somewhat. And so the same story is repeated in endless progression,
-till one gets wearied with the repetition of finitude which is held out
-as infinite.
-
-Thus in determinate being as in mere being we see the apparent fixity
-resolved into a double movement--the alteration from some to somewhat
-else, and _vice versa._ But a movement like this implies after all
-that there is a something which alters: which is alterable, but which
-alters into somewhat. This somewhat which alters into somewhat, and
-thus retains itself, is a being which has risen above alteration, which
-is independent of it because including it: which is _for itself,_ and
-not for somewhat else. Thus in order to advance a step further from
-determinate and alterable being, we have only to keep a firm grasp
-on both sides of the process, and not suffer the one to slip away
-from the other. We must not merely _say,_ but energise the unity of
-the two 'antithetical yet inseparable' elements we are naturally
-disposed to take and leave only as One _and_ an Other. Something
-becomes something else: in short, the one side passes on to the other
-side of the antithesis, and the limitation is absorbed. The new result
-is something _in_ something else: the limit is taken up within: and
-this being which results is its own limit, i. e. no restrictive limit
-at all, but self-imposed characteristic and definiteness. It is
-Being-for-self:--the third step in the process of thought under the
-general category of Being. The range of Being which began in a vague
-nebula, and passed into a series of points, is now reduced to a single
-point, self-complete and whole.
-
-This Being-for-self is a kind of true infinite, which results by
-absorption of the finite. The false infinite, which has already come
-before us, is the endless range of finitude, passing from one finite
-to another, from somewhat to somewhat else, until _satiety_ sets in
-with weariness. The true infinite is _satisfaction_,--the inclusion
-of the other being into self, so that it is no longer a limit, but a
-constituent part in the being. Such inclusion in the unity of an idea,
-of elements which are realistically separate, is termed 'ideality.' The
-antithesis is reduced to become an organic and dependent part. It still
-exists, but as no longer outside and independent. Thus in determinate
-being the determinateness is found in somewhat else: in being-for-self
-the determinateness is self-realisation. Being-for-self may be shortly
-expressed by 'one' or 'each': as determinate being a, or an, or by
-'some': and Being simple has no nominal equivalent. As 'some' is always
-fractional or partial, 'each' is always a whole or unit. Mere Being has
-not the consistency of any noun or pronoun: it is the bare (impersonal)
-verb.
-
-But 'each for self' expresses the sentiment of an armed neutrality
-with implicit leanings to universal war,--the _bellum omnium contra
-omnes._ Each is self-centred, independent, resting upon self, and not
-minding anything else,--which is now thrown out as indifferent into the
-background. Each is centripetal; anything else is for it a matter of no
-moment. If determinate being was something to be explained by something
-other, this is or professed to be self-explanatory, and rests upon
-itself. It seems purely affirmative, and promises to give a definite
-unity. But we cannot free thought from negation in this sphere, any
-more than in the earlier. We may, if we like, assert the absolute
-self-sufficingness, primariness, and unalterability of each; but a
-very little reflection shows the opposite to be true. The very notion
-of each is exclusiveness towards the rest: a negative and, as it were,
-polemical attitude towards others is the very basis of Being-for-self.
-One after one, they each rise to confront each, each excluding each,
-until their self-importance is reduced to be a mere point in a
-series of points, one amongst many. When that is clearly seen, their
-qualitative character has disappeared: and there is left only their
-quantity.[9] The negative attitude of each to each forms a sort of
-bond connecting them. If to the reference which connects we give the
-name of attraction, then we may say that the repulsion of each against
-each is exactly equal to their mutual attraction. And thus, in the
-language of Hobbes, the universal quarrel is only the other side of the
-general union in the great Leviathan: repulsion, in the shape of mutual
-fear, is the principle of attraction. Thus each for self is repeated
-endlessly: instead of the atom or unit we have a multitude, utterly
-indifferent to what each is for itself. The mere fact that it is,
-entitles it to count, and so constitutes quantity. Here we may shortly
-recapitulate the categories of Quality or Being Proper. It forms three
-steps or grades: those of indeterminate being: determinate being:
-self-determined being: or if we speak of them as processes, we have
-becoming: alteration: attraction and repulsion[10]. From the extreme of
-abstraction and concentration thought, under the form of Being, passes
-on to greater determinateness and development. The fixity of mere
-Being is seen to imply a distinction of elements, and a dependence of
-one upon the other: where the 'is' and 'is not' part from each other
-sufficiently to let us distinguish them. This is the stage of finitude:
-when we say that there is somewhat, but there are others, and imply
-that any one has an end, a limit, a negation in its nature. These
-words describe the finite scene,--a fragmentary being which makes an
-advance upon indeterminateness, but loses its wholeness and is always
-and necessarily leading on to something else. It is the revulsion
-from the vague and yet unspecified universal to definite and limited
-particulars. In the third stage the limit is uplifted and included in
-the particular, which now contains its negation in itself,--is (by
-accepting its dependence) independent, is its own ground, and may be
-called an individual. But an individual, again, implies an aggregate
-of ones, or a multitude. This being-for-self is an individual or atom:
-it is the basis of those higher developments known as subjectivity and
-personality. These are, as it were, higher multiples of it.
-
-This first sphere of thought, apparently so abstruse and unreal in its
-abstractions, had to be thus narrowly discussed because it presents
-all the difficulties and peculiarities of Hegel in their elementary
-form. They are clearly the fundamental problems of ancient Greek
-philosophy--of that first or fundamental philosophy which discusses
-Being and its intrinsic attributes or accidents. Modern superficiality
-has sometimes reproached these old thinkers (who, forsooth, 'knew no
-language but their own') for their tiresome insistence on this problem
-of Is and Is not. Compared, indeed, with what are called topics of
-interest, e. g. the Soul and the Hereafter, or the origins of the
-Cosmic process, tiresome such inquiry is. But it is the bitter lesson
-of experience that till such fundamentals are at least critically
-surveyed, the interesting topics will still (and in more than one
-sense) belong to the Unknowable. Herbart not less than Hegel sees it is
-the prime business of philosophical criticism (i. e. of philosophy) to
-examine thoroughly those primary notions on which the whole structure
-of thought rests. It is on the comprehension of the radical limitations
-latent in the seemingly simplest terms of thought, that the profoundest
-problems of human interest ultimately turn.
-
-Thus, in the first place, the process of Being, as seen in the light
-of the whole system of Logic, shows that reality is truly known only
-as a trinity,--or perhaps rather as a duality in unity. This is the
-'Notion' or 'Grasp' of Being. First, reality seems an unspecialised
-and self-centred being,--and that by itself is mere nothing: a mere
-_universal._ Second, it appears a specialised and differentiated being
-of some and other: a mere _particular_, limited by other particulars,
-and so finite. Third, as a combination of the two earlier stages:
-as wholeness with determinateness, as unity; and so an _individual_
-which is the _true_ or complete and authentic character of all being.
-In the _metaphysics_ of Being these three elements follow, one after
-another: but in the _logic_ of the notion they interpenetrate, and
-each of them is the others and the total. The truth or the notion of
-being takes it in Being-for-self as a universalised particular or
-as an individual.--In the second place: the sphere of mere Being is
-that of _mere_ identity: that of determinate being is the sphere of
-otherness, difference: that of self-determined being is the sphere of
-well-grounded existence.--Thirdly: the first sphere may be illustrated
-by the freedom of indeterminateness, expressed by the word 'may': the
-second by necessity or determinateness, expressed by the word 'must':
-and the third, by the freedom which even in its determinateness
-is self-determining, expressed by the word 'will.'--Fourthly:
-these steps illustrate the meaning of the Hegelian technical terms
-_setzen_: _aufheben: an sich_: _für sich_: _Idealität: Realität._
-Thus Determinate Being or somewhat is _an sich_ or implicitly (by
-implication) somewhat else: and the process of determinate being
-is to lay it down or express (_setzen_) it as such. When this
-explicitly-stated 'other' or limit is included in the Being, and
-reduced into a unity with somewhat in each Being-for-self, it is said
-to be '_aufgehoben_'--uplifted, as it were, so that it is no longer a
-separate existent, but is still an efficient element. As being partly
-_this,_ and partly _that,_ now _one,_ and now an _other,_ which limits
-and is limited, determinate being is _Realität._ The characteristic
-of reality is externality of its parts, which are thus left side by
-side quasi-independent: that of ideality is unity and solidarity of
-function. When the mutual dependence of elements is tightened till
-it becomes equivalent to unity and totality, these elements are seen
-in their Ideality (_Idealität_). Such a total has the others in it
-as elements (_Momente_); they are there ideally (_ideëller Weise,_)
-as it were (in the loose analogical use of that term) organically:
-that is, they are denied the privilege, which their total has, of
-being-for-themselves. They do not enjoy the benefit of their own being,
-though their presence is felt.--Fifthly: Being-for-self is absolute
-negativity; i.e. the negation of negation. Determinate being was a
-negation of Being mere and simple: Being-for-self is the negation of
-this, and so a return to true affirmation, as including the element of
-negation.
-
-Being seemed to describe a complete reality. But its latent limitation
-has become explicit. It only retains itself by a self-assertion which
-leaves it a mere abstract unit, or atom,--a unit with nothing in it
-to be united,-and where it matters not whether it be somewhat or
-other. The quality of Being, in which all qualitative attributes are
-lost and sunk, is Quantity: the characteristic of which is to be a
-matter of no importance to Being, as it originally presents itself.
-In other words, whilst Quality is identical with Being,--while Being
-means qualitativeness, and the Being of a thing means its quality, or
-constitution; Quantity is external to Being, and a thing is, while its
-quantity undergoes all sorts of variation. At least this is true within
-certain limits: for quantity is not an ultimate category any more than
-quality. But for the present the truth of quality is quantity; or, in
-other words, if a thing is to be anything definite it must ultimately
-rest on a solid atom: must be a unit and amenable to measurement. First
-come qualities, such as sweet, green, and the like: these seem to be
-truth and reality to the senses and the natural mind: and in their
-universality are represented by the abstract terms of qualitative
-being. The first step in the progress of knowledge consists in seeing
-that quality presupposes quantity. Number, in short, is the proximate
-truth to which the vague qualitative distinction of _a, some,_ and
-_each_ is to be reduced. The qualitative differences of sounds are
-reduced to relations or ratios of number: and so are the other data of
-sensation. We see this truth recognised in the Atomic School, which
-may be taken to represent the summing-up of that period of thought
-which begins with the 'Being' of Parmenides, and the 'Becoming' of
-Heraclitus. When Democritus says that, although bitter and sweet are
-conventional distinctions, yet in reality there is only atoms and
-void[11], he is introducing a distinction between real and apparent.
-But again the irregular and sporadic appearances of species of quality
-are replaced by a gradual and regular series of quantities. With mere
-Being you have a conception quite unfit for describing the manifold
-reality. But by breaking up the whole Being into a countless number of
-atoms of being, you get the means of establishing an equation between
-a given sensible and some multiple of the atomic unit. Thus Atomism,
-with its many bits of being and its interfluent non-being in which they
-can unite, replaces the total and complete universe of being and its
-attendant shadow of unreality, the world of opinion. Still the _Is not_
-clings to the _Is_: if each atom seems complete, they are subject to a
-necessity which forces them by negation, i. e. by the void (as Atomism
-figuratively calls the repulsion of the atoms) to meet each other and
-form apparent unities. Before a step could be made to higher problems,
-it was necessary to see that the proximate truth of the qualitative
-world,--or world of sense proper (ἰδία αἴσθησις) is in its simplest
-terms a quantitative world, or world of common sensibles (κοινὰ
-αἴσθητα), universalised sensibles, number and quantity.
-
-The sphere of quantity need only be briefly sketched. It has its three
-heads: (1) quantity in general,--the universal and vague notion of
-quantitativeness, the mere conception of reality as the Great and the
-Little, or the More and Less[12]: (2) Quantum, or defined quantity,
-expressed in the shape of a number: and (3) the quantitative ratio
-or degree, which is the individualisation or self-determination of
-numbers, or their application to one another,--which gives the real
-meaning and value of numbers. The fundamental antithesis, which
-we found in quality, comes before us here more definitely as the
-opposition of many ones in one number. In every quantity there are the
-two elements: the 'one,' unity or solidarity, which renders a total
-number possible, and the 'many' or multiplicity, which gives it real
-body and character. By this quantitative law, reality must always be
-both Continuous and Discrete. Thus when I regard a line as consisting
-of a number of points I treat it as a discrete quantity: as many in
-one. When, on the other hand, I regard the line as the unity of these
-points, it becomes a continuous quantity. These distinctions are not
-so trivial as they may appear: they lie at the bases of paradoxes like
-those by which Zeno disproved the ordinary representations of motion,
-and when a M.P. informs the House of Commons that it is impossible
-to divide 73l. 1s. 6d. by 1l. 2s. 6d., he is, like Zeno, and perhaps
-more unconsciously, forgetting that these quantities are not merely
-continuous but discrete.
-
-The Pythagoreans, according to the tradition of antiquity,
-philosophised number. In it they found the reality, or the principle
-of things,--the characteristic feature which dominated existence, and
-by which the world in all its multiplicity could be made coherent
-and intelligible. They saw it composed of two elements: a limit or
-limiting, and an unlimited: the latter as it were a dark ground,
-measureless and endless, on which definiteness was gradually marked
-out. Such a limiting principle would be e. g. the unit of number. But
-the full definiteness of number only comes out when a numerical scale
-is fixed on, in which each number bears a definite ratio to what goes
-before and what comes after. Each number in such a scale is really a
-multiple of its unit: a product of its unity into its multeity, of the
-monad into the indefinite duad. It is this view of each number, as the
-product of its prime unit with the ratio, which comes explicitly to
-the fore in Degree, or quantitative ratio. Each so-called quantitative
-statement is thus a ratio between a given quantity in the object and an
-assumed standard or unit of number.
-
-These implications latent in quantitative order or determination come
-out in mensuration. If quantitative or numerical precision is to have
-a real basis, it presupposes the existence of a qualitative atom or
-unit which shall be the Measure. Measure is therefore the truth and the
-unity of quantity and quality: each refers forward and backward to the
-other, and both lead up to or imply a modulus, or standard unit. Such
-a standard unit may seem, at first sight, to be a matter of arbitrary
-choice and imposition. There seems to be no ultimate reason for taking
-the foot or the cubit as unit of measurement: and if the original foot
-or cubit be the king's limb, it is easy to say that the whole thing is
-conventional and artificial. But it is evident on further reflection,
-first that the foot or the pace is the natural and primitive measurer
-of lengths of space for the human being, and secondly that the
-particular foot which is imposed as the measure is taken as being
-normal and typical. So too it is partly arbitrary choice which fixes
-upon the starting-point for the scale of temperatures: but here also
-the range from freezing-point to boiling-point of the commonest of
-liquids affords a sufficient standard from which naturally to carry on
-the scale above or below it.
-
-What happens is therefore that what is the rule, the standard,--we
-may also say, the test of being, is the natural mean or average. The
-measure presents itself as the permanent and regular proportion of
-quantity and quality. It is the amount or quantity at which things
-settle down in equilibrium and produce the quality or characteristic
-feature of the object. To say that Measure is the supreme category
-or the truth of being--of that superficial being which merely is--of
-the mere fact of perception--is to say that the prime or governing
-feature of reality, its obviously dominant characteristic in this
-sphere, is a self-imposing harmony and proportion. It naturally
-arranges itself--defines and describes itself in rhythmic series, in
-regular scales, in symmetrical schemes. All things are in geometrical
-proportion, self-defined and uniformly graded. Such a conception and
-category of reality may be said to be peculiarly Greek. The doctrine
-of the Mean is well known as a principle of their popular Ethics. But
-the Mean is an average which is regarded as a Normal,--a regular and
-permanent mode of being which is equivalent to a standard. The rule is
-given by the logic of facts and of nature. There is in it an apparent
-optimism--a belief that what is predominant and fundamental is right:
-a doctrine of immanent symmetry and order. The mere habitual custom
-is as such held to be the right and good. It is true, no doubt, that
-Protagoras came to point out that this Measure was not inherent in
-things, but came from Man, the measure of all things: and that the
-later philosophy had to show how the conception of reality should
-be re-construed, if the objectivity of Measure and symmetry in the
-universe were still to be maintained. Still even with this correction
-the belief remained down to the Stoic School that being is essentially
-self-ordering: that Nature is immanent proportion.
-
-The Measure thus emerging as the Mean, which stands out as the
-permanent background or recurrent same amidst varying extremes, is
-set against these divergencies and used to measure them. It has to
-serve as a denominator for all of these: or each of these differences
-has a definite ratio to it. For that purpose it must be so graded or
-present such a scale that the smallest difference from it that exists
-may be measured, estimated and defined in terms of it. It is here out
-of place to consider how this can be accomplished,--how mensuration in
-any case is solved as a problem of scientific determination. What is
-more important is to note the fact that appearances everywhere start up
-to testify to the incompatibility of the two elements in measure,--to
-their tendency to fly away from each other. It is only within certain
-ranges that quantity and quality change proportionately to each other.
-The colour spectrum, the scale of musical notes, the series of chemical
-combination, the order of the planets, all are found in experience up
-to some point to follow a symmetrical order, and exhibit a measure.
-But after that point is reached, a sudden change or transition occurs.
-There is a break in the continuity of being: without warning, a new
-series of physical manifestation, having a new rule or measure, emerges
-by a sort of catastrophe. So also, it is only to a certain portion of
-the process of physical order in the human body that psychical changes
-are found to correspond. Everywhere the correspondence or harmony or
-proportion of immediate fact has its breaks,--its sudden emergencies
-into a new range of being.
-
-It is on the repeated evidence of this fact--the discontinuity of
-immediate being, the inexplicable gulfs which separate its ordered
-provinces from one another, that we rise to the distinction of two
-orders or grades of being: a double aspect of reality. The primitive
-consciousness is, we may suppose, confined to one level of being, one
-world. And so long as the facts remain within limits there is no need
-to go further. The measure is the rule. But the uniformity breaks
-down abruptly[13]: the rule has its inevitable exceptions: it is no
-law or principle, but only the factual majority within a fixed range.
-Thus the measure, to fulfil all that is expected of it, and be a full
-expression or definition of reality, must go beyond a mere measure:
-must become the essence, or rather give place to the essence. In order
-to explain the irregularity and want of measure which turns up if we
-exceed the narrow provinces of being, we are forced on the conception
-of a being, one permanent and the same, set in relation, antithetical
-but inseparable, to an other being, manifold, changing, and different.
-The undying rhythm, the ceaseless symmetry retreat into the further
-region--the world beyond: while the older surface-being, as set against
-it, comes to be a mere phenomenon or appearance, a derivative and
-dependent something, which has its roots of being in the underlying
-law and essential reality. But the two planes are still in intimate
-connexion, in a correlation which becomes more and more palpable as its
-implications are disclosed and realised.
-
-This change from Measure to Essential Being is one which Greek
-philosophy seems to exhibit in the step from Pythagoreanism to
-Platonism. Plato himself has noted the passage from what have been
-called the mathematical to the metaphysical categories, and insisted
-on the essential and higher truth to which mathematics only point.
-Mathematical terms give the supreme definiteness to the world of being;
-they show it as in its several compartments a world immanently ordered
-and measured. As in Greek Art, all seems to be fully brought to the
-surface: as the image suggests no further and deeper meaning, but
-affords an absolute identity of aspect and purport; so the natural and
-semi-popular philosophy of Greece was satisfied for its ethics with the
-proportionate, the becoming, the beautiful. Plato however passes beyond
-the surface, and reflects the apparent fact on a deeper permanent
-reality behind. That reality is still, in name, only the 'form' or
-'shape'-- only the regular and permanent type--only the measure. But
-it is called the really real, the _ὄντως ὄν_,--the being of being. In
-it the truth is clear, transparent, one and systematic, which in the
-sensible or immediate world is obscure, confused, multiple. It is the
-key to explain the difficulties and irregularities of the first and
-visible scene. Yet even Plato never for a moment forgets the essential
-correspondence of the two realms, however he may insist upon their
-separation, and however hard he may find it to explain how being can be
-duplicated, how the one can be many and yet not cease to be one, how
-appearance has part in reality.
-
-This indeed is not a difficulty confined to Plato. It is, after all,
-the same antithesis as we found in the beginning: the Is which lapses
-into the Is not. It now becomes the play of positive and negative--of
-perpetual relativity: of a known dependent on an unknown, and an
-unknown interpreted by a known: an essence guaranteed by its show
-or seeming and a _Schein_ which supposes permanent _Sein._ How can a
-thing be, and yet not be true? How can pleasures seem and not be real?
-Aristotle, taking up the Platonic antithesis of true and apparent
-being, carries it on into greater detail. Matter and form: possibility
-and actuality: are amongst his cardinal pairs of correlatives. But
-he is anxious to maintain their essential relativity: to show that
-reality only is and maintains itself as the unity of the two poles of
-universal and particular, reason and sense, or as a syllogism and a
-development. So far as he succeeds in doing this, Aristotle rises above
-the correlational view of reality into the comprehension of it as a
-unity, which carries itself through difference into self-realisation.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: What he did show was that these Ideas were not objects in
-the vulgar sense of reality, or things.]
-
-[Footnote 2: Cf. the controversy between Schiller and Goethe as to idea
-and observation, quoted by Whewell, _Scientific Ideas_, i. 36.]
-
-[Footnote 3: The use of the substantival form _Being_ for the verbal
-(participle, infinitive, or indicative) suggests an idea of permanence
-and substance, or essence. So potentiality seems much more real than
-_may_ or _can._ And yet the phrase He knows δυνάμει is only equivalent
-to He can or may know (δύναται or ἐνδέχεται).]
-
-[Footnote 4: When it is said that: 'It is strange that so profound a
-thinker as Hegel should not have seen that the conception of definite
-objects, such as a _dog_ and _cat_, is prior no less in nature than in
-knowledge to the conception of abstract relations, such as _is_ and _is
-not,'_ it is difficult to say what the writer meant. Had he ever heard
-of geometry? Both in nature and in knowledge (i. e. in the natural
-process from sense to thought) chairs and tables are prior to lines
-and surface. The mathematical point and line are abstractions, i. e.
-thoughts, and no image of sensuous reality. It is also true that the
-ordinary conception of the sun's movements was 'prior no less in nature
-than in knowledge' to the theory of the earth's rotation. And no doubt
-Hegel, sedate though his boyhood was, had made the acquaintance of dog
-and cat in his pre-logical days: as of balls and windows before he was
-turned upon Euclid. See Mansel's _Letters_, _Lectures_, &c., p. 209.]
-
-[Footnote 5: As _Being_ to ordinary unthinkingness seems to mean a
-great deal it cannot expound, so the mind full of the mystic depths of
-time and space is disgusted to find them turn so empty and shallow when
-it would set forth its wealth. See Augustin. _Confess._ xi. 14.]
-
-[Footnote 6: This may be illustrated by saying that to _affirm_ is the
-same energy of thought as to _deny,_ and that the difference lies in
-the terms related by the judgment. _In themselves,_ the one act is as
-empty or meaningless as the other.]
-
-[Footnote 7: Heine, _Ueber Deutschland (Werke),_ v. 213.]
-
-[Footnote 8: πᾱσα οὐσία δοκεῑ τόδε τι σημαίνειν (Ar. _Cat._ 5).]
-
-[Footnote 9: Hence the disparaging sense in which the term 'individual'
-may be used.]
-
-[Footnote 10: These latter terms being used in a metaphorical sense.]
-
-[Footnote 11: νόμῳ γλυκὺ καὶ νόμῳ πικρόν ἐτεῇ δὲ ἃτομα καὶ κενόν.
-Democritus ap. Sext. _Empir. adv. Math._ vii. 135.]
-
-[Footnote 12: Aristotle's μᾱλλον καὶ ἦττον: see _Metaph._ i. 6 τὺ μέγα
-κaὶ τὸ μικρον.]
-
-[Footnote 13: Thus, the sharp break at death suggests the reference of
-vital phenomena to a substantial soul.]
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXXI.
-
-
-THE LOGIC OF EXPLANATION AND REALISTIC METAPHYSICS: ESSENCE.
-
-
-The coherence and consistency of being was, it appeared in the last
-chapter, only to be maintained by assuming it to fall into two planes,
-or orders, always however relative to each other. The need of a measure
-forced itself upon even the superficial student. In the ordinary
-business of economical life one commodity of common use or of general
-acceptability steps into the place of a common measure. At first it is
-no more than one amongst many, a more suitable and convenient means of
-discharging the task of mensuration. But gradually it draws away into
-a world of its own, and acquires in common estimation a unique and
-peculiar dignity. It becomes a commodity of a higher order than the
-common, and is even treated as if it had intrinsic and inherent worth,
-apart from all relations of exchange. In a further stage it rises to
-rank as an invariable and almost supersensible standard, which amid all
-the fluctuations of currency tends to remain unchanged. One loses sight
-of the movement out of which it grew and in which it exists--the social
-give and take, the interaction of individual needs and general opinion.
-
-The characteristic feature of this sphere of thought is the perpetual
-antithesis of terms. And its tragedy is the result of the tendency to
-separate the terms, and treat them as independently real. It matters
-not how often this error may be detected. Each side of the antithesis
-no doubt reflects itself upon the other. But we as constantly fail to
-note that reflection. Even the philosopher who most loudly preaches
-relativity falls into the common trap, and speaks of relatives as
-ultimate and absolute. He talks of an Unknowable, as if it could be
-without a Known (or Knowable): whereas no such term fully manifests
-itself. Each term owes its distinct existence to its correlative:
-each gives itself over to the other, and invests it with meaning
-and authority. Accordingly when even the ordinary mind, which takes
-these categories as they are given, is asked what each means, it can
-only reply by referring to the other. A cause is _that_ which has an
-effect. The dialectic in the nature of thought,--its self-revising
-self-conscious nature--which was concealed in the First Part of Logic,
-where one term, when carried to its extreme, passed over into another,
-is made obvious in the Second Part, where each term postulates and even
-points to its correlative, and, however it may be contra-distinguished,
-cannot be thought without it. Thus, force is a meaningless abstraction
-without the correlative expression or utterance of force: and matter
-means nothing except in its distinction from, and yet reflection on,
-form. These, it may be said, are simple and tautological statements.
-They are principles, however, which every day sees disregarded. Have
-they, for example, been remembered by those theorists who tell us
-that everything is ultimately reducible to matter, or who propose to
-improve upon that theory by explaining that matter is after all only
-another name for force? Forgetting how this reduction is made, they are
-dealing with abstractions or mental figments, and losing their way in
-an endless maze of metaphysics. Do those who speak so confidently of
-laws of nature as something real and effective ever reflect that the
-two terms are more or less relative to each other, and that there is
-some latent metaphor in the phrase? Or if they prefer to speak of laws
-of phenomena, on which word is the accent to be laid? Those who thus
-speak of matter and force, really speak of a matter which is formed and
-form-possessed, capable of determining its own form, and of a force
-which can rule its own exertions: and for such conceptions the words in
-question are scarcely adequate representatives. They use the language
-of the Second, to express notions which properly belong to the Third
-branch of Logic.
-
-The whole range of Essence or Relativity exhibits a sort of see-saw:
-while one term goes up in importance, the other term goes down. The
-several antitheses, too, have their day of fashion, and give place to
-others. Those inquirers who speak of the phenomena of nature shrug
-their shoulders at the very mention of essences: and the practical
-man, whose field is actuality, acquires a very pronounced contempt
-for both abstractions. One class of investigators glories in the
-perpetual discovery of differences, and stigmatises the seekers after
-identity and similarity as dreamers: while the latter retort, and
-name the specialisers empiricists. One intellect considers an action
-almost solely by its grounds or motives: another almost solely by
-its consequences. Some console themselves for their degradation by
-piquing themselves on what they might have been: others despise these
-'would-be' minds for what they practically are. What a wealth there
-lies in each of us, which our nearest friends know nothing of, and
-which has never been made outward! But in this mode of thought, it is
-the persistent delusion, misleading science no less than metaphysics
-and the reflective thinking of ordinary life, to suppose that either of
-two relative terms has an existence and value of its own. In Germany
-paper-money is sometimes known as 'Schein' or Show. That term marks its
-relativity to the gold or silver currency of the realm: and it would
-be as absurd to pay with Austrian paper-money in Persia, as to take
-one term of Essence apart from its correlative. The disputes about
-essences, about matters and forces, about substance, about freedom and
-necessity, or cause and effect, are generally aggravated by a forced
-abstraction of one term from another on which its meaning and existence
-depend.
-
-The essence may be roughly defined as that measure or standard which
-corresponds to the variation of immediate being, and yet remains
-identical in all variation. Or, if we like, we may say that this
-immediate being, which, as derivative, may now be called existence[1],
-has its ground in the essence. The essence is the ground of existence:
-and essence which exists is a 'thing,' Such an existing essence or
-thing subsists in its properties; and these properties are only found
-in the thing. Thus the essence, when it comes into existence as a
-thing, turns out to be a mere phenomenon or appearance.--Such briefly
-stated is the development of essence proper into appearance.
-
-With the idea of essential being--a permanent which yet changes, there
-emerge the problems connected with the double aspect of relation as
-identity and difference,--the favourite categories of reflection. These
-terms indeed the popular logician would fain avoid as savouring of
-pedantic accuracy, and prefers the psychological titles of similarity
-and contrast. These, he tends to insinuate, are unique experiences,
-direct feelings, beyond which it is impossible to go in analysis.
-The logician, on the other hand, must insist on dealing with the
-more radical phase of the terms. And he must note their essential
-interdependence and their intrinsic contradictoriness. Abstract
-sameness, or sameness which does not presuppose a tinge of difference,
-is a fiction of weak thought, which wishes to simplify the subtlety
-of nature. Identity is a relative term, and for that very reason
-presupposes difference: and for the same reason difference presupposes
-identity and is meaningless without it. The whole dispute about
-'Personal Identity,' as it descends from one English psychologist to
-another, is enveloped in the obscurity which springs from failure to
-grasp the logical antinomy on which the question turns. When I feel
-that my friend whom I have not met for years is still the same, should
-I take the trouble to express myself in this manner, unless with
-reference to the difference betwixt Then and Now? If I remark that
-two men are different, would the remark be worth making or hearing
-unless there was some identity which made that difference all the
-more striking? The essence is, in short, the unity of sameness and
-difference: and when so apprehended, it is the ground by which we
-explain existence. The essence, ground, or possibility, is at once
-itself and not itself: if it is self-identical, it is for the same
-reason self-distinguishing. If it is to be itself, it can only be so
-by negativing what in it is other than itself. The affirmation of self
-implies the negation of the other of self,--the redintegration (though
-not the blank absorption) of the other in it. This is the _crux_ which
-lies in _Ex nihilo nihil fit:_ what exists must not be other than
-the essence (the effect not more than the cause), and yet unless it
-is other and different, there has been no passage from essence to
-existence.
-
-The tendency to identify, and the tendency to distinguish, alternate
-both in scientific thought and in general culture. But whichever
-prevail for the moment, it is only as a re-action and a protest against
-the one-sided predominance of the other. And thus both ultimately
-rest upon and presuppose a ground of existence which is neither mere
-sameness nor mere difference. It is only when the two tendencies meet
-and interpenetrate that science accomplishes its end, and discovers
-the ground of existence. In the first instance the world presents to
-incipient science the aspect of mere identity and of mere difference.
-Likeness is confounded with sameness, and unlikeness with diversity.
-The popular and the infant minds do not draw fine distinctions. Things
-to them are either the same or different: one point of sameness may
-in certain conditions obliterate whole breadths of difference; and
-tiny divergence may make as nothing all the many points of agreement,
-purely and simply, i. e. abstractly. But the process of comparison,
-setting things beside each other, teaches us to refine a little, and
-speak of things as Like or Unlike. One thing is like another when the
-element of identity preponderates: it is unlike, when the difference
-is uppermost. Thus while we distinguish things from one another, we
-connect them. From mere variety, and mere sameness, we have risen,
-secondly, to distinctions of like and unlike. But, thirdly, this
-distinction of same and different is in the thing itself. Everything
-includes an antithesis or contradiction in it: it is at once positive
-and negative. One can only be virtuous, so long as one is not utterly
-virtuous.[2] To be a philosopher, implies that you are not wholly or
-merely a philosopher. The rational animal is so, because of an inherent
-irrationality, and is so, only as rising upon and superseding it. Every
-epithet, so to speak, by which you describe any reality, presupposes in
-it the negative of the quality. Not only does every negation presuppose
-an attempted or surmised affirmation, but an affirmation is always,
-it may be said, a re-affirmation against an incipient doubt. Every
-stage of reality involves the presence of antithetical but inseparable
-elements: every light implies a shadow to set it forth. The epithet
-of each real is only _a potiori._ While it retains itself, it must
-lose itself. Its positivity is only secured by its self-negation and
-its identity is based upon its self-distinction. Every proposition
-which conveys real knowledge is a statement that self-sameness is
-combined with difference. Every such proposition is synthetical: it
-unites or identifies what is supposed to be implicitly different,
-or differentiates what seemed only identical. Here we have that
-_coincidentia oppositorum,_ which is the truth of essence. Thus, e. g.
-the essence of the Self is the contradiction between its self-centred
-unity and its existence by self-differentiation into elements.
-
-Essence, thus comprehended as the unity of identity and difference,
-as that which is and is not the same, is the Ground, from which an
-Existence comes as the Consequent. Or, otherwise expressed, the ground
-is the source of the differences,--the point where they converge into
-unity, and whence they diverge into existence. Everything in existence
-has such a ground: or, as it is somewhat tautologically stated in the
-common formula, a sufficient ground. On that account, it is no great
-matter to give reasons or grounds for a thing, and no amount of them
-can render a thing either right or wrong, unless in reference to some
-given and supposedly fixed point. For the ground only states the same
-thing over again in a mediate or reflected form. It carries back the
-actual fact to its antecedent: and thus deprives it of its abruptness
-or inexplicability, by showing you it was there implicitly; and
-therefore as you accepted the ground you cannot complain of what but
-serves to continue it. To refer to the ground is to say there is really
-nothing new: and as you raised no objection before, you need raise none
-now.
-
-The Existent world--a world of existents, each conditioning and
-conditioned--is popularly described as a world of Things. These
-Things are the solid hinges on which turns our ordinary conception of
-change and action. They act, and exhibit properties. Being is partly
-substantive, partly adjective. The Thing itself is the ground of
-its properties: i. e. each thing is looked upon as a unity in which
-different relations converge, or an identity which subsists through its
-changing states. This is the side emphasised in ordinary life, when
-a thing is regarded as the permanent and enduring subject, which has
-certain properties. But a little science or a little reflection soon
-turns the tables upon the thing, and shows that the properties are
-independent matters, which, temporarily it may be, converge or combine
-into a factitious unity which we term a thing. But these very matters
-cannot be independent or whole, just because they interpenetrate each
-other in the thing. The thing, which from one point of view seemed
-permanent, and the properties, which from another point of view seemed
-self-subsistent matters, are neither of them more than appearance. For
-they must be at one, and at one they cannot be. And if we reduce the
-various matters to one, and speak of Matter in general, we have a mere
-abstraction--a something which only becomes real by being stamped with
-a special form. _Mere_ Matter like _mere_ Thing (thing in itself) is a
-knowable Unknowable.
-
-In this way we pass from the talk about essence, things, and matter
-into an other range of the sphere of relativity. We no longer have
-one order of being behind or in the depth, and another referring back
-to it. We now speak (as Mill does) of Phenomena:--not phenomena of
-an unknown, but, simply disregarding the background, we find all we
-want upon the surface. For neither is thing more real than property,
-nor essence than existence. Each is exactly equal in reality to the
-other, and that reality is its relation to the other. The thing and
-the essence with their claim to truth disappear. Nothing truly is:
-but only appears to be. The semblance (_Schein_) may refer to an
-essential. But the appearance (_Erscheinung_) only refers to another
-appearance, and so on. The phenomenal world is all on one level:--as
-was the world of immediate being. But, there, each term of being
-presented itself as independent: here, nothing is independent--nothing
-ever really _is,_ but only represents something else, which is in its
-turn representative. Yet even here there is a pretence of hierarchy
-in existence. In the phenomenon a certain superiority is attributed
-to its Law. But the conception of Law is hard to keep in its proper
-place. Either it assumes a permanency--even were it but a permanent
-possibility--as contrasted with the coming and passing phenomenon:
-and then it is apt to be confounded with a real Essence. Or, on the
-other hand, it comes to be looked on as a mere way of colligating
-phenomena,--as a mere appearance in the variety of appearance (as it
-were an iris in the rain-drops)--a phenomenon of a phenomenon. Such a
-distinction between the phenomenon and its law; therefore, is and must
-be illusory, or itself only an appearance. As such it is described as
-the difference of Form and Content: two terms, which are incessantly
-opposed, but which more than most antitheses reveal when pressed the
-hollowness of their opposition. For true or developed Form is Content,
-and _vice versa._
-
-Instead however of this practical identification of the law of the
-phenomenon with the duly-formulated phenomenon itself, it is more
-natural to emphasise the discordance of the two aspects of reality,
-and yet to acknowledge their essential relativity. This essential
-relativity in the phenomenon has a threefold aspect: the relation of
-whole and parts; of force and the exertion of force; of inward and
-outward. The relation of whole and parts tends to explain by statical
-composition: the relation of force and its exertion, by dynamical
-construction. According to the former the parts are constituted by
-their dependence upon and in the whole, and yet the whole is composed
-by the addition of the several parts together. Each extreme is what
-it is only through the other. Only those parts can make up a whole,
-which somehow have the whole in them: and to become the whole, they
-must contrive to wholly obliterate their partitional character. A
-better exhibition of the inner unity and the difference between form
-and contents is seen in the relation of a force to its exertion. Here
-the contents appear under a double form: first, under the form of mere
-identity, as force,--secondly, under the form of mere distinction,
-as the manifestation of that force. Yet a force is only such in its
-utterance or manifestation, while in that utterance, if abstracted
-from the force it carries forth, all energy has been superseded.
-This separation of content and form, or of content as developed in
-two forms, appears still more clearly in the third relation: that
-of outward and inward. This is a popular distinction of very wide
-application in reference to phenomena. But neither outside nor inside
-is anything apart from its correlative. If the elements implied in the
-conception of phenomena are to have full justice done them, it must be
-expanded so as to give expression to these two phases, to include the
-outward and the inward. But at first only by reverting to something
-like the old distinction of essence and existence,--an essence however
-which is existent or phenomenal, and an existence which stands
-independent, though in correlation. Such being is Actuality--being, i.
-e. which is what it must be, and must be what it is.
-
-Actuality, though it comes under the general head of Essence, tends
-to pass away into another sphere. Here, as elsewhere, we see that
-the general rubric of a sphere is only partially applicable to some
-of its subordinate sections. In essence proper there were, or were
-assumed to be, two grades of being--a real or essential, and an
-unessential or seeming: or being was regarded (contradictorily) both
-as ideal (as one thing) and real (as having several properties). In
-Appearance or Manifestation the aspects of being are supposed to lie
-on a level; but they are always a pair of aspects, one side of which
-is entirely dependent for its explanation on a reflection from the
-other, e. g. whole and parts, the favourite category for explaining
-the larger unities. But in the category of actuality there is nothing
-so merely potential, so unessential as mere essence recognised: and
-each actual is something firm and self-supporting which does not,
-like a phenomenon, merely borrow its reality from its antithesis or
-correlative. Thus we have, in a way, got back to the characteristics
-of immediate being: only, as we find it, we have this affirmation of
-the self-subsistence of reals contradictorily accompanied with the
-conviction of their necessary interdependence. It is a reflective (or
-correlated), not an immediate reality. There is no other world of being
-to have recourse to for explanation now: nor can we play back and
-forward from aspect to aspect of a reality which never comes forward
-itself, but only as a reflection on or from another. The world of
-reality is a self-contained world: its parts and phases are each hard
-realities: and for that reason they bear hard upon each other in the
-bond of necessity.
-
-The total actuality falls naturally in our conception into three
-elements. We separate first the central fact--the nucleus of the
-business, the concentrated reality in reality: the fact in its
-mere identity and inner abstractness: the ultimate drift or inner
-possibility of things. Then we turn to the rest of the concrete
-fact--all without which the fact would not be itself--the detail
-and particularity: this we treat as a sort of materials or passive
-conditions from which the real fact is to be produced, on which it
-is dependent and which precede it in time. Lastly, in order to get
-back the unity of the fact from these two unconnected elements, we
-refer to some agency which puts them together. The End--or thing to
-be realised--(so to speak) has to be brought out by a motive agency
-(efficient cause) which imposes the form (or general character) on
-the matter and makes these one. By this analysis, however, we have
-only put asunder what is one experience and introduced a mechanical
-(external) unifier needlessly. The name of _conditions_ is given to the
-particulars or details, considered apart from the rest of the fact,
-and hypothetically invested with an existence anterior to it, with
-the implication, first, that they are self-subsistent, and secondly,
-that they to some extent involve the rest of it. Again, the general
-fact, the fact in its mere nominal or abstract generality or essence,
-its mere possibility, does not exist separately: every fact when in
-thought completed has its so-called conditions not outside it, but as
-constituent elements, aspects, or factors in it. Lastly, the so-called
-agency is the active element itself in the act, an aspect or factor
-in the totality: the aspect which keeps actuality together as a
-self-energising fact--a _Thathandlung_ and not a mere _Thatsache_ (to
-quote Fichte's phrase). Our practical and technical habits, where the
-agent is other than his materials and aims, lead us to draw the same
-distinctions in the realm of total Nature: they are aspects useful _in
-ordine ad hominem_ which we, without due modification, apply _in ordine
-ad Universum._
-
-It is originally in our practical operations that the distinctions
-of necessary and possible emerge,--with a view to the accomplishment
-of our desires and purposes. That is necessary which is required and
-needed if some bare plan is projected and is to be actualised: it is
-the condition or conditions without which the end cannot be attained.
-It is an epithet of the means. Possible, on the contrary, is an
-epithet of the end or plan, and denotes that there are means for its
-attainment, without however always specifying that this is known of the
-present or given instance. It is clear that everything as regards the
-application of these terms will depend on the definiteness with which
-the plan is conceived, both in itself so to speak and in its relations
-with the rest of the circumstances. On the other hand, when a result
-emerges without being included in the purpose, and without any means
-having been employed for attaining it, it is said to be a chance,
-accident, or contingency.
-
-These terms are applied by analogy to the uses of theoretical
-explanation. Just as in will you have a general aim to begin with,
-which becomes more and more determinate as it moves forward in the
-volitional process to execution; so in the attempt to understand the
-world you suppose it first of all the mere shadow or phantom of itself,
-a promise and potentiality of things to come: a next-to-nothing,
-which however you credit with a magic wealth of potential being. So
-much indeed may this possibility be emphasised that nothing more
-is needed: it is possible, and, without a thought of difficulties
-and counteractives, you could swear that it is actual[3]. Being
-removed above this solid land of actuality, cut off from the ties
-and bonds of conditions, it fancies itself moving in its vacuum;
-and being free from all bonds of actuality fancies itself actually
-free, or self-disposing, whereas it can only claim this _liberum
-arbitrium indifferentiae,_ so long as it remains bare and powerless
-possibility--a mere may-be, which, apart from all conditions, would
-exist only by a mere contingency, or freak of chance. This mere
-potentiality--being only an ante-dated, presupposed, and hypothetical
-actuality--being only a substance or substratum--must be raised out
-of its supposititious existence into reality by means of appropriate
-conditions. These conditions are necessary to its resuming its place
-or reaching a place in actuality. Thus each object becomes actual or
-real from a presupposed possibility by means of an external necessity.
-As in the former case the possibility was identified with power,
-and conditions were left out of sight as comparatively unimportant:
-so here the possibility--taken to lie at the root of the thing--is
-made a mere susceptibility, which would be nothing actual unless
-stimulated and necessitated from outside. This necessity in the very
-heart of actuality (which is its characteristic to the reflectional
-mode of mind) thus arises from the separation and hypostatisation
-of its elements into independent powers which are so far in stress
-and opposition. This is the climax of metaphysics--if metaphysics
-be the investiture of the dynamic factors of the notion with the
-power and character of supposed agents or forces. It appears in
-three phases, with the three categories of substance, cause, and
-reciprocity. To the first, reality is regarded as dominated by its
-mere underlying potentiality: the reality of the mere superficial
-contingents is controlled by the necessity of its latent or substantial
-being. To explain event or incident, here, is merely to bind it
-to the generic nature or the intrinsic doom, which--unexplained
-and inexplicable--manifests itself in an extrinsically fluctuating
-appearance of facts: e. g. the single crime is explained as the product
-of social conditions. Under the conception of Causality, each thing is
-a mere might-be which owes all its actuality to a definite antecedent
-or cause,--an antecedent termed for the moment unconditional, but anon
-reduced to dependence on further conditions. The effect is as a fact:
-but would not have been so unless for an earlier fact--i. e. unless the
-effect in a supposed earlier stage of its growth had been helped on by
-certain conditions or circumstances to acquire actual and full being in
-the effect. And cause and conditions can change places, according to
-what we happen to regard as the central nucleus or inner possibility
-of the effect. Lastly, the conception of reciprocity recognises that
-causality is rather an arbitrary simplification of reality into strands
-of rectilinear event; it remembers that Substance emphasises the
-dependence of each non-independent element on the supposed totality
-which they grow from, and doing so, it lays down the reversibility
-and essential elasticity of the causal relation. The cause in causing
-re-acts upon itself, and the effect is itself a cause of the effect,
-active as well as passive. The dependence in short is all-environing:
-nowhere is there any loop-hole to escape from necessity. Motives act
-on purpose, and purpose acts on motives: the stone hurls back the hand
-that hurled it.
-
-Explanation is thus baffled and thus forced to recognise its own
-limitations. The simplest fact is beyond all the powers of explanatory
-science to do full justice to: for to know fully the 'flower in the
-crannied wall' after this method of explanation would involve endless
-multiples of action and re-action. The antinomy between necessity
-and contingency arose by following out the antithesis, so natural to
-us, between selfsame and different, essence and existence, substance
-and accidents, till they were invested with a right to independent
-place and function. But the separation of the abstract receptacle
-of possibility, self-same and essential, from the equally abstract
-conditions which fill it up and make it actual, is only the great
-human instrumentality of comprehension, which however is not reached
-until each thing is realised and idealised as an individual, which
-has universality and has particularity, but never either alone.
-Its universality is possibility--its particularity the aspect of
-contingency: but these aspects are in submission to an inclusive unity.
-The real when ill known seems contingent; when somewhat better known
-it seems necessary by external (physical) compulsion; in its truth
-to intelligence, the real is a self-active, a _causa sui,_ or it is
-necessary by that self-determination which is the freedom of autonomy.
-
-The view of the world under the category of actuality (Reality), and
-as dominated by the law of causality, is the culminating stand-point
-of scientific or reflective realism. It began with a mere descriptive
-science, naming and qualifying the successive aspects of being,--with
-description which passed through numeration into the definiteness
-of measurement. But all such determination was found to imply the
-existence of a permanent reality, or at least to involve the reference
-of one reality to another, outside of it, and yet not independent
-of relations to it, which had to make part of its nature. To the
-scientific realist the sum of fact presents itself independent of
-consciousness, as a complicated mass of real elements governed by
-laws and subject to necessities. Each thing or state of a thing is
-explained by reference to something outside it, which is its cause, and
-measured by something inside it which is its unit or atomic standard.
-Alternately the reference, and the unit are designated arbitrary
-(contingent) and necessary (essential): i. e. they are sometimes
-considered as only a way of looking at reality[4]--and sometimes as
-inevitable implications and conditions of reality.
-
-All this is Objective Logic: or, so far as it does not realise
-its implications, it is Metaphysics. Its terms of thought[5] are
-in practice treated as elements of a reality which is what it is,
-apart from thought-conditions, apart from consciousness. As Hegel
-exhibits them in their interdependence, they hint their underlying
-thought-nature, which in their empirical applications is hardly
-apparent. For to the realistic stand-point mind and subjectivity are
-left out of account as only passive onlookers. The realist may no
-doubt speak of a Subject: but he means a real, a corporeal self, an
-actual amongst other actuals. If he speaks of mind and will, such mind
-and will are parts and ingredients in a general scheme of causes and
-effects; they are points of transition through which passes the moving
-stream of event. They also are things and substances. They are agents
-and patients, always both, no doubt but the chief circumstance to note
-is that they are actuals, and that even knowledge and will are regarded
-as species of action and motion.
-
-When Protagoras laid down his maxim that _Man is the measure of all
-things_, he stated, apparently in an ambiguous manner, that the fact
-of measure (and all that mensuration implies), and (we may add)
-the existence of correlation in actuality, presupposed for their
-explanation the assumption of Mind and subjectivity. Mind thus became
-the basis of all actuality which claimed to be objective--claimed, in
-short, to be actual. The truth and objectivity of the objective lies in
-the subjective; Mind is its own measure, i. e. the absolute measure,
-and it is self-relation. So Kant had taught and Fichte enforced. The
-basis of objectivity is the subjective; but a subjective different
-from that so-called by the plain man or by the naive psychologist. By
-the subjective he does not, as the plain man, understand the compound
-of body and soul, the living and breathing organism amid outer
-objects--nor, as the psychological idealist does, a psychical process,
-a series or bundle of states of consciousness, always contrasted
-with a reality, _the_ reality outside consciousness. It is true that
-his language resembles the language of psychology: as Herbart and
-others have said, that is to be expected, for he talks of mind and
-consciousness. But the consciousness he speaks of is a unity that
-includes all space and all time: it is one and all-embracing, infinite,
-because not as individual (psychological) consciousness set in
-antithesis to reality, as the other half of the duality of existence.
-It is consciousness generalised_--Bewusstsein überhaupt--_ an eternal,
-i. e. a timeless consciousness, an universal i. e. not a localised,
-mind:--a necessary Idea, but with an inward self-regulating necessity.
-Such a consciousness Fichte called the Absolute Ego: but as we saw
-before, the adjective transforms the substantive. Such a consciousness,
-which is absolute self-consciousness, is the Idea:--no psychical event,
-but the logical condition and explanation of reality whether physical
-or psychical. The Idea is the presupposition of epistemology, but
-of an epistemology which claims to occupy the place of old usurped
-by metaphysics. Metaphysics has no higher category than actuality:
-transcendental logic shows that actuality rests in the Idea,--reality
-conceived and conception realised.
-
-
-[Footnote 1: _Existence,_ as opposed to _Dasein_, should thus imply
-the emergence into efficient being from a state of quietude or passive
-latency (_Wesen_).]
-
-[Footnote 2: As Aristotle says, The brave man stands his ground, yet
-fearing: (cf. Tolstoi: _Siege of Sevastopol_). If he does not fear,
-brave is not the word for him.]
-
-[Footnote 3: Put into Greek, the mere ἐνδέχεται (_licet,_ or
-_forsitan_) is taken as equivalent to δύναμαι (_possum_).]
-
-[Footnote 4: Herbart's _Zufällige Ansicht_, or contingent aspect.]
-
-[Footnote 5: 'Denkbestimmungen.']
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XXXII.
-
-
-LOGIC OF COMPREHENSION AND IDEALISM: THE NOTION.
-
-
-The distinction between the psychical or psychological idea and the
-logical concept has been more than once alluded to. The idea or
-representation is under psychical form exactly equivalent to the
-undigested and passively accepted thing to which we give the title of
-physical or external. It is the ideal, in the sense of the psychical,
-pendant to the real: and hangs up in the mental view in the same way as
-the real object to the physical perception. It is in brief the crude
-object, considered not as existing, but as a state of consciousness--it
-is a reduplication in inner space of the thing in outer space. If we
-cannot say it is altogether mythological, we must however note that
-it is simply a psychical reflex, which has an existence only through
-abstraction, and is neither more or less than the object apprehended
-without comprehension.
-
-The concept or notion is more than an image, and less than an image. An
-idea-image is symbolical of the unanalysed totality of the thing. But
-the notion is in the first instance due to an analysis, and secondly,
-a reconstruction of the thing. It takes up the thing in its relations:
-it thinks it, i. e. it abstracts and mutilates it, and artificially
-recombines. It implies analysis and synthesis. It produces a sort of
-manufactured thing: a mental construction. But the construction--as
-contrasted with the passivity that says first A and then B and a
-connexion of them--has the traces of subjective or mental violence
-about it: for violence there is in the act of comprehension. We have
-however got together in unity what actuality in the process of history
-let fall asunder, and could only, at the best, show as independent
-reals held against their will in ubiquitous relations of reciprocity.
-But the unity in which the individual sets the universal and the
-particular is an imported unity, which though it gives place and
-explanation to the elements of reality, seems to impose its synthesis
-upon reality. So far the concept is subjective only. It is an ample
-explanation including the facts, but not quite self-explanatory. _We_
-conceive, and judge, and reason: but all this is alien to the object.
-
-But there is a counterpart almost in antagonism to this. There is
-a concept, i. e. a grouping of existence into totals mediated by
-necessary links, which presents itself as embodied in things: and
-this embodied concept is the objective world. That world, apart from
-our interpretation and conception, offers itself as a synthesis of
-universal, particular and individual. It groups itself into systems,
-mechanical, chemical, and teleological. But in all of these there
-is lacking the evidence of the inward and subjective principle of
-unification. The unity is external, the members are held in a vice:
-their unity is given as a fact: it follows through certain laws and
-does not reveal itself. There is a want of perspicuity of connexion:
-logic--the need of inner explanation--in short, is not satisfied by
-this logic of facts. It is rather a realm of necessity than of freedom.
-It wants life; wants true self-activity. As in the subjective notion,
-the facts resented the hand of the logician (for here is the sphere
-of logic proper in the old Aristotelian sense), and refused to show
-themselves in the simple and transparent transitions of his argument:
-so the objective synthesis of the members of a mechanical system, or
-of a kingdom of means and ends, lacks the freedom and lucidity of
-inner movement which logical insight demands. Objectivity--the logic
-of fact--is a syllogism of necessity, so hardened and fixed that the
-necessity of the conclusion is more obvious than the self-determination
-by the syllogism.
-
-The third stage of the Notion shows the union of the pellucidity and
-ideality of the syllogistic progress with the necessity and reality
-of the objective order. Here actuality and the concept are at one. At
-first as a mere fact--or more fact than idea. Life, organic life, is
-no doubt development: a totality which is in all its parts, and where
-parts have their being in the total. But life as such, the so-called
-vital principle, does not emancipate itself to a true universal: it is
-immersed in its particulars. Intellectual life, on the contrary,--the
-form of consciousness--rises independent and distinct from the
-totality of life. Psychology follows Biology. But as such--under the
-form of intellect and will--it has an antithesis no less fatal to its
-absoluteness than the opposite one-sidedness of life. There is--to
-put it in language more familiar to the present day--there is an
-analogue of life in all nature; and all reality, even the rock and the
-crystal, has its life-history. There is, properly speaking, no mere
-inorganic reality: organic life is universal. And then, going a step
-further, we attribute to all reality something analogous to a soul, or
-a consciousness. We talk, in rash moods, of mind-stuff and feelings,
-even in molecules. But as Spinoza has reminded us, terms like Will
-and Intellect have about them something finite, because they imply
-an antagonism to an object: they are predominantly subjective. The
-reality in its final truth must be a subject-object: the adequacy of
-thought and being, the equation of real and ideal, the intellection
-which is life. And this is called Absolute Idea. It is natural to
-translate such an equation, when made a result, into a mere blank.
-And a blank it would be, if we suppose all that has gone before
-obliterated, and only the result left. Then, in the coincidence of
-opposites, we have only a zero of a gulf of negation. A life which _is_
-consciousness may seem to fade away like a vague ideal with no reality.
-A consciousness which _is_ life can be no consciousness at all. The
-_is_ and the _is known_ dare not coincide or they perish both.
-
-A categorical proposition, says Hegel, can never express a speculative
-truth. That is to say: the subject over-rides the predicate, or the
-predicate makes you ignore the subject. The affirmation keeps out
-of sight the negation. To say that life _is_ consciousness makes us
-forget that the very assertion would not and could not be made, unless
-also life were other than consciousness. In its full proportion of
-meaning, therefore, the proposition must imply a return to unity
-through difference, to identity through otherness. Affirmation,
-fully realised, is re-affirmation through negation. Cognition is but
-recognition deepened by contrast. This law which governs--or rather
-which is--logic; the principle of identity through contradiction--must
-not be lost sight of in the supreme struggle of thought. The Idea is
-the unity of life and consciousness: but it is a unity in which they
-are (_aufgehoben_)--not a zero in which they utterly collapse.
-
-We may illustrate in two ways. In the first we may compare the
-'Ενεργεια of Aristotle. That is his formula of reality. Nominally
-it only means activity and actuality: and sums up the metaphysical
-formula for what really is,--the hard fact of being. But through it
-there glimmers the meaning of consciousness. It not merely is, but
-it means what it is. Energy of Soul is the end of life--the supreme
-fulfilling of desire, and consummation of tendency. As such it is, and
-feels that it is. It is the virtuous deed, which is its own reward. But
-Aristotle seems sometimes to fall from that identification of being and
-consciousness. The world of _praxis_ parts from the world of _Theoria._
-In that case the activity is a mere activity--the outward shell of
-action: and then, as a supplement or complement to the abstract result
-of the activity the consciousness of achievement gets a distinct
-position as Pleasure: and the activity, now no consummation, but only
-a means to an end, get its completion from this arbitrarily abstracted
-shadow of reality.[1]
-
-The second illustration may come from Mr. Spencer.
-
-'We can think of Matter only in terms of Mind. We can think of Mind
-only in terms of Matter. When we have pushed our explorations of the
-first to the uttermost limit we are referred to the second for a
-final answer: and when we have got the final answer of the second we
-are referred back to the first for an interpretation of it.' Beyond
-this see-saw indeed we cannot go, so as to leave it behind: but in
-reality we transcend it. The Mind that is in terms of Matter is partly
-the region of psychic event, partly the world of science, art and
-religion. And psychic event is always antithetical to physical reality.
-But the spiritual world already includes the antithesis of psychical
-and physical, and including it keeps it as a principle of life and
-consciousness. The supreme or absolute mind does not indeed rise above
-Physis and Psyche so as to have no antagonism: but it is the unity of
-antitheses.
-
-What those who crave for something higher than this rest in unrest,
-this life in consciousness and consciousness in life, want, would
-destroy the very condition of reality. Still philosophising, they would
-be above philosophy. They want an objective reality in which they may
-still their beating hearts,--a 'repose which ever is the same' and
-yet is not annihilation:--to sink into the great sea of being, and
-leave consciousness with its radical division behind. Such a craving
-philosophy, in Hegers hands, has no power of satisfying. It cannot, in
-the sense in which Jacobi and Schelling used the words, reveal Being.
-It cannot get at the _That_ except by means of the _What,_ and is the
-eternal antithesis and correlation of these two. It will always be
-rational and logical--for it is its function to think being: and it
-will re-affirm that an unthought and a-logical being is a mere name,
-which in the language of humanity at least has no meaning, whatever
-it may stand for in the Volapük of imagined gods. To go beyond this
-correlation of Being and Thought is therefore no advance, but a relapse
-into the _Natura Naturans_, which, in its abstract completeness, _is,_
-but dare not be anything. Philosophy therefore in its supreme Idea is
-still the 'Ενεργεια of θεωρία, and not bare Οὐσία. For it mere Being
-is always Nothing. And to be actual it must live in antithesis and
-live victorious over antithesis. It follows the law of humanity _(Und
-das heisst ein Kämpfer sein_)--which can only exist in warfare as a
-church militant, but for continuous existence must also be a church
-triumphant. Like religion and art, it sometimes craves for utter union
-in the fullness of Being. Such a fullness is the unspeakable and the
-vain,--which we may picture as the apathy of Nirvana; but which is the
-absorption of Art, Religion and Philosophy,--the cease of consciousness
-and an abyss. We may call it--it matters not--Being.
-
-These stages of the Notion must be examined in somewhat fuller detail.
-The subjective notion is the effort at the comprehension (at first
-subjective) of the two correlated elements into which actuality as
-such has been seen to fall--and to fall again and again without
-end. It brings out, or explicates (and with some opposition to the
-divisions of reality) the unity which was presupposed by the antagonist
-and inseparable reals. Hitherto we have had two things or aspects
-in relation and move from one to the other by an act of reflection.
-But to get two points in relation, they must belong to or exist in
-a unity. The divided reality of cause and effect must, if it is to
-be intelligible, submit to a unification of its elements. It is
-comparatively easy to get on if we are always allowed to have one foot
-on solid ground, and can move the other. Give us a standing-point, and
-explanation is simplified. But to get a notion of things is, it may
-seem, to transcend them, or get beneath them, and take a stand-point
-outside actuality which shall unify them. If we added to immediate
-being a further element to explain it, it may be said we now superadd
-a third to explain the two others. Over and above the different and
-related elements, there is assumed to be a unity. And at first it is
-certainly such a superimposed element, added to the facts, and regarded
-as our way of looking at them, as a subjective notion or grasp, holding
-together what is in itself reluctant to be unified.
-
-The three aspects or factors in a Concept are the Universal, the
-Particular, and the Individual. These are what Hegel calls the
-'moments' or 'vanishing factors' of the notion. They are 'vanishing,'
-because in their logical mobility they form a pellucid union: if they
-are distinct, yet they refuse to be independent of one another. Or, we
-may say, each in its truth is the meeting-ground and unification of
-the two others, thus forming a sort of cycle of perpetual movement.
-And in this way we may see that the addition of the third has really
-been a simplification: it has made two one. For the Unit which welds
-together is not a _tertium quid_, but simply the explicit statement
-and assertion of the truth implied in the antithesis, which was yet
-inseparability, of the two others. And for the same reason, neither
-mere universal nor mere particular nor mere individual are full
-reality, when taken apart. One can understand how Hegel could speak of
-the 'Bacchantelike intoxication' of the concept. It may be illustrated
-by the following utterances in which a modern psychologist labours
-to express the complex unity of mental fact. First we are told that
-a 'nervous shock,' e. g. the awakening caused by a sudden blow, or a
-simple sensation (so-called), is the ultimate unit of consciousness.
-And if this were all, it would correspond to the qualities of immediate
-being, which we can suppose measurable: we should get a science of
-purely empirical psychology based on psychical atoms. But, immediately
-after, it appears that the 'relational element' is never absent from
-the lowest stage of consciousness. Accordingly, besides feelings, there
-_must be_ relations between feelings. And that means a good deal:
-especially if we also note the proposition that, in truth, 'neither a
-feeling nor a relation is an independent element of consciousness,'
-Evidently you cannot have either without both, and it seems difficult
-to have both when neither is independent. Nor does it mend matters to
-learn that 'a relation is a momentary feeling': for that only seems
-a way of implying that it is, and yet is not, a feeling. Such are
-the difficulties that beset the sincere attempt to comprehend. The
-fixed points of explanation stagger under the burden of truth; and
-their unsteadiness shows that they lack the full foundation. Yet that
-foundation--it must be repeated--is not something extra: it is the
-underlying unity which gives life to the relativity of the separates.
-
-For the peculiarity of the Notional stand-point is that it insists on
-thorough comprehension. The usual explanation refers us from a later to
-an earlier, from a strange to a familiar, from a complex to a simple,
-from compound to elements. It keeps analysis and synthesis, induction
-and deduction apart. To comprehend is, on the other hand, to light up
-earlier by later and later by earlier, and carry both into their unity.
-It does not merely refer existence to its ground, phenomenon to law,
-or effect to cause; because beyond these it has still to reveal the
-unity of nature which carries on one of these into the other. Thus, the
-explanatory method in Social Science may either refer us to the simple
-elements or parts out of which the total is composed, or to an earlier
-stage in the same institution's life. The analytical sociologist
-does the former: the historical the latter. Neither really faces the
-problem. For if the whole is made up of parts, it is made up of parts
-which have been characterised by the whole. If the later has come
-from the earlier, that only shows that the nature of the earlier was
-inadequately ascertained. Development--which implies a permanent which
-changes, an identity which is also different,--is thus more than mere
-reference to an antecedent; because the antecedent must also figure as
-a simultaneous. _Cessante causa, cessat et effectus._ But here, in the
-concept (or λόγος) or syllogism, the permanent exists as the--may we
-call it--consciousness which binds together the elements of reality,
-as the life and the history, which is ideally continuous through real
-changes, and is a real unity through the distinctions of appearance.
-
-Such a comprehension e. g. of the State would show that though it
-must have a universal aspect, a particular, and an individual, yet
-these are not severally identifiable with the divisions of sovereign,
-executive, and people, but that in each of the latter the three
-moments of the notion must appear, and that e. g. the people is not
-mere people, but also executive and sovereign, just as the sovereign
-is no mere sovereign, but also executive and of the people. The same
-may be illustrated in the so-called individual. A man in his special
-department and sphere of action may very likely lose the sense of his
-wholeness and his integrity,--perhaps in more senses than one! He
-may reduce himself to the limits of his profession. But in so doing
-he becomes untrue, or, in Hegelian parlance, abstract: he fails to
-recognise the universality of his position. All work, however petty,
-which is done in the right spirit, is holy.
-
-    'One place performs, like any other place,
-    The proper service every place on earth
-    Was framed to furnish man with: serves alike
-    To give him note, that through the place he sees
-    A place is signified he never saw.'
-
-It is a false patriotism, for example, which is inconsistent with the
-spirit of universal brotherhood: and there is something radically wrong
-with the religion, on the other hand, which cannot be carried into act
-amid the pettiness of ordinary practical interests. The universal,
-again, is not a world beyond this world of sense and individuals: if it
-were so, it would itself be a mere particular. It is rather the world
-of sense unified, organised, and, if we may say so, spiritualised.
-And an individual which is merely and simply individual is an utter
-abstraction, which is quite meaningless, and in the real world
-impossible. Or, if we prefer to express the same thing in connexion
-with the mind, sensation apart from thought is an inconceivable
-abstraction. Sensation is always alloyed with thought, and we can at
-the most _suppose_ pure sensation to exist amongst the brutes. The mere
-individual opens out and expands: and in that expansion we see the
-universal: (sensation is thought in embryo). But, on the other hand,
-the developed universal concentrates itself into a point: (thought
-returns into the centre of feeling).
-
-The same process of particular, individual and universal, which thus
-goes on under the apparent point of the notion, is more distinctly
-and explicitly seen, with due emphasis on the several members, in
-the evolution of the notion into the Judgment and the Syllogism. The
-judgment is the statement of what each individual notion implicitly is,
-viz. a universal or inward nature in itself, or that it is a universal
-which individualises itself. The judgment may, therefore, in its
-simplest terms be formulated as: The Individual is the Universal. The
-connective link,--the copula 'is,' expresses however at first no more
-than a mere point-like contact of the two terms, not their complete
-identity. By a graduated series of judgments this identity between the
-two terms is drawn closer, until in the three terms and propositions of
-a syllogism the unity of the three factors of the notion finds its most
-adequate expression in (subjective) thought.
-
-It may be a question how far syllogisms as they are ordinarily found
-are calculated to impress this synthesis of the three elements upon the
-observer. The three elements there tend to bid each other good-bye, and
-are only kept together by the awkward means of the middle term, and
-the conjunction 'therefore.' In these circumstances it becomes easy
-to show, that the major premiss is a superfluity, not adding anything
-to the cogency of the argument. But under the prominence of this
-criticism of form, we are apt to let slip the real question touching
-the nature of the syllogism. And that nature is to give their due place
-to the three elements in the notion: which in the syllogism have each
-a quasi-independence and difference as separate terms, while they are
-also reduced to unity. The syllogism expresses in definite outlines
-that everything which we think, or the comprehension which constitutes
-an object, is a particular which is individualised by means of its
-universal nature. As always, thought refers to reality; and a notion
-has to be carried out into objectivity. But as Aristotle complained,
-matter is recalcitrant to form. The objective appears at first only as
-an opposite, and instead of revealing, it rather obscures and condenses
-the features of subjectivity.
-
-Objectivity, or the thought which has forgotten its origin and stands
-out as a world, may be taken in three aspects: Mechanical, Chemical,
-and Teleological. That is to say, the mode in which groups or systems
-naturally present themselves in the objective world, is threefold. The
-contradiction which stands in the way of comprehending objectivity
-comes from the fact that it contains subjectivity absorbed in it. In
-other words, the object is at once active and passive; as thought and
-subjectivity it should be its own synthetiser, as objectivity it is
-necessitated to interdependence, and the subjectivity, at this stage,
-is in abeyance. Consequently, either the two attributes co-exist, or
-they cancel each other, or they are in mutual connexion.
-
-(1) In the first case the objects are independent, and yet are
-connected with one another. Such connexion is an external one, due
-to force, impulse, and outward authority. The principle of union is
-implied: but the objects are mutually determined from without. The
-more, for example, an object acts upon the imagination, the more
-vehement is the reaction of the mind towards it.--(2) But if the
-object is independent, as has been allowed, then the determination
-from without must really come from within. Thus desire is a turning or
-bent towards the object which draws it. The desiring soul leans out of
-itself. It gravitates towards a centre: and it is its own nature to be
-thus centripetal. The lesser objects of themselves draw closer around
-the more prominent object.--(3) But if this gravitation were absolute,
-the objects would lose their independence altogether, and sink into
-their centre. Accordingly if the independence of these objects is
-to remain, there must be, as it were, a double centre, the relative
-centre of each object, and the absolute centre of the system to which
-it belongs. In each of these three forms of mechanical combination,
-the objects continue external and independent. A mechanical theory of
-the state regards classes as independent, seeks to produce a balance
-between them, separates individuals and associations from the state,
-and, in short, conceives the state as one large centralising force with
-a number of minor spheres depending upon it, but with a greater or less
-amount of self-centred action in each of them.
-
-The fact is that an object cannot really be thought as thus
-independently subsistent. Its real nature is rather affinity,--a
-tendency to combine with another: it requires to receive its
-complement. Every object is naturally in a state of unstable
-equilibrium, with a tendency to quit its isolation and form a union.
-This theory, which is called the Chemical theory of an object,
-regards it as the reverse of indifferent: as in a permanent state
-of susceptibility. When objects thus open and eager for foreign
-influences combine, there results a new product, in which both the
-constituents are lost, so far as their qualities go. The qualities
-of the constituents are neutralised. A man's mind, for example,
-prepared by certain culture, meets a new stimulus in some strange
-doctrine, and the result is a new form of intellectual life. But at
-this point the process, which such a form of objectivity represents,
-is closed: all that remains is for the product to break up one day
-into its constituent factors. There is no provision made for carrying
-it on further. Hence if we are to have a self-regulating system of
-objectivity, we must rise above the Chemical theory of objects. And
-to do that, the first course is to look at the objective world as
-_regulated_ (though not immanently constituted) by the Notion.
-
-The Notion as regulative of objectivity,--as independent and
-self-subsistent, but as in necessary connexion with Objectivity,--is
-the End, Aim, or Final Cause. According to this, the Teleological
-and practical theory of the Universe[2], the object is considered as
-bound to reproduce and carry out the notion, and the notion is looked
-upon as meant to execute itself in reality. The two sides, subjective
-and objective, are, in other words, in necessary connexion with each
-other, but not identical. This is the contrast of the End and the
-Means. By the 'Means' is meant an object _which is determined by an
-End_, and which operates upon other objects.--(1) The End is originally
-subjective: an instinct or desire after something-- a feeling of
-want and the wish to remedy it. It is confronted by an objective
-mass, which is indifferent to these wishes: and manifests itself as a
-tendency outwards,--an appetite towards action. It seizes and uses up
-the objective world.--(2) But the End in the second place reduces this
-indifferent mass to be an instrument or Means: makes it the middle term
-between itself and the object.--(3) But the means is only valuable as
-a preparation to the End regarded as Realised, which thus counts as
-the truth of the thing. These are the three terms of the Syllogism of
-Teleology: the Subjective End, the Means, and the End Realised. It is
-the process of adaptation by which each thing is conceived as the means
-to some end, and which actively transforms the thing into something
-by which that end is realised. In the last resort it presents us with
-an objective world in which utility or design is the principle of
-systematisation: and in which therefore there is an endless series of
-ends which become means to other and higher ends. After all is done,
-the object remains foreign to the notion, and is only subsumed under
-it, and adapted to it. We want a notion which shall be identifiable
-with objectivity--which shall permeate it through and through, as soul
-does body. Such a unity of Subjective and Objective--the Motion in (and
-not merely in relation to) Objectivity--is what Hegel terms the Idea.
-
-The first form of the Idea is Life, taking that as a logical category,
-or as equivalent to self-organisation. The living, as organisms, are
-contrasted with mere mechanisms. The essential progress of modern
-science lies in its emphasis on this aspect of the Idea: which includes
-all that the teleological period taught about adaptation, and only sets
-aside the externality of means to ends there found. The savant of the
-last century and the beginning of the present dealt with the object
-of his inquiries as a mechanical, chemical, or teleological object.
-The modern theorist tends to see the world as one self-evolving Life.
-According to the naturalist of last century, kinds of animals and
-plants were viewed as convenient, and perhaps arbitrary arrangements:
-according to the moderns, these kinds represent the grades or steps in
-the life of the natural world.
-
-What, then, is the nature of the process which we call Life? Is it
-adequately or definitely defined as 'a continuous adjustment of
-internal to external relations'? Or is it a good deal more than
-anything the word 'correspondence' implies? According to Hegel it is
-nothing so simple, but a syllogism with three terms, and a syllogism
-moreover which permutates its terms and premisses. There is, in the
-first place, the term, which is also a process, of self-production. The
-living must articulate itself, create for itself limbs and members, and
-keep up a perpetual re-creation of morphological and structural system
-of parts. Secondly, there is the assimilation of what is external to
-the living individual. If there is to be life, spiritual or bodily,
-there must be a physiological intus-susception of foreign elements.
-Without this the first term or process is impossible. Thirdly, there
-must be a term or process of Reproduction or generation by which
-the living being passes itself on as a new unit. All life, mental
-or bodily, involves Reproduction.--These are the three terms of the
-process of vitality.
-
-But such a life, considered as merely organic, the life studied in
-Biology, is only a fragment. The truer life is in the genus, not in the
-individual: the consciousness, the sensation which inwardly unifies the
-diversity of organic processes. The universal has become the medium
-in which the Idea exists: it exists no longer in immediacy. The mere
-natural life gives place to the life of the Spirit. The life of the
-Spirit has the double form of Cognition and Will:--the theoretical and
-the practical action of the Idea: or Truth and Goodness. In short, the
-Idea divides into two halves, which yet remain the same at bottom:
-Reason and the World: but yet there is reason in the world. The action
-of the Idea, or its process at this stage, is to bring these two terms
-into connexion, and show their ideal unity. Beginning with Reason, it
-goes on to discover reason in the World. Truth consists in the adequacy
-of object to notion. Such adequacy is the Idea: and an object which
-thus corresponds with its notion is an ideal object. The ideal man is
-the True Man. Truth is the revelation of rationality from the objective
-world: and Cognition is the name for that process. On the other hand,
-Goodness is the realisation of rationality in the objective world:
-and the Will is the name for that process. Truth proceeds from the
-Objectivity: Goodness from the Subjectivity. But truth can only proceed
-(analytically) from the objective world, in so far as it is produced
-(synthetically) by the subjectivity. And, on the other hand, when the
-good is realised in objectivity, it is submitted to the process of
-Cognition.
-
-With the unity of Life and Consciousness, the Absolute Idea, we reach
-the supreme effort of Logic. In Bacon's words, 'the truth of being and
-the truth of knowing is all one' (cf. p. 224). That is the absolute
-condition of comprehending reality: the principle of Absolute Idealism,
-so far apart from its psychological wraith, and yet compelled to
-employ the same language. But after all it is Logic, i. e., only the
-supreme logical condition of the reality of the physical and psychical
-world. And it gains reality at the cost of the disruption of its
-elements: it lets the Is slip from the Is known-- the _est_ from the
-_cogitatur_--Being from consciousness. Or, in less mysterious language,
-fundamental philosophy, or Logic, gives place to the concreter system
-of Philosophy--the Philosophy of the Outward and of the Inward
-actuality,--of Nature and Mind.
-
-The reader of the _Divina Commedia_ may hardly need to be reminded
-that, at each of the grander changes of scene and grade in his
-pilgrimage, Dante suddenly finds himself without obvious means
-transported into a new region of experience. There are catastrophes
-in the process of development: not unprepared, but summing up, as in
-a flash of insight, the gradual and unperceived process of growth.
-There is birth and death in the spiritual world: and such are moments
-of sudden lapse, abrupt conversion, when the waters of Lethe close
-around, and thereafter all things are new. There are such moments of
-accumulated and abnormal intensity also in the Hegelian philosophy when
-a new cycle of idea suddenly appears. Such are the epochs of change at
-the great crises from Being to Essence, and from Essence to Notion.
-There is a revulsion, a sharp turn of the path which dialectic can
-enforce but cannot smooth away,--on that path which dialectic indeed,
-as opposed to the old logic of identity, shows not to be a mere smooth
-continuity. All development is by breaks, and yet makes for continuity.
-
-This is again exemplified in the passage from Logic to Physics. The
-reality which presents itself to the philosopher as Nature is a world
-of reason--but, as it stands, it only lives as some speechless work
-of art. It is, so to speak, the picture on the wall--the reflection
-that is cast by the fuller reality of experience. Reason here is
-in the garb of sense-perception. Nature is the silent image--the
-_tableau vivant_--which becomes intelligent, speaking, and real, in
-the observing and comprehending mind. It is the statue of Condillac,
-not yet invested with the minimum of sensibility and consciousness.
-Nature is or shows all that the Idea contained, but contained only
-in possibility, as a logical condition of reality. It shows it in
-reality--and that is a reality spread through endless times and spaces.
-Its unity, its meaning, its continuity are broken up into fragments.
-Yet as Nature, i. e. in its structural unity, and not in the dispersion
-of things and elements, it is all a unity of development and has a
-life-history written in its organism for intelligence to read and to
-reconstitute, on the assumption that all its accident and irregularity
-is but the inevitable imperfection of reality as given in parts and
-successions.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's
-Philosophy, by William Wallace and G. W. F. Hegel
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROLEGOMENA--STUDY OF HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY ***
-
-***** This file should be named 54992-0.txt or 54992-0.zip *****
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
-        http://www.gutenberg.org/5/4/9/9/54992/
-
-Produced by Produced and Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature
-(online soon in an extended version, also linking to free
-sources for education worldwide ... MOOC's, educational
-materials,...) Images generously made available by the
-Internet Archive.
-
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
-be renamed.
-
-Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
-law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
-so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
-States without permission and without paying copyright
-royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
-of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
-concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
-and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
-specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
-eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
-for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
-performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
-away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
-not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
-trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
-
-START: FULL LICENSE
-
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
-
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
-Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
-Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
-www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-
-1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
-(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
-destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
-possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
-Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
-by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
-person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
-1.E.8.
-
-1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
-paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
-agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
-
-1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
-Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
-of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
-works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
-States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
-United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
-claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
-displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
-all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
-that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
-free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
-works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
-Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
-comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
-same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
-you share it without charge with others.
-
-1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
-what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
-in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
-check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
-agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
-distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
-other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
-representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
-country outside the United States.
-
-1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
-
-1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
-immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
-prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
-on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
-phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
-performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
-
-  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
-  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
-  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
-  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
-  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
-  are located before using this ebook.
-
-1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
-derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
-contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
-copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
-the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
-redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
-Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
-either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
-obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
-trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
-additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
-will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
-posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
-beginning of this work.
-
-1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
-
-1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm License.
-
-1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
-any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
-to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
-other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
-version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
-(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
-to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
-of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
-Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
-full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
-
-1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-provided that
-
-* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
-  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
-  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
-  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
-  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
-  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
-  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
-  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
-  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
-  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
-  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
-  Literary Archive Foundation."
-
-* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
-  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
-  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
-  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
-  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
-  works.
-
-* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
-  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
-  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
-  receipt of the work.
-
-* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
-  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
-are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
-from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
-Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
-trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
-
-1.F.
-
-1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
-works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
-Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
-contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
-or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
-intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
-other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
-cannot be read by your equipment.
-
-1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
-of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
-fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
-DAMAGE.
-
-1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
-written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
-with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
-with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
-lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
-or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
-opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
-the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
-without further opportunities to fix the problem.
-
-1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
-OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
-LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
-
-1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
-damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
-violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
-agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
-limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
-unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
-remaining provisions.
-
-1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
-accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
-production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
-including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
-the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
-or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
-additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
-Defect you cause.
-
-Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
-computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
-exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
-from people in all walks of life.
-
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
-remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
-generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
-Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
-www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-
-Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
-
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
-Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
-number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
-U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
-
-The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
-mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
-volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
-locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
-Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
-date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
-official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
-
-For additional contact information:
-
-    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
-    Chief Executive and Director
-    gbnewby@pglaf.org
-
-Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
-array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
-status with the IRS.
-
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
-States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
-with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
-DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
-state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
-approach us with offers to donate.
-
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
-outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
-
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
-methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
-donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
-
-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
-freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
-distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
-volunteer support.
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
-editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
-the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
-necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
-edition.
-
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
-facility: www.gutenberg.org
-
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
-
diff --git a/old/54992-0.zip b/old/54992-0.zip
deleted file mode 100644
index 81704cb..0000000
--- a/old/54992-0.zip
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/old/54992-h.zip b/old/54992-h.zip
deleted file mode 100644
index cac5f83..0000000
--- a/old/54992-h.zip
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/old/54992-h/54992-h.htm b/old/54992-h/54992-h.htm
deleted file mode 100644
index 8c5f419..0000000
--- a/old/54992-h/54992-h.htm
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,15255 +0,0 @@
-<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
-    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
-<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
-  <head>
-    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
-    <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
-    <title>
-      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, by William Wallace, M.A., Ll.D..
-    </title>
-    <style type="text/css">
-
-body {
-    margin-left: 10%;
-    margin-right: 10%;
-}
-
-    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
-    text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
-    clear: both;
-}
-
-p {
-    margin-top: .51em;
-    text-align: justify;
-    margin-bottom: .49em;
-}
-
-.p2       {margin-top: 2em;}
-.p4       {margin-top: 4em;}
-.p6       {margin-top: 6em;}
-
-hr {
-    width: 33%;
-    margin-top: 2em;
-    margin-bottom: 2em;
-    margin-left: auto;
-    margin-right: auto;
-    clear: both;
-}
-
-hr.tb   {width: 45%;}
-hr.chap {width: 65%}
-hr.full {width: 95%;}
-
-hr.r5  {width: 5%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em;}
-hr.r65 {width: 65%; margin-top: 3em; margin-bottom: 3em;}
-
-
-table {
-    margin-left: auto;
-    margin-right: auto;
-}
-
-    .tdl      {text-align: left;}
-    .tdr      {text-align: right;}
-    .tdc      {text-align: center;}
-
-.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
-    /*  visibility: hidden;  */
-    position: absolute;
-    left: 92%;
-    font-size: smaller;
-    text-align: right;
-    color: #A9A9A9;
-} /* page numbers */
-
-.linenum { position: absolute;
-           left: 85%;
-           font-size: smaller;} /* content number */
-
-.blockquot {
-    margin-left: 5%;
-    margin-right: 10%;
-}
-
-a:link {color: #000099;}
-
-v:link {color: #000099;}
-
-.center   {text-align: center;}
-
-.right   {text-align: right;}
-
-.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
-
-
-
-.caption  {font-weight: bold;}
-
-/* Images */
-.figcenter   {
-    margin: auto;
-    text-align: center;
-}
-
-.figleft {
-    float: left;
-    clear: left;
-    margin-left: 0;
-    margin-bottom: 1em;
-    margin-top: 1em;
-    margin-right: 1em;
-    padding: 0;
-    text-align: center;
-}
-
-.figright {
-    float: right;
-    clear: right;
-    margin-left: 1em;
-    margin-bottom:
-    1em;
-    margin-top: 1em;
-    margin-right: 0;
-    padding: 0;
-    text-align: center;
-}
-
-/* Footnotes */
-.footnotes        {border: dashed 1px;}
-
-.footnote         {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}
-
-.footnote .label  {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;}
-
-.fnanchor {
-    vertical-align: super;
-    font-size: .8em;
-    text-decoration:
-    none;
-}
-
-
-/* Transcriber's notes */
-.transnote {background-color: #E6E6FA;
-    color: black;
-     font-size:smaller;
-     padding:0.5em;
-     margin-bottom:5em;
-     font-family:sans-serif, serif; }
-    </style>
-  </head>
-<body>
-
-
-<pre>
-
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's
-Philosophy, by William Wallace and G. W. F. Hegel
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-Title: Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy
-       and Especially of his Logic
-
-Author: William Wallace
-        G. W. F. Hegel
-
-Release Date: June 27, 2017 [EBook #54992]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROLEGOMENA--STUDY OF HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Produced and Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature
-(online soon in an extended version, also linking to free
-sources for education worldwide ... MOOC's, educational
-materials,...) Images generously made available by the
-Internet Archive.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
-<div class="figcenter" style="width: 500px;">
-<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="500" alt="" />
-</div>
-<h1>PROLEGOMENA</h1>
-
-<h3>TO THE STUDY OF</h3>
-
-<h1>HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY</h1>
-
-<h4>AND</h4>
-
-<h4><i>ESPECIALLY OF HIS LOGIC</i></h4>
-
-<h3>BY</h3>
-
-<h2>WILLIAM WALLACE</h2>
-
-<h4>M.A., LL.D.</h4>
-
-<h4>FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE</h4>
-
-<h4>AND WHYTE'S PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD</h4>
-
-<h4>SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND AUGMENTED</h4>
-
-<h5>OXFORD</h5>
-
-<h5>AT THE CLARENDON PRESS</h5>
-
-<h5>1894</h5>
-
-
-
-<hr class="full" />
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">IN REMEMBRANCE OF<br />
-<span style="font-size: 1.2em;">B. JOWETT</span><br />
-<span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LATE REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK</span><br />
-<span style="font-size: 0.8em;">AND</span><br />
-<span style="font-size: 0.8em;">MASTER OF BALLIOL COLLEGE</span><br />
-<span style="font-size: 0.8em;">OXFORD</span></p>
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<h4><a name="PREFACE" id="PREFACE">PREFACE</a></h4>
-
-
-<p>The present volume of Prolegomena completes the second edition of my
-<span style="font-size: 0.8em;">LOGIC OF HEGEL</span> which originally appeared in 1874. The translation,
-which was issued as a separate volume in the autumn of 1892, had been
-subjected to revision throughout: such faults as I could detect had
-been amended, and many changes made in the form of expression with the
-hope of rendering the interpretation clearer and more adequate. But,
-with a subject so abstruse and complicated as Hegel's Logic, and a
-style so abrupt and condensed as that adopted in his <i>Encyclopaedia</i>,
-a satisfactory translation can hardly fall within the range of
-possibilities. Only the enthusiasm of youth could have thrown itself
-upon such an enterprise; and later years have but to do what they may
-to fulfil the obligations of a task whose difficulties have come to
-seem nearly insuperable. The translation volume was introduced by a
-sketch of the growth of the <i>Encyclopaedia</i> through the three editions
-published in its author's lifetime: and an appendix of notes supplied
-some literary and historical elucidations of the text, with quotations
-bearing on the philosophical development between Kant and Hegel.</p>
-
-<p>The Prolegomena, which have grown to more than twice their original
-extent, are two-thirds of them new matter. The lapse of twenty years
-could not but involve a change in the writer's attitude, at least in
-details, towards both facts and problems. The general purpose of the
-work, however, still remains the same, to supply an introduction to the
-study of Hegel, especially his <i>Logic,</i> and to philosophy in general.
-But, in the work of altering and inserting, I can hardly imagine that
-I have succeeded in adjusting the additions to the older work with
-that artful juncture which would simulate the continuity of organic
-growth. To perform that feat would require a master who surveyed from
-an imperial outlook the whole system of Hegelianism in its history
-and meaning; and I at least do not profess such a mastery. Probably
-therefore a critical review will discern inequalities in the ground,
-and even discrepancies in the statement, of the several chapters. To
-remove these strains of inconsistency would in any case have been a
-work of time and trouble: and, after all, mere differences in depth
-or breadth of view may have their uses. The writer cannot always
-compel the reader to understand him, as he himself has not always
-the same faculty to penetrate and comprehend the problems he deals
-with. In these arduous paths of research it may well happen that the
-clearest and truest perceptions are not always those which communicate
-themselves with fullest persuasion and gift of insight. Schopenhauer
-has somewhere compared the structure of his philosophical work to the
-hundred-gated Thebes: so many, he says, are the points of access it
-offers for the pilgrims after truth to reach its central dogma. So&mdash;if
-one may parallel little things with his adventurous quest&mdash;even the
-less speculative chapters, and the less consecutive discourse, of
-these Prolegomena may prove helpful to some individual mood or phase
-of mind. If&mdash;as I suspect&mdash;the Second Book should elicit the complaint
-that the reader has been kept wandering too long and too deviously in
-the <i>Porches of Philosophy</i>, I will hope that sometimes in the course
-of these rovings he may come across a wicket-gate where he can enter,
-and&mdash;which is the main thing&mdash;gather truth fresh and fruitful for
-himself.</p>
-
-<p>Fourteen chapters, viz. II, XXIV, and the group from VII to XVIII
-inclusive, are in this edition almost entirely new. Three chapters of
-the first edition, numbered XIX, XXII, XXIII, have been dropped. For
-the rest, Chaps. III-VI in the present correspond to Chaps. II-V in
-the first edition: Chap. XIX to parts of VII, VIII: Chaps. XX-XXIII to
-Chaps. IX-XII: Chaps. XXV-XXX to Chaps. XIII-XVIII: and Chaps. XXXI,
-XXXII to Chaps. XX, XXI. But some of those nominally retained have been
-largely rewritten.</p>
-
-<p>The new chapters present, amongst other things, a synopsis of the
-progress of thought in Germany during the half-century which is
-bisected by the year 1800, with some indication of the general
-conditions of the intellectual world, and with some reference to the
-interconnexion of speculation and actuality. Jacobi and Herder, Kant,
-Fichte, and Schelling have been especially brought under succinct
-review. In the first edition I did Kant less than justice. I have now,
-so far as my limits allowed, tried to rectify the impression; and even
-more perhaps, by a clear palinode, to tender my apology for the meagre
-and somewhat inappreciative notice I gave to the great names of Fichte
-and Schelling. For like reasons, and from a growing perception how
-much post-Kantian thought owed to the pre-Kantian thinkers, Spinoza
-and Leibniz have been partly brought within my range. If, furthermore,
-I may seem to have transgressed the due amount of allusions and
-comparisons drawn from Plato and Aristotle, Bacon and Mill, the excuse
-must be sought in that fixture of philosophical horizon which can
-hardly but creep on after a quarter of a century spent in teaching
-philosophy under the customs and ordinances of the Oxford School of
-Classical Philology.</p>
-
-<p>It would be to mistake the scope of this survey to seek in it a
-history of the philosophers of the period I have named. They have
-been presented, not in and for themselves, but as <i>momenta</i> or
-constituent! factors in producing Hegel's conception of the aim and
-method of philosophy. To do this it was necessary to lay stress on
-their inner purport and implications: to treat the individual thinker
-in subordination to the general movement of ideas: to give, as far as
-was possible, a constructive conception of them rather than an analysis
-and chronicle. Yet as the picture had to be done, so to say, with a few
-vigorous touches, and made characteristic rather than descriptive, it
-cannot have that fairness and completeness which only patient study of
-every feature and untiring experiment in reconstruction can enable even
-the artist to produce. I may have seemed to confine the environment
-too exclusively to continental thinkers: but this is not, I think,
-due to any anti-patriotic bias. English (by which term, I may explain
-to my countrymen, I mean English-writing) thought, if it has its own
-intrinsic value, has after all been only an occasional influence,
-of suggestion and modification, in Germany. It is not therefore an
-integral portion of my theme. Even in Kant's case, too much may be made
-of the stimulus he received from Hume.</p>
-
-<p>Even twenty years ago, my translation could hardly be described
-literally as a voice crying in the wilderness. But since that time
-there has been a considerable out-put of history, translation, and
-criticism referring to the great age of German philosophy, and a
-comparatively numerous group of writers, more or less familiar with
-the aims and principles of that period, have treated various parts
-of philosophy with notable independence and originality. To these
-writers it has sometimes been found convenient to give the title
-of Neo-Kantians, or Neo-Hegelians. The prefix suggests that they
-do not in all points reproduce the ideal or the caricature which
-vulgar tradition fancied, and perhaps still fancies, to be implied
-in German 'transcendentalism.' And that for the good reason that the
-springs of the movement lie in the natural and national revulsion of
-English habits of mind. Slowly, but at length, the storms of the great
-European revolution found their way to our intellectual world, and
-shook church and state, society and literature. The homeless spirit
-of the age had to reconsider the task of rebuilding its house of
-life. It may have been that some of the seekers, in the fervour of a
-first impression, spoke unadvisedly, as if salvation could and would
-come to English philosophy only by Kant and Hegel. Yet, there was a
-real foundation for the belief that the insularity&mdash;however necessary
-in its season, and however admirable in some of its results&mdash;which
-had secluded and narrowed the British mind since the middle of the
-eighteenth century, needed something deeper and stronger than French
-'ideology' to bring it abreast of the requirements of the age. Whatever
-may be the drawbacks of transcendentalism, they are virtues when set
-beside the vulgar ideals of enlightenment by superficialisation. Mill
-has well pointed out how the spirit of Coleridge was for the higher
-intellectual life a needful complement to the spirit of Bentham. Yet
-the spirit of Coleridge had but caught some of the side-lights and
-romantic illuminations: it had not dared to face the central sun either
-in literature or philosophy. The scholar who has given us excellent
-versions of Fichte's lighter works, those who have translated and
-expounded Kant, and the great author who opened German literature
-to the British public, have brought us nearer the higher teaching
-of Germany. In Germany itself it has always been the possession
-only of the few. Even at the height of the classical period there
-were litterateurs who vended thousands of their books for Goethe's
-hundreds, and the great philosophers had ten opponents to one follower
-even amongst the teachers of their day. Yet Goethe and not Kotzebue
-gave the permanent law to literature; Hegel, and not Krug or Fries,
-has influenced philosophy. To have had the resolution to learn in
-this school is the merit of 'Neo-Hegelianism.' It has probably not
-found Kant free from puzzles and contradictions, or Hegel always
-intelligible. But the example of the Germans has served to widen and
-deepen our ideas of philosophy: to make us think more highly of its
-function, and to realise that it is essentially science, and the
-science of supreme reality. And it has at least familiarised many with
-the heresy that dilettantism and occasional fits of speculativeness are
-worth as little in philosophy as elsewhere. To have striven for dignity
-in its scope, and scientific security in its method, is something. If
-the Neo-Hegelian has not given philosophy a settled language, it may
-be urged that a philosophical language cannot be created by the easy
-device of inventing a few Hellenistic-seeming vocables.</p>
-
-<p>I could have wished to make these volumes a worthier contribution
-to the work whereby these and other writers have recently enriched
-our island philosophy. Not least because of the honoured name I have
-ventured to write on the dedication-page. If, as Epicurus said, we
-should above all be grateful to the past, the first meed is from the
-scholar due to the teachers of earlier years, and not least those who
-have now entered into their rest. I do not forget what I, and others,
-owed to T. H. Green, my predecessor in the Chair of Moral Philosophy;
-that example of high-souled devotion to truth, and of earnest and
-intrepid thinking on the deep things of eternity. But at this season
-the memory of my Oxford tutor and friend is naturally most prominent.
-The late Master of Balliol College was more than a mere scholar or
-a mere philosopher. He seemed so idealist and yet so practical: so
-realist and yet so full of high ideals: so delicately kind and yet
-so severely reasonable. You felt he saw life more steadily and saw
-it more whole than others: as one reality in which religion and
-philosophy, art and business, the sciences and theology, were severally
-but elements and aspects. To the amateurs of novelty, to the slaves
-of specialisation, to the devotees of any narrow way, such largeness
-might, with the impatience natural to limited minds, have seemed
-indifference. So must appear those who on higher planes hear all the
-parts in the harmony of humanity, and with the justice of a wise love
-maintain an intellectual <i>Sôprosyné</i>. On his pupils this secret power
-of an other-world serenity laid an irresistible spell, and bore in upon
-them the conviction that beyond scholarship and logic there was the
-fuller truth of life and the all-embracing duty of doing their best to
-fulfil the amplest requirements of their place.</p>
-
-<p>In earlier days Jowett had been keenly interested in German philosophy,
-and had made a version (most of which was still extant in 1868) of the
-Logic I have translated. But Greek literature, and above all Plato,
-drew him to more congenial fields. It was on his suggestion,&mdash;or shall
-I say injunction&mdash;at that date, that the work I had casually begun was
-some years later prosecuted to completion. It was his words, again, two
-years ago, that bade me spare no labour in the work of revision.</p>
-
-<p style="font-size: 0.8em;">OXFORD,</p>
-
-<p><i>December</i>, 1893.</p>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<h4><a name="FROM_THE_PREFACE_TO_THE_FIRST_EDITION" id="FROM_THE_PREFACE_TO_THE_FIRST_EDITION">FROM THE PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION</a></h4>
-
-
-<p>The 'Logic of Hegel' is a name which may be given to two separate
-books. One of these is the 'Science of Logic' (Wissenschaft der Logik),
-first published in three volumes (1812-1816), while its author was
-schoolmaster at Nüremberg. A second edition was on its way, when Hegel
-was suddenly cut off, after revising the first volume only. In the
-'Secret of Hegel,' the earlier part of this Logic has been translated
-by Dr. Hutchison Stirling, with whose name German philosophy is chiefly
-associated in this country.</p>
-
-<p>The other Logic, of which the present work is a translation, forms the
-First Part in the 'Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences.' The
-first edition of the Encyclopaedia appeared at Heidelberg in 1817; the
-second in 1827; and the third in 1830. It is well to bear in mind that
-these dates take us back forty or fifty years, to a time when modern
-science and Inductive Logic had yet to win their laurels, and when the
-world was in many ways different from what it is now. The earliest
-edition of the Encyclopaedia contained the pith of the system. The
-subsequent editions brought some new materials, mainly intended to
-smooth over and explain the transitions between the various sections,
-and to answer the objections of critics. The work contained a synopsis
-of philosophy in the form of paragraphs, and was to be supplemented by
-the <i>viva voce</i> remarks of the lecturer.</p>
-
-<p>The present volume is translated from the edition of 1843, forming the
-Sixth Volume in Hegel's Collected Works. It consists of two nearly
-equal portions. One halt here printed in more open type, contains
-Hegel's Encyclopaedia, with all the author's own additions. The first
-paragraph under each number marks the earliest and simplest statement
-of the first edition. The other half, here printed in closer type, is
-made up of the notes taken in lecture by the editor (Henning) and by
-Professors Hotho and Michelet. These notes for the most part connect
-the several sections, rather than explain their statements. Their
-genuineness is vouched for by their being almost verbally the same with
-other parts of Hegel's own writings.</p>
-
-<p>The translation has tried to keep as closely as possible to the
-meaning, without always adhering very rigorously to the words of the
-original. It is, however, much more literal in the later and systematic
-part, than in the earlier chapters.</p>
-
-<p>The Prolegomena which precede the translation have not been given in
-the hope or with the intention of expounding the Hegelian system. They
-merely seek to remove certain obstacles, and to render Hegel less
-tantalizingly hard to those who approach him for the first time. How
-far they will accomplish this, remains to be seen.</p>
-
-<p style="font-size: 0.8em;">OXFORD,</p>
-<p><i>September,</i> 1873.</p>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<h4><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</a></h4>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">BOOK I.</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">OUTLOOKS AND APPROACHES TO HEGEL.</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER I. <span class="linenum">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#Page_3">3</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">WHY HEGEL IS HARD TO UNDERSTAND</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER II. <span class="linenum">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#Page_14">14</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">WHY TRANSLATE HEGEL?</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER III. <span class="linenum">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#Page_21">21</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY AND HEGEL</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER IV. <span class="linenum">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#Page_30">30</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">HEGEL AND THEOLOGY</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER V. <span class="linenum">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#Page_37">37</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">PSEUDO-IDEALISM: JACOBI</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER VI. <span class="linenum">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#Page_57">57</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE SCIENCES AND PHILOSOPHY</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER VII. <span class="linenum">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#Page_72">72</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">ANTICIPATORY SKETCH OF THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER VIII. <span class="linenum">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#Page_88">88</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE SCEPTICAL DOUBT: HUME</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER IX. <span class="linenum">&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="#Page_98">98</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE ATTEMPT AT A CRITICAL SOLUTION: KANT</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER X. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_112">112</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE CRITICAL SOLUTION (<i>continued</i>): KANT</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XI. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_124">124</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">SYNTHESIS AND RECONSTRUCTION: FICHTE</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XII. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_136">136</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE BEGINNINGS OF SCHELLING</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XIII. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_147">147</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND IDEALISM</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XIV. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_163">163</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">TRANSITION TO HEGEL</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">BOOK II. </p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">IN THE PORCHES OF PHILOSOPHY.</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XV.<span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_175">175</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE TWO AGES OF REASON</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XVI. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_189">189</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE NEW IDEALISM</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XVII. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_202">202</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">METHODS, ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XVIII. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_230">230</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE RANGE OF PERSONALITY</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XIX. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_261">261</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">GENESIS IN MENTAL LIFE</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XX. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_277">277</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">GENERAL LAW OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XXI. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_292">292</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE: AND THE ORDINARY LOGIC</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XXII. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_307">307</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">FROM SENSE TO THOUGHT</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XXIII. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_323">323</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">FIGURATE OR REPRESENTATIVE THOUGHT</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XXIV. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_335">335</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">FROM SUBSTANCE TO SUBJECT</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XXV. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_348">348</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">REASON AND THE DIALECTIC OF UNDERSTANDING</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">BOOK III.</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">LOGICAL OUTLINES.</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XXVI. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_365">365</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THOUGHT PURE AND ENTIRE</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XXVII. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_383">383</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE: OR THE CATEGORIES</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XXVIII. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_394">394</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE THREE PARTS OF LOGIC</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XXIX. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_404">404</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE SEARCH FOR A FIRST PRINCIPLE</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XXX. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_415">415</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE LOGIC OF DESCRIPTION: NATURAL REALISM: BEING</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XXXI. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_440">440</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE LOGIC OF EXPLANATION AND REALISTIC METAPHYSICS:</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">ESSENCE</p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">CHAPTER XXXII. <span class="linenum"><a href="#Page_459">459</a></span></p>
-
-<p class="center" style="font-size: 0.8em;">THE LOGIC OF COMPREHENSION AND IDEALISM: THE NOTION</p>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<h5>Book I</h5>
-
-<h4><i>OUTLOOKS AND APPROACHES TO HEGEL</i></h4>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></p>
-<h5>CHAPTER I.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>WHY HEGEL IS HARD TO UNDERSTAND.</h4>
-
-
-<p>'The condemnation,' says Hegel, 'which a great man lays upon the
-world, is to force it to explain him<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>.' The greatness of Hegel, if
-it be measured by this standard, must be something far above common.
-Interpreters of his system have contradicted each other, almost as
-variously as the several commentators on the Bible. He is claimed
-as their head by widely different schools of thought, all of which
-appeal to him as the original source of their line of argument. The
-Right wing, and the Left, as well as the Centre, profess to be the
-genuine descendants of the prophet, and to inherit the mantle of his
-inspiration. If we believe one side, Hegel is only to be rightly
-appreciated when we divest his teaching of every shred of religion and
-orthodoxy which it retains. If we believe another class of expositors,
-he was the champion of Christianity.</p>
-
-<p>These contradictory views may be safely left to abolish each other. But
-diversity of opinion on such topics is neither unnatural, nor unusual.
-The meaning and the bearings of a great event, or a great character,
-or a great work of reasoned thought, will be estimated and explained
-in different ways, according to the effect<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span> they produce on different
-minds and different levels of life and society. Those effects, perhaps,
-will not present themselves in their true character, until long after
-the original excitement has passed away. To some minds, the chief value
-of the Hegelian system will lie in its vindication of the truths of
-natural and revealed religion, and in the agreement of the elaborate
-reasonings of the philosopher with the simple aspirations of mankind
-towards higher things. To others that system will have most interest
-as a philosophical history of thought,&mdash;an exposition of that organic
-development of reason, which underlies and constitutes all the varied
-and complex movement of the world. To a third class, again, it may seem
-at best an instrument or method of investigation, stating the true
-law by which knowledge proceeds in its endeavour to comprehend and
-assimilate existing nature.</p>
-
-<p>While these various meanings may be given to the Hegelian scheme
-of thought, the majority of the world either pronounce Hegel to be
-altogether unintelligible, or banish him to the limbo of <i>a priori</i>
-thinkers,&mdash;that bourne from which no philosopher returns. To argue with
-those who start from the latter conviction would be an ungrateful,
-and probably a superfluous task. Wisdom is justified, we may be sure,
-of all her children. But it may be possible to admit the existence of
-difficulties, and agree to some extent with those who complain that
-Hegel is impenetrable and hard as adamant. There can be no doubt of
-the forbidding aspect of the most prominent features in his system.
-He is hard in himself, and his readers find him hard. His style is
-not of the best, and to foreign eyes seems unequal. At times he is
-eloquent, stirring, and striking: again his turns are harsh, and his
-clauses tiresome to disentangle: and we are always coming upon that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
-childlikeness of literary manner, which English taste fancies it can
-detect in some of the greatest works of German genius; There are faults
-in Hegel, which obscure his meaning: but more obstacles are due to the
-nature of the work, and the pre-occupations of our minds. There is
-something in him which fascinates the thinker, and which inspires
-a sympathetic student with the vigour and the hopefulness of the
-spring-time.</p>
-
-<p>Perhaps the main hindrance in the way of a clear vision is the contrast
-which Hegelian philosophy offers to our ordinary habits of mind.
-Generally speaking, we rest contented if we can get tolerably near our
-object, and form a general picture of it to set before ourselves.
-It might almost be said that we have never thought of such a thing as
-being in earnest either with our words or with our thoughts. We get
-into a way of speaking with an uncertain latitude of meaning, and leave
-a good deal to the fellow-feeling of our hearers, who are expected to
-mend what is defective in our utterances. For most of us the place of
-exact thought is supplied by metaphors and pictures, by mental images,
-and figures generalised from the senses. And thus it happens that, when
-we come upon a single precise and definite statement, neither exceeding
-nor falling short in its meaning, we are thrown out of our reckoning.
-Our fancy and memory have nothing left for them to do: and, as fancy
-and memory make up the greater part of what we loosely call thinking,
-our powers of thought seem to be brought to a standstill. Those who
-crave for fluent reading, or prefer easy writing, something within
-the pale of our usual mental lines, are more likely to find what they
-seek in the ten partially correct and approximate ways commonly used
-to give expression to a truth, than in the one simple and accurate
-statement of the thought. We prefer a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span> familiar name, and an accustomed
-image, on which our faculties may work. But in the atmosphere of
-Hegelian thought, we feel very much as if we had been lifted into a
-vacuum, where we cannot breathe, and which is a fit habitation for
-unrecognisable ghosts only.</p>
-
-<p>Nor is this all. The traveller, as his train climbs the heights of
-Alps or Apennines, occasionally, after circling in grand curve upon
-the mountain-side, and perhaps after having been dragged mysterious
-distances through the gloom of a tunnel, finds himself as it would seem
-back at the same place as he looked forth from some minutes before; and
-it is only after a brief comparison that he realises he now commands a
-wider view from a point some hundreds of feet higher. So the student
-of Hegel&mdash;(and it might be the case with Fichte also) as the machinery
-of the dialectical method, with its thesis, antithesis, and synthesis,
-carries him round and round from term to term of thought&mdash;like the
-<i>Logos</i> and the Spirit, which blow us whithersoever they list&mdash;begins
-to suffer from dizziness at the apprehension that he has been the
-victim of phantasmagoria and has not really moved at all. It is only
-later&mdash;if ever&mdash;that he recognises that the scene, though similar,
-is yet not altogether the same. It is only later&mdash;if ever&mdash;that he
-understands that the path of philosophy is no wandering from land to
-land more remote in search of a lost Absolute, a vanished God; no
-setting forth of new and strange facts, of new Gods, but the revelation
-in fuller and fuller truth of the immanent reality in whom we live, and
-move, and have our being,&mdash;the manifestation in more closely-knit unity
-and more amply-detailed significance of that Infinite and Eternal,
-which was always present among us, though we saw but few, perhaps even
-no, traces of its power and glory.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>To read Hegel often reminds us of the process we have to go through
-in trying to answer a riddle. The terms of the problem to be solved
-are all given to us: the features of the object are, it may be, fully
-described: and yet somehow we cannot at once tell what it is all about,
-or add up the sum of which we have the several items. We are waiting
-to learn the subject of the proposition, of which all these statements
-may be regarded as the predicates. Something, we feel, has undoubtedly
-been said: but we are at a loss to see what it has been said about.
-Our mind wanders round from one familiar object to another, and tries
-them in succession to see whether any one satisfies the several points
-in the statement and includes them all. We grope here and there for
-something we are acquainted with, in which the bits of the description
-may cohere, and get a unity which they cannot give themselves. When
-once we have hit upon the right object, our troubles are at an end: and
-the empty medium is now peopled with a creature of our imagination. We
-have reached a fixed point in the range of our conception, around which
-the given features may cluster.</p>
-
-<p>All this trouble caused by the Hegelian theory of what philosophy
-involves&mdash;viz. really beginning at the beginning, is saved by a device
-well known to the several branches of Science. It is the way with them
-to assume that the student has a rough general image of the objects
-which they examine; and under the guidance, or with the help of this
-generalised image, they go on to explain and describe its outlines more
-completely. They start with an approximate conception, such as anybody
-may be supposed to have; and this they seek to render more definite.
-The geologist, for example, could scarcely teach geology', unless he
-could pre-suppose or produce some acquaintance on the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> part of his
-pupils with what Hume would have called an 'impression' or an 'idea' of
-the rocks and formations of which he has to treat. The geometer gives
-a short, and, as it were, popular explanation of the sense in which
-angles, circles, triangles, &amp;c. are to be understood: and then by
-the aid of these provisional definitions we come to a more scientific
-notion of the same terms. The third book of Euclid, for example, brings
-before us a clearer notion of what a circle is, than the nominal
-explanation in the list of definitions. By means of these temporary
-aids, or, as we may call them, leading-strings for the intellect, the
-progress of the ordinary scientific student is made tolerably easy.
-But v in philosophy, as it is found in Hegel, there is quite another
-way of working. The helps in question are absent: and until it be seen
-that they are not even needed, the Hegelian theory will remain a sealed
-mystery. For that which the first glance seemed to show as an enigma,
-is only the plain and unambiguous statement of thought. Instead of
-casting around for images and accustomed names, we have only to accept
-the several terms and articles in the development of thought as they
-present themselves. These terms merely require to be apprehended. They
-stand in no immediate need of illustration from our experience. What we
-have to bring to the work, is patience, self-restraint, the sacrifice
-of our cherished habits of mind, the surrender of the natural wish to
-see at once what it all comes to, what it is good for, how it squares
-with other convictions. As Bacon reminded his age, Into the kingdom
-of philosophy, as into the kingdom of heaven, none can enter, <i>nisi
-sub persona infantis</i>: i. e. unless he at least steadfastly resolve to
-renounce that world which lieth in the Evil.</p>
-
-<p>Ordinary knowledge consists in referring a new object<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> to a class of
-objects, that is to say, to a generalised image with which we are
-already acquainted. It is not so much cognition as re-cognition.
-'"What is the truth?"' asked Lady Chettam of Mrs. Cadwallader in
-<i>Middle-march</i>. "The truth? he is as bad as the wrong physic&mdash;nasty to
-take, and sure to disagree." "There could not be anything worse than
-that," said Lady Chettam, with so vivid a conception of the physic
-that she seemed to have learned something exact about Mr. Casaubon's
-'disadvantages.' Once we have referred the new individual to a familiar
-category or a convenient metaphor, once we have given it a name, and
-introduced it into the society of our mental drawing-room, we are
-satisfied. We have put a fresh object in its appropriate drawer in
-the cabinet of our ideas: and hence, with the pride of a collector,
-we can calmly call it our own. But such acquaintance, proceeding from
-a mingling of memory and naming, is not the same thing as knowledge
-in the strict sense of the term.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> 'What is he?' 'Do you know him?'
-These are our questions: and we are satisfied when we learn his name
-and his calling. We may never have penetrated into the inner nature of
-those objects, with whose <i>tout ensemble,</i> or rough outlines, we are
-so much at home, that we fancy ourselves thoroughly cognisant of them.
-Classifications are only the first steps in science: and we do not
-understand a thought because we can view it under the guise of some of
-its illustrations.</p>
-
-<p>In the case of the English reader of Hegel some peculiar hindrances
-spring from the foreign language. In strong contrast to most of the
-well-known German philosophers, he may be said to write in the popular
-and national dialect of his country. Of course there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> are tones and
-shades of meaning given to his words by the general context of his
-system. But upon the whole he did what he promised to J. H. Voss&mdash;the
-translator of Homer, and the poet of the <i>Luise,</i> in a letter written
-from Jena in 1805. He there says of his projects: 'Luther has made the
-Bible, and you have made Homer speak German. No greater gift than this
-could be given to the nation. So long as a nation is not acquainted
-with a noble work in its own language, it is still barbarian, and does
-not regard the work as its own. Forget these two examples, and I may
-describe my own efforts as an attempt to teach philosophy to speak in
-German.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a></p>
-
-<p>Yet, in this matter of nationalising or Germanising philosophy, he only
-carried a step further what Wolff and even Kant had begun; just as, on
-the other hand, he falls a long way short of what K. C. F. Krause, his
-contemporary, attempted in the same direction. Such an attempt, by its
-very nature, could never command a popular success. It runs directly
-counter to that tendency already noted, to escape the requirement to
-think and think for ourselves, by taking refuge under the shadow of
-a familiar term, which conceals in its apparent simplicity a great
-complex of ill-apprehended elements. The ordinary mind&mdash;and the more
-readily perhaps the more vulgar it is&mdash;flees for ease and safety to a
-cosmopolitan term, to the denationalised vocable of learned origin, to
-the language of general European culture. To such an ordinary mind&mdash;and
-up at least to a certain extent we all at times come under that
-heading&mdash;the effort to remain in the pellucid air of our unadulterated
-mother-tongue is too embarrassing to be long continued. Nor, after all,
-is it more than partially practicable. The well of German undefiled
-is apt to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> run dry. Hegel himself never shrinks when it is needful to
-appropriate non-Teutonic words, and is in the habit of employing the
-synonymous terms of native and of classical origin with a systematic
-difference of meaning <a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></p>
-
-<p>Hegel is unquestionably <i>par excellence</i> the philosopher of
-Germany,&mdash;German through and through. For philosophy, though the
-common birthright of full-grown reason in all ages and countries,
-must like other universal and cosmopolitan interests, such as the
-State, the Arts, or the Church, submit to the limits and peculiarities
-imposed upon it by the natural divisions of race and language. The
-subtler <i>nuances</i>, as well as the coarser differences of national
-speech, make themselves vividly felt in the systems of philosophy,
-and defy translation. If Greek philosophy cannot, no more can German
-philosophy be turned into a body of English thought by a stroke of the
-translator's pen. There is a difference in this matter, a difference
-at least in degree, between the special sciences and philosophy. The
-several sciences have a de-nationalised and cosmopolitan character,
-like the trades and industries of various nations; they are pretty much
-the same in one country and another, especially when we consider the
-details, and neglect the general subdivisions. But in the political
-body, in the works of high art, and in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> systems of philosophy, the
-whole of the character and temperament of the several peoples finds
-its expression, and stands distinctly marked, in a shape of its own.
-If the form of German polity be not transferable to this side of the
-Channel, no more will German philosophy. Direct utilisation for English
-purposes is out of the question: the circumstances are too different.
-But the study of the great works of foreign thought is not on that
-account useless, any more than the study of the great works of foreign
-statesmanship.</p>
-
-<p>Hegel did good service, at least, by freeing philosophy from that
-aspect of an imported luxury, which it usually had,&mdash;as if it were an
-exotic plant removed from the bright air of Greece into the melancholy
-mists of Western Europe. 'We have still,' he says, 'to break down the
-partition between the language of philosophy, and that of ordinary
-consciousness: we have to overcome the reluctance against thinking what
-we are familiar with<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>.' Philosophy must be brought face to face with
-ordinary life, so as to draw its strength from the actual and living
-present, and not from the memories or traditions of the past. It has
-to become the organised and completed thinking of what is contained
-blindly and vaguely in the various levels of popular intelligence, as
-these are more or less educated and ordered. It must grow naturally, as
-in ancient Greece, from the necessities of the social situation, and
-not be a product of artificial introduction and nurture: the revelation
-by the mind's own energy of an implicit truth, not the communication
-of a mystery sacramentally received. To suppose that a mere change of
-words can give this grace, would be absurd. Yet where the national life
-pulses strong, as that of Germany in those days did at first in letters
-and then in social reform, the dominant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> note will make itself felt
-even in the neutral regions of speculation. It was a step on the right
-road to banish a pompous and aristocratic dialect from philosophy, and
-to lead it back to those words and forms of speech, which are at least
-in silent harmony with the national feeling.</p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Hegel's <i>Leben</i> (Rosenkranz), p. 555.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Das Bekannte überhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist,
-nicht erkannt.' <i>Phenomenologie des Geistes,</i> p. 24.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Vermischte Schriften,</i> vol. ii. p. 474.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> e. g. <i>Dasein</i> and <i>Existenz: Wirklichkeit</i> and
-<i>Realität</i>: <i>Wesen</i> and <i>Substanz.</i> It is the same habit of curiously
-pondering over the tones and shades of language which leads him to
-something very like playing on words, and to etymologising, as one may
-call it, on unetymological principles: e. g. the play on <i>Mein</i> and
-<i>Meinung</i> (vol. ii. 32: cf. <i>Werke</i>, ii. 75): the literal rendering of
-<i>Erinnerung</i> (<i>Encycl.</i> §§ 234 and 450); and the abrupt transitions,
-as it would seem, from literal to figurative use of such a term as
-<i>Grund.</i> At the same time it is well not to be prosaically certain
-that a free play of thought does not follow the apparently fortuitous
-assonance of words.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Hegel's <i>Leben</i> (Rosenkranz), p. 553.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER II.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>WHY TRANSLATE HEGEL?</h4>
-
-
-<p>'But,' it is urged, 'though it be well to let the stream of foreign
-thought irrigate some of our philosophical pastures, though we should
-not for ever entrench ourselves in our insularity&mdash;why try to introduce
-Hegel, of all philosophers confessedly the most obscure? Why not be
-content with the study and the "exploitation" of Kant, whom Germans
-themselves still think so important as to expound him with endless
-comment and criticism, and who has at length found, after some
-skirmishes, a recognised place in the English philosophical curriculum?
-Why seek for more Teutonic thinking that can be found in Schopenhauer,
-and found there in a clear and noble style, luminous in the highest
-degree, and touching with no merely academic abstruseness the problems
-of life and death? Or&mdash;as that song is sweetest to men which is the
-newest to ring in their ears&mdash;why not render accessible to English
-readers the numerous and suggestive works of Eduard von Hartmann,
-and of Friedrich Nietzsche&mdash;not to mention Robert Hamerling<a name="FNanchor_1_6" id="FNanchor_1_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_6" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>? Or,
-finally, why not give us more and ever more translations of the works
-in logic, ethics, psychology, or metaphysics, of those many admirable
-teachers in the German universities, whom it would be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> invidious to
-try to single out by name? As for Hegel, his system, in the native
-land of the philosopher, is utterly discredited; its influence is
-extinct; it is dead as a door-nail. It is a pity to waste labour and
-distract attention, and that in English lands, where there are plenty
-of problems of our own to solve, by an attempt, which must perforce be
-futile, to resuscitate these defunctitudes?'</p>
-
-<p>That Hegelianism has been utterly discredited, in certain quarters, is
-no discovery reserved for these later days. But on this matter perhaps
-we may borrow an analogy. If the reader will be at the trouble to take
-up two English newspapers of opposite partisanship and compare the
-reports from their foreign correspondents on some question of home
-politics, he may, if a novice, be surprised to learn that according
-to one, the opinion e. g. of Vienna is wholly adverse to the measure,
-while, according to the other, that opinion entirely approves.</p>
-
-<p>It is no new thing to find Hegelianism in general obloquy. Even in 1830
-the Catholic philosopher and theologian Günther<a name="FNanchor_2_7" id="FNanchor_2_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_7" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>&mdash;an admirer, but by
-no means a follower of Hegel&mdash;wrote that, 'for some years it had been
-the fashion in learned Germany to look upon philosophy, and above all
-Hegelian philosophy, as a door-mat on which everybody cleaned his muddy
-boots before entering the sanctuary of politics and religion.' What
-is true as regards the alleged surcease of Hegelianism is that in the
-reaction which from various causes turned itself against philosophy in
-the two decennia after 1848, that system, as the most deeply committed
-part of the 'metaphysical' host, suffered most severely. History and
-science seemed to triumph along the whole line. But it may be perhaps
-permissible to remark that Hegelianism had predicted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> for itself the
-fate that it proved had fallen on all other philosophies. After the
-age of Idealism comes the turn of Realism. The Idea had to die&mdash;had to
-sink as a germ in the fields of nature and history before it could bear
-its fruit. Above all it is not to be expected that such a system, so
-ambitious in aim and concentrated in expression, could find immediate
-response and at once disclose all its meaning. His first disciples
-are not the&mdash;truest interpreters of any great teacher. What he saw
-in the one comprehensive glance of genius, his successors must often
-be content to gather by the slow accumulation of years, and perhaps
-centuries, of experience. It is not to Theophrastus that we go for
-the truest and fullest conception of Aristotelianism; nor is Plato to
-be measured by what his immediate successors in the Academy managed
-to make out of him. It is now more than a century since Kant gave his
-lesson to the public, and we are still trying to get him focussed in a
-single view: it may be even longer till Hegel comes fully within the
-range of our historians of thought. Aristotelianism too had to wait
-centuries till it fully entered the consciousness even of the thinking
-world.</p>
-
-<p>It is to be said too that without Hegel it would be difficult to
-imagine what even teachers, like Lotze, who were very unlike him, would
-have had to say. It does not need a very wide soul, nor need one be a
-mere dilettantist eclectic, to find much of Schopenhauer's work far
-from incompatible with his great, and as some have said, complementary
-opposite. It is not indeed prudent as yet for a writer in Germany who
-wishes to catch the general ear to affix too openly a profession of
-Hegelian principles, and he will do well to ward off suspicion by some
-disparaging remarks on the fantastic methods, the overfondness for
-system, the contempt for common sense and scientific results which,
-as he declares, vitiate all<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> the speculations of the period from 1794
-to 1830. But under the names of Spinoza and of Leibniz the leaven of
-Hegelian principles has been at work: and if the Philistines solve the
-riddle of the intellectual Samson, it is because they have ploughed
-with his heifer,&mdash;because his ideas are part of the modern stock of
-thought,&mdash;not from what they literally read in the great thinkers at
-the close of the seventeenth century. Last year saw appear in Germany
-two excellent treatises describable as popular introductions to
-philosophy<a name="FNanchor_3_8" id="FNanchor_3_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_8" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>, one by a thinker who has never disguised his obligations
-to Hegel, the other by a teacher in the University of Berlin who may in
-many ways be considered as essentially kindred with our general English
-style of thought. But both treatises are more allied in character to
-the spirit of the Hegelian attempts to comprehend man and God than to
-the formalistic and philological disquisitions which have for some
-years formed the staple of German professorial activity. And, lastly,
-the vigorous thinker, who a quarter of a century ago startled the
-reading public by the portent of a new metaphysic which should be the
-synthesis of Schelling and Schopenhauer, has lately informed us<a name="FNanchor_4_9" id="FNanchor_4_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_9" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> that
-his affinity to Hegel is, taken all in all, greater than his affinity
-to any other philosopher'; and that that affinity extends to all that
-in Hegel has essential and permanent value.</p>
-
-<p>But it is not on Eduard von Hartmann's commendation that we need rest
-our estimate of Hegelianism. We shall rather say that, till more of
-Hegel has been assimilated, he must still block the way. Things have
-altered greatly in the last twenty years, it is true; and ideas of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>
-more or less Hegelian origin have taken their place in the common
-stock of philosophic commodities. But it will probably be admitted by
-those best qualified to speak on the subject, that the shower has not
-as yet penetrated very deeply into the case-hardened soil, still less
-saturated it in the measure most likely to cause fruitful shoots to
-grow forth. We have to go back to Hegel in the same spirit as we go to
-Kant, and, for that matter, to Plato or Descartes: or, as the moderns
-may go back&mdash;to borrow from another sphere&mdash;to Dante or Shakespeare.
-We do not want the modern poet to resuscitate the style and matter of
-<i>King Lear</i> or of the <i>Inferno.</i> Yet as the Greek tragedian steeped his
-soul in the language and the legend of Homeric epic, as Dante nurtured
-his spirit on the noble melodies of Mantua's poet; so philosophy, if it
-is to go forth strong and effective, must mould into its own substance
-the living thought of former times. It would be as absurd, and as
-impossible to be literally and simply a Hegelian,&mdash;if that means one
-for whom Hegel sums up all philosophy and all truth&mdash;as it is to be at
-the present day in the literal sense a Platonist or an Aristotelian.
-The world may be slow, the world of opinion and thought may linger: <i>e
-pur si muove.</i> We too have our own problems&mdash;the same, no doubt, in a
-sense, from age to age, and yet infinitely varying and never in two
-ages alike. New stars have appeared on the spiritual sky; and whether
-they have in them the eternal light or only the flash and glare of a
-passing meteor, they alter the aspects of the night in which we are
-still waiting for the dawn.</p>
-
-<p>A new language, born of new relations of ideas, or of new ideas, is
-perforce for our generation the vehicle of all utterances, and we
-cannot again speak the dialect, however imposing or however quaint, of
-a vanished day.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>And for that reason there must always be a new philosophy, couched
-in the language of the age, sympathetic with its hopes and fears,
-conscious of its beliefs, more or less sensible of its problems&mdash;as
-indeed we may be confident there always will be. But, perhaps, the
-warrior in that battle against illusion and prejudice, against the
-sloth which takes things as they are and the poorness of spirit
-which is satisfied with first appearances, will not do wisely to
-disdain the past. He will not indeed equip himself with rusty swords
-and clumsy artillery from the old arsenals. But he will not disdain
-the lessons of the past,&mdash;its methods and principles of tactics and
-strategy. Recognising perhaps some defects and inequalities in the
-methods and aims of thought most familiar to him and current in his
-vicinity, he may go abroad for other samples, even though they be not
-in all respects worth his adoption. And so without taking Hegel as
-omniscient, or pledging himself to every word of the master, he may
-think from his own experience that there is much in the system that
-will be helpful, when duly estimated and assimilated, to others. There
-is&mdash;and few can be so bigoted<i></i> or so positive-minded as to regret
-it&mdash;there is unquestionably a growing interest in English-speaking
-countries in what may be roughly called philosophy&mdash;the attempt,
-unprejudiced by political, scientific, or ecclesiastical dogma, to
-solve the questions as to what the world really is, and what man's
-place and function is. 'The burthen of the mystery, the heavy and the
-weary weight of all this unintelligible world' is felt&mdash;felt widely
-and sometimes felt deeply. To the direct lightening of that burthen
-and that mystery it is the privilege of our profoundest thinkers and
-our far-seeing poets and artists to contribute. To the translator of
-Hegel there falls the humbler task of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> making accessible, if it may be,
-something of one of the later attempts at a solution of the enigma of
-life and existence,&mdash;an attempt which for a time dazzled some of the
-keenest intellects of its age, and which has at least impressed many
-others with the conviction, born of momentary flashes from it of vast
-illuminant power, that&mdash;<i>si sic omnia</i>&mdash;there was here concealed a key
-to many puzzles, and a guard against many illusions likely to beset the
-inquirer after truth.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_6" id="Footnote_1_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_6"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> A book by V. Knauer published last year (<i>Hauptprobleme
-der Philosophie</i>), a series of popular lectures, gives one-sixth of its
-space to the 'Atomistic of Will' by the Austrian poet Hamerling.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_7" id="Footnote_2_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_7"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Hegel's <i>Briefe</i>, ii. 349.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_8" id="Footnote_3_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_8"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> J. Volkelt, <i>Vorträge zur Einführung in die Philosophie
-der Gegenwart</i> (München 1892): F. Paulsen, <i>Einleitung in die
-Philosophie</i> (Berlin 1892).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_9" id="Footnote_4_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_9"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> E. v. Hartmann, <i>Kritische Wanderungen</i>, p. 74.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER III.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY AND HEGEL.</h4>
-
-
-<p>Although we need not take too seriously Hegel's remark (vol. ii. p.
-13) on the English conception of philosophy, it may be admitted that,
-by the dominant school of English thought, philosophy, taken in the
-wide sense it has predominantly born abroad, was, not so very long
-ago, all but entirely ignored. Causes of various kinds had turned the
-energy of the English mind into other directions, not less essential to
-the common welfare. Practical needs and an established social system
-helped&mdash;to bind down studies to definite and particular objects, and to
-exclude what seemed vague and general investigations with no immediate
-bearing on the business of life. Hence philosophy in England could
-hardly exist except when it was reduced to the level of a special
-branch of science, or when it could be used as a receptacle for the
-principles and methods common to all the sciences. The general term
-was often used to denote the wisdom of this world, or the practical
-exhibition of self-control in life and action. For those researches,
-which are directed to the objects once considered proper to philosophy,
-the more definite and characteristic term came to be Mental and Moral
-Science.</p>
-
-<p>The old name was in certain circles restricted to denote the vague and
-irregular speculations of those thinkers, who either lived before the
-rise of exact science, or who acted in defiance of its precepts and its
-example. One large and influential class of English<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> thinkers inclined
-to sweep philosophy altogether away, as equivalent to metaphysics and
-obsolete forms of error; and upon the empty site thus obtained they
-sought to construct a psychological theory of mind, or they tried to
-arrange and codify those general remarks upon the general procedure
-of the sciences which are known under the name of Inductive Logic. A
-smaller, but not less vigorous, school of philosophy looked upon their
-business as an extension and rounding off of science into a complete
-unification of knowledge. The first is illustrated by the names of J.
-S. Mill and Mr. Bain: the second is the doctrine of Mr. Herbert Spencer.</p>
-
-<p>The encyclopaedic aggregate of biological, psychological, ethical
-and social investigation which Mr. Spencer pursues, under the
-general guidance of the formula of evolution by differentiation
-and integration, still proceeds on its course: but though its
-popularity&mdash;as such popularity goes&mdash;is vast and more than national,
-it does not and probably cannot find many imitators. Very differently
-stand matters with the movement in psychology and logic. Here
-the initiative has led to divergent and unexpected developments.
-Psychology, which at first was partly an ampler and a more progressive
-logic, a theory of the origin and nature of knowledge, partly a
-propaedeutic to the more technical logic and ethics, and pursued in
-a loosely introspective way, has gravitated more and more towards
-its experimental and physiological side, with occasional velleities
-to assume the abstractly-mathematical character of a psycho-physical
-science. Logic, on the other hand, has also changed its scope. Not
-content to be a mere tool of the sciences or a mere criterion for the
-estimation of evidence, it has in one direction grown into a systematic
-effort to become an epistemology&mdash;a system of the first principles of
-knowledge and reality&mdash;a metaphysic of science; and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> in another it has
-sought to realise the meaning of those old forms of inference which
-the logicians of half a century ago were inclined to pooh-pooh as
-obsolete. Most remarkable&mdash;and most novel of all&mdash;is the vast increase
-of interest and research in the problems of ethics and v of what is
-called the philosophy of religion&mdash;subjects which at that date were
-literally burning questions, apt to scorch the fingers of those who
-touched them. In all of this, but especially marked in some leading
-thinkers, the ruling feature is the critical&mdash;the sceptical, i. e. the
-eager, watchful, but self-restrained&mdash;attitude towards its themes. Ever
-driving on to find a deeper unity than shows on the surface, and to get
-at principles, the modern thinker&mdash;and in this we see the permanent
-and almost overwhelming influence of Kant upon him&mdash;recoils from the
-dogmatism of system, at the very moment it seems to be within his grasp.</p>
-
-<p>Thus the recent products of English thought have been, as Mr. Spencer
-has taught us to say, partly in the line of differentiation, partly
-of integration. At one moment it seems as if the ancient queen of the
-sciences sat like Hecuba, <i>exul, inops,</i> while her younger daughters
-enjoyed the freedom and progress of specialisation. The wood seems lost
-behind the trees. And at another, again, the centripetal force seems to
-preponderate: every department, logic, ethics, psychology, sociology,
-rapidly carries its students on and up to fundamental questions, if
-not to fundamental principles. Philosophy&mdash;the one and undivided
-truth and quest of truths&mdash;emerges fresh, vigorous, and as yet rather
-indeterminate, from the mass of detailed investigations. That the
-position is now altered from what it was in times when knowledge had
-fewer departments, is obvious. The task of the 'synoptic' mind&mdash;which
-Plato claims for the philosopher&mdash;grows increasingly difficult: but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
-that is hardly a reason for performing it in a more perfunctory way.
-It seems rather as if in such a crisis one of the great reconstructive
-systems of a preceding age might be in some measure helpful.</p>
-
-<p>If we consult history, it is at once clear that philosophy, or the
-pursuit of ultimate reality and permanent truth, went hand in hand with
-scientific researches into facts and their particular explanations.</p>
-
-<p>In their earlier stages the two tendencies of thought were scarcely
-distinguishable. The philosophers of Ionia and Magna Graecia were also
-the scientific pioneers of their time. Their fragmentary remains remind
-us at times of the modern theories of geology and biology,&mdash;at other
-times of the teachings of idealism. The same thing is comparatively
-true of the earlier philosophers of Modern Europe. The seventeenth
-and eighteenth centuries, in spite of Bacon and Newton, endeavoured
-to study the mental and moral life by a method which was a strange
-mixture of empiricism and metaphysics. In words, indeed, the thinkers
-from Descartes to Wolff duly emphasise, perhaps over-emphasise, the
-antithesis between the extended and the intellectual. But in practice
-their course is not so clear. Their mental philosophy is often only a
-preliminary <i>medicina mentis</i> to set the individual mind in good order
-for undertaking the various tasks awaiting a special research. They are
-really eager to get on to business, and only, as it were, with regret
-spend time in this clearance of mental faculty. And when they do deal
-with objects, the material and extended tends to become the dominant
-conception, the basis of reality. The human mind, that <i>nobilissima
-substantia</i>, is treated only as an aggregate, or a receptacle, of
-ideas, and the <i>mens</i>,&mdash;with them all nearly as with Spinoza,&mdash;is only
-an <i>idea corporis,</i> and that phrase not taken so<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> highly as Spinoza's
-perhaps should be taken. In the works of these thinkers, as of the
-pre-Socratics, there is one element which may be styled philosophical,
-and another element which maybe styled scientific,&mdash;if we use both
-words vaguely. But with Socrates in the ancient, and with Kant in the
-modern epoch of philosophy, an attempt was made to get the boundary
-between the two regions definitively drawn. The distinction was in the
-first place accompanied by something like turning the back upon science
-and popular conceptions. Socrates withdrew thought from disquisitions
-concerning the nature of all things, and fixed it upon man and
-the state of man. Kant left the broad fields of actually-attained
-knowledge, and inquired into the central principle on which the
-acquisition of science, the laws of human life, and the ideals of art
-and religion, were founded.</p>
-
-<p>The change thus begun was not unlike that which Copernicus effected in
-the theory of Astronomy. Human personality, either in the actualised
-forms of the State, or in the abstract shape of the Reason,&mdash;that
-intellectual liberty, which is a man's true world,&mdash;was, at least by
-implication, made the pivot around which the system of the sciences
-might turn. In the contest, which according to Reid prevails between
-Common Sense and Philosophy, the presumptions of the former have
-been distinctly reversed, and Kant, like Socrates, has shown that it
-is not the several items of fact, but the humanity, the moral law,
-the thought, which underlies these doctrines, which give the real
-resting-point and true centre of movement. But this negative attitude
-of philosophy to the sciences is only the beginning, needed to secure
-a standing-ground. In the ancient world Aristotle, and in the modern
-Hegel (as the inheritor of the labours of Fichte and Schelling),
-exhibit<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> the movement outwards to reconquer the universe, proceeding
-from that principle which Socrates and Kant had emphasised in its
-fundamental worth.</p>
-
-<p>Mr. Mill, in the closing chapter of his Logic, has briefly sketched
-the ideal of a science to which he gives the name of Teleology,
-corresponding in the ethical and practical sphere to a <i>Philosophia
-Prima</i>, or Metaphysics, in the theoretical. This ideal and ultimate
-court of appeal is to be valid in Morality, and also in Prudence,
-Policy and Taste. But the conception, although a desirable one, falls
-short of the work which Hegel assigns to philosophy. What he intended
-to accomplish with detail and regular evolution was not a system of
-principles in these departments of action only, but a theory which
-would give its proper place in our total Idea of reality to Art,
-Science, and Religion, to all the consciousness of ordinary life, and
-to the evolution of the physical universe. Philosophy ranges over
-the&mdash;whole field of actuality, or existing fact. Abstract principles
-are all very well in their way; but they are not philosophy. If the
-world in its historical and its present life develops into endless
-detail in regular lines, philosophy must equally develop the narrowness
-of its first principles into the plenitude of a System,&mdash;into what
-Hegel calls, the Idea. His point of view may be gathered from the
-following remarks in a review of Hamann, an erratic friend and
-fellow-citizen of Kant's.</p>
-
-<p>Hamann would not put himself to the trouble, which in an higher sense
-God undertook. The ancient philosophers have described God under the
-image of a round ball. But if that be His nature, God has unfolded it;
-and in the actual world He has opened the closed shell of truth into a
-system of Nature, into a State-system, a system of Law and Morality,
-into the system of the world's History. The shut fist has become
-an open<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> hand, the fingers of which reach out to lay hold of man's
-mind, and draw it to Himself. Nor is the human mind a self-involved
-intelligence, blindly moving within its own secret recesses. It is no
-mere feeling and groping about in a vacuum, but an intelligent system
-of rational organisation. Of that system Thought is the summit in point
-of form: and Thought maybe described as the capability of going beyond
-the mere surface of God's self-expansion,&mdash;or rather as the capability,
-by means of reflection upon it, of entering into it, and then when the
-entrance has been secured, of retracing in thought God's expansion of
-Himself. To take this trouble is the express duty and end of ends set
-before the thinking mind, ever since God laid aside His rolled-up form,
-and revealed Himself<a name="FNanchor_1_10" id="FNanchor_1_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_10" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>.'</p>
-
-<p>Enthusiastic admirers have often spoken as if the salvation of the time
-could only come from the Hegelian philosophy. 'Grasp the secret of
-Hegel,' they say, 'and you will find a cure for the delusions of your
-own mind, and the remedy which will set right the wrongs of the world.'
-These high claims to be a panacea were never made by Hegel himself.
-According to him, as according to Aristotle, philosophy <i>as such</i> can
-produce nothing new. Practical statesmen, and theoretical reformers,
-may do their best to correct the inequalities of their time. But the
-very terms in which Bacon scornfully depreciated one great concept of
-philosophy are to be accepted in their literal truth. Like a virgin
-consecrated to God, she bears no fruit<a name="FNanchor_2_11" id="FNanchor_2_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_11" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>. She represents the spirit
-of the world, resting, as it were, when one step in the progress has
-been accomplished, and surveying the advance which has been made.
-Philosophy is not,' says Fichte, 'even a means to <i>shape</i> life:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> for
-it lies in a totally different world, and what is to have an influence
-upon life must itself have sprung from life. Philosophy is only a means
-to the <i>knowledge</i> of life.' Nor has it the vocation to edify men, and
-take the place of religion on the higher levels of intellect. 'The
-philosopher,' Fichte boldly continues, 'has no God at all and can have
-no God: he has only a concept of the concept or of the Idea of God. It
-is only in life that there is God and religion: but the philosopher as
-such is not the whole complete man, and it is impossible for any one
-to be <i>only</i> a philosopher<a name="FNanchor_3_12" id="FNanchor_3_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_12" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>.' Philosophy does not profess to bring
-into being what ought to be, but is not yet. It sets up no mere ideals,
-which must wait for some future day in order to be realised. Enough
-for it if it show what the world <i>is,</i> if it were what it professes
-to be, and what in a way it must be, otherwise it could not be even
-what it is. The subject-matter of philosophy is that which is always
-realising and always realised&mdash;the world in its wholeness as it is and
-has been. It seeks to put before us, and embody in permanent outlines,
-the universal law of spiritual life and growth, and not the local,
-temporary, and individual acts of human will.</p>
-
-<p>Those who ask philosophy to construe, or to deduce <i>a priori</i> a
-single blade of grass, or a single act of a man, must not be grieved
-if their request sounds absurd and meets with no answer. The sphere
-of philosophy is the Universal. We may say, if we like, that it is
-retrospective. It is the spectator of all time and all existence: it
-is its duty to view things <i>sub specie aeternitatis</i>. To comprehend
-the universe of thought in all its formations and all its features, to
-reduce the solid structures, which mind has created, to fluidity and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>
-transparency in the pure medium of thought, to set free the fossilised
-intelligence which the great magician who wields the destinies of the
-world has hidden under the mask of Nature, of the Mind of man, of
-the works of Art, of the institutions of the State and the orders of
-Society, and of religious forms and creeds:&mdash;such is the complicated
-problem of philosophy. Its special work is to comprehend the world,
-not try to make it better. If it were the purpose of philosophy to
-reform and improve the existing state of things, it comes a little
-too late for such a task. 'As the thought of the world,' says Hegel,
-'it makes its first appearance at a time, when the actual fact has
-consummated its process of formation, and is now fully matured. This is
-the doctrine set forth by the notion of philosophy; but it is also the
-teaching of history. It is only when the actual world has reached its
-full fruition that the ideal rises to confront the reality, and builds
-up, in the shape of an intellectual realm, that same world grasped in
-its substantial being. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, some
-one shape of life has meanwhile grown old: and grey in grey, though
-it brings it into knowledge, cannot make it young again. The owl of
-Minerva does not start upon its flight, until the evening twilight has
-begun to fall<a name="FNanchor_4_13" id="FNanchor_4_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_13" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>.'</p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_10" id="Footnote_1_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_10"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Vermischte Schriften</i>, vol. ii. p. 87.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_11" id="Footnote_2_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_11"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>De Augm. Scient.</i> iii. 5.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_12" id="Footnote_3_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_12"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> The passages occur in some notes (written down by F. in
-reference to the charge of Atheism) published in his <i>Werke,</i> v. pp.
-342, 348.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_13" id="Footnote_4_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_13"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>Philosophie des Rechts</i>, p. 20 (<i>Werke,</i> viii).</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER IV.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>HEGEL AND THEOLOGY.</h4>
-
-
-<p>Even an incidental glance into Hegel's Logic cannot fail to discover
-the frequent recurrence of the name of God, and the discussion of
-matters not generally touched upon, unless in works bearing upon
-religion. There were two questions which seem to have had a certain
-fascination for Hegel. One of them, a rather unpromising problem,
-referred to the distances between the several planets in the solar
-system, and the law regulating these intervals<a name="FNanchor_1_14" id="FNanchor_1_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_14" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>. The other and more
-intimate problem turned upon the value of the proofs usually offered
-in support of the being of God. That God is the supreme certitude of
-the mind, the basis of all reality and knowledge, is what Hegel no more
-put in question, than did Descartes, Spinoza, or Locke. What he often
-repeated was that the <i>matter</i> in these proofs must be distinguished
-from the imperfect <i>manner</i> in which the arguers presented it.
-Again and again<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> in his Logic, as well as in other discussions more
-especially devoted to it, he examines this problem. His persistence
-in this direction might earn for him that title of 'Knight of the
-Holy Ghost,' by which Heine, in one of the delightful poems of his
-'Reisebilder,' describes himself to the maid of Klausthal in the Harz.
-The poet of Love and of Freedom had undoubted rights to rank among the
-sacred band: but so also had the philosopher. Like the Socrates whom
-Plato describes to us, he seems to feel that he has been commissioned
-to reveal the truth of God, and quicken men by an insight into the
-right wisdom. Nowhere in the modern period of philosophy has higher
-spirit breathed in the utterances of a thinker. The same theme is
-claimed as the common heritage of philosophy and religion. A letter
-to Duboc<a name="FNanchor_2_15" id="FNanchor_2_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_15" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>, the father of a modern German novelist, lets us see how
-important this aspect of his system was to Hegel himself. He had been
-asked to give a succinct explanation of his standing-ground: and his
-answer begins by pointing out that philosophy seeks to apprehend in
-reasoned knowledge the same truth which the religious mind has in its
-faith.</p>
-
-<p>Words like these may at first sight suggest the bold soaring of ancient
-speculation in the times of Plato and Aristotle, or even the theories
-of the medieval Schoolmen. They sound as if he proposed to do for the
-modern world, and in the full light of modern knowledge, what the
-Schoolmen tried to accomplish within the somewhat narrow conceptions
-of medieval Christianity and Greek logic. Still there is a difference
-between the two cases. While the Doctors of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> Church, in appearance
-at least, derived the form of exposition, and the matter of their
-systems, from two independent and apparently heterogeneous sources,
-the modern Scholastic of Hegel claims to be a harmonious unity, body
-finding soul, and soul giving itself body. And while the Hegelian
-system has the all-embracing and encyclopaedic character by which
-Scholastic science threw its arms around heaven and earth, it has also
-the untrammeled liberty of the Greek thinkers. Hegel, in short, shows
-the union of these two modes of speculation: free as the ancient, and
-comprehensive as the modern. His theory is the explication of God;
-but of God in the actuality and plenitude of the world, and not as a
-transcendent Being, such as an over-reverent philosophy has sometimes
-supposed him, in the solitude of a world beyond.</p>
-
-<p>The greatness of a philosophy is its power of comprehending facts.
-The most characteristic fact of modern times is Christianity. The
-general thought and action of the civilised world has been alternately
-fascinated and repelled, but always influenced, and to a high degree
-permeated, by the Christian theory of life, and still more by the
-faithful vision of that life displayed in the Son of Man. To pass that
-great cloud of witness and leave it on the other side, is to admit that
-your system is no key to the secret of the world,&mdash;even if we add, as
-some will prefer, of the world as it is and has been. And therefore
-the Hegelian system, if it is to be a philosophy at all, must be in
-this sense Christian. But it is neither a critic, nor an apologist of
-historical Christianity. The voice of philosophy is as that of the
-Jewish doctor of the Law: 'If this council or this work be of men,
-it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it,
-Philosophy examines what is, and not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> what, according to some opinions,
-ought to be. Such a point of view requires no discussion of the 'How'
-or the 'Why' of Christianity. It involves no inquiry into historical
-documents, or into the belief in miracles: for to it Christianity
-rests only incidentally on the evidence of history; and miracles, as
-vulgarly explained, can find no reception in a philosophical system.
-For it Christianity is 'absolute religion': religion i. e. which has
-fully become and realised all that religion meant to be. That religion
-has, of course, its historical side: it appeared at a definite epoch
-in the annals of our race: it revealed itself in a unique personality
-in a remarkable nation. And at an early period of his life Hegel had
-tried to gather up in one conception the traits of that august figure,
-in his life and speech and death. But, in the light of philosophy,
-this historical side shrivels up as comparatively unimportant. Not the
-personality, but the 'revelation of reason' through man's spirit: not
-the annals of a life once spent in serving God and men, but the words
-of the 'Eternal Gospel are henceforth the essence of Christianity.</p>
-
-<p>Thus the controlling and central conception of life and actuality,
-which is the final explanation of all that man thinks and does, has
-a twofold aspect. There is, as it were, a double Absolute&mdash;for under
-this name philosophy has what in religion corresponds to God. It is
-true that in the final form of his system the Absolute Spirit has three
-phases&mdash;each as it were passing on into and incorporated with the
-next&mdash;Art working out its implications till it appears as Religion,
-and Religion calling for its perfection in Philosophy. But in the
-<i>Phenomenology</i>, his first work, the religion of Art only intervenes
-as a grade from 'natural' religion to religion manifest or revealed;
-and in the first edition of the <i>Encyclopaedia</i> what is subsequently
-called Art is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> entitled the Religion of Art. It is in entire accordance
-with these indications when in the Lectures on Aesthetics<a name="FNanchor_3_16" id="FNanchor_3_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_16" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> it is
-said 'the true and original position of Art is to be the first-come
-immediate self-satisfaction of Absolute Spirit'; though in our days (it
-is added) 'its form has ceased to be the highest need of the spirit.'
-It is hardly too much then to say that, for Hegel, the Absolute has two
-phases, Religion and Philosophy.</p>
-
-<p>The Hegelian view presents itself most decisively, though perhaps
-with a little lecture-like over-insistance, in the Philosophy of
-Religion<a name="FNanchor_4_17" id="FNanchor_4_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_17" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>. 'The object of religion as of philosophy is the eternal
-truth in its very objectivity,&mdash;God and nothing but God,&mdash;and the
-"explication" of God. Philosophy is not a wisdom of the world, but
-cognition of the non-worldly: not a cognition of the external mass of
-empirical existence and life, but cognition of what is eternal, what
-is God, and what flows from His nature. For this nature must reveal
-and develop itself. Hence philosophy "explicates" itself only when
-it "explicates" religion; and in explicating itself it explicates
-religion.... Thus religion and philosophy coincide: in fact, philosophy
-is itself a divine service, is a religion: for it is the same
-renunciation of subjective fancies and opinions, and is engaged with
-God alone.'</p>
-
-<p>Again, it may be asked in what sense philosophy has to deal with God
-and with Truth. These two terms are often synonyms in Hegel. All the
-objects of science, all the terms of thought, all the forms of reality,
-lead out of themselves, and seek for a centre and resting-point. They
-are severally inadequate and partial, and they crave adequacy and
-completeness. They tend to organise themselves; to call out more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> and
-more distinctly the fuller reality which they presuppose,&mdash;which must
-have been, otherwise they could not have been: they reduce their first
-appearance of completeness to its due grade of inadequacy and bring out
-their complementary side, so as to constitute a system or universe; and
-in this tendency to a self-correcting unity consists their progress
-to truth. Their untruth lies in isolation and pretended independence
-or finality. This completed unity, in which all things receive their
-entireness and become adequate, is their Truth: and that Truth, as
-known in religious language, is God. Rightly or wrongly, God is thus
-interpreted in the Logic of Hegel.</p>
-
-<p>Such a position must seem very strange to one who is familiar only
-with the sober studies of English philosophy. In whatever else the
-leaders of the several schools in this country disagree, they are
-nearly all at one in banishing God and religion to a world beyond
-the present sublunary sphere, to an inscrutable region beyond the
-scope of scientific inquiry, where statements may be made at will,
-but where we have no power of verifying any statement whatever.
-This is the common doctrine of Spencer and Mansel, of Hamilton and
-Mill. Even those English thinkers, who show some anxiety to support
-what is at present called Theism, generally rest content with
-vindicating for the mind the vague perception of a Being beyond us,
-and differing from us incommensurably. God is to them a residual
-phenomenon, a marginal existence. Outside the realm of experience
-and knowledge there is not-nothing&mdash;a something&mdash;beyond definite
-circumscription: incalculable, and therefore an object, possibly of
-fear, possibly of hope: the reflection in the utter darkness of a great
-What-may-it-not-be? He is the Unknown Power, felt by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> what some of
-these writers call intuition, and others call experience. They do not
-however allow to knowledge any capacity of apprehending in detail the
-truths which belong to the kingdom of God. Now the whole teaching of
-Hegel is the overthrow of the limits thus set to religious thought. To
-him all thought, and all actuality when it is grasped by knowledge, is
-from man's side, an exaltation of the mind towards God: while, when
-regarded from the divine standing-point, it is the manifestation by God
-of His own nature in its infinite variety.</p>
-
-<p>It is only when we fix our eyes clearly on these general features in
-his speculation, that we can understand why <i>he</i> places the maturity
-of ancient philosophy in the time of Plotinus and Proclus. Not that
-these Neo-Platonists are, as thinkers, of power equal to their master
-of Athens. But, in the realm of the blind the one-eyed may be king. The
-later thinkers set their vision more distinctly and persistently on the
-land that is eternal&mdash;'on the further side of being,' to quote Plato's
-phrase. It is for the same reason Hegel gives so much attention to the
-religious or semi-religious theories of Jacob Böhme and of Jacobi,
-though these men were in many ways so unlike himself.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_14" id="Footnote_1_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_14"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Hegel's <i>Leben</i>, p. 155. It was in his dissertation
-<i>de Orbitis Planetarum,</i> that the notorious contretemps occurred,
-whereby, whilst the philosopher, leaning to a Pythagorean proportion,
-hinted&mdash;in a line&mdash;that it was unnecessary to expect a planet between
-Mars and Jupiter, astronomers in the same year discovered Ceres, the
-first-detected of the Planetoids. A good deal has been made out of
-this trifle; but it has not yet been shown that the corroboration was
-anything but the <i>luck</i> of the other hypothesis.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_15" id="Footnote_2_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_15"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Vermischte Schriften</i>, vol. ii. p. 520. Duboc was a
-retired hatter, of French origin, who had settled at Hamburg (Hegel's
-<i>Briefe</i>, ii. 76 seqq.).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_16" id="Footnote_3_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_16"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Werke</i>, x. I, p. 131.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_17" id="Footnote_4_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_17"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>Werke,</i> xi. p. 21.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER V.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>PSEUDO-IDEALISM: JACOBI.</h4>
-
-
-<p>It is hazardous to try to sum up the net result of a philosophy in
-a few paragraphs. Since Aristotle separated the pure 'energy' of
-philosophy from the activities which leave works made and deeds
-done behind them, it need scarcely be repeated that the result of a
-philosophical system is nothing palpable or tangible,&mdash;nothing on which
-you can put your finger, and say definitely: Here it is. The spirit of
-a philosophy always refuses to be incarcerated in a formula, however
-deftly you may try to charm it there. The statement of the principle
-or tendency of a philosophical system tells not what that system is,
-but what it is not. It marks off the position from contiguous points
-of view; and on that account never gets beyond the borderland, which
-separates that system from something else. The method and process of
-reasoning is as essential in knowledge, as the result to which it
-leads: and the method in this case is thoroughly bound up with the
-subject-matter. A mere analysis of the method, therefore, or a mere
-record of the purpose and outcome of the system, would be, the one as
-well as the other, a fruitless labour, and come to nothing but words.
-Thus any attempt to convey a glimpse of the truth in a few sentences
-and in large outlines seems foreclosed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> The theory of Hegel has an
-abhorrence of mere generalities, of abstractions with no life in them,
-and no growth out of them. His principle has to prove and verify itself
-to be true and adequate: and that verification fills up the whole
-circle of circles, of which philosophy is said to consist.</p>
-
-<p>It seems as if there were in Hegel two distinct habits of mind which
-the world&mdash;the outside observer&mdash;rarely sees except in separation.
-On one hand there is a sympathy with mystical and intuitional minds,
-with the upholders of immediate knowledge and of innate ideas, with
-those who find that science and demonstration rather tend to distract
-from the one thing needful&mdash;who would 'lie in Abraham's bosom all the
-year,'&mdash;those who would fain lay their grasp upon the whole before they
-have gone through the drudgery of details. On the other hand, there
-is within him a strongly 'rationalising' and non-visionary intellect,
-with a practical and realistic bent, and the full scientific spirit.
-Schelling, in an angry mood, could describe him as 'the quintessence
-of all that is prosaic, both outside and in<a name="FNanchor_1_18" id="FNanchor_1_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_18" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>.' Yet, seen from other
-points of view, Hegel has been accused of dreaminess, pietism, and
-mystical theology. His merging of the ordinary contrasts of thought
-in a completer truth, and what would popularly be described as his
-mixing up of religious with logical questions, and the general
-unfathomableness of his doctrine,&mdash;all seem to support such a charge.
-Yet all this is not inconsistent with a rough and incisive vigour
-of understanding, a plainness of reason, and a certain hardness of
-temperament. This philosopher is in many ways not distinguishable from
-the ordinary citizen, and there are not unfrequent moments when his
-wife hears him groan over the providence that condemned him to be a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span>
-philosopher<a name="FNanchor_2_19" id="FNanchor_2_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_19" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>. He is contemptuous towards all weakly sentimentalism,
-and almost brutal in his emphasis on the reasonableness of the actual
-and on the folly of dreaming the might-have-been; and keeps his
-household accounts as carefully as the average head of a family. And,
-perhaps, this convergence of two tendencies of thought may be noticed
-in the gradual maturing of his ideas. In the period of his 'Lehrjahre,'
-or apprenticeship, from 1793 to 1800, we can see the study of religion
-in the earlier part of that time at Bern succeeded by the study of
-politics and philosophy at Frankfort-on-the-Main.</p>
-
-<p>His purpose on the whole may be termed an attempt to combine breadth
-with depth, the intensity of the mystic who craves for union with
-Truth, with the extended range and explicitness of those who multiply
-knowledge. 'The depth of the mind is only so deep as its courage
-to expand and lose itself in its explication<a name="FNanchor_3_20" id="FNanchor_3_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_20" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>. It must prove its
-profundity by the ordered fullness of the knowledge which it has
-realised. The position and the work of Hegel will not be intelligible
-unless we keep in view both of these antagonistic points.</p>
-
-<p>The purpose of philosophy&mdash;as has been pointed out&mdash;is, for Hegel&mdash;to
-know God, which is to know things in their Truth&mdash;to see all things in
-God&mdash;to comprehend the world in its eternal significance. Supposing
-the purpose capable of being achieved, what method is open to its
-attainment? There is on one hand the method of ordinary science
-in dealing with its objects. These are <i>things,</i> found as it were
-projected into space before the observer, lying outside one another in
-<i>prima facie</i> independence,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> though connected (by a further finding)
-with each other by certain 'accidents' called qualities and relations.
-Among the objects of knowledge, there are included, by the somewhat
-naïve intellect that accepts tradition like a physical fact, certain
-'things' of a rather peculiar character. One of these is God: the
-others, which a historical criticism has subjoined, are the Soul and
-the World. And whatever may be said of the thinghood, reality, or
-existence of the World, there is no doubt that God and the Soul figure,
-and figure largely, in the consciousness of the human race as entities,
-differing probably in many respects from other things, but still
-possessed of certain fundamental features in common, and thus playing a
-part as distinct realities amongst other realities.</p>
-
-<p>Given such objects, it is natural for a reflecting mind to attempt
-to make out a science of God and a science of the Soul, just as of
-other 'things.' And to these, a system-loving philosopher might add a
-science of the world (Cosmology)<a name="FNanchor_4_21" id="FNanchor_4_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_21" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>. It was felt, indeed, that these
-objects were peculiar and unique. Thus, for example, as regards God,
-it was held necessary by the logician who saw tradition in its true
-light to prove His existence': and various arguments to that end were
-at different times devised. With regard to the human Soul, similarly,
-it was considered essential to establish its independent reality as a
-thing really separate from the bodily organism with which its phenomena
-were obviously connected,&mdash;to prove, in short, its substantial
-existence, and its emancipation from the bodily fate of dissolution and
-decay. With reference to the World, the problem was rather different:
-it was felt that the name suggested problems for thought rather than
-denoted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> reality. How can we predicate of the whole what is predicable
-of its parts? This or that may have a beginning and a cause, may have
-a limit and an end: but can the totality be presented under these
-aspects, without leading to self-contradiction? And the result of
-these questions in the case of 'Cosmology' was to shed in the long run
-similar doubts on 'Rational' Theology and 'Rational' Psychology.</p>
-
-<p>Practically this metaphysical science&mdash;which is so called as dealing
-with a province or provinces of being <i>beyond</i> the ordinary or natural
-<i>(physical)</i> realities&mdash;treated God and the Soul by the same terms
-(or <i>categories</i>) as it used in dealing with 'material' objects. God
-e. g. was a force, a cause, a being; so, too, was the Soul. The main
-butt of Kant's destructive <i>Criticism of pare Reason</i> is to challenge
-the justice of including God and the Soul among the objects of
-science,&mdash;among the things we can know as we may know plants or stars.
-To make an object of knowledge (in the strict sense), to make a thing,
-the prerequisite, Kant urges, is perception in space and time. Without
-a sensation&mdash;and that sensation, as it were, laid out in place and
-duration&mdash;an object of science is impossible. No mere demonstration
-will conjure it into existence. And with that requirement the old
-theology and psychology, which professed to expound the object-God and
-the object-soul, were ruled out-of-order in the list of sciences, and
-reduced to mere dialectical exercises. The circle of the sciences,
-therefore, does not lead beyond the conditioned,' beyond the regions
-of space and time. It has nothing to say of a 'first cause' or of an
-ultimate end.</p>
-
-<p>Such was the result that might fairly be read from Kant's <i>Criticism of
-pare Reason</i>,&mdash;especially if read without its supplementary sequels,
-and, above all, if read by those in whom feeling was stronger than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
-thought, or who were by nature more endowed with the craving for faith
-than with the mind of philosophy. Such a personality appeared in J.
-H. Jacobi, the younger brother of a poet not undistinguished in his
-day. Amid the duties of public office and the cares of business, he
-found time to study Spinoza, the English and Scotch moralists, and
-above all to follow with interest the development of Kant from the year
-1763 onwards. His house at Düsseldorf was the scene of many literary
-reunions, and Jacobi himself maintained familiar intercourse with
-the leaders of the literary and intellectual world, such as Lessing,
-Hamann, Goethe. His first considerable works were two novels, in
-letters,&mdash;Allwill, begun in a serial magazine in 1775, and Woldemar,
-begun in another magazine in 1777; both being issued as complete works
-in 1781. Both turn on a moral antithesis, and both leave the antithesis
-as they found it. <i>Here</i> pleads the advocate of the heart: 'it is the
-heart which alone and directly tells man what is good': 'virtue is a
-fundamental instinct of human nature': the true basis of morals is an
-immediate certainty; and the supreme standard is an 'ethical genius'
-which as it were discovered virtue and which still is a paramount
-authority in those exceptional situations in life when the 'grammar
-of virtue' fails to supply adequate rules, and where, therefore, the
-immediate voice of conscience must in a 'licence of sublime poesy<a name="FNanchor_5_22" id="FNanchor_5_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_22" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>'
-dare, as Burke says, to 'suspend its own rules in favour of its own
-principles.' <i>There</i>, on the other hand, is the champion of reason,
-who declares all this sentimentalism 'a veritable mysticism of
-antinomianism and a quietism of immorality<a name="FNanchor_6_23" id="FNanchor_6_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_23" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>': 'To humanity,' he says,
-'and to every man (every complete man) principles, and some system<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>
-of principles, are indispensable.' Woldemar concludes with the pair
-of mottoes: 'Whosoever trusts to his own heart is a fool,' and 'Trust
-love: it takes everything, but it gives everything.'</p>
-
-<p>In 1780 Jacobi had his historic conversation with Lessing at
-Wolfenbüttel<a name="FNanchor_7_24" id="FNanchor_7_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_24" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>. The talk turned on Spinoza. For many years the
-philosophy of Spinoza had seemed to vanish from the world. His name
-was only heard in a reference of obloquy, as if it were dangerous to
-be even suspected of infection with the taint of Atheism. But both
-Lessing and Jacobi had found him out. The former saw in him an ally in
-that struggle for higher light and wider views which he undertook in
-a spirit and with a scope hardly surmised by those he usually wrought
-with. Jacobi, on the contrary, saw in him personified the conjunction
-of all those irreligious tendencies which all philosophy in some degree
-exhibited: the tendency to veil or set aside God and personality. 'I
-believe,' says Jacobi, as he began the conversation 'in an intelligent
-personal cause of the world.' 'Then I am going,' replied Lessing, 'to
-hear something quite new': and he dryly put aside the other's rhapsody
-on the 'personal extra-mundane deity with the remark 'Words, my dear
-Jacobi, words.' Jacobi's work <i>Letters on the doctrine of Spinoza</i>
-(it appeared in 1785) was the beginning of a controversy in which
-Mendelssohn and Herder took part, and in which Goethe took an interest
-under Herders tutorship. To the exact philological study of Spinoza
-it did not contribute much: for the Spinoza whom Herder and Goethe
-saw as their spiritual forefather was transfigured in their thought
-to a figure to which Leibniz had almost an equal right to give his
-name. He upheld to them the symbol of the immanence of the divine in
-nature: he was the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> leader in the battle against 'philistine' deism and
-utilitarianism.</p>
-
-<p>With the Kantian criticism of the pseudo-science of theology Jacobi had
-in one way no fault to find. That reasoning by its demonstration cannot
-find out God, was to him an axiomatic belief. But the 'man of feeling'
-felt uneasy at the trenchant methods of the Königsberg man of logic.
-He seemed to see the world of men and things passing under Kant's
-manipulation into a mere collection of phenomena and ideas of the mind.
-Still more was he sensible to the loss of his God. That surrogate of an
-argument for theism which Kant seemed to offer in the implications of
-the Moral Law did not give what Jacobi wanted. Mere morality is a cold
-and mechanical principle&mdash;he thinks&mdash;compared with that infinite life
-and love which we deem we have in God. The son of man, he felt, was, in
-virtue of an indwelling genius of conscience, supreme over the moral
-law: how much more, then, the Absolute and Eternal on a higher grade of
-being than its mechanical regularities!</p>
-
-<p>If the way of reasoning will not carry us to the Absolute, still
-less (and that is whither Jacobi wishes to reach) to God, there must
-be another way: for something in him, which may be called Faith
-or Feeling, Spiritual Sense or Reason, proclaims itself certain
-of the reality both of God and Nature. There <i>is</i> an objective
-reality&mdash;outside and beyond him&mdash;yet somehow to be reached by a daring
-leap,&mdash;whereby, out of sheer force of will, he, shutting his eyes
-to the temporal and the mechanical, finds himself carried over the
-dividing gulf into the land of eternal life and love.</p>
-
-<p>'I appeal' he says in his latest utterances<a name="FNanchor_8_25" id="FNanchor_8_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_25" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> 'to an imperative, an
-invincible feeling as the first and underived ground of all philosophy
-and all religion,&mdash;to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> a feeling which lets man become aware of and
-alive to the fact that he has a sense for the supersensuous.' 'As it
-is religion which makes man man,' he continues, 'and which alone lifts
-him above the animals, so it also makes him a philosopher.' Such an
-organ for the supersensuous is what in his later writings he calls
-<i>Vernunft</i> (Reason) and distinguishes from <i>Verstand</i> (Understanding).
-'This reason,' says Coleridge (to whom we owe this use of the terms in
-English) in the <i>Friend,</i> 'is an organ bearing the same relation to
-spiritual objects as the eye bears to material phenomena,' It is 'that
-intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves as one with
-the whole and is opposed to that 'science of the mere understanding'
-in which 'transferring reality to the negations of reality (to the
-ever-varying framework of the uniform life) we think of ourselves
-as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as
-object to subject, thing to thought, death to life.' But this Reason
-is even more than this. It is the direct contact with reality, which
-it affirms and even <i>is.</i> It apprehends the <i>me</i> and the <i>thee,</i> it
-apprehends above all the great <i>Thee,</i> God: apprehends, and we may even
-say appropriates<a name="FNanchor_9_26" id="FNanchor_9_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_26" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>. And it apprehends them at one bound&mdash;in one <i>salto
-mortale</i>&mdash;because it is really in implicit possession of them. Call the
-step a miracle, if you will: you must admit, he adds, that 'some time
-or other every philosophy must have recourse to a miracle<a name="FNanchor_10_27" id="FNanchor_10_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_27" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>.'</p>
-
-<p>And yet the asseveration rings false&mdash;it shows a womanish wilfulness
-and weakness in its reiteration. He has the reality; yet he has it
-not. 'Were a God known,' he says in one place, 'He would not be God.'
-He yearns with passionate longing to find the living<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> and true: he
-feels himself and the Eternal clasped in one: his faith effects the
-reality of things hoped for. But, he adds, 'We never see the Absolute':
-the primal light of reason is but faint. It is but a presage&mdash;a
-pre-supposition&mdash;of the Everlasting. This reason, in short, needs
-discipline and development, it needs the ethical life to raise it:
-'without morality no religiosity,' he says. 'Light,' he complains,
-'is in my heart,' but at the moment I want to bring it into the
-understanding, the light goes out.' And yet he knows&mdash;and Coleridge
-repeats&mdash;'the consciousness of reason and of its revelations is only
-possible in an understanding.'</p>
-
-<p>'There seem to be one or two motives acting upon Jacobi. The 'plain
-man,' especially if he be of high character and of 'noble' religiosity,
-has a feeling that the lust of philosophising disturbs the security of
-life, and endangers things which are deservedly dear to him. In such
-an one the 'enthusiasm of logic'&mdash;the calm pursuit of truth at all
-costs, so characteristic of Lessing&mdash;is inferior to the 'enthusiasm
-of life,'&mdash;a passion in which the terrestrial and the celestial are
-inextricably blended, where one clings to God as the stronghold of
-self, and sets personality&mdash;our human personality&mdash;in the throne of
-the Eternal. He will be all that is noble and good, if only he be not
-asked utterly to surrender self. So, too, Jacobi's God&mdash;or Absolute
-(for he leaves his 'non-philosophy' so far as to use both names), is
-rather the final aim of a grand, overpowering yearning, than a calm,
-self-centred, self-expanding life which carries man along with it.
-It would be, he feels, so very terrible, if at the last there were
-no God to meet us&mdash;to find the throne of the universe vacant. Avaunt
-philosophy, therefore! Let us cling to the faith of our nature and our
-childhood, and refuse her treacherous consolations!<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> With the central
-proposition of Jacobi, Hegel, for one, is not inclined to quarrel. He
-too, as he asks and answers the question as to the issues of this and
-of the better life, might say</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-<span style="margin-left: 13em;">'Question, answer presuppose</span><br />
-Two points: that the thing itself which questions, answers,&mdash;<i>is,</i> it<br />
-<span style="margin-left: 2em;">knows;</span><br />
-As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself&mdash;a force<br />
-Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course,<br />
-Unaffected by its end,&mdash;that this thing likewise needs must be;<br />
-Call this&mdash;God, then, call that&mdash;Soul, and both the only facts for me.<br />
-Prove them facts? that they o'erpass my power of proving proves<br />
-<span style="margin-left: 2em;">them such:</span><br />
-Fact it is, I know, I know not something which is fact as much.'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>But when Jacobi goes on to say that it is the supreme and final duty
-of the true sage 'to unveil reality,'&mdash;meaning thereby that, given the
-feeling, he has only to</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-<span style="margin-left: 8em;">'Define it well</span><br />
-For fear divine Philosophy<br />
-Should push beyond her mark and be<br />
-Procuress to the Lords of Hell,'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>Hegel withdraws. It is the duty of philosophy to labour to make the
-perception&mdash;the fleeting, uncertain, trembling perception&mdash;of faith,
-a clear, sure, inwardly consistent knowledge: to show, and not merely
-to assert, that 'the path of (this world's) duty is the way to (that
-world's) glory.' There is, Hegel himself has said more than once,
-something opposed to ordinary ways of thinking in the procedure of the
-philosopher. To the outsider, it seems like standing on your head.
-It involves something like what, in religious language, is termed
-conversion&mdash;a new birth&mdash;becoming a new man. But though such a change
-always seems to culminate in a moment of sudden transformation,&mdash;as if
-the continuity of old and new were disrupted, the process has a history
-and a preparation. Of that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> pilgrim's progress of the world-distracted
-soul to its discovery of its true being in God, philosophy is the
-record: a record which Hegel has written both in the <i>Phenomenology of
-Mind</i>, and, more methodically, in his <i>Encyclopaedia.</i> The passage from
-nature to God&mdash;or from man's limitations to the divine fullness&mdash;must
-be made, he urged, in the open day and not in the secret vision when
-sleep falls upon men. When the aged Jacobi read these requirements of
-Hegel, he wrote to a friend: 'He may be right, and I should like once
-again to experiment with him all that the power of thinking can do
-alone, were not the old man's head too weak for it<a name="FNanchor_11_28" id="FNanchor_11_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_28" class="fnanchor">[11]</a>.'</p>
-
-<p>'For a philosophy like this,' says Hegel<a name="FNanchor_12_29" id="FNanchor_12_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_29" class="fnanchor">[12]</a>, 'individual man
-and humanity are the ultimate standpoint:&mdash;as a fixed invincible
-finitude of reason, not as a reflection of the eternal beauty, or as
-a spiritual focus of the universe, but as an ultimate sense-nature,
-which however with the power of faith can daub itself over here and
-there with an alien supersensible. Let us suppose an artist restricted
-to portrait-painting; he might so far idealise as to introduce in the
-eye of a commonplace countenance a yearning look, and on its lips a
-melancholy smile, but he would be utterly debarred from depicting the
-Gods, sublime over yearning and melancholy&mdash;as if the delineation of
-eternal pictures were only possible at the cost of humanity. So too
-Philosophy&mdash;on this view&mdash;must not portray the Idea of man, but the
-abstraction of a humanity empirical and mingled with short-comings, and
-must bear a body impaled on the stake of the absolute antithesis; and
-when it clearly feels its limitation to the sensible, it must at the
-same time bedeck itself with the surface colour of a super<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>sensible,
-and point the finger of faith to a something Higher.</p>
-
-<p>'But the truth cannot be defrauded by such a consecration if finitude
-be still left subsisting; the true consecration must annihilate it.
-The artist, who fails to give actuality the true truth by letting
-fall upon it the ethereal illumination and taking it completely in
-that light, and who can only depict actuality in its bare ordinary
-reality and truth (a reality however which is neither true nor real)
-may apply the pathetic remedy to actuality, the remedy of tenderness
-and sentimentality, everywhere putting tears on the cheeks of the
-commonplace, and an O God! in their mouth. No doubt his figures in
-this way direct their look over the actual heavenwards, but like
-bats they belong neither to the race of birds nor beasts, neither to
-earth nor heaven. Their beauty is not free from ugliness, nor their
-morals without weakness and meanness: the intelligence they haply may
-show is not without banality: the success which enters into it is
-not without vulgarity, and the misfortune not without cowardice and
-terror; and both success and misfortune have something contemptible.
-So too philosophy, if it takes the finite and subjectivity as absolute
-truth in the logical form habitual to her, cannot purify them by
-bringing them into relation with an infinite: for that infinite is not
-itself the true, because it is unable to consume finitude. But where
-a philosophy consumes the temporal as such and burns up reality, its
-action is pronounced a cruel dissection, which does not leave man
-complete, and a forcible abstraction which has no truth, above all
-no truth for life. And such an abstraction is treated as a painful
-amputation of an essential piece from the completeness of the whole:
-that essential piece, and absolute substantiality being believed to
-consist in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> temporal and empirical, and in privation. It is as if
-a person, who sees only the feet of a work of art, were to complain,
-should the whole work be unveiled to his eyes, that he was deprived of
-the privation, that the incomplete was decompleted.'</p>
-
-<p>Jacobi has been spoken of as the leader of this 'Un-philosophy' of
-faith. As such his allies lie on one side among philosophers who hold
-by the deliverances of 'common sense,' by the consciousness of the
-unsophisticated man shrinking from the waywardness of an idealism that
-deprives him of his solidest realities. The type of such a philosopher
-has been drawn by Hegel<a name="FNanchor_13_30" id="FNanchor_13_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_30" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> in Krug. But, on the other side, Jacobi
-touched hands&mdash;though not in a sympathetic spirit&mdash;with a somewhat
-motley band which also had set its face to go to the everlasting gates,
-but had turned aside to aimless wandering on the Hill Difficulty, or
-sought too soon the repose of the Delectable Mountains, without due
-sojourn in the valley of Humiliation or descent under the Shadow of
-Death. Like Wordsworth, they felt that the world is too much with
-us: that our true self is frittered away into fragments and passing
-stages, in which we are not ourselves,&mdash;whereby we also lose the true
-perception of the essential life of nature. Gradually we have sunk
-into the deadening arms of habit, reduced ourselves to professional
-and conventional types, and lost the freer and larger mobility of
-spiritual being. We have grown into <i>verständige Leute</i>&mdash;people of
-practical sense and worldly wisdom. To such, philosophy would come&mdash;if
-it could come&mdash;as the great breath of life&mdash;of 'reason' (<i>Vernunft</i>)
-which transcends the separations inevitable in practical will and
-knowledge. But to this band&mdash;which has been styled the Romantic School
-of Germany&mdash;the liberation came in ways more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span> analogous to that craved
-for by Jacobi. Their way was the way of Romance and Imagination. The
-principle of Romance is the protest against confining man and nature
-to the dull round of uniformities which custom and experience have
-imprisoned them in. Boundless life, infinite spontaneity is surging
-within us and the world, ready to break down the dams convention
-and inertia have established. That inner power is an ever-fresh,
-ever-restless Irony, which sets up and overthrows, which refuses to be
-bound or stereotyped, which is never weary, never exhausted,&mdash;free in
-the absolute sense. It is the mystic force of Nature, which they seemed
-to see ever on the spring to work its magic transformations, and burst
-the bulwarks of empirical law. It is the princely <i>jus aggratiandi,</i>
-the sportive sovereignty of the true artist, who is able at any moment
-to enter into direct communion with the heart of things.</p>
-
-<p>The beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany, as well as in
-England, was a period of effervescence:&mdash;there was a good deal of fire,
-and naturally there was also a good deal of smoke. Genius was exultant
-in its aspirations after Freedom, Truth, and Wisdom. The Romantic
-School, which had grown up under the stimulus of Fichte's resolve to
-enact thought, and had for a time been closely allied with Schelling,
-counted amongst its literary chiefs the names of the Schlegels, of
-Tieck, Novalis, and perhaps Richter. The world, as that generation
-dreamed, was to be made young again,&mdash;first by drinking, where
-Wordsworth led, from the fresh springs of nature,&mdash;afterwards when, as
-often has happened, doubts arose as to where Nature was really to be
-found, by an elixir distilled from the withered flowers of medieval
-Catholicism and chivalry,</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-'Since the Mid-Age was the Heroic Time'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>and even from the old roots of primeval wisdom. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> good old times of
-faith and harmonious beauty were to be brought back again by the joint
-labours of ideas and poetry.&mdash;</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-'So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,<br />
-This Duke would fain know he was without being it.'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>To that period of incipient and darkling energy Hegel stands in
-very much the same position as Luther did to the pre-Reformation
-mystics, to Meister Eckhart, and the unknown author of the 'German
-Theology.' It was from this side, from the school of Genius and Romance
-in philosophy, that Hegel was proximately driven, not into sheer
-re-action, but into system, development, and science.</p>
-
-<p>To elevate philosophy from a love of wisdom into the possession of real
-wisdom, into a system and a science, is the aim which he distinctly
-set before himself from the beginning. In almost every work, and every
-course of lectures, whatever be their subject, he cannot let slip the
-chance of an attack upon the mode of philosophising which substituted
-the strength of belief or conviction for the intervention of reasoning
-and argument. There may have been a strong sympathy in him with the
-end which these German contemporaries and, in some ways, analogues
-to Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron had in view. No one who
-reads his criticism of Kant can miss perceiving his bent towards the
-Infinite. But he utterly rejects the vision of feeling, whether as
-longing faith or devout enjoyment, as an adequate exposition of the
-means to this end. Whereas these fantastic seers and sentimentalists
-either disparage science as a limitation to the spirit, in the calm
-trust of their life in God, or yearn throughout life for a peace
-which they never quite reach, Hegel is bent upon showing men that the
-Infinite is not unknowable, as Kant would have it, and yet that man can
-not, as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> Jacobi would have it, naturally and without an effort enjoy
-the things of God<a name="FNanchor_14_31" id="FNanchor_14_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_31" class="fnanchor">[14]</a>. He will prove that the way of Truth is open, and
-prove it by describing in detail every step of the road. Philosophy for
-him must be reasoned truth. She does not visit favoured ones in visions
-of the night, but comes to all who win her by patient study.</p>
-
-<p>'For those,' he says, 'who ask for a royal road to science, no more
-convenient directions can be given than to trust to their own sound
-common sense, and, if they wish to keep up with the age and with
-philosophy, to read the reviews criticising philosophical works, and
-perhaps even the prefaces and the first paragraphs in these works
-themselves. The introductory remarks state the general and fundamental
-principles; and the reviews, besides their historical information,
-contain a critical estimate, which, from the very fact that it is
-such, is beyond and above what it criticises. This is the road of
-ordinary men: and it may be traversed in a dressing-gown. The other
-way is the way of intuition. It requires you to don the vestments of
-the high-priest. Along that road stalks the ennobling sentiment of the
-Eternal, the True, the Infinite. But it is wrong to call "this a road.
-These grand sentiments find themselves, naturally and without taking
-a single step, centred in the very sanctuary of truth. So mighty is
-genius, with its deep original ideas and its high flashes of wit. But
-a depth like this is not enough to lay bare the sources of true being,
-and these rockets are not the empyrean. True thoughts and scientific
-insights are only to be gained by the labour which comprehends and
-grasps its object. And that thorough grasp alone can produce the
-universality of science. Contrasted with the vulgar vagueness and
-scantiness of common sense, that universality<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> is a fully-formed and
-rounded intellect; and, contrasted with the un-vulgar generality of
-the natural gift of reason when it has been spoilt by the laziness and
-self-conceit of genius, it is truth put in possession of its native
-form, and thus rendered the possible property of every self-conscious
-reason<a name="FNanchor_15_32" id="FNanchor_15_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_32" class="fnanchor">[15]</a>.'</p>
-
-<p>These words which were taken to heart (unnecessarily, perhaps) by the
-patron of the <i>Intellectual Intuition</i> rung the knell to the friendship
-of Hegel with his great contemporary Schelling. Yet this hard saying
-is also the keynote to the subsequent work of the philosopher. In
-Hegel we need expect no brilliant <i>apergus</i> of genius, no intellectual
-legerdemain, but only the patient unraveling of the clue of thought
-through all knots and intricacies: a deliberate tracing and working-out
-of the contradictions and mysteries in thought, until the contradiction
-and the mystery disappear. Perseverance is the secret of Hegel.</p>
-
-<p>This characteristic of patient work is seen, for example, in the
-incessant prosecution of hints and glimpses, until they grew into
-systematic and rounded outline. Instead of vague anticipations and
-guesses at truth, fragments of insight, his years of philosophic study
-are occupied with writing and re-writing, in the <i>V</i> endeavour to clear
-up and arrange the masses of his ideas. Essay after essay, and sketch
-after sketch of a system, succeed each other amongst his papers. His
-first great work was not published before his 37th year, after six
-years spent in university work at Jena, following as many spent in
-preliminary lucubration. The notes which he used to dictate some years
-afterwards to the boys in the Gymnasium at Nürnberg bear evidence
-of constant remodelling, and the same is true of his professorial
-lectures.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>Such insistance in tracing every suggestion of truth to its place
-in the universe of thought is the peculiar character and difficulty
-of Hegelian argument. Other observers have now and again noticed,
-accentuated, and, it may be, popularised some one point or some one
-law in the evolution of reason. Here and there, as we reflect, we
-are forced to recognise what Hegel termed the dialectical nature in
-thought,&mdash;the tendency, by which a principle, when made to be all that
-it implied, when, as the phrase is, it is carried to extremes, recoils
-and leaves us confronted by its antithesis. We cannot, for example,
-study the history of ancient thought without noting this phenomenon.
-Thus, the persistence with which Plato and Aristotle taught and
-enforced the doctrine that the community was the guide and safeguard
-of the several citizens, very soon issued in the schools of Zeno and
-Epicurus, teaching the rights of self-seeking and of the independent
-self-realisation of the individual. But the passing glimpse of an
-indwelling discord in the terms, by which we argue, is soon forgotten,
-and is set aside under the head of accidents, instead of being referred
-to a general law. Most of us take only a single step to avoid what has
-turned out wrong, and when we have overcome the seeming absoluteness of
-one idea, we are content and even eager to throw ourselves under the
-yoke of another, not less one-sided than its predecessor. Sometimes
-one feels tempted to say that the course of human thought as a whole,
-as well as that branch of it termed science, exhibits nothing but a
-succession of illusions, which enclose us in the belief that some idea
-is all-embracing as the universe,&mdash;illusions, from which the mind is
-time after time liberated, only in a little while to sink under the
-sway of some partial correction, as if it and it only were the complete
-truth.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>Or, again, the Positive Philosophy exhibits as one of its features an
-emphatic and popular statement of a fallacy much discussed in Hegel.
-One of the best deeds of that school has been to protest against a
-delusive belief in certain words and notions; particularly by pointing
-out the insufficiency of what it calls metaphysical terms, i. e. those
-abstract entities formed by reflective thought, which are little else
-than a double of the phenomenon they are intended to explain. To
-account for the existence of insanity by an assumed basis for it in
-the 'insane neurosis,' or to attribute the sleep which follows a dose
-of opium to the soporific virtues of the drug, are some exaggerated
-examples of the metaphysical intellect which is so rampant in much
-of our popular, and even of our esoteric science. Positivism by its
-logical precepts ought at least to have instilled general distrust of
-abstract talk about essences, laws, forces and causes, whenever they
-claim an inherent and independent value, or profess to be more than
-a reflex of sensation. But all this is only a desultory perception,
-the reflection of an intelligent observer. When we come to Hegel, the
-Comtian perception of the danger lying in the terms of metaphysics is
-replaced by the Second Part of Logic, the Theory of Essential Being,
-where substances, causes, forces, essences, matters, are confronted
-with what Mr. Bain has called their 'suppressed correlative<a name="FNanchor_16_33" id="FNanchor_16_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_33" class="fnanchor">[16]</a>.'</p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_18" id="Footnote_1_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_18"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Aus Schellings Leben (Plitt.), ii. 161.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_19" id="Footnote_2_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_19"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Hegel's <i>Briefe</i>, ii. 377.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_20" id="Footnote_3_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_20"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Phenomenologie des Geistes,</i> p. 9.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_21" id="Footnote_4_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_21"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Cf. Notes and Illustrations in vol. ii. 396, and chapter
-iii. of the <i>Logic.</i></p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_22" id="Footnote_5_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_22"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Jacobi's <i>Werke</i>, v. 79, III, 115, 417.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_23" id="Footnote_6_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_23"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Ibid., i. 178.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_24" id="Footnote_7_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_24"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Jacobi's <i>Werke,</i> iv. i. Abth. p. 55 seqq.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_8_25" id="Footnote_8_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_25"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Jacobi's <i>Werke</i>, iv. i, p. xxi.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_9_26" id="Footnote_9_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_26"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Jacobi's <i>Briefwechsel,</i> i. 330.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_10_27" id="Footnote_10_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_27"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Jacobi's <i>Werke</i>, iii. 53.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_11_28" id="Footnote_11_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_28"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> Jacobi's <i>Briefwechsel</i>, ii. 468.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_12_29" id="Footnote_12_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_29"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> Hegel's <i>Werke,</i> i. 15.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_13_30" id="Footnote_13_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_30"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> Hegel's <i>Vermischte Schriften,</i> i. 50.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_14_31" id="Footnote_14_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_31"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> Compare pages 121-142 of the <i>Logic.</i></p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_15_32" id="Footnote_15_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_32"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> <i>Phenomenologie des Geistes</i>, p. 54 (<i>Werke</i>, ii).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_16_33" id="Footnote_16_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_33"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> <i>Practical Essays,</i> p. 43.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER VI.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>THE SCIENCES AND PHILOSOPHY.</h4>
-
-
-<p>By asserting the rights of philosophy against the dogmatism of
-self-inspired 'unphilosophy,' and by maintaining that we must not feel
-the truth, with our eyes as it were closed, but must open them full
-upon it, Hegel does not reduce philosophy to the level of one of the
-finite sciences. The name 'finite,' like the name 'empirical,' is not
-a title of which the sciences have any cause to be ashamed. They are
-called empirical, because it is their glory and their strength to found
-upon experience. They are called finite, because they have a fixed
-object, which they must expect and cannot alter; because they have an
-end and a beginning,&mdash;presupposing something where they begin, and
-leaving something for the sciences which come after. Botany rests upon
-the researches of chemistry: and astronomy hands over the record of
-cosmical movements to geology. Science is interlinked with science; and
-each of them is a fragment. Nor can these fragments ever, in the strict
-sense of the word, make up a whole or total. They have broken off,
-sometimes by accident, and sometimes for convenience, from one another.
-The sciences have budded forth here and there upon the tree of popular
-knowledge and ordinary consciousness, as the interest and needs of the
-time drew attention<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> closer to various points and objects in the world
-surrounding us.</p>
-
-<p>Prosecute the popular knowledge about any point far enough,
-substituting completeness and accuracy for vagueness, and especially
-giving numerical definiteness in weight, size, and figure, until
-the little drop of fact has grown into an ocean, and the mere germ
-has expanded into a structure with complex interconnexion,&mdash;and
-you will have a science. By its point of origin this luminous body
-of facts is united to the great circle of human knowledge and
-ignorance. Each special science is a part, which presupposes a total
-of much lower organisation, but much wider range than itself: each
-branch of scientific knowledge grows out of the already existent
-tree of acquaintance with things. But the part very soon assumes an
-independence of its own, and adopts a hostile or negative attitude
-towards the general level of unscientific opinion. This process of what
-we may, from the vulgar point of view, call abnormal development, is
-repeated irregularly at various points along the surface of ordinary
-consciousness. At one time it is the celestial movements calling for
-the science of astronomy: at another the problem of dividing the soil
-calling for the geometrician. Each of these outgrowths naturally
-re-acts and modifies the whole range of human knowledge, or what we
-may call popular science; and thus, while keeping up its own life, it
-quickens the parent stock with an infusion of new vigour, and raises
-the general intelligence to a higher level and into a higher element.</p>
-
-<p>The order of the outcome of the sciences in time, therefore, and their
-connexions with one another, cannot be explained or understood, if we
-look only to the sciences themselves. We must first of all descend
-into the depths of natural thought, or of general culture,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> and trace
-the lines which unite science with science in that general medium. The
-systematic interdependence of the sciences must be chiefly sought for
-in the workings of thought as a whole in its popular phases, and in the
-action and reaction of that <i>general</i> human thought with the sciences,
-those definite organisations of knowledge which form sporadically round
-the <i>nuclei</i> here and there presented in what would superficially be
-described as the inorganic mass and medium of popular knowledge. Thus,
-by means of the sciences in their aggregate action, the material of
-common consciousness is expanded and developed, at least in certain
-parts, though the expansion may be neither consistent nor systematic.
-But so long as this work is incomplete, so long, that is to say, as
-every point in the line of popular knowledge has not received its due
-elaboration and equal study, the sciences merely succeed each other in
-a certain imperfect sequence, or exist in juxtaposition: they do not
-form a total. The whole of scientific knowledge will only be formed,
-when science shall be as completely rounded and unified, as in its
-lower sphere and more inadequate element the ordinary consciousness of
-the world is now.</p>
-
-<p>Up to a certain point the method of science is but the method of
-ordinary consciousness pursued knowingly and steadily. But ere long
-the method acquires a distinctive character of its own. It shakes
-off the pressure of that immediate subservience in which ordinary
-knowledge stands to man's needs, wishes and interests. Knowledge
-is pursued&mdash;within a wide range&mdash;for its own sake, and by a class
-more or less definitely set apart by humanity for its scientific
-service,&mdash;which is thus performed more systematically and continuously.
-But the great step which carries ordinary knowledge into its higher
-region is the discovery, due to reflection<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> and comparison, that
-there is a double grade of reality-a permanent, essential, uniform,
-substantial being, which is contrasted with an evanescent, apparent,
-varying and accidental. To know a thing is in all cases to <i>relate it</i>
-to something else: to know it in the higher sense<i>&mdash;vere scire</i>&mdash;is
-to relate it to its essence, its substantial or universal form, its
-permanent self. Ordinary knowledge, e. g., fixes a thing by referring
-to its antecedents: scientific knowledge refers it to its 'invariable,
-'unconditional' or 'essential' antecedent,&mdash;to something which
-contains it implicitly, and necessarily, and is not merely by accident
-or juxtaposition associated with it. To discover this permanent,
-underlying substance or reality comes to be the problem of science&mdash;a
-problem which may be taken in the widest generality, or restricted
-to some one group of existences. What is asked for, e.g., may be
-the uniformity and essence in the appearance of the diurnal journey
-of the sun, or it may be the underlying, invisible, nature which
-displays itself in all the variety of minerals, and in animal and plant
-life. The one-and-the-same in a diversity of many; the type-form in
-individuals: the cause which is the key to understanding an effect that
-always and unconditionally follows it; the force which finds different
-expression in actions&mdash;are what Science seeks.</p>
-
-<p>In that search two points emerge as regards the method. The first is
-the importance of quantitative statements or numerical appreciations,
-and the general law that variations in the qualitative are in some
-ratio concomitant with variations in the quantitative. Mathematics,
-in a word, is found to be an invaluable instrument for recording
-with accuracy the minutest as well as the most immense differences
-of quality. First, it is seen that qualitative differences within a
-given range, e.g. various colours or various musical notes, can be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>
-accurately expressed by a numerical ratio. But, secondly, it soon
-appears that even greater divergences of quality, e.g. those of colour
-and of chemical quality, may possibly be reduced to stages on one
-quantitative scale. It is not unnatural that such experiences should
-give rise to a hope&mdash;and in sanguine minds, an assurance&mdash;that all the
-phenomena of nature are ultimately phases of some common nature&mdash;some
-elementary being&mdash;which runs through an infinite gamut of numerically
-defined adjustments.</p>
-
-<p>But the numerical prepossession&mdash;as we may call it&mdash;creates another
-assumption. Every number consists of units: every cube can be regarded
-as an aggregation of smaller cubes, and in measurement is (implicitly
-at least) so regarded. Transferring this to the physical world, every
-object is regarded as a composite&mdash;a Large, made up by the addition
-and juxtaposition of many (relatively) Littles. The essentials of the
-composite are here the elements that compose it: these, by a natural
-tendency, we proceed to conceive as remaining always unchanged, and
-giving rise by their peculiar juxtaposition to certain perceptions in
-the human being. You whirl rapidly a blazing piece of wood, and instead
-of a discontinuous series of flashes you see one orbit of luminous
-matter: or, let falling rain-drops take up a particular position in
-reference to your eyes and the sun, and a rainbow is visible. In both
-cases there is what may be called an illusion&mdash;the illusion, above
-all, of unity and continuity. Now what is in these cases obviously
-and demonstrably seen, is, as Leibniz in particular has reminded us,
-the general law of all matter as such. In the extended and material
-world there is nowhere a real unity discoverable. The small is made
-up of the smaller <i>ad infinitum</i><a name="FNanchor_1_34" id="FNanchor_1_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_34" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>. But the conclusion<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> (which
-Leibniz drew)&mdash;that unity belongs only to v,' Monads and never by any
-possibility to a material substance, was not that commonly reached
-or accepted. There are&mdash;or there must be,&mdash;said the prevalent creed,
-ultimates, indivisibles, indecomposables, simples, atoms. These are the
-final bricks of reality, out of which the apparent universe is built:
-each with a maximum,&mdash;a <i>ne plus ultra</i>&mdash;of resistibility, hardness,
-fullness, and unsqueezable bulk.</p>
-
-<p>Into further details of these ultimate irreducibles we need not enter.
-It is sufficient to denote the general purport of the conception, and
-the tendency it implies.</p>
-
-<p>In these ultimates supreme reality is understood to lie; and on them
-at last, and indeed always, rests whatever reality truly exists in
-any object. All else is secondary&mdash;and, comparatively speaking,
-illusory,&mdash;unreal. Any phenomena that may be noted only affect the
-surface or show of these reals: the inner reality continues one
-and unchanged. Outside them, around them, is the void&mdash;emptiness,
-non-entity. Yet null and void as it may be, we may, in passing,
-reply,&mdash;this circumambient is the source of all that gives these
-masses of atoms any distinctive reality&mdash;any character of true being.
-Space may be empty enough,&mdash;a mere spectre-shell; and yet it is their
-differences in spatial circumstance that bring out and actualise what
-they implicitly are. These '<i>individua</i>' these units of reality, these
-atoms, are real and knowable only in their relations. So too Time may
-be contemptuously treated as a passive receptacle: yet it is only by
-its connexions in the past and the future that the present moment has
-any actuality it may claim. And time and space are potent agencies&mdash;in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>
-popular mode of utterance&mdash;whatever the mechanical philosophy may say.</p>
-
-<p>But all of these relations are in the realm of unreality. The atoms
-alone <i>are</i>: and yet the void, which ought <i>not</i> to <i>be,</i> in an
-unmistakable way <i>is</i> also. To this mysterious vacuum which lies
-outside (and yet not outside) reality, to this not-being which <i>is,</i>
-there can only be given a half-negative and baffling name. Let it
-be called Chance&mdash;or let it be called Necessity; let it be called
-inexplicable Law of co-existence and sequence,&mdash;the Force which is the
-beginning of motion. It is the ultimate key to the mystery&mdash;but it is
-at least a key which no human hand can use, or even lay hold of. It is
-enough for science if, leaving this ultimate inexplicability untouched,
-it trace in each separate instance the exact equation between the sum
-of the constituents and the total which they compose,&mdash;if it prove that
-the several items when put together exactly give the sum proposed.
-Identification&mdash;the establishment of quantitative equations&mdash;is the
-work of science. Identity is its canon, working on the presumption
-or axiom that there can be nothing in the result which was not in
-the antecedents or conditions. <i>Ex nihilo nihil fit.</i> The quantity
-of energy must always be the same, though its phases may vary, or
-temporarily avoid detection. Matter, i.e. the ultimate reality, is
-indestructible. In short, the method of analysis and synthesis, as that
-of addition and subtraction, is a calculus which takes the form of an
-equation.</p>
-
-<p>So far the inorganic, inanimate world has been mainly in view. If we
-now turn to the organisms, we find the popular creed expressed in the
-adage <i>Omne vivum e vivo.</i> No eye has ever seen&mdash;though fanatical
-observers have sometimes so deluded themselves as to think they saw&mdash;a
-living being directly emerge from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> inorganic stuff. The saner student
-of physiology contents himself with leaving for the while the crux of
-the genesis of Life, and examining only the building up of the living
-creature out of its constituents. Here the atom is called the cell:
-every organism is a synthesis of cells, and in the cell we have the
-primary element of organic reality: <i>Omnis cellula e cellula,</i> In the
-atom we have the ultimate element; in the cell a relative element,&mdash;the
-absolute beginning of a new order of things,&mdash;which we may, if we
-like, choose to treat (though only for logical simplicity's sake) as a
-gradual development from the other and more primitive, but which, so
-far as experience and history teach, is equally ultimate in its kind.
-But be the final constituent (physical) atom, or (physiological) cell,
-the relation of these constituents is at first conceived by science
-only as composition, or mechanical synthesis. It is only gradually
-that science begins to have doubts as to the inviolability and
-unalterableness of the elements. When the idea&mdash;not altogether new&mdash;of
-a 'latent meta-schematism' and latent process within the constituents
-is entertained and carried out in earnest, science has passed on to a
-new stage: from mechanical atomism to a dynamic and organic theory of
-existence. And the governing ideas of scientific logic have then ceased
-to be co-existence, and sequence, correlation and composition: the new
-category is intus-susception, development, adaptation not only external
-but internal.</p>
-
-<p><i>Divide et impera</i> is the motto of Science. To isolate one thing
-or one group of facts from its context,&mdash;to penetrate beneath the
-apparent simplicity, which time and custom have taught ordinary eyes
-to see in the concrete object, to the multitude of underlying simple
-elements,&mdash;to leave everything extraneous out of sight,&mdash;to abolish the
-teleology which imposes upon Nature<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> a permanent tribute (direct or
-indirect) towards the supply of human wants,&mdash;and to take, as it were,
-one thing at a time and study it for itself disinterestedly; that is
-the problem of the sciences. And to accomplish that end they do not
-hesitate to break the charmed links which in common vision hold the
-world together,&mdash;to disregard the spiritual harmony which the sense of
-beauty finds in the scene,&mdash;to strip off the relations of means and
-end, which reflection has thrown from thing to thing, and the sensuous
-atmosphere of so-called 'secondary' qualities in which human sense has
-enveloped each; and finally to sever its connexion by which</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-'the whole round world is every way<br />
-Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>In those days when reflection had not set in,&mdash;when humanity had not
-yet found itself a stranger in the house of Nature, and had not yet
-dared to regard her as a mere automatic slave, men had no doubts as to
-the meaning of things. They lived sympathetically her life.</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">'Man, once descried, imprints for ever</span><br />
-His presence on all lifeless things: the winds<br />
-Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,<br />
-A querulous mutter, or a quick gay laugh.'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>To the extent of his abilities and his culture, indeed man has in all
-ages read himself into the phenomena external to him. Such readings, in
-times when he feared and loved his kinsfolk of Nature, were fetichism
-and anthropomorphism. Gradually, however, forgetting his community, he
-claimed to be the measure and master of all things: to decree their use
-and function. But in course of time, when the sciences had emancipated
-themselves from the yoke of philosophy, they refused to borrow any such
-help in reading the riddle of the universe, and resolved to begin,
-<i>ab ovo</i>,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> from the atom or cell, and leave the elements to work out
-their own explanation. Modern science in so doing practises the lessons
-learned from Spinoza and Hume. The former teaches that all conception
-of order, i. e. of adaptation and harmony in nature, and indeed all
-the methods by which nature is popularly explained, are only modes of
-our emotional imagination, betraying how imperfect has been in most
-of us the emancipation of human intellect from the servitude to the
-affections<a name="FNanchor_2_35" id="FNanchor_2_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_35" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>. The latter points out that all connexions between things
-are solely mental associations, ingrained habits of expectation, the
-work of time and custom, accredited only by experience<a name="FNanchor_3_36" id="FNanchor_3_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_36" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>. There must
-be no pre-suppositions allowed in the studies of science, no help
-derived prematurely from the later terms in the process to elucidate
-the earlier. Let man, it is said, be explained by those laws, and by
-the action of those primary elements which build up every other part
-of nature: let molecules by mechanical union construct the thinking
-organism, and then construct society. The elements which we find by
-analysis must be all that is required to make the synthesis. Thus in
-modern times science carries out, fully and with the details of actual
-knowledge in several branches, the principles of the atom and the void,
-which Democritus suggested.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>The scientific spirit, however, the spirit of analysis and abstraction
-(or of 'Mediation' and 'Reflection'), is not confined in its
-operations to the physical world. The criticism of ordinary beliefs
-and conventions has been applied&mdash;and applied at an earlier period&mdash;to
-what has been called the Spiritual world, to Art, Religion, Morality,
-and the institutions of human Society. Under these names the agency of
-ages, acting by their individual minds, has created organic systems,
-unities which have claimed to be permanent, inviolable, and divine.
-Such unities or organic structures are the Family, the State, the works
-of Art, the forms, doctrines, and systems of Religion, existing and
-recognised in ordinary consciousness. But in these cases, as in Nature,
-the reflective principle may come forward and ask what right these
-unities have to exist. This is the question which the 'Encyclopaedic,'
-the 'Aufklärung,' the 'Rationalist' and 'Freethinking' theories,
-raise and have raised in the last century and the present. What is
-the Family, it is said, but a fiction or convention, which is used to
-give a decent, but somewhat transparent covering to a certain animal
-appetite, and its probable consequences? What is the State, and what
-is Society, but a fiction or compact, by which the weak try to make
-themselves seem strong, and the unjust seek to shelter themselves from
-the consequences of their own injustice? What is Religion, it is said,
-but a delusion springing from the fears and weakness of the crowd, and
-the cunning of the few, which men have fostered until it has wrapped
-humanity in its snaky coils? And Poetry, we are assured, like its
-sister Arts, will perish and its illusions fade away, when Science,
-now in the cradle, has become the full-grown Hercules. As for Morality
-and Law, and the like, the same condemnation has been prepared from
-of old.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> All of them, it is said, are but the inventions of power and
-craft, or the phantoms of human imagination, which the strength of
-positive science and bare facts is destined in no long time to dispel.</p>
-
-<p>When they insisted upon a severance of the elements in the
-vulgarly-accepted unities of the world, Science and Freethinking, like
-Epicurus in an older day, have believed that they were liberating the
-world from its various superstitions, from the bonds which instinct
-and custom had fastened upon things so as to combine them into systems
-more or less arbitrary. They denied the supremacy and reality of those
-ideas which insist on the essential unity and self-sameness in things
-that visibly and tangibly have a separate existence of their own, and
-branded these ideas comprehensively as mysticism and metaphysics.
-They sought to disabuse us of spirits, vital forces, divine right of
-governments, final causes, <i>et hoc genus omne.</i> They were exceedingly
-jealous for the independence of the individual, and for his right to
-demand satisfaction for the questioning, ground-seeking faculty of
-his nature. But while they did so they hardly realised how entirely
-the spectator is the part, the product of what he surveys, and while
-surveying treats as if it were but a spot or mark on the circumference
-of the circle that lies&mdash;some way off&mdash;around him. 'Phenomenalism,' as
-this mode of looking at things has been called, is false to life, and
-would cut away the ground from philosophy.<a name="FNanchor_4_37" id="FNanchor_4_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_37" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></p>
-
-<p>To some extent philosophy returns to the position of the wider
-consciousness, to the general belief in harmony and symmetry. It
-reverts to the unity or connexion, which the natural presumptions of
-mankind find in the picture of the world. The <i>nolo philosophari</i>
-of the intuitivist, in reaction from the supposed excesses<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> of the
-sciences, simply reverted to the bare re-statement of the popular
-creed. If science, e. g., had shown that the perception of an
-external world pre-supposed for its accomplishment an unsuspected
-series of intermediate steps, the mere intuitivist simply denied
-the intermediation by appealing to Common Sense, or to the natural
-instincts and primary beliefs of mankind. Conviction and natural
-instinct were declared to counterbalance the abstractions of science.
-But philosophy which seeks to comprehend existence cannot take the
-same ground as the intuitional school, or neglect the testimony of
-science. If the spiritual unity of the world has been denied and lost
-to sight, mere assertion that we feel and own its pervading power will
-not do much good. It is necessary to reconcile the contrast between
-the wholeness of the natural vision, and the fragmentary, but in its
-fragments elaborated, result of science.</p>
-
-<p>The sciences break up the rough generalisations or vulgar concepts of
-everyday use, and make their fixed distinctions yield to analysis.
-They thus render continuous things which were looked at as only
-separate. But they tend again to substitute the results of their
-analysis as a new and permanent distinction and principle of things.
-They are like revolutionists who upset and perturb an old order, and
-set up a new and minuter tyranny in its place. Gradually, the general
-culture, the average educated intelligence gathers up the fruit of
-scientific research into the total development of humanity: and uses
-the work of science to fill up the <i>lacunae,</i> the gaps, which make
-popular consciousness so irregular and disconnected. A sort of popular
-philosophy comes to sum up and estimate what science has accomplished:
-and therein is as it were the spirit of the world taking into his own
-hand the acquisitions won by the more audacious and self-willed of
-his sons,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> and investing them in the common store. They are set aside
-and preserved there, at first in an abstract and technical form, but
-destined soon to pass into the possession of all, and form that mass of
-belief and instinctive or implanted knowledge whence a new generation
-will draw its mental supplies. Each great scientific discovery is in
-its turn reduced to a part of the common stock. It leaves the technical
-field, and spreads into the common life of men, becoming embodied in
-their daily beliefs,&mdash;a seed of thought, from which, by the agency of
-intelligent experience, new increments of science will one day spring.</p>
-
-<p>Philosophy properly so called is also the unification of science,
-but in a new sphere, a higher medium not recognised by the sciences
-themselves. The reconciliation which the philosopher believes himself
-to accomplish between ordinary consciousness and science is identified
-by either side with a phase of its antagonist error. Science will
-term philosophy a modified form of the old religious superstition.
-The popular consciousness of truth, and especially religion, will
-see in philosophy only a repetition or an aggravation of the evils
-of science. The attempt at unity will not approve itself to either,
-until they enter upon the ground which philosophy occupies, and move
-in that element. And that elevation into the philosophic ether calls
-for a tension of thought which is the sternest labour imposed upon
-man: so that the continuous action of philosophising has been often
-styled superhuman. If anywhere, it is in pure philosophy that proof
-becomes impossible, unless for those who are willing to think for
-themselves<a name="FNanchor_5_38" id="FNanchor_5_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_38" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>. The philosophic lesson cannot be handed on to a mere
-recipient: the result, when cut off from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span> the process which produced
-it, vanishes like the palace in the fairy tale.</p>
-
-<p>'The whole of philosophy is nothing but the study of the specific
-forms or types of unity.<a name="FNanchor_6_39" id="FNanchor_6_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_39" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> There are many species and grades of this
-unity. They are not merely to be enumerated and asserted in a vague
-way, as they here and there force themselves upon the notice of the
-popular mind. Philosophy sees in that unity neither an ultimate and
-unanalysable fact, nor a deception, but a growth (which is also a
-struggle), a revealing or unfolding, which issues in an organism or
-system, constructing itself more and more completely by a force of its
-own. This system formed by these types of the fundamental unity is
-called the 'Idea,' of which the highest law is development. Philosophy
-essays to do for this connective and unifying nature, i. e. for the
-thought in things, something like what the sciences have done or
-would like to do for the facts of sense and matter,&mdash;to do for the
-spiritual binding-element in its integrity, what is being done for
-the several facts which are more or less combined. It retraces the
-universe of thought from its germinal form, where it seems, as it were,
-an indecomposable point, to the fully matured system or organism, and
-shows not merely that one phase of pure thought passes into another,
-but how it does so, and yet is not lost, but subsists suspended and
-deprived of its narrowness in the maturer phase.</p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_34" id="Footnote_1_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_34"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Leibniz, ed. Gerhardt, iii. 507: 'Les atomes sont l'effet
-de la foiblesse de nostre imagination, qui aime à se reposer et à se
-hater à venir à une fin dans les sous-divisions et analyses: il n'en
-est pas ainsi dans la nature qui vient de l'infini et va à l'infini.'</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_35" id="Footnote_2_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_35"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Spinoza, <i>Ethica,</i> i. 36, App. '<i>Quoniam ea nobis prae
-ceteris grata sunt quae facile imaginari possumus, ideo homines ordinem
-confusioni praeferunt; quasi ordo aliquid in natura praeter respectum
-ad nostram imaginationem esset... Videmus itaque omnes rationes quibus
-vulgus solet naturam explicare modos esse tantummodo imaginandi.</i>' Cf.
-<i>Eth.</i> iv. praef.: Epist. xxxii.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_36" id="Footnote_3_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_36"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'This transition of thought from the Cause to the Effect
-proceeds not from Reason. It derives its origin altogether from
-Custom and Experience.' Hume, Essay V. (Enquiry concerning Human
-Understanding.) 'All inferences from Experience therefore are effects
-of Custom.' (Ibid.)</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_37" id="Footnote_4_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_37"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> J. Grote, <i>Exploratio Philosophica.</i></p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_38" id="Footnote_5_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_38"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Cf. vol. ii. p. 4.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_39" id="Footnote_6_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_39"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Philosophie der Religion,</i> i. p. 97: 'Die ganze
-Philosophie ist nichts Anderes als das Studium der Bestimmungen der
-Einheit.' See especially <i>Encycl.</i> § 573 (Philosophy of Mind, pp. 192
-seqq.).</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER VII.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>ANTICIPATORY SKETCH OF THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY.</h4>
-
-
-<p>The psychology of the Greeks has to all appearance given the mere
-intellect an undue pre-eminence, if it has not even treated it as man's
-essential self. Whether the appearance is altogether sound might be
-a profitable inquiry for those who most criticise it. At any rate, a
-later psychology has taught us to regard man as at once a cognitive, an
-emotional, and a volitional being. It has arrived at this conclusion as
-it looked at the division that parted off the systems of science from
-the sphere of conduct and social life, and both from the inner life of
-sentiment, of love, admiration and reverence. And the inference was
-justifiable, in the same way as Plato's when, as he surveyed the triple
-sphere into which the outward world of his contemporary society was
-divided, he concluded a triplicity of the soul. If it was justifiable,
-it was also, as in his case, somewhat misleading. In the outward
-manifestation, where the letters are posted up on a gigantic scale,
-one tends to forget that they only spell one word. Their difference
-and distance seem increased, and we fail to note that, though there
-are three aspects, yet there is only one power or soul, which exhibits
-itself under one or other of the three tones or modes. In the actual
-human being, cognition is always of some emotional<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span> interest and always
-leads up to some practical result. From different points of view one or
-other is occasionally declared to be primary and original; the others
-derivative and secondary. At any rate we may say that in the ordinary
-human being who is still in the garden of preparation and has not yet
-stepped forth on one of the separate routes of life, his knowledge, his
-emotional and his active life are in a tolerable harmony, and that each
-in its little development is constantly followed by the other.</p>
-
-<p>But with the outward differentiation an inward went hand in hand. In
-some cases the intellectual or scientific, in others the emotional, in
-others the active faculties became predominant. Human nature in order
-to attain all its completeness had first of all, as it were, to lose
-its life in order to gain it. The individual had to sacrifice part of
-his all-sided development in order that he might gain it again, and
-in a larger measure, through the medium of society. This process is
-the process of civilisation: the long and, as it often seems, weary
-road by which man can only realise himself by self-sacrifice: can only
-reach unity through the way of diversity, and must die to live. It is a
-process in which it is but too easy to notice only one stage and speak
-of it as if it were the whole. It is possible sometimes to identify
-civilisation with the material increase in the means of producing
-enjoyment, or with the progress of scientific teaching as to the laws
-of those material phenomena on which material civilisation is largely
-dependent. It is possible sometimes to take as its test the stores of
-artistic works, and the extension of a lively and delicate love of all
-that is beautiful and tasteful. One may identify it with a high-toned
-moral life, and with an orderly social system. Or one may maintain that
-the real civilisation of a country presupposes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> a lofty conception and
-reverent attitude to the supreme source of all that is good, and true,
-and beautiful.</p>
-
-<p>The question is important as bearing on the relation of philosophy to
-the special sciences. Philosophy is sometimes identified with the sum
-of sciences: sometimes with their complete unification. Philosophy,
-says a modern, is knowledge completely unified. It is of course to some
-extent a question of words in what sense a term is to be defined. And
-no one will dispute that the scientific element is in point of form the
-most conspicuous aspect of philosophy. Yet if we look at the historical
-use of the term, one or two considerations suggest themselves.
-Philosophy, said an ancient, is the knowledge of things human and
-divine. Again and again, it has claimed for its task to be a guide and
-chart of human life&mdash;to reveal the form of good and of beauty. But to
-do this, it must be more than a mere science, or than a mere system
-of the sciences. Again, it has been urged by modern critics that Kant
-at last discovered for philosophy her true province&mdash;the study of the
-conditions and principles of human knowledge. But though epistemology
-is all-important, the science of knowledge is not identical with
-philosophy: nor did Kant himself think it was. Rather his view is on
-the whole in accord with what he has called the 'world's (as opposed
-to the scholar's) conception of philosophy<a name="FNanchor_1_40" id="FNanchor_1_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_40" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>,' as the science of the
-bearing of all ascertainable truths on the essential aims of human
-reason&mdash;<i>teleologia humanae rationis</i>,&mdash;in accord, too, with the
-world's conception of the philosopher as no mere logician, but the
-legislator of human reason.</p>
-
-<p>This, it need hardly be added, is the conception of philosophy which
-is implicitly the basis of Hegel's use. Let us hear Schelling. 'A
-philosophy which in its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> principle is not already religion is no true
-philosophy<a name="FNanchor_2_41" id="FNanchor_2_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_41" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>.'</p>
-
-<p>Or again, as to the place of Ethics: 'Morality is Godlike disposition,
-an uplifting above the influence of the concrete into the realm of the
-utterly universal. Philosophy is a like elevation, and for that reason
-intimately one with morality, not through subordination, but through
-essential and inner likeness<a name="FNanchor_3_42" id="FNanchor_3_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_42" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>.' But, again, it has more than once
-been felt that philosophy is kindred with Art. It has been said&mdash;not
-as a compliment&mdash;that philosophy is only a form of gratifying the
-aesthetic instincts. Schopenhauer has suggested&mdash;as a novelty&mdash;that
-the true way to philosophy was not by science, but through Art. And
-Schelling before him had&mdash;while asserting the inner identity of the
-two&mdash;even gone so far as to assert<a name="FNanchor_4_43" id="FNanchor_4_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_43" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> that 'Art is the sole, true and
-eternal organon as well as the ostensible evidence of philosophy.'</p>
-
-<p>Philosophy, therefore, is one of a triad in which the human spirit has
-tried to raise itself above its limitations and to become god-like. And
-philosophy is the climax; Art the lowest; Religion in the mean. But
-this does not mean that Religion supersedes Art, and that Philosophy
-supersedes religion; or, if we retain the term 'supersede,' we must add
-that the superseded is not left behind and passed aside: it is rather
-an integral constituent of what takes its place. Philosophy is true and
-adequate only as it has given expression to all that religion had or
-aimed at. So, too, Religion is not the destruction of Art: though here
-the attitude may often seem to be more obviously negative. A religion
-which has no place for art is, again, no true religion. And thus again,
-Philosophy becomes a reconciler of Art and Religion: of the visible
-ideal and the invisible God.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> Art, on the other hand, is a foretaste
-and a prophecy of religion and philosophy.</p>
-
-<p>But Art, Religion, and Philosophy, again, rest upon, grow out of, and
-are the fulfilment of an ethical society-a state of human life where an
-ordered commonwealth in outward visibility is animated and sustained by
-the spirit of freedom and self-realisation. And that public objective
-existence of social humanity in its turn reposes on the will and
-intelligence of human beings, of souls which in various relations
-of discipline and interaction with their environment have become
-free-agents, and have risen to be more than portions of the physical
-world, sympathetic with its changes, and become awake to themselves and
-their surroundings. Such is the mental or spiritual life as it rises to
-full sense of its power, recognises its kindred with the general life,
-carries out that kindred in its social organisation, and at length
-through the strength social union gives floats boldly in the empyrean
-of spiritual life, in art, religion, and philosophy.</p>
-
-<p>But, what about the special relationship of philosophy to the sciences?
-Undoubtedly the philosophers of the early years of the century
-have used lordly language in reference to the sciences. They have
-asserted&mdash;from Fichte downwards&mdash;that the philosophical construction,
-of the universe must justify itself to itself&mdash;must be consistent,
-continuous, and coherent&mdash;and that it had not to wait for experience
-to give it confirmation. Even the cautious Kant<a name="FNanchor_5_44" id="FNanchor_5_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_44" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> had gone so far
-as to assert that the 'understanding gives us nature'&mdash;i. e. as he
-explains, <i>natura formaliter spectata</i>, viz., the order and regularity
-in the phenomena&mdash;that it is the source of the laws of nature and
-of its formal unity. The so-called proofs of natural laws are only
-instances and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> exemplifications, which no more <i>prove</i> them, than we
-prove that 6 x 4 = 24, because 6 yards of cloth at 4s. must be paid
-for by 24 shillings. To assert that this instance is no proof, is
-not to reject experience&mdash;still less to refuse respect to the new
-discoveries of science. But it is unquestionably to assert that there
-is something prior to the sciences&mdash;prior, i. e. in the sense that Kant
-speaks of the <i>a priori,</i> something which is fundamental to them, and
-constitutes them what they are&mdash;something which is assumed as real if
-their syntheses (and every scientific truth is a synthesis) are to be
-possible. The analysis and exhibition in its organic completeness of
-this Kantian <i>a priori</i> is the theme of the Hegelian Logic.</p>
-
-<p>The Philosophy of Nature stands in the Hegelian system between Logic
-and Mental or Spiritual Philosophy. Man&mdash;intelligent, moral, religious
-and artistic man&mdash;rests upon the basis of natural existence: he
-is the child of the earth, the offspring of natural organisation.
-But Nature itself&mdash;such is the hypothesis of the system&mdash;is only
-intelligible as the reflex of that <i>a priori</i> which has been
-exhibited in Logic. The whole scheme by which the natural world is
-scientifically held together, apprehended by ordinary consciousness
-and elaborated by mathematical analysis, presupposes the organism
-of the categories&mdash;these fundamental habits of thought or form of
-conception which are the framework of the existence we know. Yet
-Nature never shows this intelligible world&mdash;the Idea&mdash;in its purity
-and entirety. In the half-literal, half-figurative phrases of Hegel,
-Nature shows the Idea beside itself, out of its mind, alienated, <i>non
-compos mentis.</i> 'It is a mad world, my masters,' 'The impotence of
-nature<i>&mdash;Ohnmacht der Natur</i><a name="FNanchor_6_45" id="FNanchor_6_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_45" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>&mdash;is a frequent phrase, by which he
-indicates the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> a-logical, if not illogical, character of the physical
-world. Here we come across the negation of mind: chance plays its part:
-contingency is everywhere. If you expect that the physical universe
-will <i>display</i> unquestioning obedience to the laws of reason and of the
-higher logic, you will be disappointed. What you <i>see</i> is fragmentary,
-chaotic, irregular. To the bodily sense&mdash;even when that sense has been
-rendered more penetrating by all the many material and methodical
-aids of advanced civilisation&mdash;the Idea is in the natural world
-presented only in traces, indications, portions, which it requires a
-well-prepared mind to descry, still more to unite. Yet at the same
-time the indications of that unity are everywhere, and the hypothesis
-of the logical scheme or organisation of the Idea is the only theory
-which seems fully to correspond with the data. Nature<a name="FNanchor_7_46" id="FNanchor_7_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_46" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>, says Hegel,
-is the Idea as it shows itself in sense-perception, not as it shows
-itself in thought. In thought a clear all-comprehending total; in sense
-a baffling fragment. The Idea&mdash;the unity of life and knowledge&mdash;is
-everywhere in nature, but nowhere clearly, or whole, or otherwise
-than a glimpse; not a logical scheme or compact theory. Nature is the
-sensible in which the intelligible is bound&mdash;the reality which is the
-vehicle of the ideal. But the ideal treasure is held in rough and
-fragile receptacles which half disclose and half conceal the light
-within. Nature in short contains, but disguised, the idea, in fainter
-and clearer evidences: it is the function of man, by his scientific
-intelligence and ethical work, building up a social organisation,
-to provide the ground on which the ultimate significance and true
-foundation of the world may be deciphered, guessed, or believed, or
-imaginatively presented. The verification of the guess or deciphering,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>
-of course, lies in its adequacy to explain and colligate the facts.
-The true method and true conception is that which needs no subsequent
-adjustments&mdash;no epicycles to make it work&mdash;which is no mere hypothesis
-useful for subjective arrangement, but issues with uncontrollable force
-and self-evidence from the facts.</p>
-
-<p>What Hegel has called the 'impotence of nature,' Schopenhauer has
-styled the irrational Will, and it is from that end, so to speak, that
-Schopenhauer's philosophy begins. Nature&mdash;the basis of all things&mdash;the
-fundamental prius&mdash;is an irresistible and irregular appetite or craving
-to be, to do, to live,&mdash;but an <i>appetitus</i> or <i>nisus</i> which ascends
-from grade to grade&mdash;from mere mechanical forces acting in movement up
-to the highest form of animal activity. But as this 'Will' or blind
-lust of being and instinct of life gets above the inorganic world, and
-manifests itself in the animal organism, there emerges a new order of
-existence&mdash;the intellect, or the ideal world. Seen from the underside,
-indeed, all that has appeared now in the animal is a brain and a
-nerve-system&mdash;a new species of matter. But there is another side to the
-Mind which has thus awakened out of the sleep of natural forces. This
-intellect is unaware and can never be made aware that it is a child of
-nature: it acknowledges no superior, and no beginning or end in time.
-Its natal day is infinitely beyond the age when the cosmic process
-began its race; before stars gathered their masses of luminosity, and
-the earth received the first germs of life. As the genius of Art, it
-arrests the toiling struggle of existence to produce new forms and
-destroy old ones; it sets free in typical forms of eternal beauty
-the great ideas that nature vainly seeks to embody, and as moral and
-religious life its aim is to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> annihilate the craving and the lust for
-more and ever more being and to enter in passionless and calm union
-with the One-and-All.</p>
-
-<p>Thus it is, if not absurd, at least misleading, to speak of Hegel's
-system as Panlogism. Strictly speaking, it is only of the Logic
-that this is the proper name: there, unquestionably, reason is all
-and in all. Yet to hold that reason is the very life and centre of
-things is for philosophy the cardinal article&mdash;the postulate which
-must inspire her first and last steps and guide her throughout. But
-the Logical Idea, if put at the beginning, is at first only put as a
-presupposition, which it is the task of human intelligence to work
-out and organise. If it be the key which is to explain nature and
-render it intelligible, it is a key which has only been gained in the
-process&mdash;the long process&mdash;by which man has risen from his natural
-origin&mdash;never however parting company with it&mdash;to survey and comprehend
-himself and his setting. The faculty of 'pure thinking,' which is the
-pre-condition of Logical study, is the result of a gradual development
-in which animal sense has grown, and metamorphosed, and worked itself
-up to be a free intelligence and a good will capable of discerning
-and fulfilling the universal and the eternal. Thus in the Logic the
-system constructs the pure Idea&mdash;the ideal timeless organisation of
-thoughts or λόγοι on which all knowledge of reality rests&mdash;the diamond
-net which suffers nothing to escape its meshes: in the Philosophy of
-Nature it tries to put together in unity and continuity the phases
-and partial aspects which the physical universe presents in graduated
-exemplification of the central truth: and in the Philosophy of Mind it
-traces the steps by which a merely natural being becomes the moral and
-aesthetic idealist in whom man approaches deity.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>It is indeed Hegel's fundamental axiom that actuality is reasonable.
-But the actuality is not the appearance&mdash;the temporary phases&mdash;the
-succession of event: it is the appearance rooted in its essence&mdash;the
-succession concentrated (yet not lost) in its unity. There is room
-for much so-called irrationality within these ranges. For, when
-human beings pronounce something irrational, they only mean that
-their practical intelligence would have adopted other methods to
-arrive at certain conclusions. They judge, in fact, by their limited
-understandings and not <i>ex ordine universi.</i> Hegel's doctrine is after
-all only another way of stating the maintenance of the fittest; and
-it is liable to the v same misconception by those who employ their
-personal aims as the standards of judgment.</p>
-
-<p>So too there is reason&mdash;there is the Idea&mdash;in Nature. But it is
-there only for the artist, the religious man, and the philosopher;
-and they see it respectively by the eye of genius, by the power of
-faith, by the thought of reason. They see it from the standpoint
-of the absolute<i>&mdash;sub specie quadam aeternitatis.</i> It is therefore
-a recalcitrant matter in which Nature presents the Idea: or, if
-recalcitrant suggests a positive opposition, let us say rather a realm
-in which the Idea fails to come out whole and clear, where unity has to
-be forced upon and read into the facts. Science, says one writer, is
-an ideal construction: it implies an abstraction from irregularities
-and inequalities: it smoothes and sublimates the rough and imperfect
-material into a more rounded and perfect whole. Its object, which it
-terms a reality, is a non-sensible, imperceptible reality: what one
-might as well call an ideality, were it not that here again the popular
-imagination twists the word into a subjective sense to mean the private
-and personal ideas of the student.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>But the obvious individual reality never quite in its obviousness
-equals the 'golden mediocrity' of the ideal. Its myriad grapes must be
-crushed to yield the wine of the spirit.</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-'It's a lifelong toil till our lump be leavened'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>&mdash;till the ore be transformed into the fine gold. But the gold is
-there, and in the great laboratory of <i>natura</i> <i>naturans</i> is the
-principle and agent of its own purification. 'Nature is made better by
-no mean, but nature makes that mean'&mdash;for nature is spirit in disguise.</p>
-
-<p>It is on this side that a certain analogy of Hegel's and Schelling's
-philosophy of nature with the Romantic school comes out. Nature
-is felt, as it were, to be spirit-haunted, to give glimpses of a
-solidarity, a design, a providentiality, which runs counter to that
-general outward indifference in which part seems to have settled beside
-part, each utterly indifferent to the other. Romance is the unexpected
-coincidence, the sudden jumping together of what seemed set worlds
-apart and utterly alien. It was the sense of this Romance which wove
-its wild legends of nymph and cobold, of faun and river-god, of imp and
-fairy, wielding the powers of the elements and guiding the life of even
-the so-called inanimate world. But it is no less the theme of the fairy
-tale of science. Even in the austere demonstrations of geometry, and
-the constructions of mechanics, the un-looked-for slips upon us with
-gipsy tread. Who has not&mdash;in his early studies of mathematics&mdash;been
-fain to marvel at the almost unexpected consilience of property with
-property in a figure, suddenly placing in almost 'eery' relief the
-conjunction of what was apparently poles asunder? It is not a mere
-form of words to speak of beautiful properties of a conic section or
-a curve. Custom perhaps has blunted our<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> sense for the symmetries of
-celestial dynamics, but they are none the less admirable, because we
-are otherwise engrossed. To the first generation of our century the
-phenomena of chemistry, magnetism and electricity appealed&mdash;as they
-have never since done&mdash;with a tangible demonstration of that <i>appetitus
-ad invicem,</i> that instinct of union Bacon speaks of; and this time in
-a higher form than in mere mechanism. Polarity&mdash;the bifurcation of
-reality into a pair of opposites which yet sought their complement
-in each other&mdash;eternally dividing only eternally to unite, and thus
-only to exist&mdash;became a process pressed into general service. Lastly,
-what more admirable than that adaptation of the individual to the
-environment&mdash;and of the environment to the individual&mdash;of the organs in
-him to his total, and of his total to his organs. One in all and All in
-one: one life in perpetual transformation, animals, plants, and earth
-and air; one organism, developing in absolute coherence. This was the
-vision which the genius of Schelling and his contemporaries saw&mdash;the
-same vision which, by accumulation of facts and pictorial history,
-Darwin and his disciples have impressed in some measure even on the
-dullest.</p>
-
-<p>But there is a profound difference between the spirit of a Philosophy
-of Nature and the aggregate of the physical sciences. Each science
-takes the particular quarry which accident or providence has assigned
-to it, and does its best to 'put out' every piece of rock it contains.
-But it seldom goes, unless by constraint, and in these days of
-specialisation it does so less and less, to examine the neighbouring
-excavation, and see if there be any connexion between the strata. Even
-within its own domain it is ashamed to put forward too much parade of
-system. Its method is often like that of the showman in the travelling
-menagerie: 'And<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> now, please pass to the next carriage.' It respects
-the compartmental arrangement into which it finds the world broken up,
-and often thinks it has deserved well if it has filled the compartment
-fuller than before, or succeeded in creating a few sub-compartments
-within the old bounds. Even the so-called mental and moral sciences
-when they lose their philosophical character tend to imitate these
-features. Yet in every science there is an outlook and an outlet,
-for whosoever has the will and the power, to emerge from his narrow
-domain on the open fields and free prospect into the first fountains
-and last great ocean of being. Always, and not least in our own day,
-the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist, the psychologist, the
-sociologist, and the economist, have made their special field a
-platform where they might discourse <i>de omnibus rebus,</i> and become
-for the nonce philosophers and metaphysicians. It would be a silly
-intolerance and a misconception of the situation to exclaim <i>Ne sutor
-ultra crepidam</i>. In the organic system of things 'each "moment" even
-independent of the whole is the whole; and to see this is to penetrate
-to the heart of the thing.' We need hardly go to Hegel to be told that
-to know one thing thoroughly well is to know all things. The finite,
-which we inertly rest content with, would, if we were in full sympathy
-with it, open up its heart and show us the infinite. And yet if the
-specialist when he rises from his shoe-making, with a heart full of
-the faith that 'there is nothing like leather,' should proclaim his
-discovery of it in regions where it was hitherto unsurmised, one may
-smile incredulous and be no cynic.</p>
-
-<p>Philosophy then keeps open eye and ear&mdash;as far as may be no doubt for
-the finer shades and delicate details&mdash;but essentially for the music
-of humanity and the music of the spheres&mdash;for the general<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> purpose and
-drift of all sciences&mdash;from mathematics to sociology&mdash;as they help to
-make clear the life of nature and further the emancipation of man. It
-will seem occasionally to over-emphasise the continuity of science
-and to make light of its distinctions: it will seem occasionally more
-anxious as to the order than as to the contents of the sciences: it
-will remind the sciences of the hypothetical and formal character of
-much of their method and some of their principles: and sometimes will
-treat as unimportant, results on which the mere scholar or dogmatist
-of science lays great weight. From his habit of dealing with the
-limitations and mutual implication of principles and conceptions,
-the philosopher will often be able&mdash;and perhaps only too willing&mdash;to
-point out cases where the mere specialist has allowed himself to
-attribute reality to his abstraction. He will tell the analyst of
-the astronomical motions that he must not take the distinction of
-centrifugal and centripetal force, into which mechanics disintegrate
-the planetary orbit, as if it really meant that the planet was pulled
-inward by one force and sent on spinning forward by another<a name="FNanchor_8_47" id="FNanchor_8_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_47" class="fnanchor">[8]</a>. And
-the scientist, proud of his mathematics, will resent and laugh at
-the philosopher who lets fall a word about the planets moving in
-grand independence like 'blessed gods.' The philosopher will hint to
-the chemist that his formulae of composition and decomposition of
-bodies are, as he uses them, somewhat mythological, picturing water
-as atom of oxygen locked up with atom of hydrogen; and the chemist
-will go away muttering something about a fool who does not believe
-in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> well-ascertained chemical truth that water is composed of
-these two gases. If the philosopher further hints that it is not the
-highest ideal of a chemical science to be content with enumerating
-fifty or sixty elements, and detecting their several properties
-and affinities<a name="FNanchor_9_48" id="FNanchor_9_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_48" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>; that it would be well to find some principle of
-gradation, some unity or law which brought meaning into meaningless
-juxtaposition, the mere dogmatist, whose chemistry is his living and
-who shrinks from disendowment, will scent a propensity towards the
-heresy which sinks all elements in one. And yet, even among chemists,
-the instinct for law and unity begins to demand satisfaction.</p>
-
-<p>A still richer store of amazing paradox and perplexing analogies awaits
-anyone who will turn over the volume in Hegel's <i>Werke</i> (vii. i) and
-select the plums which lie thick in the lecture-notes. He will find
-a great deal&mdash;and probably more, the less he really knows of any of
-the subjects under discussion&mdash;that he cannot make head or tail of:
-language where he cannot guess whether it should be taken literally or
-figuratively. For Hegel seriously insists on the essential unity and
-identity of all the compartments of the physical universe; he will not
-keep time and space on one level, matter and motion on another, and
-senses, suns, plants, passions, all in their proper province. Going
-far beyond the theory which supposes that all the complex difference
-of organisation has grown up in endless, endless ages from a primitive
-indistinctness, so that the gap of time acts as a wall to keep early
-and late apart, Hegel insists upon their essential unity to-day. And
-that sounds hard&mdash;the herald of anarchy, of the collapse of the ordered
-polity of the scientific state. It is no doubt probable that Hegel,
-like other men, made mistakes; that he over-estimated the supposed
-discoveries of the day: that he indulged in false analogies, and that
-he was attracted by a daring paradox. All this has nothing to do with
-his main thesis: which is, that the natural realm is as it stands an
-a-logical realm where reason has gone beside itself, and yet containing
-an instrument&mdash;man, and that is mind&mdash;by which its rationality may be
-realised and restored. In that point at least he and Schopenhauer are
-at one.</p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_40" id="Footnote_1_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_40"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Kant's <i>Kritik d. r. Vernunft</i>: Methodenl. Architektonik
-d. r. Vern.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_41" id="Footnote_2_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_41"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Schelling's Werke, v. 116.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_42" id="Footnote_3_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_42"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Ibid. v. 276.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_43" id="Footnote_4_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_43"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Ibid. iii. 267.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_44" id="Footnote_5_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_44"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Kant, <i>Kritik d. r. Vern.,</i> Deduction of the Categories,
-Sect. III.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_45" id="Footnote_6_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_45"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Encyclopaedie</i>, § 250.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_46" id="Footnote_7_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_46"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Encycl.</i> Sect. 244 (<i>Logic,</i> p. 379).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_8_47" id="Footnote_8_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_47"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> <i>Encyclop.</i> §§ 266, 269; cf. the lecture-note as given
-in <i>Werke</i> vii i. p. 97. A large number of paradoxical analogies
-from Hegel's <i>Naturphilosophie</i> has been collected by Riehl in his
-<i>Philosophisher Criticismus</i>, ii. 2, 120.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_9_48" id="Footnote_9_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_48"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. 419.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a><br /><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER VIII.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>THE SCEPTICAL DOUBT: HUME.</h4>
-
-
-<p>We have seen that an innate tendency leads the human mind to connect
-and set in relation,&mdash;to connect, it may be erroneously, or without
-proper scrutiny, or under the influence of passions or prejudices,&mdash;but
-at any rate to connect. Criticism occasionally has impatiently banned
-this tendency as a mere fountain of errors. The human mind, says
-Francis Bacon, always assumes a greater uniformity in things than it
-finds; it expects symmetry, is bold in neglecting exceptional cases,
-and would fain go beyond all limits in its everlasting cry, Why and To
-what end. It varies in individuals between a passion for discovering
-similarities and an intent acuteness to every shade of unlikeness. But
-notwithstanding these warnings of the hen, the ugly duckling Reason
-<i>will</i> go beyond what is given: it knows no insuperable limitation.
-It may be guilty of what Bacon calls 'anticipation'&mdash;an induction
-on evidence insufficient&mdash;or it may subdue itself to the duty of
-'interpretation' of nature by proper methods: in either case, it is
-an act of association, synthesis, unification. For Nous <i>is</i> archè,
-and knows that it is: it will not yield to clamour or mere rebuke: it,
-too, cannot be commanded, unless by first obeying it: and Bacon, having
-duly objurgated the 'mind left to itself,' is obliged to let it go to
-gather the grapes before they are quite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> ripe, and to indulge it with
-a 'prerogative' of instances. As Mr. Herbert Spencer and many others
-are never weary of telling us: 'We think in relations. This is truly
-the form of all thought: and if there are any other forms they must be
-derived from this<a name="FNanchor_1_49" id="FNanchor_1_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_49" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>.' Man used to be defined as a thinking or rational
-animal: which means that man is a connecting and relation-giving
-animal; and from this, Aristotle's definition, making him out to be
-a 'political' animal, is only a corollary, most applicable in the
-region of Ethics. Here is the ultimate point, from which the natural
-consciousness, and the energies of science, art, and religion equally
-start upon their special missions.</p>
-
-<p>In ordinary life we attach but little importance to this machinery of
-cognition. We incline to let the fact of synthesis drop out of sight,
-as if it required no further study or notice, and we regard the things
-connected as exclusively worth attending to. The interest centres
-on the object&mdash;on the matter: the formal element&mdash;the connective
-tissue&mdash;is <i>only</i> an instrument of no importance, except in view of
-the end it helps us to. We use general and half-explained terms, such
-as development, evolution, continuity, as bridges from one thing to
-another, without giving any regard to the means of locomotion on their
-own account. Some one thing is the product of something else: we let
-the term 'product' slip out of the proposition as unimportant: and
-then read the statement so as to explain the one thing by turning it
-into the other. Things, according to this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> opinion, are all-important:
-the rest is mere words. These relations between things are not open
-to further investigation or definition: they are each <i>sui generis,</i>
-or peculiar: and even if the logician in his analysis of inference
-finds it advisable to deal with them, he will be content, if he can
-classify them in some approximate way, as a basis for his subdivision
-of propositions. This is certainly one way of getting rid of
-Metaphysics&mdash;for the time.</p>
-
-<p>But there are epochs in life, and epochs in universal history, when the
-mind withdraws from its immersion in active life, and reflects upon its
-own behaviour as on the proceedings of some strange creature, of which
-it is a mere spectator. At such seasons when we stop to reflect upon
-the partial scene, and close our eyes to the totality, doubts begin to
-arise, whether our procedure is justified when we unify and combine the
-isolated phenomena. Have we any right to throw our own subjectivity,
-the laws of our imagination and thought, into the natural world? Would
-it not be more proper to refrain altogether from the use of such
-conceptions?</p>
-
-<p>Philosophy, said one of the ancients<a name="FNanchor_2_50" id="FNanchor_2_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_50" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>, begins in wonder, and ends in
-wonder. It begins from the surprise that something could <i>be</i> what it
-purports to be: it ends in the marvel of our having <i>thought</i> anything
-else possible. Such a phrase well becomes the naive age in which the
-soul goes freely forth, wandering from one novelty to another, curious
-to find out all that can be known,&mdash;like the young wanderer on the
-sea-shore whom fresh pebbles and new shells tempt endlessly to fill his
-basket. But as the ages roll on, and the accumulations of the past grow
-heavier in the receptacle, the need of a re-examination of the stores
-becomes imperative. The bright colours have faded&mdash;and generally<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>
-they fade soon: there has been much picked up in the inexperience of
-youthful enthusiasm which maturer reflection hardly can think worth
-carrying further.</p>
-
-<p>The duty of doubt and of re-examination of what tradition has
-bequeathed has been enforced by philosophy in all ages. For it is the
-cardinal principle of philosophy to be free&mdash;to possess its soul&mdash;never
-to be a mere machine or mere channel of tradition. But, in some ages,
-this assertion of its freedom has had for the soul a pre-eminently
-negative aspect. It has meant only freedom <i>from</i>&mdash;and not also freedom
-<i>in</i> and <i>through</i>&mdash;its environing, or rather constituting, substance.
-Such an epoch was seen in the ancient world when the <i>New Academy</i>,
-with its sceptical abstention from all objective assertions, had to
-protest against the dogmatism of the Stoic and Epicurean schoolmen.
-In modern times the initial shudder before plunging in has been a
-recurrent crisis. Each thinker&mdash;as he personally resolved to thread his
-way through the wilderness of current opinion to the realm of certified
-truth&mdash;has had to remind himself (and his contemporaries) that in
-knowledge at least no possessions are secured property unless they have
-been earned by the sweat of their owner's brow. This is the common
-theme of Bacon's aphorisms in the beginning of the <i>Novum Organum</i>, of
-Descartes' <i>Discourse of Method</i>, and of Spinoza's unfinished essay
-on the <i>Emendation of the Intellect.</i> There is indeed a discrepancy
-in these utterances as to the measure in which they severally think
-it needful to insist as preliminary on a kind of moral and religious
-consecration of life to the service of truth. But a more compelling
-division arises. The maxim may be understood to say, 'Divest thy mind
-of its ill-gotten gains, its evil habits, prejudices, and system,
-and in childlike simplicity prepare thine eye<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> and ear to receive in
-pure vessels the stores of truth which are ready to stream in from
-the world.' Or it may rather be held to say, 'Remember that thou art
-a conscious, waking mind, and that every idea thou hast is thine by
-thine own assent: insist upon thy right of free intelligence, and give
-no place to any belief which thou hast not raised into full light of
-consciousness, and found to be completely consistent with the whole
-power and content of thy clearest thought.' And, we may add, if the
-maxim be obeyed too exclusively in either way, it will be obeyed amiss.</p>
-
-<p>With Locke the question comes into even greater prominence. On
-what conditions can I have knowledge? How can I be certified that
-my ideas&mdash;the subjective images in <i>my</i> mind&mdash;have a reference to
-something objective and real? Locke's answer is, not unnaturally
-perhaps, somewhat prolix, and wanting in fundamental precision of
-principles. After dismissing the view that, even before experience,
-there are certain common ideas spontaneously and by original endowment
-present in all human beings, he goes on to show how we can sufficiently
-account for the ideas we actually find by supposing in us an almost
-unlimited power of joining and disjoining, of comparing, relating,
-and unifying the various elementary 'ideas' which make their way into
-the empty chambers of our mind by the senses. As to the source, the
-channel, and the nature of these sense-ideas, Locke is obscure and
-apparently inconsistent: though clearly it should be all important
-to know how an idea can be caused by, or spring from, a material
-thing. When in his fourth book he comes to the question of what is the
-reality, or the <i>meaning</i> of our ideas, he does not really get beyond a
-few&mdash;rather dubiously reasoned-out&mdash;conclusions that, although strictly
-we cannot go beyond 'the present testimony of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span> our senses employed
-about the particular objects that do affect them,' we may for practical
-purposes allow a good deal to the presumptions of general probability.</p>
-
-<p>But Locke had also begun to criticise our ideas, in his account of
-their formation out of the 'simple ideas'&mdash; (which neither Locke
-nor any other atomist of mind has succeeded in making clear)&mdash;which
-the several senses give, and by observing or reflecting on what
-goes on or is present in <i>our</i> minds, <i>we</i> 'form,' he says, various
-ideas. In a style of discussion which is on the borderland between
-vulgar and philosophical analysis&mdash; (never quite false, but nearly
-always inadequate, because it almost invariably assumes what it
-ostensibly proposes to explain,) Locke tells us how we get one idea by
-'enlarging,' another by 'repeating,' as we please, the bounteous data
-of the touch and sight. But amongst the compounds there are some of
-more disputable origin. There are some&mdash;e.g. ideas of punishable acts
-or legalised states&mdash;which are 'voluntary collections of ideas put
-together in the mind independent from any original patterns in nature,'
-These, though entirely subjective, are entirely real, because they only
-serve as patterns by which we may judge or designate things so and so.
-It is worse with the idea of power, which we only 'collect' or 'infer,'
-and that not from matter, where it is invisible, but only in a clear
-light when we consider God and spirits. Still worse, perhaps, is it
-with the idea of substance, which is a 'collection' of simple ideas
-with the 'supposition' of an 'incomprehensible' something in which the
-collection 'subsists.'</p>
-
-<p>Hump put all this rather more pointedly. We have 'impressions,' i.
-e. lively perceptions by sense. We have also 'ideas,' i. e. fainter
-images of these, but otherwise identical. An idea <i>should</i> be a copy
-of an impression. If you cannot point out any such impression, you
-may<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> be certain you are mistaken when you imagine you have any such
-idea. There is prevalent in the mental world a kind of association; a
-'gentle force' connects ideas in our imagination according to certain
-relations they possess. This 'mind' or this 'imagination' is only a
-bundle or collection of impressions and ideas; but a collection which
-is continually and rapidly changing in its constituents, and in the
-scale of liveliness possessed by each constituent. When an idea is
-particularly fresh and forcible, it is a <i>belief</i> or it is believed in:
-when faint, not so. Or, otherwise put, the object of an idea is <i>said</i>
-to <i>exist</i>, when the idea itself is vividly <i>felt</i><a name="FNanchor_3_51" id="FNanchor_3_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_51" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>. Really there is
-no such thing as 'external existence' taken literally. 'Our universe is
-the universe of the imagination': all existence is for a consciousness.</p>
-
-<p>Impressions arise in certain orders of sequence or co-existence. When
-two impressions frequently recur and always in the same order, the
-custom binds them so closely together, that, should one of them only be
-given as impression, we cannot help having an idea of the other, which,
-growing more vivid by the contagion of the contiguous impression,
-creates, or is, a belief in its reality. Between the perceptions
-as such, there is no connexion; they are distinct and independent
-existences. They only get a connexion through <i>our feeling; we feel</i>
-a 'determination' of our thought to pass from one to another. The
-one impression has no power to produce the other; the one thing does
-not cause the other. 'We never have any impression that contains any
-power or efficacy<a name="FNanchor_4_52" id="FNanchor_4_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_52" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>,' Hence the power and necessity we attribute to
-the so-called causal agent and to the connexion are an illegitimate
-transference from our feeling, and a mistranslation of <i>our</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>
-incapacity to resist the force of habitual association into a real
-bond between the two impressions <i>themselves,</i> The necessity is in the
-mind&mdash;as a habit-caused compulsion&mdash;not in the objects.</p>
-
-<p>As with the relation of cause and effect, so it is with others. The
-identity of continued existence is only another name&mdash;an objective
-transcript&mdash;of the feeling of smooth uninterrupted succession of
-impressions in which our thought glides along from one in easy
-transition to another. And here the coherence and continuity of
-perceptions need not be absolute. A vivid impression of unbroken
-connexion in a part will, if predominant, by association fill up the
-gaps and weak points, and behind the admitted breaks in the line of
-our ideas will suppose&mdash;invent&mdash;or create an imperceptible but <i>real</i>
-continuity in the supposed things. And by this fiction of a continuous
-existence of our perceptions, we easily lapse into the doctrine that
-our perceptions have an independent existence as objects or things in
-themselves:&mdash;a doctrine which according to Hume is contrary to the
-plainest experience.</p>
-
-<p>But if the world is always the world of imagination&mdash;of
-<i>Vorstellung</i>&mdash;of mental representation, Hume is aware that we must
-admit two orders or grades of such representation. We must distinguish,
-he remarks<a name="FNanchor_5_53" id="FNanchor_5_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_53" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>, 'in the imagination betwixt the principles which
-are permanent, irresistible and universal (such as the customary
-transition from causes to effects and from effects to causes), and the
-principles which are changeable, weak and irregular. The former are
-the foundation of all our thoughts and actions,' There are, in other
-words, normal and general laws of association&mdash;such as the relation
-of cause and effect&mdash;which persuade us of real existence. By its own
-laws, therefore,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> within the realm of <i>Vorstellung</i> or Mental idea,
-there grows up a permanent, objective world for all, contrasted with
-the temporary, accidental perception of the individual and of the
-moment; and this serves as the standard or the one common measure by
-which occasional perturbations are to be measured. Within the limits of
-the subjective in general there arises a subjective of higher order,
-which is truly objective. This same change of front&mdash;as it may be
-called&mdash;Hume makes in morals. There the mind can modify and control
-its passions according as it can feel the objects of them near or far;
-and though each of us has his 'peculiar position,' we can&mdash;so creating
-the ethical basis&mdash;'fix on some steady and general points of view, and
-always in our thoughts place ourselves in them, whatever may be our
-present situation<a name="FNanchor_6_54" id="FNanchor_6_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_54" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>': we can 'choose some common point of view,' and
-from the vantage-ground of a permanent principle, however distant, we
-have a chance of gaining the victory over our passion, however near.</p>
-
-<p>Thus far Hume had gone in the development of idealism,' Whether his
-theory is consistent from end to end, need not be here discussed. But
-it is evident that Hume was not lost in the quagmire of subjective
-idealism. The objective and the subjective are with him akin: the
-objective is the subjective, which is universal, permanent, and normal.
-The causal relation has, in the first instance, only a subjective
-necessity; but through that subjective necessity or its irresistible
-belief, it generates an objective world. But it has been and is the
-fortune of philosophers to be known in the philosophical world by some
-conspicuous red rag of their system which first caught the eye of the
-bull-like leaders of the human herd. It was so notably with Hobbes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
-and Spinoza; and most of the thinkers whose names appear in the pages
-of Kant suffer from this curtailment. Descartes, Locke, Leibniz,
-Berkeley, Hume, are <i>there</i> not the real philosophers, discoverable in
-their works, but the creatures of historic reputation and of popular
-simplification who do duty for them.</p>
-
-<p>Kant's Hume is therefore a somewhat imaginary being: the product,
-partly of imperfect knowledge of Hume's writings, partly of
-prepossessions derived from a long previous training in German
-rationalism. Such a Hume was&mdash;or would have been, had he existed&mdash;a
-philosopher who 'took the objects of experience for things in
-themselves,' who 'treated the conception of cause as a false and
-deceptive illusion,' who did not indeed venture to assail the certainty
-of mathematics, but held&mdash;as regards all knowledge about the existence
-of things&mdash;'empiricism to be the sole source of principles,' founding
-his conclusion mainly on an examination of the causal nexus<a name="FNanchor_7_55" id="FNanchor_7_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_55" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>. This
-'note of warning' sounded against the claims of pure reason&mdash;as he
-calls Hume's <i>Enquiry</i> was what about 1762 broke Kant's dogmatic
-slumber and forced him to give his researches in speculative philosophy
-a new direction. His first step was to generalise Hume's problem from
-an inquiry into the origin of the causal idea into a general study
-of the synthetic principles in knowledge. His next was to attempt to
-fix the number of these concepts and synthetic principles. And his
-third was to 'deduce' them: i. e., to prove the reciprocal implication
-between experience or knowledge and the concepts or categories of
-intelligence.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_49" id="Footnote_1_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_49"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>First Principles</i>, p. 162. It may be as well to remark
-that Relation is scarcely an adequate description of the nature of
-thought as a whole. We shall see when we come to the theory of logic,
-that the term is applicable&mdash;and then somewhat imperfectly&mdash;only to the
-second phase of thought, the categories of reflection, which are the
-favourite categories of science and popular metaphysics.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_50" id="Footnote_2_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_50"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Arist. <i>Metaph.</i> i. 2. 26.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_51" id="Footnote_3_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_51"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Treatise of Human Nature</i> (Understanding), iii. 7 and ii.
-6.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_52" id="Footnote_4_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_52"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Ibid. iii. 14.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_53" id="Footnote_5_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_53"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>Treatise of Human Nature</i> (Understanding iv. 4.)</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_54" id="Footnote_6_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_54"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Treatise of Human Nature</i> (Morals), iii. i.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_55" id="Footnote_7_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_55"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Kant, <i>Prolegomena</i> to Metaph. Introduction and <i>Crit. of
-Practical Reason</i> (on the Claim of Pure Reason, <i>Werke,</i> viii. 167).</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER IX.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>THE ATTEMPT AT A CRITICAL SOLUTION: KANT.</h4>
-
-
-<p>The <i>Criticism of Pure Reason</i> has been described by its author as a
-generalisation of Hume's problem. Hume, he thought, had treated his
-question on the 'relations of ideas' in their bearing upon 'matters of
-fact' mainly with reference to the isolated case of cause and effect.
-Kant extended the inquiry so as to comprise all those connective and
-unifying ideas which form the subject-matter of metaphysics. In his own
-technical language&mdash;which has lost its meaning for the present day&mdash;he
-asked, 'Are Synthetic judgments <i>a priori</i> possible?'&mdash;a question which
-in another place he has translated into the form, 'Is the metaphysical
-faith of men sound, and is a metaphysical science possible?' By a
-metaphysics he meant in the first instance the belief in a more than
-empirical reality, and secondly the science which should give real
-knowledge of God, Freedom and Immortality,&mdash;a science whose objects
-would be God, the World, and the Soul. From a comparatively early date
-(1762-4) Kant had been inclined to suspect and distrust the claims
-of metaphysics to replace faith, and to give knowledge of spiritual
-reality; and he had tried to vindicate for the moral and religious life
-an independence of the conclusions and methods of the metaphysical
-theology and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> psychology of the day. But it was not till some years
-later&mdash;in 1770&mdash;that he formulated any very definite views as to the
-essential conditions of scientific knowledge: and it was not till 1781
-that his theory on the subject was put together in a provisionally
-complete shape.</p>
-
-<p>What then are the criteria of a science? When is our thought knowledge,
-and of objective reality? In the first place, there must be a given
-something&mdash;a sens<i>-datum</i>&mdash;an 'impression' as Hume might have said. If
-there be no impression, therefore, there can be no scientific idea,
-no real knowledge. There must be the primary touch&mdash;the feeling&mdash;the
-affection&mdash;the <i>je ne sais quoi</i> of contact with reality. Secondly,
-what is given can only be received if taken up by the recipient, and
-in such measure as he is able to appropriate it. The given is received
-in a certain mode. In the present case, the sensation is apprehended
-and perceived under the forms of space and time. Perception, in other
-words, whatever may be its special quality or its sensuous material,
-is always an act of dating and localisation. The distinction between
-the mere lump of feeling or sensibility and the perception is that
-the latter implies a field of extended and mutually excluding parts
-of space, and a series of points of time, both field and series being
-continuous, and, so far as inexhaustibility goes, infinite. Thirdly,
-even in the reception of the given there is a piece of action and
-spontaneity. If the more passive recipiency be called Sense, this
-active element in the adaptation may be termed Intellect. Intellect is
-a power or process of choice, selection, comparison, distinguishing and
-dividing, analysis and synthesis, affirmation and negation, numeration,
-of judgment and doubt, of connexion and disjunction, differentiation
-and integration. Its general aspect is by Kant<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> sometimes described
-as Judgment&mdash;the act of thought which correlates by distinguishing;
-sometimes as Apperception, and the unity of apperception. It is, i.
-e., an active unity and a synthetic energy; it unifies, and always
-unifies. It links perception to perception, correlating one with
-another&mdash;interpreting one by another; estimating the knowledge-value of
-one by the rest. It thus 'apperceives.' It is a faculty of association
-and consociation of ideas. But the association is inward and 'ideal'
-union: the one idea interpenetrates and fuses with the other, even
-while it remains distinct.</p>
-
-<p>Kant's work may be described&mdash;in its first stage&mdash;as an analysis and a
-criticism of experience. The term Experience is an ambiguous one. It
-sometimes means what has been called the 'raw material' of experience:
-the crude, indigested mass of poured-in <i>matter</i>-of-knowledge. If
-there be such a shapeless lump anywhere,&mdash;which has to be considered
-presently&mdash;it, at any rate, is not on Kant's view properly entitled to
-the name of Experience. The Given must be felt and apprehended: and&mdash;to
-put the point paradoxically&mdash;to be felt it must be more than felt,&mdash;it
-must be perceived. It must, in other words, be projected&mdash;set in space
-and time: let out of the mere dull inner subjectivity of feeling into
-the clear and distinct outer subjectivity of perception. But, again,
-to be perceived, it must be apperceived: to be set in time and space,
-it must first of all be in the hands of the unifying consciousness,
-which is the lord of time and space. For in so far as space and time
-mean a place and an order&mdash;in so far as they mean more than an empty
-inconceivable receptacle for bulks of sensation, in the same degree
-do they presuppose an intellectual, synthetic genius, which is in all
-its perceptions one and the same,&mdash;the fundamental, original unity of
-consciousness. And this analysis of experience is transcendental.'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
-Beginning with the assumed datum&mdash;the object of or in experience&mdash;it
-shows that this object which is supposed to be <i>there</i>&mdash;to exist by
-itself and wait for perception&mdash;is created by and in the very act which
-apprehends it. Climbing up and rising above its habitual absorption
-<i>in</i> the <i>thing</i>, consciousness (that of the philosophic observer and
-analyst) sees the thing in the act of making, and watches its growth.</p>
-
-<p>We have seen that Kant made free use of the metaphor of giving and
-receiving. But it is hardly possible to use such metaphors and retain
-independence of judgment. The associations customarily attached to the
-figurative language carry one away easily, and often for a long way, on
-the familiar paths of imagination. The analogy is used even where&mdash;if
-all were looked into&mdash;its terms become meaningless. No reader of Locke
-can have failed, e. g., to notice how he is misled by his own images of
-the dark room and the empty cabinet:&mdash;images, useful and perhaps even
-necessary, but requiring constant restraint in him who would ply them
-wisely and to his reader's good. From what has been said above it will
-be clear that the acquisition of experience, the growth of knowledge,
-is a unique species of gift and acceptance. The consciousness which
-Kant describes may be the consciousness of John Doe or Richard Roe:
-but as Kant describes it, the limitations of their personality,
-i.e. of their individual body and soul, have been neglected. It is
-consciousness in general which is Kant's theme, just as it is granite
-in general&mdash;and not the block in yonder field,&mdash;which is the theme
-of the geologist. Once get that clear, and you will also see clearly
-that consciousness is at once giver and recipient&mdash;neither or both:
-at once receptivity and spontaneity. But&mdash;you may reply&mdash;does not the
-material object <i>act</i> (chemically, optically,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> mechanically, &amp;c.) on
-the sense-organ on the periphery of my body, does not the nerve-string
-<i>convey</i> the impression to the brain; and is not perception the
-<i>effect</i> of that process, in which the material object is the initial
-<i>cause</i>?</p>
-
-<p>In this exposition&mdash;which is not unknown in vulgar philosophy&mdash;there
-is a monstrous, almost inextricable, complication of fact with
-inference, of truth with error. So long as there is an uncertainty&mdash;and
-metaphysicians themselves, we may be reminded, are not agreed upon the
-matter&mdash;as to what we are to understand by cause, effect, and act,
-what an impression is, and how brain and intelligence mutually stand
-to each other, it is hardly possible to pronounce judgment upon this
-mode of statement. Yet perhaps we may go so far as to say that while
-the terms quoted bear an intelligible meaning when applied within the
-physiological process they are vain when used of relations of mind to
-body. There is a sense in which we may speak of the action of mind
-on body, and of body on mind: but what we mean would perhaps be more
-unmistakably expressed by saying that the higher intellectual and
-volitional energies are never in our experience entirely independent
-of the influences of the lower sensitive and emotional nature. In
-the metaphysical sense which the terms are here made to bear, they
-mislead. Action and re-action can only take place in the separateness
-of space, where one is here and another there: (though, be it added,
-they cannot take place even on these terms, unless the here and the
-there be somehow unified in a medium which embraces both). <i>Mens</i>, said
-Spinoza, is the <i>idea corporis</i><a name="FNanchor_1_56" id="FNanchor_1_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_56" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>: he would hardly have said <i>Corpus
-habet ideam</i>. What he meant would scarcely have been well described by
-calling it a <i>parallelism</i> or mutual independence,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> yet with harmony or
-identity, of body and mind. Apart from body, no doubt, mind is for him
-a nullity: for body is what gives it reality. But, on the other hand,
-Mind is the enveloping and including 'Attribute' of the two: idealism
-overlaps realism.</p>
-
-<p>This was the fundamental proposition which Kant contended for; what he
-spoke of as his own Copernican discovery: though, in reality, for the
-<i>student</i> of the history of philosophy it was only the re-statement,
-in some respects the clearer statement, of the idealism which even
-Hume, not to mention Spinoza and Leibniz, had maintained. The world
-of experience&mdash;the empirical, objective, and real world&mdash;is a world
-of ideas, of representations which have place only in mind, of
-appearances. Space and time are subjective: the forms of thought are
-subjective: and yet they constitute phenomenal or empirical or real
-objectivity. Such language is&mdash;it would seem inevitably&mdash;misunderstood:
-and in his second edition, Kant&mdash;besides many other minor modifications
-of statement,&mdash;had to defend himself by inserting a 'confutation of
-idealism,' i.e. of the theory which holds that the existence of objects
-outside us in space is doubtful, if not even impossible. But no end
-of argument will ever confute the view that Kant's doctrine is such
-idealism: until people can be got to rise to a new view of what is
-subjectivity&mdash;what is an idea&mdash;and what is existence outside us.</p>
-
-<p>By 'subjective' the world is in the way of understanding what is due
-to personal prepossession, void of general acceptability, a product of
-individual feeling, peculiar and inexplicable tastes. By subjective
-Kant means what belongs to <i>the</i> subject or knowing mind as such and
-in its generality: what is constitutive of intelligence in general,
-what sense and intellect are <i>semper et ubique</i>. Into the question
-how the human<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> being came to have such an intellectual endowment&mdash;the
-question which Nativist psychology is supposed to settle in one way;
-and Evolutionism in another&mdash;Kant does not enter; he merely says
-where there is knowledge, there is a knower,&mdash;a knowing subject <i>so</i>
-constituted. It comes after all to the tautology that the reality we
-know is a known reality: that knowledge is a growth in the knower,
-and not an accidental product due to things otherwise unknown. The
-predicate (or category) <i>'is'</i> is contained, implicit, in the predicate
-'<i>is known,</i>' or what '<i>is</i>' puts implicitly, '<i>is known</i>' puts
-explicitly and truly.</p>
-
-<p>By 'appearance' the world understands a sham, or at least somewhat
-short of reality. By appearance Kant understands a reality which has
-appeared: or, as that is going too far, a something which is real
-so far as it goes (a <i>prima facie</i> fact), but only a candidate for
-admission into the circle of reals. And such reality depends on nothing
-more than its thorough-going coherence with other appearances, its
-explaining the rest, and being in turn explained by them,&mdash;its absolute
-adaptation to its environment. And this environment all lies in the
-common field of consciousness, and in the one correlating and unifying
-apperceptivity of the ego,&mdash;that Ego which is the inseparable comrade,
-vehicle, and judge, of all our perceptions. It is the appearance&mdash;but
-as yet not the appearance <i>of</i> something,&mdash;but rather an appearance
-<i>to</i> or <i>for</i> something.</p>
-
-<p>By an 'idea' the world in general understands what it is sometimes
-ready to call a <i>mere</i> idea. And by a mere idea is meant something
-which is <i>not</i> reality, but a peculiarity of an individual mind, or
-group of minds-a fancy, without objective truth:&mdash;something, we may
-even add, which for many people is located in their own head or brain,
-cut off by blank bone-walls<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> from the open air of real being. By idea
-(representation, <i>Vorstellung</i>) Kant meant that an object is always
-and essentially the object of a mind: always relative to a subject
-consciousness, and implying it, just as a subject consciousness always
-implies an object.</p>
-
-<p>And by 'existence outside us' the world probably means&mdash;for it is
-imprudent to define and refine too much in this hazy medium of words
-where we all drowse&mdash;existence of things on an independent footing
-beyond the limits of our personal, i. e. bodily and sentient, self.
-As regards <i>our own</i> trunk and limbs, most of us, except in some most
-strange insanity, are not likely ever to be in doubt, and are indeed
-more likely, after Schopenhauer's model, to take the knowledge of these
-<i>personalia</i> as the one thing immediately and intuitively certain. We
-talk freely enough, it is true, about existence outside our own minds;
-but it is only a drastic method of stating the difference between a
-fancy and a fact. And probably we labour under a half-unconscious
-hallucination that our minds are localised in some material 'seat,'
-somewhere in our bodily limits, and more especially in the central
-nerve-organs.</p>
-
-<p>But, as has been said elsewhere<a name="FNanchor_2_57" id="FNanchor_2_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_57" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>, the point of view under which Mind
-is regarded by Kant is that of Consciousness, and especially perceptive
-consciousness. He describes, as we have put it above, the steps or
-conditions under which the single sense-observation is elevated into
-the rank of an experience claiming universality and necessity. But
-the whole machinery of consciousness&mdash;the form of sensibility and the
-category of intellect&mdash;is originally set in motion by an<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> impetus
-from without: or at least the manipulating machinery requires a raw
-material on which to operate. Consciousness, or the observer who
-takes this point of view, feels that it is being played upon by an
-unknown performer&mdash;or that it is attempting to apprehend something,
-which, because the act of apprehension is also to some extent (and to
-what extent, who can say?) a transmutation, it must for ever fail to
-apprehend truly. It is haunted by the phantom of a real,&mdash;a thing in
-its own right, which can only appear in forms of sense and intellect,
-never in its own essential being. It is only a short step further&mdash;and
-Kant, if one may judge him by several isolated passages, has more than
-once crossed the interval,&mdash;to treat, after the manner of uneducated
-consciousness and of popular science, the thing in its independent
-being as the cause which produces the sensation, or as the original
-which the mental idea reproduces under the distortions or modifications
-rendered necessary by the sensuous-intellectual medium. For, if under
-the terms of one analogy the perception is an <i>effect</i> of the thing,
-under those of another it is an <i>image</i> or copy of external reality.</p>
-
-<p>If this be Kantian philosophy&mdash;and it can quote chapter and verse in
-its favour&mdash;Kantian philosophy is one version of the great dogma of
-the relativity of knowledge. That unhappy phrase seems to have many
-meanings, but none of absolutely catholic acceptation. It may mean that
-knowledge of things states their relations&mdash;the way they behave in
-reference to this or that, in these or those circumstances; and that
-of an utterly unrelated and <i>absolutely</i> isolated thing, our knowledge
-is and must be <i>nil.</i> Of a thing-in-itself we can know nothing; for
-there is nothing to know. It may mean that knowledge is relative to the
-recipient or the knower,&mdash;that it is not a product which can stand<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
-by itself, but needs a vehicle and an object in close relation. In
-this way, too, knowledge is relative to age and circumstances: grows
-from period to period, and may even decay. And thirdly, the relativity
-of knowledge may be taken to mean that we (and all human beings) can
-never know the reality; because we can only know the phenomenon, i.
-e. the modified, transmuted, reflected thing which has reconstituted
-an image of itself after passing the interfering medium. For, first
-of all, we must strip it&mdash;this 'image' so-called (the vulgar call
-it the 'thing')&mdash;of the secondary qualities (sound, colour, taste,
-resistance) which it has in the consciousness of a being dependent on
-his sense-organs: and then, we must get rid also of those quantitative
-attributes (figure, number, size) which it has in the consciousness
-of a spatially and temporally perceptive being;&mdash;and then;&mdash;but the
-prospect is too horrible to continue further and face the Gorgon's head
-in the outer darkness, where man denudes appearance in the hope to meet
-reality.</p>
-
-<p>The fact is, there are too many strands in the web which Kant is
-weaving, for him or perhaps for any man to keep them all well in hand
-and lose none of the symmetry of the pattern he designs. To be just, we
-must, in dealing with him as with any other philosopher, try to keep
-in view the unity of that design instead of insisting too minutely and
-too definitely upon its occasional defects. It is easy to work the pun
-that a 'critical' philosophy must itself expect to be criticised; it is
-more important to remember that by a criticism Kant meant an attempt to
-steer a course between the always enticing extremes of dogmatism and
-scepticism,&mdash;an attempt to be fair, i. e. just to both sides, and yet
-neither to sink into the systematised placidity of the former, nor to
-rove in a mere guerilla warfare with the latter. And it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> is the mere
-privateer who in the popular sense of the word is the mere critic.</p>
-
-<p>Of Kant we must remember that he has the defects of his qualities.
-He prides himself on his distinctions of sense and intellect, of
-imagination and understanding, of understanding and reason; and with
-justice: but his distinctions are sometimes so decisive that it is
-hard work both for him and for his reader to reconstitute their
-unity. He is fond of utilising old classifications to embody his new
-doctrine: and occasionally the result is like what we have been taught
-to expect from pouring new wine into old bottles. He draws hard and
-fast lines, and then has to create, as it seems, supplementary links
-of connexion, which, if they operate, can only do so because they are
-the very unity he began by ignoring. One gets perfectly lost in the
-multitude of syntheses, in the labyrinth of categories, schemata, and
-principles, of paralogisms, antinomies, and ideals of pure reason. One
-part of this formalism <i>may</i> be set down to the pedantry and pipeclay
-of the age of the Great Frederick&mdash;pedantry, from which, as we console
-ourselves, our modern souls are freed. But it arises rather from the
-necessity of pursuing the battle between truth and error through every
-complicated passage in that great fortress which ages of scholasticism
-had&mdash;on various plans&mdash;gradually constructed. Kant is always a little
-of the martinet and the schoolmaster; but it is because he knows that
-true liberty cannot be secured without forms and must capture the old
-before it can plant the new. The forms as they stand in his grouping
-may often appear stiff and lifeless: but a more careful study, more
-sympathetically intent, will find that there is latent life and
-undisplayed connexion in the terms. Unfortunately the classified
-cut-and-dried specimens are more welcome<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span> to the collector, and can
-more easily be put in evidence in the examination-room.</p>
-
-<p>Thus the original question, Are synthetic judgments <i>a priori</i>
-possible? is answered&mdash;somewhat piecemeal&mdash;in a way that leads the
-reader to suppose it is a question of psychology. He hears so much of
-sense, imagination, intellect, in the discussion, that he fancies it is
-an account of a process carried on by the faculties of an individual
-mind. And of course nobody need suppose these processes are ever
-carried on otherwise than by individual thinkers, human beings with
-proper names. But scientific investigation is concerned only with
-the essential and universal. For it, really, sense, imagination, &amp;c.
-are not so many faculties in a thinking agent: they are grades and
-aspects of consciousness,&mdash;'powers' in a process of gradual mental
-complication (involution). Kant is really dealing with a 'normal'
-thought with its distinguishable constituent aspects. Only&mdash;he fails
-to 'make this explicit and clear. The individualism&mdash;the un-historical
-prepossession&mdash;of his age is upon his phraseology, if not upon his
-thought: and one hardly realises that he is really engaged on human
-thought and knowledge as a substantial subject of itself apart from its
-individual vehicles,&mdash;on that thought, which lives and grows in social
-institutions and products,&mdash;in language, science, literature, and moral
-usage,&mdash;the common stock which one age bequeathes to the next, but
-which the later-comer can only inherit if he works for and creates it
-afresh. If it be a psychology, therefore, it is a psychology which does
-not assume a soul with qualities, but which expounds the steps in the
-constitution of a normal intelligence.</p>
-
-<p>One may note, without insisting on them too much, the defects of his
-treatment of the forms of thought. It may be said that, in the <i>first</i>
-place, the table of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> categories was incomplete. It had been
-borrowed, as Kant himself tells us, from the old logical subdivision
-of judgments, derived more or less directly from Aristotle and the
-Schoolmen. Now many of the relations occurring in ordinary thought
-could not be reduced to any of the twelve forms, without doing violence
-to them. But Kant expressly disclaims exhaustiveness in detail. He
-could, if he would: but that is for another season. In the <i>second</i>
-place, the classification did not expressly put forward any principle
-or reason, and gave ground for no development. That there should be
-four fundamental categories, each with three divisions, making twelve
-in all, seems as inexplicable as that there should be four Athenian
-tribes in early times and twelve Phratriai. The twelve patriarchs of
-thought stand as if in equal authority, with little or no bearing upon
-one another. We have here, in short, what seems an artificial and not
-a natural classification of the types of thought. But Kant himself has
-given some explanation of the triad, and a sympathetic interpretation
-has shown how the four main groups are steps in the solution of one
-problem<a name="FNanchor_3_58" id="FNanchor_3_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_58" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> In the <i>third</i> place, the question as taken up seems largely
-psychological, or subjective, concerning the constitution of the human
-mind as a percipient and cognitive faculty. But this is necessary,
-perhaps, to the restricted nature of Kant's problem. He is dealing with
-the elements that form our objective or scientific consciousness of
-the physical world. The deeper question of the place and work of mind
-in life in general, in law and morality and religion, does not at this
-stage come before him. That problem in fact only gradually emerges
-with the Criticism of the Moral Faculty and the Aesthetic Judgment.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
-Logic&mdash;as the doctrine of the <i>Logos</i> which is the principle of all
-things, even of its own Other&mdash;had to wait for its preparation till it
-could be matured.</p>
-
-<p>In Hegel, the question assumes a wider scope, and receives a more
-thorough-going answer. In the <i>first</i> place the question about the
-Categories is transferred from what we have called the epistemological
-or psychological, to what Hegel terms the logical, sphere. It is
-transferred from the Reason subjectively considered as a mere
-receptive and synthetic human consciousness to the Reason which is in
-the world and in history,&mdash;a Reason, which our Reason, as it were,
-touches, and so becomes possessed of knowledge. In the <i>second</i> place,
-the Categories become a vast multitude. The intellectual telescope
-discovers new stars behind the constellations named in ancient lore.
-There is no longer, if there ever was, any mystic virtue supposed to
-inhere in the number twelve: while the triadic arrangement is made
-radical and everywhere recurs. The modern chemist of thought vastly
-amplifies the number of its elementary types and factors, and proves
-that many of the old Categories are neither simple nor indecomposable.
-<i>Thirdly</i>, there is a systematic development or process which links
-the Categories together, and shows how the most simple, abstract, and
-inadequate, inevitably lead up to the most complex and adequate. Each
-term or member in the organism of thought has its place conditioned by
-all the others: each of them is the germ, or the ripe fruit of another.</p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_56" id="Footnote_1_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_56"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Spinoza, <i>Eth.</i> ii. 7-13.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_57" id="Footnote_2_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_57"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Encyclopaedia</i>, §§ 415, 420. Consciousness is only as it
-were the surface of the ocean of mind; and reflects only the lights and
-shadows in the sky above it.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_58" id="Footnote_3_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_58"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> It is not the least of the merits of the exposition in
-Caird's <i>Critical Philosophy</i> of Immanuel Kant, vol. i. to have brought
-out this.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER X.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>THE CRITICAL SOLUTION, CONTINUED: KANT.</h4>
-
-
-<p>Kant's answer to his question was briefly this. Intelligence is
-essentially synthetic, always supplementing the given by something
-beyond, instituting relationships, unifying the many, and thus
-building up concrete totalities. In pure mathematics this is obvious:
-the process of numeration shows it creating number out of units, and
-geometry shows elementary propositions leading on to complicated
-theorems. In abstract physics it is hardly less obvious: there, e.g.,
-the principle of reason and consequent or the persistence of substance
-are rational and legitimate steps beyond the mere datum. The more
-important question follows. How are these 'pure' syntheses applicable
-to real fact? To that Kant replies: They apply, because in all that
-we call real or objective fact there is a subjective element or
-constituent. What appears to be purely given, and independent of our
-perceptions, is a product of perceptual and conceptual conditions,&mdash;is
-constituted by a synthesis in perception, imagination, conception. Our
-world is a mental growth&mdash;not our individual product, but the work of
-that common mind in which we live and think, and which lives and thinks
-in us. Anyhow it is not an isolated self-existing un-intelligent world
-for ever materially outside us&mdash;an other world,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> eternally separate
-from us; but bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, the work realised
-by our great 'elder brother,'&mdash;the Idea of human collectivity&mdash;the
-Reason or Spirit in which we are all one soul. It is therefore no
-unwarranted step on to a foreign property when we apply the categories
-of thought and forms of sense to determine objective reality: for
-objective reality has been for ever made, and is now making, objective
-and reality by the conscious or unconscious syntheses of perception and
-imagination.</p>
-
-<p>There remains the answer to the same question as regards the objects
-of Metaphysics. These objects are according to Kant inferences, and
-illegitimate inferences. They are not necessary elements or factors
-in the constitution of experience. In order that there should be
-experience, knowledge, science, there must be an endless hold of
-space and time in which to stow it clearly and distinctly away: and
-there must also be ties and relations binding it part to part, links
-of reference and correlation, a sort of logical elastic band that
-will stretch to include infinitely copious materials. But each real
-knowledge attaches to a definite assignable perception, in a single
-place and time. From this point we can travel&mdash;by means of like
-points&mdash;practically without limit in any direction. But though the old
-margin fades forever and forever as we move, a new margin takes its
-place: the limitation and finitude remain: and new acquisitions are
-always balanced in part by the loss of the old. Yet the heart and the
-imagination are clamorous, and the intellect is ready to serve them.
-Such an intellect Kant has called Reason, and its products (Platonic)
-'Ideas.' The (Platonic) Idea expresses not so much an object of
-knowledge as a postulate, a problem, an act of faith. The 'Vaulting
-ambition' Intelligence 'o'erleaps itself and falls on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> t'other,'
-Unsatisfied with a bundle of sensations and ideas, it demands their
-abiding unity in a substantial Soul. To simplify the endlessness of
-physical phenomena, it sums them up in a Universe. To gather all mental
-and physical diversities and divisions into one life, it creates the
-ideal of God.</p>
-
-<p>Each single experience, and the collected aggregate of these
-experiences, is felt to fall short of a complete total: and yet this
-complete total, the ultimate unity, is itself not an experience at
-all. But, if it be no object of experience, it is still an idea on
-which reason is inevitably driven: and the attempt to apprehend it, in
-the absence of experience, gives rise to the theories of Metaphysics.
-Everything, however, which can be in the strict sense of the word
-known, must be perceived in space and time, or, in other words, must
-lie open to experience. Where experience ends, human reason meets a
-barrier which checks any efficient progress, but refuses to recognise
-the check as due to a natural limit which it is really impossible to
-pass. The idea of completeness, of a rounded system, or unconditional
-unity, is still left, after the categories of the understanding have
-done their best: and is not destroyed although its realisation or
-explication is declared to be impossible.</p>
-
-<p>There is thus left unexplained a totality which encompasses all the
-single members of experience&mdash;a unity compared to which the several
-categories are only a collection of fragments&mdash;an infinite which
-commands and regulates the finite concepts of the experiential
-intellect. But in the region of rational thought there is no objective
-and independent standard by which we can verify the conclusions of
-Reason. There are no definite objects, lying beyond the borders of
-experience, towards which it might unerringly turn; and its sole
-authentic use, accordingly, is to see that the understanding is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>
-thorough and exact, when it deals in the co-ordination of experiences.
-In this want of definite objects, Reason, whenever it acts for itself,
-can only fall into perpetual contradictions and sophistries. Pure
-Reason, therefore, the faculty of ideas, the organ of Metaphysics, does
-not of itself 'constitute' knowledge, but merely 'regulates' the action
-of the understanding.</p>
-
-<p>By this rigour of demonstration Kant dealt a deadly blow, as it seemed,
-to the dogmatic Metaphysics, and the Deism of his time. Hume had
-shaken the certainty of Metaphysics and thrown doubt upon Theology:
-but Kant apparently made an end of Metaphysics, and annihilated
-Deistic theology. The German philosopher, as Hegel has said and Heine
-has repeated, did thoroughly and with systematic demonstration what
-Voltaire did with literary graces and not without the witticisms with
-which the French executioner gives the <i>coup de grâce.</i> When a great
-idea had been degraded into a vulgar doctrine and travestied in common
-reality, the Frenchman met its inadequacies with graceful satire, and
-showed that these half-truths were not eternal verities. The German
-made a theory and a system of what was only a sally of criticism; and
-rendered the criticism wrong, by making it too consistent and too
-logical<a name="FNanchor_1_59" id="FNanchor_1_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_59" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>.</p>
-
-<p>Science&mdash;such is Kant's conclusion&mdash;is of the definite and detailed,
-of the conditioned. It goes from point to point, within the
-enveloping unity of what we call experience, and which rests upon the
-transcendental and original unity of consciousness. But a knowledge
-of the whole&mdash;of the enveloping unity&mdash;is a contradiction in terms.
-To know is to synthetise: you cannot synthetise synthesis. Knowledge
-is of the relative: but an absolute and unconditional totality has no
-relations. We may therefore, possibly, feel, believe in, presuppose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
-the absolute: but know it in the stricter sense, we cannot. It may be
-the object of a rational faith. But as for knowledge, we can get on
-in psychology without the invisible and immortal soul: we can carry
-out sciences of the physical universe, without troubling ourselves
-about the 'cosmological' questions of ultimate atoms or ultimate
-void, of first beginning and final end: and no proofs will ever prove
-the <i>existence</i> of that 'ideal' of reason&mdash;briefly termed God&mdash;which
-transcends and completes and creates all existence. Not that such Ideas
-are useless even in science. They represent&mdash;if not without risks&mdash;the
-faith and the presupposition which underlie the spirit of scientific
-progress, and set before it an ideal perfection which it will do well
-to strive after, though it can never get beyond approximations. What
-is perhaps more important: this faith of reason science is as little
-competent to disprove, as it is incompetent to prove it. Science is not
-all in all: we are more than mere theoretical and cognitive beings.
-The logic of science is not the sole code of our spiritual or higher
-intellectual life;</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-'We live by admiration, hope, and love.'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>The sequel and development of the first Criticism are found in Kant's
-works on ethics, aesthetics, teleology and religion. Only in one
-supplementary chapter, and in casual indications as need arises, has
-Kant made any pronouncement on his view of Philosophy as a whole and as
-a system. That it is and can only be a system, when it really engages
-on reconstruction in theory, was of course his fundamental insight.
-But in his stage of <i>Zetesis</i><a name="FNanchor_2_60" id="FNanchor_2_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_60" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>, of testing and sifting the sound<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
-from the professed, he has confined himself to breaking up the mass
-piecemeal, and leaving each result in its turn to corroborate and
-correct the other. Sense and intellect may spring from a common stem;
-but let us, he says, deal with them in their apparent separateness.
-Reason practical must no doubt be identical at bottom with reason
-theoretical: all the more convincing will be the undesigned coincidence
-between the results of an inquiry into the principles of science, and
-one into the principles of morals. We have seen that science ultimately
-rests&mdash;though it does not discuss it and would indeed be incompetent
-to do so&mdash;on a faith, a hope, a postulate of the ultimate supremacy of
-intelligence,&mdash;the faith of reason in its own power (not verifiable
-indeed by an exhaustive list of actual results)&mdash;or in the rationality
-of the world. For science&mdash;though a kind of action and a part of
-conduct&mdash;is a sort of inactive action: an <i>enclave</i> in the busy world,
-a period of preparation for the battle of life. In the field of conduct
-the ultimate presupposition, which was for the luxury of science called
-a reasonable faith or faith of reason, makes itself felt in the more
-forcible form of a categorical imperative.</p>
-
-<p>Or, at least, so it seems on first acquaintance. The command of duty,
-addressed to the sensuously-conditioned nature, brooks no opposition
-and condescends to no reasons in explanation or promises by way of
-attraction. The moral law claims unconditional authority: towards its
-sublime aspect reverence and sheer obeisance is due, utter loyalty to
-duty for duty's sake. Nothing short of this absolute identification
-with the Ought and a willingly willed self-surrender of the whole self
-to it can entitle an agent to the full rank of moral goodness. Such is
-the form&mdash;the synthetic link which joins the sensuous will indissolubly
-with the will reasonable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> of moral law. Now for its explanation.
-Humanity, though in the world of appearance and experience always
-subject to sensuous conditions, is also a power of transcending these
-conditions. Man is more than he can ever show in visibly single act.
-He has in him the hope, the faith, the vision of absolute perfection
-and completeness: but has it not as positive attained vision, but as
-the perpetual unrest of unsatisfied endeavour, as the feeling and
-the anticipation of an unachieved idea. And that perfection, that
-completeness he believes himself to be; he even in some sense is.
-Lapses and ill-success cannot quench the faith: for so long as there is
-life, there is hope.</p>
-
-<p>As he pictures out this invisible self, it may assume various forms
-more or less imaginative. At times it may seem a far away, and yet
-intimately near, being of beings,&mdash;the common father of all souls, the
-eternal self-existent centre of life and love, the omnipresent bond
-of nature, the omniscient heart of hearts,&mdash;on whom he can lean in
-closest communion; though he is only too well aware how often he lives
-as if God were not, and human beings were roaming specks in chaos. At
-other times, he looks up to it as to an inner and better self, his
-conscience, the true and permanent being, which controls his choices
-and avoidances, which approves and disapproves, commands and condemns:
-his soul of soul, genius, and guardian spirit. In such a mood to be
-true to his own self&mdash;to follow the very voice of his nature&mdash;is to
-realise his law of life. His Ego is the absolute ego&mdash;the reason which
-is all things. And lastly, there are times when he conceives this
-better self and true essence as the community of the faithful, as the
-congregation of reasonable beings, of all perfected humanity.</p>
-
-<p>In Kantian phraseology, man under one visible form<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> is the union of
-an intelligence and a sensibility, of a noümenal with a phenomenal
-being. He is, indeed, says Kant, the former only in idea: it is only
-a standpoint which he assumes. But it is a standpoint he always does
-assume, if he is to be practical, i. e. if he is to move and modify
-the world he finds around him. And what standpoint is that? What is
-the law that has to govern his action, the law of the spiritual world?
-Its supreme law is the law of liberty; and that law is autonomy.
-Action&mdash;always under law&mdash;but that law a self-imposed one. So act
-that thy will may be thy law, and with thy will the law of all others
-whatsoever; so act that no other human being may by thy act be deprived
-of full freedom and treated merely as a thing: so act as to respect the
-dignity of every human being as implicitly a sovereign legislative.
-In other words, Morality is a stage of struggle and of progress
-which bears witness to something beyond. The 'I ought' represents a
-transition stage towards the 'I will,' or rather it is the translation
-of it into the language of the phenomenal world.<a name="FNanchor_3_61" id="FNanchor_3_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_61" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> Morality, in a
-sense-being, always presents itself as a contest between the good
-and the evil principle: but in the transcendent and noümenal being
-which such a being essentially is,&mdash;in the reasonable or good will,
-the victory is already won by the good. Good is the law which governs
-the world, and which is the strength of the individual life. To the
-sensuous imagination, indeed, which here is apt to usurp the place of
-reason, things appear under a somewhat different aspect. There the
-certainty of self-conquest is forced by the difficulties of apparent
-failure to veil itself under the picture of a perpetual approximation
-through endless ages towards the standard<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> of perfect goodness:
-the confidence that the world is reasonable is presented under the
-conception of a God who makes all things work together for good to the
-righteous: and the autonomy of reason presents itself as the postulate
-of freedom to begin afresh, absolutely untrammeled by all that has
-gone before. Thus the kingdom of reason is represented as having its
-times and seasons; as making determinate starts, and working up to a
-consummation in the end of ages. But implicitly Kant's idea of reason's
-autonomy,&mdash;of the 'I ought' as in its supreme truth an 'I will,'&mdash;is
-an eternal truth. The 'standpoint,' so to call it after Kant, is the
-standpoint which explains life and conduct and which makes conduct
-possible. It is the assertion that the completeness <i>is,</i> and is my
-inmost being, the source of my action, my chief good, and that chief
-good not a gratification or satisfaction to be looked forward to as
-reward, but essential life and self-realisation. And this joy is what
-is hidden under the austere gravity of the categorical imperative.</p>
-
-<p>The Criticism of the Judgment-faculty is Kant's next step towards
-providing a completer philosophy. Ostensibly it owes its origin to
-the need of supplementing the treatment of Understanding and Reason
-by a discussion of Judgment, and of considering our emotional as well
-as our cognitive and volitional appreciations. What it really does
-is to minimise still further the gulf left between the intellect
-and nature&mdash;between the natural and the spiritual world. The
-intellect, said the first criticism, makes nature: it makes possible
-the general outlines of our conception of the world around us as
-a causally-connected system, in which a permanent being undergoes
-perpetual alteration, and manifests phenomena subject to mathematical
-conditions. Intellect, in short, has staked out the world which is
-the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span> object of the practical man, and of his adviser the scientist.
-But there is another world&mdash;the world of beauty and sublimity&mdash;the
-world which art imitates and realises. The interpretation Kant gives
-to the aesthetic world is as follows. The fact of beauty is a witness
-to the presence in the mere copiousness of sensible existence of a
-sub-conscious symmetry or spirit of harmony which realises without
-compulsion and as if by free grace all the proportion and coherence
-which intellect requires. Nature itself has something which does the
-work that intellect was charged with, and does it with a subtle secret
-hand which does not suggest the artificer. The fact of sublimity, on
-the other hand, indicates the presence of an even greater spirit.
-For beauty may seem&mdash;from what has been said&mdash;to be only an unbought
-accrement to the commodities of life&mdash;facilitating the task of the
-practical intellect. But the sublime in nature speaks of something
-which is greater than human utilities and practical conveniences. It
-reveals a something which is in sympathy with our essential and higher
-self, and therefore stirs within us the keen rapture of the traveller
-who sees from afar his home in 'rocky Ithaca,' but a something which
-is cold to daily wants and vulgar satisfactions, and therefore strikes
-upon us a gelid awe.</p>
-
-<p>Another world yet remains, which appeals neither to our utilitarian
-science, nor to our higher sentiments of artistic perfection. This is
-the world as the home of organic life, and perhaps itself an organism.
-The organism is apt to be a poser for the ordinary categories of
-mechanical science. Here the part contains the whole, not less than the
-whole contains the part: the cause is an effect, as well as cause, of
-its effect. One thing is in another, and the other in it: 'the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> present
-is charged with the past, and pregnant of the future,'&mdash;as the great
-founder of modern teleology often said. In the plant and the animal
-the natural world has to a certain degree reached an ideal unity which
-is also real. Reason&mdash;the syllogism&mdash;is here not merely introduced
-from without, as when man manipulates, but is the immanent law of a
-natural life,&mdash;the end working out itself by its own means and act.
-The fact admitted in these creatures suggests extending the conception
-of organism (or teleology) to nature as a whole. From this point of
-view Nature may almost be said to have a history&mdash;because it is almost
-conceived as having one abiding self which in apparent unconsciousness
-wonderfully simulates the purposive adaptation of conscious life.
-The older vulgar teleology was somewhat mechanical: it regarded the
-natural world outside of&mdash;or as it said, below&mdash;man as having no end
-of its own, but in its series subserving man's commodities. In the
-teleology of Kant the supreme end is still in a way man, and still
-there is a little of the mechanical about it: but it is not to promote
-man's happiness, understood as that probably <i>must</i> be in a selfish
-sense, but to produce in him the worthiest agent to carry on to its
-highest the rational process of development. The struggles and pains
-of natural existence, the laws of life, the competition of rivals, are
-all means in the hands of nature to produce an autonomous being. Kant
-says, a moral agent. But a moral agent has been already explained as
-an intelligence certified unto truth and a self-centred will whose law
-is the law of the cosmos,&mdash;whose plan of life, if we so put of it, is
-essentially a concentration in miniature and in individuality of the
-system ordained by the all-present God.</p>
-
-<p>It is true that Kant, after all these soarings, checks<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> enthusiasm by
-the words 'not that we can know this, or that it is so: but our nature
-with unmistakable tendency bids us act <i>as if</i> it were so. Logic will
-hardly justify it&mdash;but life seems to demand it.' And some have replied:
-'let us trust the larger hope.'</p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_59" id="Footnote_1_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_59"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Hegel's <i>Werke</i>, vol. i. p. 140.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_60" id="Footnote_2_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_60"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Kant from 1762 onwards continues to insist on the
-necessity for philosophy taking up an analytic and critical attitude to
-current conceptions: see especially <i>Werke,</i> i. 95 and 292.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_61" id="Footnote_3_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_61"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Foundation of Metaph. of Eth. (<i>Werke</i>, viii. 82, 89):
-'Dieses Sollen ist eigentlich ein Wollen.'</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XI.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>SYNTHESIS AND RECONSTRUCTION: FICHTE.</h4>
-
-
-<p>To get the full effect of a new doctrine it must be brought into
-contact with a mind unshackled by those traditional prepossessions
-which clung to its original author. Kant, essentially by training a
-man of the school, was by heart and character essentially a seeker
-after the wider ends of the larger world. His lesson is on one hand
-the scholar's disproof of pretended science, and on another an appeal
-and an example to the mere scholar to make his philosophy ample for
-the whole life, and co-extensive with the whole field of reality. His
-first disciples who stand forward as teachers caught only the first
-part of his message, and sought to set theoretical philosophy on a
-sounder basis. Johann Gottlieb Fichte&mdash;perhaps the least professional
-of great philosophical professors&mdash;with a resolute will, a passion for
-logical thoroughness, and great impulse to force mankind to be free
-and to realise liberty in an institution&mdash;was the first who really
-grappled with the searching questions that arose out of Kant's message
-to his age. His was a Kantism, not certainly always of the letter, nor
-indeed always of the spirit: yet for all that, there was substantial
-justice in his claim that his system supplied the presupposition which
-gives meaning and interconnexion to Kant's utterances<a name="FNanchor_1_62" id="FNanchor_1_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_62" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>. It is, says<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>
-the proverb, the first step that costs. And Fichte took that step.
-Before his impetuosity the cautelous clauses which besmirched the great
-purpose of Criticism shrunk away, the central truth was disengaged from
-its old-fashioned swaddling clothes, and openly announced itself as a
-renovating, almost a revolutionary principle.</p>
-
-<p>But, as was to be expected, the unity and force are paid for by a
-considerable surrender of catholicity. If Kant's utterances are
-fused into comparative simplicity, the unification does not embrace
-the whole of the Kantian gospels. What Fichte did in his earlier
-stage&mdash;the stage by which he counts in the history of philosophy&mdash;was
-to emphasise and exhibit in his systematic statement that priority or
-supremacy of the 'practical' over the 'theoretical' reason which Kant
-had enunciated, and to put in the very foreground that self or Ego
-which Kant had indicated, under the title of 'transcendental unity
-of apperception,' as the focus which gives coherence and objectivity
-to experience. But to put the final presupposition at the head and
-front of all, as a principle originating and governing the whole line
-of procedure, is really to modify in a thorough-going way the whole
-aspect of a doctrine and its inner constitution. Kant's way is quiet
-analysis: from the given, or what is supposed given, up regressively
-to its final presuppositions, its latent <i>prius.</i> He shows you the
-thing is so, apparently without effort, by judicious application of
-the proper re-agent, as it were. Fichte, on the contrary, pours forth
-a strong current of deduction: Let it be assumed that so and so is,
-then <i>must,</i> or then shall, something else be; and so onwards. Instead
-of a glance at the secret substructure of the world, you see it, at a
-magician's mandate, building itself up; stone calling to stone, and
-beam to beam, to fill up the gaps and bind the walls together. And you<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>
-must not merely read or listen. You are summoned as a partner in the
-work; a work the author feels, only half-consciously, he has not yet
-quite accomplished, and where therefore he complains of the bystander's
-dullness.</p>
-
-<p>This, one may say, was a new conception, certainly a new practice,
-of philosophy. Kant had indeed hinted that the pupil in philosophy
-must 'symphilosophise'; but practically, even his aim had been to
-describe or narrate a process of thought with such quasi-historical
-vividness and detail that the listener was sympathetically carried
-through the succession of ideas which were called up before him. What
-had been generally given in philosophical literature was a sort of
-historical account of how thoughts happened: a succession of pictures
-presented with the interposition here and there of a little reasoning,
-expository of connexions. You enlisted your reader's sympathy: you
-set his imagination to work by translating the logical process into a
-historical event&mdash;the <i>Logos</i> into a <i>Mythos</i>&mdash;and blending with your
-narrative a little explanation as to general drift and relations, you
-left him to himself to enjoy the <i>Theoria.</i> The nearest approach Fichte
-makes to this polite and easy method is in the 'Sun-clear Statement,'
-where he, as he says, attempts to '<i>force</i> the reader to understand'
-him. But probably these things cannot be forced. And for the rest
-Fichte's characteristic attitude is to request, or command, his reader
-(or pupil) to think with him, to put himself in the posture required,
-to perform the act of thought described. He has not merely to be
-present at the lecture, but personally to perform the experiment. It
-is not a mere story to be heard and admired and forgotten. <i>De te</i> O
-pupil! <i>fabula narratur.</i> If it be a play, you are the actor as well as
-the onlooker: and the play is not a play, but the drama&mdash;the nameless
-drama&mdash;of the soul<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> transacted in the unseen sub-conscious depths which
-bear up its visible life.</p>
-
-<p>You do not therefore begin by getting a fact put before you. Your
-<i>fact,</i> in philosophy, must be your own <i>act</i>: not something done
-and dead, passive, a thing, but something doing, alive, active: your
-introspection must be, let us say, an experiment in the growing,
-responsive, quick life, not anatomy of the mere <i>cadaver.</i> Think,
-therefore, and catch yourself in the act of thinking. Get something
-before your mind's eye, and see what it involves. It matters not what
-you perceive or feel: only realise it fully and penetrate its meaning
-and implications. It is of course the perception of something here and
-now. And you would be, in ordinary life, eager to get on to something
-else&mdash;to associate the present fact to something perceived elsewhere,
-to draw conclusions about things yet to come. But if you philosophise,
-you must check this practical-minded impatience and concede yourself
-leisure to ponder deeply all that the single perception involves. Be
-content to sit awhile with Mary, by the side of Rachel of old. Let
-Martha bustle about. Fichte tells you that your perception rests,&mdash;and
-you, you <i>see</i> that it rests, on the 'I am that I am,'&mdash;on the I = I,
-i. e. on the continuity, identity, and unity of the percipient self.
-Make the statement of what you perceive, believe it, that is, assert
-it: and you have&mdash;done what? You have pledged your whole self<i>&mdash;falsus
-in uno, falsus in omnibus</i>&mdash;to its truth: its background is your whole
-and one mental life. And is that all? You have also called the world to
-witness: your statement&mdash;if, as it professes, it form an item however
-slight in the realm of knowledge&mdash;requests and expects every other 'I'
-to acknowledge your perception. Your certainty of the fact rests on
-the certainty of your self: and your self is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> a self certified by its
-ever-postulated identity with other selves, so on <i>ad infinitum</i>. In
-affirming this (whatever be your statement) you affirm the Absolute
-Infinite Ego. Heaven and earth are at stake in every jot and tittle<a name="FNanchor_2_63" id="FNanchor_2_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_63" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>.</p>
-
-<p>At which plain frankness there was much cachinnation and even
-muttering among the baser sort. Even wiser heads forgot&mdash;if they
-ever knew&mdash;that Leibniz a century before had startled the world of
-his day by a view that 'the Ego or something like it<a name="FNanchor_3_64" id="FNanchor_3_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_64" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> was, under
-the name of <i>monad</i>, the presupposition of each and every detail of
-existence in any organic total. It was useless for Fichte to repeat<a name="FNanchor_4_65" id="FNanchor_4_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_65" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>
-that his philosophical Ego was not the empirical or individual ego
-which he in this every-day world had to provide clothes and company
-for. It is hard to persuade the world that it does not know that 'I
-am I,' and what that means. Later, therefore, Fichte, going along
-with the movement of contemporary speculation, and willing to avoid
-one source of confusion, tended to keep off the name of Ego from
-the absolute basis of all knowledge and experienced reality. But
-unquestionably the absolutising of the Ego is the characteristic note
-of his first period in philosophy: and it rings with the spirit of
-the heaven-storming Titan. It means that the cardinal principle and
-foundation of man's conscious moral and intellectual life is identical
-with the principle of the Universe, even if the Universe seem not to
-know it. It means that self-consciousness&mdash;the certainty that I am I
-and one in all my manifestations&mdash;is the highest word yet uttered. In,
-or under, the surface of human knowledge and belief in reality, there
-is a transcendental Ego&mdash;a self identical with all other selves,&mdash;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
-infinite, unlimited, unconditional, absolute. The certainty of human
-knowledge&mdash;and therefore of all reality in consciousness&mdash;is the
-Absolute,&mdash;an absolute certainty and knowledge&mdash;but an absolute with
-which I identify myself,&mdash;which I am, and which is me. This is the
-absolute <i>thesis</i>&mdash;the nerve and utter basis-laying&mdash;at the ground, or
-rather under the ground, of all I know, feel, and will.</p>
-
-<p>This, then, is the thesis at the very foundation of all <i>Wissenschaft</i>:
-and therefore figures at the head of the <i>Wissenschaftslehre</i>,&mdash;the
-name Fichte gives his fundamental philosophy. But alone it is
-powerless. A foundation is only a foundation, by being built upon. The
-position must be defined by counterposition: thesis by antithesis: ego
-by non-ego. Ego, in fact, is first made <i>such</i>, as set against <i>you.</i>
-In other words, the perception we assumed to start with does not merely
-<i>suppose</i> and indeed pre-suppose the absolute Ego; but it sets in
-the absolute Ego an ego and a non-ego,&mdash;sets against the lesser ego,
-something limiting and limited, something defining it in one particular
-direction; or, if the original consciousness we started to examine was
-an act of will, then, it may be said, the non-ego appears as about to
-be limited and defined by the Ego. Be our consciousness, therefore,
-practical or theoretical, of action or of knowledge, its fundamental
-characteristic is the conjunction (correlation with subjugation)
-of an ego and a non-ego. It is always a synthesis of an original
-antithesis<a name="FNanchor_5_66" id="FNanchor_5_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_66" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>; of self and not-self. But every<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span> such synthesis which
-brings together into one a self and a not-self, is possible only in the
-original thesis of a greater self&mdash;an absolute Ego&mdash;which includes the
-not-self and the self it contrasts within its larger self. The unity
-of the first principle<a name="FNanchor_6_67" id="FNanchor_6_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_67" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> (A = A, or I = I) parting or distinguishing
-itself into the opposition of A versus not-A, Ego set against non-ego,
-re-asserts itself again in consciousness (perception of objects, and
-action upon them by will) as synthesis, i. e. a conjunction (not a real
-union). And this synthesis is either the limitation of the Ego by the
-non-ego or the limitation of the non-ego by the Ego. The former gives
-the formula of theoretical, the latter that of practical consciousness.</p>
-
-<p>We begin with the absolute Ego. It is absolute activity, utter
-freedom. It is the source of all action, all life. Yet if thus
-implicitly everything, it is actually nothing. To be something, it
-must restrict itself, set up in itself an antithesis:&mdash;by the setting
-up of a not-self, at once limit and realise itself: translate itself
-from ideal absoluteness and unconditionality into a reality which
-is also limited and partial. All consciousness and action exhibit
-this antithesis of a limited self and an outside and adversative
-other-being; but the antithesis rests upon the medium of a larger life,
-a thesis which transcends and includes the antithesis, and which leads
-to that alternating adaptation of the two sides to one another (their
-synthesis) which actual experience presents as its recurring phase<a name="FNanchor_7_68" id="FNanchor_7_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_68" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>.
-The <i>Wissenschaftslehre</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> leaving the absolute Ego in the background
-deals with the play that goes on in human experience between the
-correlatives to which it has reduced itself;&mdash;the antagonism, but the
-moderated and overruled antagonism, of Ego and non-ego.</p>
-
-<p>Observe the contrast to the ordinary methods of expression. Popular
-language&mdash;if the popular philosophers are to be trusted as its
-exponents&mdash;says 'an impression is produced by an external object on
-the senses, and causes an idea in the mind.' The 'object' works a
-series of marvellous effects on a mind, which&mdash;to begin with&mdash;is hardly
-describable as anything more than an imagined point of resistance,
-getting reality by being repeatedly impinged upon.<a name="FNanchor_8_69" id="FNanchor_8_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_69" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> Fichte's
-statements are rather interpreters of the vulgar phrases, which say
-'I hear, I see';&mdash;as if, forsooth, the 'I' did it all. According to
-Fichte, the 'I,'&mdash;the absolute 'I,' is the real (but secret) source
-of the position in which consciousness finds itself limited by a
-non-ego. But within the finite ego and its consciousness there is
-no reminiscence or awareness of this its great co-partner's&mdash;the
-absolute ego's&mdash;act. For the finite consciousness, the beginning of its
-activity&mdash;i. e. of all empirical consciousness, lies in an impulse or
-stimulus from without&mdash;a mere somewhat of which we can predicate the
-very minimum of attributes. It is only <i>felt</i> as opposing: and this
-is the first stage or grade of theoretical consciousness: Sensation.
-But in the perpetual antithesis&mdash;in the self-opposition which is the
-radical act of consciousness&mdash;the mere limitation of Ego by non-Ego is
-confronted by the underlying activity of the Ego which re-asserts the
-limitation as its own act. Thus while we are, as it were, impressed, we
-re-act against that impression&mdash;we set it forth before us, as ours, and
-free ourselves<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> from its immediate incumbency and oppression. Instead
-of mere sentiency or feeling, we have a perception (or intuition) of it.</p>
-
-<p>It would be out of place, here, to try to write the interpretation
-of that marvellous and difficult piece of dialectic&mdash;the
-<i>Wissenschaftslehre</i>;&mdash;a theme to which Fichte returned again and
-again up to his death, ever modifying details, selecting new modes of
-exposition, and gradually, perhaps, changing the centre of gravity
-of his system. It will be sufficient to note the two purposes which
-it keeps in view. On the one hand it is a systematic theory of the
-categories. It begins, as we have seen, with the three co-ordinates of
-all reflection,&mdash;identity, difference, and reason why; it proceeds to
-the co-relative principles of activity and passivity; to condition,
-quantity, &amp;c. And its work is to show how these forms naturally emerge
-in the recurrent antithesis which arises in consciousness, and how
-again they are brought together by the overmastering Absolute thesis
-into a synthesis, from which the same process re-appears. How much this
-corresponds in general conception to the Hegelian Logic is obvious, and
-Fichte has the merit of the original suggestion. With this however he
-conjoins&mdash;what Hegel has relegated to his Psychology&mdash;an evolutional
-or developmental theory of the mental powers. We have already seen how
-sensation is forced by the latent intelligence to rise into perception
-(<i>Anschauung</i>): the line of psychological development is carried on by
-Fichte through imagination to understanding and reason. Hegel's work is
-far more complete, definite, and detailed: but that need not keep us
-from giving due homage to the suggestive sketch of the originator of
-the conception<a name="FNanchor_9_70" id="FNanchor_9_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_70" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>But the theoretical consciousness is not all; and as we already know,
-the practical Ego is supreme over it. In it lies the key to the mystery
-of the stimulus&mdash;the shock from the unknown&mdash;which awakened the
-activity of the Ego. The non-ego is only a mass of resistance created
-by the Ego so that it may be active; only a stepping-stone on which
-it may walk; a spring-board from which it may bound. Only so much
-reality has the non-ego; the reality of something which may be shaped,
-made, made use of. Call the something which the stimulus (<i>Anstoss</i>)
-pre-supposes, the thing-in-itself (after Kant): and if you ask How are
-things-in-themselves constituted, you get from the <i>Wissenschaftslehre</i>
-the answer: 'They are as we should make them<a name="FNanchor_10_71" id="FNanchor_10_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_71" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>,' Or, as it is said
-in another place: 'My world is&mdash;object and sphere of my duties and
-absolutely nothing else<a name="FNanchor_11_72" id="FNanchor_11_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_72" class="fnanchor">[11]</a>:' if you ask whether there is really
-such a world, the only sound reply I can give is: 'I have certainly
-and truthfully these definite duties, which take the form of duties
-<i>towards</i> such, and <i>in</i> such, objects; and it is only in a world such
-as I there represent and not elsewhere that I can perform these duties
-which I cannot conceive otherwise,'</p>
-
-<p>This is a grand word: and yet we feel that, in the intensity of
-intellectual consecutiveness and moral inflexibleness, we have lost
-some elements to which Kant had given their place in the philosophy
-of life. The third of Kant's three Criticisms is conspicuous by its
-absence from the Fichtean field of view, and has no recognition in
-this scheme of the universe: and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> great conception of the natural
-world as an organism, in which natural man is only a part, and all
-is controlled by an autonomous principle of life, has been for the
-while allowed to drop. Even more than in Kant religion tends to be an
-epilogue or appendix to morality: and God is identified with the moral
-order of the world. It is customary to speak of Fichte's idealism as
-ethical, or as subjective: and so long as these words are understood,
-no harm is done. But to call it subjective does not mean that Fichte
-was so far beside himself as to believe the world was only a picture
-or a function of his individual brain. It means that he throws the
-weight too much on the side of subjectivity. The Absolute is, for him
-in his first stage, described as an Absolute Ego&mdash;and thereby the
-natural world seems to be left without God: and subjective duty has too
-exclusively thrown on it the weight of certifying objective existence.
-The world, as we shall see, and have indeed indirectly gathered from
-Kant, is too good and worthy to be the mere block of stone out of
-which our duties are to be hewn. And similarly, to call Fichte an
-ethical idealist is only to name him right, when we add that his were
-idealist ethics. The world is not here merely that social decorum may
-be maintained, and that puritanical virtue may pronounce that all is so
-well, that thenceforth there shall be no cakes and ale, nor ginger be
-hot in the mouth. The friend of the two brothers Schlegel, and their
-remarkable wives, Dorothea and Caroline, touched hands with a social
-group<a name="FNanchor_12_73" id="FNanchor_12_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_73" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> which, for good and for ill, had emancipated itself from all
-codes except that which bids</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-<span style="margin-left: 8em;">'To thine own self be true:</span><br />
-Thou canst not then be false to any man.'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>To him, as to Kant, morality presented itself as autonomy, as the
-dignity and grace of human nature in freest development; but to him,
-more than to Kant, there commended itself the ideal of a city of
-reason, a thoroughly socialised community<a name="FNanchor_13_74" id="FNanchor_13_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_74" class="fnanchor">[13]</a>, in which the welfare of
-each would be an obligation on all, and the machinery of government
-would be so marvellously self-corrective that all would do right and
-all fare well.</p>
-
-<p>Fichte's place in the annals of philosophy depends on his academic
-treatises of 1794-98, and on his more popular works from the first
-date down to 1808. In a study of the philosopher as a whole it would
-be necessary to go beyond these dates, and take account of the
-displacement which a development of thought, which there is no good
-reason to suppose other than gradual, made in the scale of his earlier
-views. But for our purposes that is out of the question. In justice,
-however, it must be added that some things that seem inadequately
-treated, some shortcomings in catholicity of mind, would appear in
-another light if the later writings&mdash;not published till after Hegel's
-death&mdash;were duly taken into account. But even at the close of the
-century the advancing thought of Germany was seeking other leaders.</p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_62" id="Footnote_1_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_62"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 399.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_63" id="Footnote_2_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_63"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 387.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_64" id="Footnote_3_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_64"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Leibniz, <i>Werke,</i> ed. Gerhardt, iv. p. 392.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_65" id="Footnote_4_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_65"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 393.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_66" id="Footnote_5_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_66"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> The <i>antithesis</i> has two members: the partial ego, and the
-non-ego, which confronts. The <i>synthesis</i> is a putting together two
-separate things, so as to correlate them; but it falls short of what
-would be understood in some present usage by 'synthetic unity' which
-has a certain mystical ring. It is important for a student of Schelling
-or Hegel to remember this distinction of synthesis from 'absolute unity
-e.g. Schelling, <i>Werke</i>, v. 43.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_67" id="Footnote_6_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_67"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>A = A</i> is the more purely logical formula: <i>I=I</i> presents
-it as a personal and metaphysical identity. The <i>A</i>, which is <i>-A,</i> is
-to be distinguished from the <i>A</i> which is opposed to <i>not-A.</i> But it is
-Fichte's standpoint to insist on their being one Ego.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_68" id="Footnote_7_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_68"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> To give this interpretation of the larger Ego as Life and
-Blessedness is to assume that the teaching, e. g. of the <i>Anweisung zum
-Seligen Leben,</i> is the logical deepening of the earlier language about
-the Ego.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_8_69" id="Footnote_8_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_69"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Cf. the description of mind as 4 a bundle of impressions.'</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_9_70" id="Footnote_9_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_70"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Especially given in the Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der
-Wiss. (<i>Werke,</i> i. 331). Of course Fichte goes through a corresponding
-'deduction' of the emotional or moral nature. Schelling (<i>System des
-transcend. Idealismus</i>) works out the 'deduction' still more at length.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_10_71" id="Footnote_10_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_71"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Fichte, <i>Werke</i>, i. 286.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_11_72" id="Footnote_11_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_72"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> Ibid. ii. 261.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_12_73" id="Footnote_12_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_73"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that the state of
-affairs alluded to, which has its literary memorials in F. Schlegel's
-<i>Lucinde</i>, and in the warm defense of that book by Scheiermacher, was
-only a passing experiment in which a high-strung idealism amid a lax
-society sought for truth at all costs and dared a noble lie.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_13_74" id="Footnote_13_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_74"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> In the <i>Geschlossener Handelstaat</i> (of 1800), the
-'classical' document of characteristic German Socialism in its earlier
-and idealist phase.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XII.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>THE BEGINNINGS OF SCHELLING.</h4>
-
-
-<p>Schelling and Hegel had been fellow-students at Tübingen, where,
-besides the ostensible lessons of the class-room, they had drunk gladly
-of the springs of thought Lessing had set running, had felt the hopes
-and the fears of the struggle republican France waged against the
-German powers, and had seen that Kantian criticism contained within
-it a fire which would burn up the hay and stubble of old theology.
-Hegel, five years the elder of the two, had passed through his college
-career in a very creditable but by no means brilliant way. Among his
-fellows he had gained the reputation of a quiet, and rather reflective
-mind, which, however, under an old-fashioned exterior, breathed a deep
-impassioned zeal for that higher life of which the nobler spirits among
-the young then, as now, longed to accelerate the advent. Schelling,
-singularly gifted with speculative ability, literary art, and the
-receptivity of genius to catch and string together the theories
-that rose to the top in science and letters, had already made his
-mark as a philosophic writer, while his senior compatriot, leading
-the inconspicuous life of a private tutor, was only working up and
-widening his ideas. Schelling's first essays in metaphysics trod the
-same lines as Fichte; but in 1797<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> (when he was aged 22) appeared his
-<i>Ideas towards a Philosophy of Nature.</i> A year later he was lecturing
-at Jena, in friendly association with the Schlegels, and with Fichte,
-who, however, soon quitted the place. In 1800 appeared the <i>System of
-Transcendental Idealism</i>, and in 1801 the <i>Exposition of my System</i>;
-followed in 1802 by <i>Bruno</i>, and in 1803 by the <i>Lectures on University
-Studies.</i> Brief periods of academic teaching at Würzburg, Erlangen, and
-Munich, and after 1841 at Berlin, broke the silence which set in after
-his <i>Inquiries into the nature of human liberty</i> in 1809; but little
-certain was known to the outside public of the final standpoint till
-the publication of his collected works (1856-61).</p>
-
-<p>An involuntary touch of sadness falls upon they historian as he surveys
-Schelling's career. Seldom had a thinker's life begun with better
-promise, and more distinguished performance; seldom had a nobler
-inspiration, a more liberal catholicity of mood, guided and propelled
-the intellectual interest; seldom had expectation of greater things
-yet to come followed a writer's traces than was the lot of Schelling.
-On one hand, a lively and active appropriation of the results of
-scientific discovery, at least in its more suggestive advances: on the
-other, a mastery of words and style which fitted him to hold his own
-amongst the literary leaders; and, again, a sympathy, that seemed to
-be religious, with the movement which sought <i>lucem ex Oriente</i>, and
-wisdom from the treasures of the world's purer youth. And yet&mdash;in the
-main&mdash;the net result, oblivion more complete than has ever befallen a
-great thinker. At first, one is inclined to pass on with the remark
-that even books and thinkers have their fates, and that some momentary
-forgetfulness let the tide slip unused. But it is possible to be less
-oracularly-obscure:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> and without detracting from the splendid faculty
-and great achievement of Schelling to note some of the causes of his
-lapse into a mere episode.</p>
-
-<p>In the first place, though his conception is of a system, his
-performance is only a succession of fragments. The nearest approach
-to an encyclopaedic exposition of his ideas is found in his popular
-<i>Lectures on the Studies of University.</i> More than once he starts
-on the task of exposition, but lets it break off about the middle.
-Again, at each new occasion, the features of his scheme of thought
-have slightly altered, and not merely does his philosophy profess
-at first to present two distinct sides, but these two sides of the
-shield vary. Thirdly, the interest in scientific novelties, always
-disposed to seek the curious, the far-reaching and suggestive, more
-than the sounder generalisations, tends as time goes on to fasten too
-greedily on the miraculous and mysterious night-side of nature, on
-magic powers and mystic discernments&mdash;a path which descends to the
-abyss of a 'positive,' i.e. a quasi-materialistic, theosophy. The
-matter-of-fact rationalists (both the Catholics in Bavaria, and the
-Protestant theologian Paulus, once a friend, but latterly his bitterest
-foe) regard him as a crypto-catholic, the advocate of medieval
-obscurantism so hateful to true enlightenment. Even his literary art
-renders him suspected: for there is an old quarrel between philosophy
-and fiction; and grave-eyed wisdom is jealous of her gipsy rival.
-Ill-advised indications of a sense of lofty superiority to the average
-teacher increased the numbers and the venom of his opponents. Nor is
-it perhaps beneath the dignity of history to suggest that his first
-wife, Caroline, with all her wonderful attractions of intellect and
-character, and notwithstanding all that she had been to Schelling in
-encouragement and counsel, was too clever and too<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> critical not to sow
-many jealousies, and to add through the female line to the ranks of
-those with whom he stood suspect.</p>
-
-<p>But perhaps the real reason of Schelling's failure was a certain
-excess of objectivity. Fichte had drawn attacks down by an abnormal
-subjectivity which would fain reform the surroundings wherever he
-went. Schelling stood more apart&mdash;animated by an immense curiosity,
-a boundless interest in all the expanse of objective existence; but
-withal he seemed not to have his heart, deeply set and pledged to
-a distinctively human interest. His first love is the Romance in
-nature; and when he turns to history it is by preference to ages far
-remote. His ideal of philosophy is to see it achieve its work by
-the instrumentality of Art. Religion seems to culminate for him in
-a mythology. Reflection and speculation are to him always somewhat
-of a disease&mdash;whence philosophy is to carry us&mdash;almost magically if
-possible&mdash;to rest again in the primeval unity of life. It is only an
-instrument towards a great end&mdash;and that end a godlike, even if you
-like a religious, Epicurean life. From such a standpoint it would be
-easy, in youth, to relapse into naturalism; it would be equally easy,
-in later life, to fall into supernaturalism. Philosophy&mdash;at least as
-Hegel understood it&mdash;is merely neither: but the life, which never
-can quite cease to be an effort, of idealism. And so Schelling could
-not earn the confidence which only goes to those who are felt to be
-fellow-fighters with those they lead.</p>
-
-<p>With Schelling occurs the confluence, into the main current of
-philosophy, of streams of idea and research which had already
-exercised a stimulative effect on the tone and products of the higher
-literature of Germany. As early as 1763 (at the very date Kant let the
-English and Scotch 'empiricists' shake him out of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span> 'rationalist'
-dogmatism) Lessing&mdash;in a couple of pages <i>On the reality of things
-outside God</i>&mdash;threw doubts on the tenability of the ordinary deistic
-arrangement of his day, which set God <i>there</i> and man and his
-surroundings <i>here,</i> each side, for the time at least, undisturbedly
-enjoying his own. Lessing read Leibniz by the light of Spinoza, and
-Spinoza by the light of Leibniz: and, if he emphasised the absolute
-right to the completest individual self-development on one hand, he no
-less declared on the other that 'nothing in the world is insulated,
-nothing without consequences, nothing without eternal consequences.'
-'I thank the Creator that I must,&mdash;must the best,' he adds (1774). Of
-his conversations on these high topics with Jacobi, we have already
-spoken. While Spinoza and Leibniz were either decried, or&mdash;what is
-worse&mdash;misunderstood, by the established masters of instruction, they
-were welcomed by a more sympathetic and, with all its drawbacks, more
-appreciative study from the non-academic leaders of thought.</p>
-
-<p>Amongst these one of the most interesting and influential was Herder.
-Herder, who had been amongst Kant's students in 1763, and who has
-expressed his admiration of his then teacher, came as years passed-by
-to consider himself the appointed antagonist of the Kantian system.
-The two men were mentally and morally of different types: and in
-Herder's case, a sense of injury, in the end, positively blinded
-him to the meaning no less than to the merits of a doctrine he had
-decreed to be pernicious. In Herder's opinion, the Kantian system
-laboured throughout from the fault of a dead logical formalism and
-abstractness: it inhabited a sort of limbo, cut off alike from the
-fresh breath of nature and the growing life of history, and from the
-eternal spirit of divine truth: it undermined (so his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> experience at
-Weimar<a name="FNanchor_1_75" id="FNanchor_1_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_75" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> indicated) the traditional faith, and inspired its 'adepts'
-with a revolutionary superciliousness to all dogma. Its cut-and-dried
-logicality, its trenchant divisions and analyses were obnoxious to his
-poetically-fervid, largely-enthusiastic, and essentially-historical
-soul. Man&mdash;in his concrete completeness, in his physical surroundings
-and his corporeal structure, in his social organisation, in his
-literary and artistic life, above all in his poetry and traditions of
-religion&mdash;was the theme of his studies; and he looked with distrust on
-every attempt to analyse and disintegrate the total unity of humanity
-by a criticism first of this, and then a criticism of that side of
-it, carried on separately. Ossian had been an early favourite of his;
-and the twilight that hovers with the haze of pensive myth around the
-figures of that visionary world hangs with a charm and a confusion
-around the ultimate horizon of Herder's ideas.</p>
-
-<p>In 1774 and 1775 Herder wrote and wrote again an essay (published 1778)
-for a prize offered by the Berlin Academy on the subject of 'Sensation
-and Cognition in the human Soul.' Its fundamental points are that
-'no psychology is possible, which is not at every step a distinct
-physiology': that 'cognition and volition are only <i>one</i> energy of the
-soul': that 'all our thought has arisen out of and through sensation,
-and in spite of all distillation still contains copious traces of
-it': that there are not separate faculties of thought, but one divine
-power, which unifies all the broad stream of inflowing sensation,&mdash;'one
-energy, and elasticity of the soul, which reaches its height through
-the medium of language.' 'What is material, what non-material in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>
-man, I know not,' he says; 'but I am in the faith that nature has not
-fastened iron plates between them,' 'Man is a slave of mechanism (but
-a mechanism disguised in the garb of a lucid celestial reason) and
-fancies himself free,' 'Self-feeling and fellow-feeling (a new phase of
-expansion and contraction) are the two expressions of the elasticity of
-our will': they vary directly with each other: and 'love therefore is
-the highest reason'&mdash;a proposition, adds Herder, for which 'if we will
-not trust St. John, we may trust the undoubtedly more divine Spinoza,
-whose philosophy and ethics turn wholly upon this axis.'</p>
-
-<p>Herder's great work, however,&mdash;which, side by side with Lessing's
-<i>Education of the Human Race,</i> and with Kant's <i>Idea for a Universal
-History</i>, helped to constitute that conception of history, as
-philosophy in concrete form, which appears in Schelling, Schlegel, and
-Hegel,&mdash;was the <i>Ideas for a Philosophy of History.</i> It is the pendant
-and contrast to Kant's three Criticisms, with which it is nearly
-contemporaneous (1784-91). Even in history Kant emphasises the work of
-intelligence, of reason: and puts the intelligently-organised state&mdash;if
-possible, the world-commonwealth, when war shall be transformed into
-merely stimulating competition,&mdash;as the final triumph of the reason.
-To Herder, while on the one hand the nature-basis is all-essential,
-and must form the foundation of any genetic explanation of spiritual
-phenomena, the ideal of humanity presents itself rather as a free
-development of the many-sided individual&mdash;a development tempered by
-the association of the family and the claims of friendship. In Kant's
-view of civilisation, natural reason by its indwelling presuppositions
-works out the end of culture: Herder, on the contrary, allows himself
-to introduce&mdash;but only in and from the dim background&mdash;a supernatural
-aid to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span> actualise the germs of rationality latent in man's nature.
-Yet, though at the first step into history the Godhead appears, and
-a deified humanity looms ahead as the consummation of the process
-of evolution, the development between these two extreme poles is
-homogeneous and indeed one. The same law governs it throughout:</p>
-
-<p>'Ethics is only a higher physics of the mind.' Man is from the
-first endowed with tendencies which, through the medium of society
-and tradition, carry him on to the double end, so hard to combine,
-of 'humanity and happiness,' 'humanity and religion.' But, for
-this training of the spirit he is prepared by a special natural
-endowment of the body: and Herder can go so far as to say that 'in
-order to delineate the duties of man, we need only delineate his
-form.' Developing under the influence of cosmic and geographical
-conditions, and formed of the same protoplasm and on the same type
-as other animals, man possesses an unique organisation, a definitely
-proportioned mechanism, which is his distinctive and permanent specific
-character. General identity of plan and condition prevails for man
-and animals; but Herder keeps back from the Darwinian inference which
-interprets the graduated diversity of type as indicating that man is
-the phase reached <i>pro tempore</i> in the gradual slide along which the
-continuous change of environment carries the unstable types which
-earlier environments have helped to form. For Herder's conception of
-nature there are fixed differences beyond which research cannot go; and
-we shall see that both Schelling and Hegel accept this reservation.</p>
-
-<p>Herder, finally, struck a blow in the war that was waged after
-Lessing's death between the friends and foes of Spinozism. His little
-book <i>God</i> (1787) is a vindication v of Spinoza against Jacobi's
-attack. Antiquarian accuracy it can lay no claim to: the picture
-of Spinozism,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> one-sided at the best, is further vitiated by an
-interpretation of the doctrine which leavens it to indistinctness with
-the ideas of Leibniz and Shaftesbury. It was a grand&mdash;but it was also
-an audacious&mdash;vision of Spinozism which found it not inconsistent with
-a fundamental theism on one side and with the poetry of nature on the
-other. Yet Herder had the merit of being perhaps the first to pierce
-the hard logical shell of rationalism under which Spinoza had lain
-hidden, and to reveal the mystic passion for God which so quaintly
-called itself <i>amor erga rem infinitam et aeternam.</i> 'Spinoza,' says
-Herder, 'was an enthusiast for the being of God,' Even where he
-translates Spinoza's terms into ample equivalents, he does service by
-teaching men that the vapid inanities they associate with terms like
-<i>substance</i>, <i>mode, cause</i>, are inadequate to interpret the intensity
-of meaning they had for the philosopher. To remove the seals which
-rendered both Leibniz and Spinoza a mystery for the world was to
-prepare the way for Schelling and Hegel<a name="FNanchor_2_76" id="FNanchor_2_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_76" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>.</p>
-
-<p>It is under the aegis of Spinoza and Leibniz that Schelling begins
-his first characteristic work,&mdash;the <i>Ideas towards a philosophy of
-Nature.</i> In these thinkers he found first proclaimed as the fundamental
-standpoint of philosophy the unity of the finite and the infinite, of
-the real and the ideal, of the absolutely active and the absolutely
-passive. They differed indeed in this, that whereas this unity is
-pre-supposed by Spinoza as infinite and absolute substance, of which
-all separate existence, body or mind, is only a <i>modus</i>, it is taken
-by Leibniz as the universal characteristic of every individual being.
-Every monad&mdash;and the human soul is the typical monad&mdash;is at once finite
-and infinite, real and ideal, active and passive. But&mdash;whether as
-under<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>lying substance, or as unity of reality&mdash;both hold the cardinal
-doctrine that the absolute (the 'Object' of philosophy) is the unity
-and unification&mdash;the identity&mdash;of what outside it appears as two
-sides or orders of being, the real and the ideal. To philosophise,
-therefore&mdash;or to see things in the absolute&mdash;is (not as Hegel's
-malicious joke puts it<a name="FNanchor_3_77" id="FNanchor_3_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_77" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>, to look at them 'in the night when all cows
-are dark,'&mdash;but) to see them in the intense light that proceeds from
-the identity of the <i>Spirit</i> within us with the <i>Nature</i> without us.</p>
-
-<p>Fichte had caught hold of this standpoint. He had seen that the
-original antithesis which confronts us, and the conjunction (synthesis)
-of its members, presupposed a still more fundamental and indeed
-absolute thesis,&mdash;an aboriginal and active unity. That antithesis is
-the opposition of ego and not-ego; that synthesis is every act of
-knowledge and will, by which each of these powers is in turn limited
-by the other. Such a synthesis (volition or cognition) would be
-impossible unless on the fundamental thesis (or hypothesis) of a unity,
-or identity, which gives rise to the antithesis and has the power of
-overcoming it. Such an original unity is what he calls the absolute
-Ego. I am what I know and will, and what I know and will is Me. Such
-is the equation (briefly written, I = I) which identifies subject
-and object (of knowledge and will). But the associations clinging to
-the terms Fichte used gave this thought a one-sided direction. The
-'<i>I</i>' is opposed to the <i>'Thee,'</i> and the '<i>Them,</i>' and the 'It.' The
-'thing'&mdash;or non-ego&mdash;is depreciated as compared with the thinker and
-willer. It is postulated <i>ad majorem gloriam</i> of the Ego: in order that
-I may work out the full fruition of my being. It is what I ought to
-make out of it. It <i>is</i> nothing but what it <i>will be</i>&mdash;or will be if
-I do what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> I ought to do. The identity of the two sides therefore is
-left as 'the object of an endless task, an absolute imperative.' The
-Absolute is not yet:&mdash;it is only the forecast of a postulated result.</p>
-
-<p>'If this be what Fichte teaches, and be called subjective idealism,
-then for Schelling the first thing is to quit the house of bondage. Let
-us leave out of view the Ego, with its misleading associations, and
-begin with the two fields which are known to us, the fields of Nature
-and Spirit. Nature&mdash;not Matter&mdash;is the one side: Mind or Spirit the
-other. Each of them furnishes the object of one branch of philosophy&mdash;a
-philosophy of Nature, on one hand, and a transcendental idealism on the
-other. The former is new, and more especially Schelling's own proper
-continuation of Kant: the other partly a continuation of Fichte's work.
-But as they are both philosophy, they must coincide or meet. The whole
-philosophy may therefore call itself a philosophy of Identity; but, for
-the while, it will present itself under the two aspects of a philosophy
-of Nature, conceived as the blind and unconscious, a philosophy of Mind
-and history, as the free and conscious product of intelligence.<a name="FNanchor_4_78" id="FNanchor_4_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_78" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_75" id="Footnote_1_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_75"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> He held posts of large general superintendence over church
-and school affairs at Weimar.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_76" id="Footnote_2_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_76"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 420.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_77" id="Footnote_3_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_77"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Hegel, <i>Werke</i>, ii. 13.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_78" id="Footnote_4_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_78"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 392.</p>
-</div>
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></p>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XIII.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND IDEALISM.</h4>
-
-
-<p>What is meant by a 'philosophy of Nature'? 'To philosophise on Nature,'
-says Schelling, 'means to lift it up out of the dead mechanism in
-which it appears immersed,&mdash;to inspire it, so to speak, with liberty,
-and to set it in free process of evolution: it means, in other words,
-to tear ourselves away from the vulgar view which sees in Nature only
-occurrences, or at the best sees the action <i>as a fact, not the action
-itself</i> in the action<a name="FNanchor_1_79" id="FNanchor_1_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_79" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>.' There is in short a process in nature
-parallel in character to what Fichte had exhibited for consciousness.
-The natural world is no longer subordinated, but to appearance
-co-ordinate: and evolution or development, exhibited under the logical
-title of a 'deduction,' is the common law of both. The real order and
-the ideal order of the world are equally the work of an infinite and
-unconditioned activity, 'which never quite exhausts itself in any
-finite product, and of which everything individual is only as it were a
-particular expression.' The nature which we see broken up in groups and
-masses, and individual objects, is to be explained as a series of steps
-in a process of development: the steps in a single continuous product
-which has been arrested<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> at several stages,&mdash;which presents distinct
-epochs, but nevertheless all approximations, with divergences, to a
-single original ideal.</p>
-
-<p>In Nature, as in Mind, the most typical phenomenon is an original
-heterogeneity, duplicity, or difference, which, however, points
-back to a still more fundamental homogeneity, unity, or identity.
-This primary unity or ground of unification does not indeed appear
-to sight; the 'soul of Nature,' the <i>anima mundi,</i> nowhere presents
-itself as such in its undivided simplicity; but only as the perpetually
-recurring re-union of what has been divided. But though unapparent,
-the absolute identity is the necessary presupposition of all life
-and existence, as of all knowledge and action. It is the link or
-'copula' which perpetually reduces the antithesis to unity, and the
-heterogeneity to homogeneity, and the different to redintegration. To
-this fact of antithesis, presupposing and continually reverting to an
-original unity, Schelling gives the name 'Polarity,' 'It is impossible
-to construe the main physical phenomena without such a conflict of
-opposite principles. But this conflict only exists at the instant
-of the phenomenon itself. Each natural force <i>awakes</i> its opposite.
-But that force has no independent existence: it only exists in this
-contest, and it is only this contest which gives it for the moment a
-separate existence. As soon as this contest ceases, the force vanishes,
-by retreating into the sphere of homogeneous forces<a name="FNanchor_2_80" id="FNanchor_2_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_80" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>.' Polarity,
-therefore, is a general law of the cosmos.</p>
-
-<p>A ceaseless, limitless activity, therefore, as the basis or groundwork
-of all, for ever crossing, arresting, and limiting itself: an eternal
-war, which, however, is always being led back to peace,&mdash;a process
-of differentiation which rests upon, is the product of, and is for
-ever<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span> forced back to integration, is the perpetual rhythm of the
-natural universe. It is a process in which can be traced three grades,
-stages, or 'powers' (first, second, and third, &amp;c.). By its more
-generally descriptive name it is called Organisation. 'Organism,'
-says Schelling, 'is the principle of things. It is not a property
-of single natural objects; but, on the contrary, single natural
-objects are so many limitations, or single modes of apprehending the
-universal organism<a name="FNanchor_3_81" id="FNanchor_3_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_81" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>.' 'The world is an organisation; and a universal
-organism itself is the condition (and to that extent the positive)
-of mechanism<a name="FNanchor_4_82" id="FNanchor_4_82"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_82" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>.' 'Mechanism is to be explained from organism: not
-organism from mechanism.' 'The <i>essential</i> of all things is <i>life</i>: the
-<i>accidental</i> is only the <i>kind</i> of their life: and even the dead in
-Nature is not utterly dead,&mdash;it is only extinct life.'</p>
-
-<p>But if the conception of an organism be thus the adequate or
-complete idea of Nature as a whole, that idea is only realised as
-a third 'power' supervening on, and by means of two subordinate or
-inferior ranges or 'powers.' The first stage is that occupied by the
-mathematical and mechanical conception of the world,&mdash;the bare skeleton
-or framework which has to be clothed upon and informed with life and
-growth. This first 'power' in the world-process of antithetical forces,
-under the control of, and on the basis supplied by, the original
-thetic unity which synthetises them, is Matter. In Matter we have the
-equilibrium and statical indifference of two opposing forces&mdash;one
-centrifugal, accelerating, repulsive, the other contripetal, retarding,
-attractive&mdash;which, working under the synthetising unity supplied by the
-force of universal gravitation, build up in their momentary arrests
-or epochs the various material forms. In this first 'power' we have
-as it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> were the scheme or machinery through which organisation will
-work: the outward and 'abstract, organism. And the essential feature
-of this 'construction' or 'deduction' of matter is that it does not
-take material atoms and build them into a world, but 'deduces' the
-properties of matter as issuing from the play of opposing forces, and
-as due to the temporary syntheses resulting from the presence of unity
-making itself felt in the opposites.</p>
-
-<p>A second and higher 'power' is seen in the physical universe as it
-presents, itself to the sciences of electricity, magnetism, and
-chemistry. If the former briefly be denominated the mechanical,
-this is the chemical world. The law of polarity is here especially
-prominent: the neutrality or indifference of parts is replaced by an
-intenser antithesis and affinity: and the return from heterogeneity
-to homogeneity takes place with more striking and even sudden effect.
-Here, matter, even as inorganised, has a certain <i>simulacrum</i> of life
-and sensibility: there is in it the trace of a spirit which emerges
-above the mere contiguity and juxtaposition of mechanical atoms. The
-atomic theory shows itself less and less adequate as an attempt to
-represent the whole phenomena of inanimate matter, and the material
-universe is already charged with sympathies and antipathies which are
-full of the promise and the potency of the organic world.</p>
-
-<p>The mechanical theory of the universe, in the ordinary sense, which
-deals with the mathematical formulation of the laws of planetary
-movement, had been the work of the seventeenth century. The eighteenth
-century had seen attempts to explain the <i>status quo</i> of the
-planetary system as a resultant from the evolution of an elementary
-molecular state of the cosmic mass. With the close of the eighteenth
-century there appeared a group<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> of new sciences dealing with subtler
-energies of matter,&mdash;with electricity, galvanism, and above all with
-the connexions of chemical, electric, and magnetic science. The
-ideas thus suggested&mdash;embraced with some generality under the title
-Polarity&mdash;threw light backward upon the old mechanical conceptions,
-and gave them a decidedly dynamic character. Even the tranquil rest
-of geometrical figures came to be explained as a meeting point and
-transition moment of opposite forces. But these ideas produced an even
-greater effect on biology. Here, too, the need of a special 'vital
-force' to explain life and organisation disappeared: organism was
-but a higher stage, a completer truth of mechanism: and both found
-their explanation in the antithesis and synthesis of forces, or in
-differentiation and integration of what has recently been termed an
-'idée-force.' In this direction, so far as Schelling was concerned,
-the obvious stimulus came from the programme sketched by Kielmeyer at
-Stuttgart in 1793, in a lecture 'on the proportions of organic forces,'
-According to Kielmeyer there are three types of force in the animal
-organisation, sensibility, irritability and reproduction<a name="FNanchor_5_83" id="FNanchor_5_83"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_83" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>. The last
-of these is the basic force which builds up and propagates the animal
-system. With irritability, or contraction in response to external
-stimuli&mdash;material adaptation to environment&mdash;a higher level of animal
-life is reached. But the highest of all forces in the living being is
-sensibility. In this same order may we reasonably conceive that the
-'plan of nature' proceeds. Her first products show little beyond that
-reproductive power which makes broad and high the pyramid of life. But
-as the creature acquires increasing heterogeneity and a comparatively
-independent position, it plays the part of a re-agent against stimuli,
-and a source of movements.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> Lastly, it not merely responds to, but
-assimilates and appropriates the impression into a sensation: it
-internalises the external, and carries within itself by means of the
-sensibility an ever-increasing picture of the world around it.</p>
-
-<p>The idea of Evolution or Development, thus introduced by Schelling into
-philosophy as a governing principle in the study of matter and of mind,
-is not to be confused either with the older use of these terms or with
-their current applications to-day<a name="FNanchor_6_84" id="FNanchor_6_84"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_84" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>. By evolution (or development)
-and involution (or envelopment) the earlier speculation on biology had
-denoted the view that the organic germ contained <i>in parvo</i> all that
-the matured organism showed in large. As the mature bulb of the healthy
-hyacinth shows, when cut open, to the naked eye, the stem and flowers
-that will issue from it next spring; so in general the seed can be
-treated as a miniature organism needing only an increase of bulk to
-make it fully visible in details. Growth is thus not accretion, but
-explication and enlargement of a microscopic organism subsisting in the
-germ.</p>
-
-<p>Evolution, in the present time, and especially since Darwin, means
-something more than this. It implies a theory of descent of the variety
-of existing organisms from other organisms of a previous age, less
-individualised in forms and functions. From comparatively simple and
-homogeneous creatures there have issued in the course of ages creatures
-of more complex, more highly differentiated structure; and this process
-of gradual differentiation may be conceived as going on through an all
-but infinite period. At one end we may conceive matter, just endowed
-with the faculties of life and organisation, but in a minimal degree;
-at the other end of the developmental process, creatures which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> have
-organised within themselves powers, maximal both in range and variety.
-The result (so far as we at present go) is a genealogy of organism
-which, to quote Darwin, pictures before us a 'great tree of life which
-fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth and
-covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.'</p>
-
-<p>Even Bugon, seeing how naturally he could regard 'the wolf, the fox,
-and the jackal' as 'degenerate species of a single family,' concluded
-we could not go wrong in supposing that 'nature could have with
-time drawn from a single being all other organised beings.' Erasmus
-Darwin (1794) had insisted on the power of 'appetency' in the organs
-of a living creature to create and acquire new structures which it
-handed down to its posterity. G. R. Treviranus<a name="FNanchor_7_85" id="FNanchor_7_85"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_85" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> in his <i>Biology</i>
-(1802-5) had noted the influence of environment, and Jean Lamarck in
-his <i>Philosophie Zoologique</i> (1809) had&mdash;after assuming that 'nature
-created none but the lowest organisms'&mdash;maintained that need and use
-(or disuse) can so effectively modify a creature that it may even
-produce new organs, and give rise by imperceptible degrees to a variety
-of creatures as widely divergent as they now appear. E. g. 'The giraffe
-owes its long neck to its continued habit of browsing upon trees.' And
-gradually it had become recognised by speculators on this subject that,
-as Mr. H. Spencer wrote in 1852, 'by small increments of modification
-any amount of modification may in time be generated.' Finally, in 1859,
-Darwin, with an ample resource of illustrative examples, enforced the
-doctrine that the existing fauna and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span> flora of the earth represent the
-result of a struggle for existence, protracted during vast ages, in
-which those creature's have been preserved (selected to live) which,
-among all the variously-endowed offspring of any kind, were best fitted
-to appropriate the means of subsistence in the circumstances in which
-they for the time found themselves placed. The circumstances of life
-on the globe are perpetually varying from place to place and time to
-time: progeny never exactly reproduce their parents, and diverge widely
-from each other: hence each form of life is perpetually sliding on from
-phase to phase, and only those survive which are best adapted to the
-new conditions of life.</p>
-
-<p>So far as Darwinism is an attempt to show that the classes of plants
-and animals are not a mere juxtaposition and aggregation, but are to be
-explained by reference to a single genetic principle, it is in harmony
-with the Evolution taught by Schelling and Hegel. Both alike overthrow
-the hard and fast lines of division which semi-popular science insists
-upon, and restore the continuity of existence. Both regard Nature as
-an organic realm, developing by action and re-action within itself,
-living a common life in thorough sympathy and solidarity, and not a
-mere machine in which the several parts retain without change the
-features and functions impressed upon them at creation by some supernal
-architect. But they differ in other points. Ordinary Darwinism,
-at least, talks as if circumstances and organism were independent
-originally, and only brought as it were, incidentally, in contact
-and correlation. It fails to keep hold of the fact&mdash;of which it is
-abstractly aware&mdash;that the two act upon and modify each other because
-they are members of a larger organism. It forgets, in short, what
-Schelling so thoroughly realised, that the organic and inorganic,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>
-ordinarily so called, are both in a wider sense organic. It wants the
-courage of recognising its own tacit presuppositions.</p>
-
-<p>But the characteristic difference between the evolution theory of
-to-day and that meant by the philosophers is different from this,
-though connected with it. 'The assertion,' says Schelling, 'that
-the various organisms have formed themselves by gradual development
-from one another, is a misconception of an Idea which really lies in
-reason<a name="FNanchor_8_86" id="FNanchor_8_86"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_86" class="fnanchor">[8]</a>.' And Hegel no less decidedly asserts that 'Metamorphosis'
-(as the term was then applied, e. g. by Goethe, to what we now call
-Evolution) really <i>exists</i> as a fact only in the case of the living
-individual,&mdash;not in the supposed or theoretical continuity of the
-species. 'It is an awkward way both ancient and modern speculative
-biology have had of presenting the development and transition of one
-physical form and sphere into a higher one as an outwardly-actual
-production,&mdash;which, however, in order to make it clearer, has been
-thrown back into the darkness of the past.'<a name="FNanchor_9_87" id="FNanchor_9_87"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_87" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> Yet notwithstanding
-these and even later protests, there is a great charm for many minds in
-the evolutionist picture, e. g., of the horse of to-day as the literal
-descendant through nearly fifty great stages (called species) from
-some creature of the eocene age, which gradually transformed itself in
-consequence of innate instability or variability of construction and in
-obedience to changes in its environment. But whatever value there may
-be in these as yet hypothetical aids to the imagination in grasping and
-unifying the variety of organic life, they run on another line from the
-philosophical evolution. That evolution is in the <i>Idea</i>, the <i>Notion.</i>
-It is the 'fluidity' of terms of thought that is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> here sought, not
-of the kinds of things,&mdash;except in a secondary way. And above all,
-philosophy does not deal with a problem in time, with a mere sequence;
-if it deals with a history of nature, the agents of that history are
-powers and forces&mdash;and powers which are ideal no less than real.</p>
-
-<p>A nearer approach to the philosophic conception is to be found in the
-views which modern physiology takes of the nature of organic structure
-and function<a name="FNanchor_10_88" id="FNanchor_10_88"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_88" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>. In the simplest phases of protoplasm, the apparently
-homogeneous mass is really undergoing a series of changes, and indeed
-only exists as such, because it is the ever-renewed resultant of
-two correlated processes,&mdash;a movement up (anabolic change) by which
-dead matter is assimilated and built into it, and a movement down
-(katabolic changes) by which its composing elements are disintegrated
-and left behind, with accompanying liberation of energy. Protoplasm or
-'living matter' is the incessantly formed and re-formed thin line on
-which these two currents for the moment converge,-a temporary crest
-of white foam, as it were, raising itself on the Heraclitean wave of
-vicissitude, where all things flow on and nothing abides. But wherever
-protoplasm arises and maintains itself on this borderline of ascending
-and descending states, it exhibits the three well-known properties of
-assimilation, contractility, and sensitiveness. Protoplasm, placed
-as it were in the mean between these two processes, is or has the
-synthetic power which governs them and keeps them in one. It is no
-mere chemical substance, undergoing composition and decomposition,
-but rather, if looked at from the somewhat speculative standpoint of
-molecular physics, a kind of intricate movement or dance of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> particles,
-a shape or 'form' instinct with the power of producing and reproducing
-itself, and, ultimately, in some highly differentiated phases
-(nerve-system), with a power of producing and reproducing a world of
-imagination.</p>
-
-<p>A philosophy of Nature is only half a philosophy. Its purport is
-to set free the spirit in nature, to release intelligence from its
-imprisonment in material encasements which hide it from the ordinary
-view, and to gather together the <i>disjecta membra</i> of the divine into
-the outlines of one continuous organisation. It seeks to spiritualise
-nature, i. e. to present the inner idea, unity, and genetic
-interdependence of all its phenomena: to delineate <i>natura formaliter
-spectata</i> not as a logical skeleton of abstract categories, but in its
-organisation and continuous life. There remains the problem of what
-Schelling calls 'Transcendental Idealism':&mdash;called 'transcendental'
-to avoid confusion with the vulgar idealism which supposes the world
-to be what it calls a mere 'idea' or phantom of the mind. Schelling's
-is on the contrary an 'Ideal-Realism': it 'materialises the laws of
-intelligence to laws of nature<a name="FNanchor_11_89" id="FNanchor_11_89"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_89" class="fnanchor">[11]</a>.'</p>
-
-<p>We need not in details consider the genesis of Reality from the action
-of the Ego. Substantially it is the same as that given by Fichte.
-An activity, which is at once self-limiting and superior to all
-limit, rises through stage to stage, from sensation and intuition,
-to reflection and intelligence, till it becomes the consciousness of
-a world of ob; ective reality. 'Give me,' says the transcendental
-philosopher, 'a nature with opposing activities, of which the one
-goes to infinity, and the other endeavours to behold itself in this
-infinity,&mdash;and from that I will show you intelligence arising with the
-whole system of its ideas<a name="FNanchor_12_90" id="FNanchor_12_90"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_90" class="fnanchor">[12]</a>.' In the first phase the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span> 'ideal-real'
-world arises by the synthetic action of the 'productive intuition,'
-Ideas, as it were, live and move: they grow and build up: causality
-is neither a category nor a schema, but an intelligent 'form' which
-is also a force&mdash;an 'idée-force,' They are (in the Hegelian sense)
-'Ideas,' i.e. neither merely objective nor merely subjective, but both
-at once. But such an ideal world is outside and beyond consciousness:
-it belongs to the same region as that higher Ego where there is no
-distinction between the Ego I am and the Ego I know. To follow the
-movement in this region needs a combination of mental vision and visual
-intellect, which Schelling has called the 'Intellectual Intuition.'
-It is a power which rising above the materialism of sense yet retains
-its realism; which, while intellectual, is free from abstractness.
-It is synthetic, and widely different from mere logical analysis.
-It is, in short, analogous to the artistic genius: it creates a
-quasi-objectivity, an ideal-reality, without which the mere words of
-the speculator are meaningless. By means of this 'organ,' philosophy
-can 'freely imitate and repeat the original series of actions in which
-the one "act" of self-consciousness is evolved<a name="FNanchor_13_91" id="FNanchor_13_91"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_91" class="fnanchor">[13]</a>.</p>
-
-<p>But the 'productive intuition' is, as Kant would say, blind: it is
-unconscious in its operation: and it is only after an arrest, a Sabbath
-when it surveys and judges its work, that it begins to realise itself
-through a process of analysis and reflection which elicits and fixes
-the categories that have been operative in it. By this abstraction
-intelligence rises out of mere production to intelligent and conscious
-production, i.e. to volition, where it has an ideal and realises it.
-With volition and voluntary action, objectivity is to appearance<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
-further certified and fortified. It is as active, i. e. as free, and
-even moral, agents, that we set forward categorically the reality of
-the world. So, too, Fichte had declared. But, as Schelling reminds
-us, with this intensified assertion of a law and an ideal to which
-the real must and shall correspond,&mdash;with the declaration that the
-realm of absolute consistency and ideal truth of reason is the true
-and real for ever and ever&mdash;we come across the fundamental antithesis
-of the 'Is' and the 'Ought,5 of the objective and subjective, of
-unconscious necessity and self-conscious freedom. With an attempt to
-get a philosophy of history,&mdash;i. e. of man and mind as the culminating
-truth of things, we see ourselves confronted with the opposition of
-fatalism and chance. On one hand history is only possible for beings
-who have an ideal in view,&mdash;one persistent aim and principle which
-their work and will is the means of realising. And yet it is an ideal
-which only the series of generations, only the whole race, can realise.
-Man's license to do or to refrain rests upon a larger, latent, divine
-necessity which constrains it. What human agents by their free choice
-determine and carry out, is carried out, in the long run, by the force
-of an everlasting and unchanging order, to which their wills seem but
-a mere plaything. But that man's free agency should thus harmonise
-with the constrained uniformities of nature is only possible on the
-assumption that both are phenomena of a common ground, or basis of
-identity, of an 'absolute identity, in which there is no duplication,
-and which for that reason, because the condition of all consciousness
-is duplication, can never reach consciousness. This ever-Unconscious,
-which, as it were the everlasting Sun in the spirit-kingdom, is hidden
-in its own undimmed light, and which, though it is never an object,
-still impresses its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> identity on all free objects, is simultaneously
-the same for all intelligences, the invisible "root" of which all
-intelligences are only the "powers," and the everlasting mediator
-between the self-determining subjective in us and the objective or
-percipient,&mdash;simultaneously the ground of the uniformity in freedom,
-and of the freedom in uniformity of the objective<a name="FNanchor_14_92" id="FNanchor_14_92"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_92" class="fnanchor">[14]</a>.' To rise to the
-sense of this Absolute Identity, as common basis of harmony between the
-'Ought' and the 'Is,' is to recognise Providence: it is Religion.</p>
-
-<p>But this 'Absolute' is never in history completely revealed&mdash;we cannot
-<i>see</i> free action coincide with predetermination. Thus if History as
-a whole be> conceived as a 'continuous and gradual self-revelation;
-of the Absolute,' 'God never <i>is,</i> if <i>is</i> means exhibition; in the
-objective world: <i>if God were, we</i> should not be<a name="FNanchor_15_93" id="FNanchor_15_93"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_93" class="fnanchor">[15]</a>.' Nor is the
-Absolute so revealed in Nature. Yet, even as the apparent contingency
-of human action throws us back on an everlasting necessity which is
-yet freedom, so the apparent uniformity of natural order shows us in
-organic life the traces of a free self-regulating development. To
-apprehend the truth at which both seem to point we want an organ of
-intelligence which shall unite in itself the conscious activity of
-free production with the unconscious instinct of natural creation.
-Such an organ is found in they aesthetic power of genius, in the
-Artist. The artistic product is the work of two intimately-conjoined
-principles:&mdash;of the art (in the narrower sense) which can be taught
-and learned, and is exercised consciously and with reflection, and of
-that 'poesy in Art,' the unconscious grace of genius which can neither
-be handed down nor acquired, but can only be inborn by free gift of
-nature. In the work thus brought to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> birth there is something definite,
-precise, and capable of exposition in finite formulae: there is also
-something which no 'prose' can ever explicate, something which tells us
-of the infinite and eternal, which ever reveals and yet conceals the
-Absolute and Perfect. Art, thus springing from 'imagination, the one
-sole power by which we can think and conjoin even the contradictory,'
-gives objectivity and outward shape to that 'intellectual intuition' by
-which the philosopher subjectively (in his own consciousness) sought to
-realise to himself the unity of thought and existence.</p>
-
-<p>'To the philosopher,' Schelling concludes, 'Art is supreme, because it
-as it were opens to him the Holy of Holies, where in everlasting and
-original unity there burns, as it were in one flame, what is parted
-asunder in nature and history, and what in life and conduct, no less
-than in thinking, must for ever flee apart. The view the philosopher
-artificially makes for himself of nature is for Art the original and
-natural. What we call nature is a poem which is locked up in strange
-and secret characters. Yet could the riddle be disclosed, we should
-recognise in it the Odyssey of the mind, which, strangely deceived, in
-seeking itself, flees from itself: for through the sense-world there
-is a glimpse, only as through words of the meaning, only as through
-half-transparent mist of the land %of imagination, after which we
-yearn. That splendid picture emerges, as it were, by the removal of the
-invisible partition-wall which sunders the actual and the ideal world,
-and is only the opening by which those figures and regions of the world
-of imagination, that but imperfectly glimmer through the actual, come
-forward in all their fulness. Nature is to the artist no more than
-it is to the philosopher, viz. the ideal world as it appears under
-constant limitations, or only the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> imperfect reflex of a world which
-does not exist outside him, but within him.'</p>
-
-<p>'If it is Art alone, then, which can succeed in making objective
-and universally accepted what the philosopher can only exhibit
-subjectively, it may also be expected that philosophy, as it was in
-the infancy of science born and nourished by poetry, and with it
-all those sciences which were by it carried on towards perfection,
-will after their completion flow back as so many single streams into
-the universal ocean of poetry from which they issued. Nor is it in
-general hard to say what will be the means for the return of science
-to poetry: for such a means has existed in mythology before this, as
-it now seems, irrevocable separation took place. But as to how a new
-mythology,&mdash;which cannot be the invention of the single poet, but of
-a new generation, as it were representing only a single poet,&mdash;can
-itself arise, is a problem, the solution of which is to be expected
-only from the future destinies of the world and the further course of
-history<a name="FNanchor_16_94" id="FNanchor_16_94"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_94" class="fnanchor">[16]</a>.'</p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_79" id="Footnote_1_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_79"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Schelling, <i>Werke</i>, iii. 13. (References always to the
-first series.)</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_80" id="Footnote_2_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_80"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Schelling, <i>Werke,</i> ii. 409.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_81" id="Footnote_3_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_81"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Schelling, <i>Werke</i>, ii. 500.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_82" id="Footnote_4_82"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_82"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Ibid. ii. 350.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_83" id="Footnote_5_83"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_83"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Compare vol. ii. 360 and 429.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_84" id="Footnote_6_84"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_84"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 424.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_85" id="Footnote_7_85"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_85"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'Every inquiry into the influence of general nature on
-living beings,' says Treviranus, 'must start from the principle that
-all living forms are products of physical influences which still go on
-at the present time and are altered only in degree and direction.'</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_8_86" id="Footnote_8_86"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_86"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Schelling, <i>Werke</i>, iii. 63.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_9_87" id="Footnote_9_87"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_87"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Hegel, <i>Encyclopaedie,</i> § 249.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_10_88" id="Footnote_10_88"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_88"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> See e. g. Professor Michael Fosters article on Physiology
-in the <i>Encyclopaedia Britannica.</i></p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_11_89" id="Footnote_11_89"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_89"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> Schelling, iii. 352, 386.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_12_90" id="Footnote_12_90"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_90"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> Ibid. iii. 427.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_13_91" id="Footnote_13_91"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_91"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> Schelling, iii. 397.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_14_92" id="Footnote_14_92"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_92"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> Schelling, iii. 600.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_15_93" id="Footnote_15_93"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_93"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> Ibid. iii. 603.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_16_94" id="Footnote_16_94"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_94"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> Schelling, iii. 628.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XIV.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>TRANSITION TO HEGEL.</h4>
-
-
-<p>Thus far Schelling (aetat. 25) had gone in 1800. Two sides of
-philosophy had been alternately presented as complementary to each
-other; and now the task lay before him to publish the System itself
-which formed the basis of those complementary views. To that task
-Schelling set himself in 1801 (in his Journal for Speculative Physics):
-but the <i>Darstellung meines Systems</i> remained a torso. The Absolute
-was abruptly 'shot from the pistol': but little followed save a
-restatement in new terms of the Philosophy of Nature. Meanwhile Hegel,
-who had inherited some little means by his father's death, began to
-think that the hour had struck for his entrance into the literary and
-philosophical arena, and wrote in the end of 1800 to Schelling asking
-his aid in finding a suitable place and desirable surroundings from
-which to launch himself into action. What answer or advice he received
-is unknown: at any rate in the early days of 1801 he took up his
-quarters at Jena, and in the autumn he gave his first lectures at the
-University. Gossip suggested that Schelling, left alone (since Fichte's
-departure) to sustain the onset of respectability and orthodoxy upon
-the extravagances of the new Transcendentalism, had summoned his
-countryman and old friend to bear a part in the fray. And the rumour<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
-seemed to receive corroboration. The two friends issued conjointly
-a <i>Critical Journal of Philosophy,</i> which ran through two years. So
-closely were the two editors associated that in one article it seems as
-if the younger had supplied his more fluent pen to expound the ideas of
-his senior.</p>
-
-<p>The influence of Hegel is to be seen in the <i>Bruno</i>, <i>or on the Divine
-and Natural Principle of Things</i>, published in 1802. It is a dialogue,
-in form closely modelled after the <i>Timaeus</i> of Plato, dealing with the
-old theme of the relation of art (poesy) and philosophy, and with the
-eternal creation of the universe. It presents philosophy as a higher
-than Art; for while Art achieves only an individual truth and beauty,
-philosophy cognises truth and beauty in its essence and actuality
-(<i>an und für sich</i>). Philosophy itself Bruno (the chief speaker of
-the dialogue) does not profess to set forth, but 'only the ground and
-soil on which it must be built up and carried out': and that soil
-is 'the Idea of something in which all antitheses are not so much
-combined, as rather one, and not so much superseded, as rather not at
-all parted,'&mdash;'a unity, in which unity and antithesis, the self-similar
-with the dissimilar, are one<a name="FNanchor_1_95" id="FNanchor_1_95"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_95" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>.' From such a standpoint it is not
-wonderful that 'in the finite understanding (<i>Verstand,</i>) compared with
-the supreme Idea and the way in which all things are in it, everything
-seems reversed, and as if standing on its head, exactly like the things
-we see mirrored on the surface of water<a name="FNanchor_2_96" id="FNanchor_2_96"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_96" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>.'</p>
-
-<p>This supreme Unity is essentially a trinity: an Eternal, embracing
-infinite and finite; an eternal and invisible father of all things,
-who, never issuing forth from his eternity, comprehends infinite and
-finite in one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> and the same act of divine knowledge. The infinite,
-again, is the Spirit, who is the unity of all things; while the finite,
-though potentially equal to the infinite<a name="FNanchor_3_97" id="FNanchor_3_97"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_97" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>, is by its own will a God
-suffering and made subject to the conditions of time<a name="FNanchor_4_98" id="FNanchor_4_98"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_98" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>. This trinity
-in unity (which is the Absolute) is by logic&mdash;a mere science of
-understanding&mdash;rent asunder: and the one Subject-object of philosophy
-becomes for reflection and understanding the three independent objects
-which such a 'logical' philosophy calls respectively the Soul (erewhile
-the infinite), the world (once the finite), and God (the eternal
-unity). 'Opposing and separating the world of intelligence from the
-world of nature, men have learned to see nature outside God, and God
-outside nature, and withdrawing nature from the holy necessity, have
-subordinated it to the unholy which they name mechanical, while by the
-same act they have made the ideal world the scene of a lawless liberty.
-At the same time as they defined nature as a merely passive entity,
-they supposed they had gained the right of defining God, whom they
-elevated above nature, as pure activity, utter "actuosity," as if the
-one of these concepts did not stand and fall with the other, and none
-had truth by itself<a name="FNanchor_5_99" id="FNanchor_5_99"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_99" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>.'</p>
-
-<p>The problem therefore of philosophy is on one hand to 'find the
-expression for an activity which is as reposeful as the deepest repose,
-for a rest which is as active as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> the highest activity<a name="FNanchor_6_100" id="FNanchor_6_100"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_100" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>.' On the
-other hand; 'to find the point of unity is not the greatest thing, but
-from it also to develop its opposite, this is the proper and deepest
-secret of art<a name="FNanchor_7_101" id="FNanchor_7_101"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_101" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>.' The world as it first presents itself labours under
-a radical antithesis: it offers a double face, body and soul, finite
-and infinite. But to an absolute philosophy, or that high idealism
-which sees all things in the light of the Eternal, the two sides are
-not so separate as they first appeared. Each is also the whole and
-one, but under a phase, a '<i>Differenz</i>' a preponderating aspect which
-disguises the essential identity of both. Behind mind, as it were,
-looms body: through body shines mind. The ideal is but a co-aspect with
-the real. The difference of nature and spirit presupposes and leads
-back to the indifference of the Absolute One. 'Wherever in a thing soul
-and body are equated, in that thing is an imprint of the Idea, and as
-the Idea in the Absolute is also itself being and essence, so in that
-thing, its copy, the form is also the substance and the substance the
-form<a name="FNanchor_8_102" id="FNanchor_8_102"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_102" class="fnanchor">[8]</a>.'</p>
-
-<p>'Thus,' so Bruno concludes, 'we shall, first in the absolute equality
-of essence and form, know how both finite and infinite stream forth
-from its heart, and how the one is necessarily and for ever with the
-other, and comprehend how that simple ray, which issues from the
-Absolute and is the very Absolute, appears parted into difference and
-indifference, finite and infinite. We shall precisely define the mode
-of parting and of unity for each point of the universe, and prosecute
-the universe to that place where that absolute point of unity appears
-parted into two relative unities. We shall recognise in the one the
-source whence springs the real and naturals world; in the other, of
-the ideal and divine world.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> With the former we shall celebrate the
-incarnation of God from all eternity; with the latter the necessary
-deification of man. And while we move freely and without resistance up
-and down on this spiritual ladder, we shall, now, as we descend, see
-the unity of the divine and natural principle parted, now, as we ascend
-and again dissolve everything into one, see nature in God and God in
-nature<a name="FNanchor_9_103" id="FNanchor_9_103"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_103" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>.' Such was the programme which Schelling offered. Hegel
-accepting it,&mdash;or perhaps helping to frame it&mdash;made two not unimportant
-changes. He attempted in his <i>Phenomenology</i> to lead up step by step
-to, and so warrant, that strange position of idealism u which claims to
-be the image of the Absolute. He tried in his <i>Logic</i> to give for this
-point of view a systematic basis and a filling out of the bare Idea of
-a Unity, neither objective nor subjective, neither form nor substance,
-neither real nor ideal, but including and absorbing these. He tried, in
-short, to trace in the Absolute itself the inherent difference which
-issued in two different worlds, and to show its unity and identity
-there.</p>
-
-<p>A <i>System</i> of philosophy, and a philosophy of the <i>Absolute!</i> The
-project to the sober judgment of common sense stands self-condemned,
-palpably beyond the tether of humanity. For if there be anything agreed
-upon, it is that the knowledge of finite beings like us can never be
-more than a&mdash;comparatively poor&mdash;collection of fragments, and can
-never reach to that which&mdash;and such is the supposed character of the
-Absolute&mdash;is utterly un-related, rank non-relativity. But in the first
-place, let us not be the slaves of words, and let us not be terrified
-by unfamiliar terms. After all, a System is only our old friend the
-unity of knowledge, and the Absolute is not something let quite loose,
-but the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span> consummation and inter-connexion of all ties. It is no doubt
-an audacious enterprise to set forth on the quest of the unity of
-knowledge, and the completion of all definition and characterisation.
-But, on the other hand, it may perhaps claim to be more truly modest
-than the self-complacent modesty of its critics. For ordinary belief
-and knowledge rest upon presuppositions which they dare not or will
-not subject to revision. They too are sure that things on the whole,
-or that the system of things, or that nature and history, are a realm
-of uniformity, subject to unvarying law, in thorough interdependence.
-They are good enough, occasionally, to urge that they hold these
-beliefs on the warranty of experience, and not as, what they are
-pleased to call, intuitions, <i>a priori</i> ideas, and what not. But to
-base a truth on experience is a loose manner of talking: not one whit
-better than the alleged Indian foundation of the earth on the elephant,
-and the elephant erected on the tortoise. For by Experience it means
-experiences; and these rest one upon another, one upon another, till
-at length, if this be all that holds them together, the last hangs
-unsupported, (and with its superincumbent load), ready to drop in the
-abyss of Nought.</p>
-
-<p>This 'transcendental,' 'absolutist,' '<i>a priori</i>' philosophy, which
-stands so strange and menacing on the threshold of the nineteenth
-century, is after all only, as Kant sometimes called it, an essay
-to comprehend and see the true measures and dimensions of this
-much-quoted Experience. All knowledge rests <i>in</i> (not <i>on</i>) the unity
-of Experience. All the several experiences rest in the totality
-of one experience,&mdash;ultimate, all-embracing, absolute, infinite,
-unconditioned; universal and yet individual, necessary and yet
-free,&mdash;eternal, and yet filling all the nooks of time,&mdash;ideal, and yet
-the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span> mother of all reality,&mdash;unextended, and yet spread through the
-spaces of the universe. Call it, if you like, the experience of the
-race, but remember that that apparently more realistic and scientific
-phrase connotes neither more nor less (if rightly understood) than
-normal, ideal, universal, infinite, absolute experience. This is the
-Unconditioned, which is the basis and the builder of all conditions:
-the Absolute, which is the home and the parent of all relations.
-Experience is no doubt yours and mine, but it is also much more than
-either yours or mine. He who builds on and in Experience, builds on
-and in the Absolute, in <i>the</i> System&mdash;a system which is not merely
-<i>his.</i> In his every utterance he claims to speak as the mouth-piece of
-the Absolute, the Unconditioned; his words expect and require assent,
-belief, acceptance;&mdash;they are candidates (not necessarily, or always
-successful) for the rank of universal and necessary truth: they are
-dogmatic assertions, and even in their humblest tones, none the less
-infected with the fervour of certainty. For, indeed, otherwise, it
-would be a shame and an insult to let them cross the lips.</p>
-
-<p>It is the aim of the Absolute <i>a priori</i> philosophy to raise this
-certainty to truth: or, as one may rather say, to reduce this certainty
-to its kernel of truth. It seeks to determine the limits&mdash;not <i>of</i> this
-absolute and basic experience (for it has no external limits)&mdash;but
-<i>in</i> this experience: the anatomy and physiology of the Absolute,&mdash;the
-correlations and inclusions, the distinctions and syntheses in the
-unconditioned field. It examines the <i>foundation</i> of all knowledge.
-But&mdash;if this be the phrase&mdash;we must be on our guard against a
-misapprehension of its terms. The foundations are also knowledge:
-they are <i>in</i> all knowledge and experience, its synthetic link and
-its analytic distinctions. We must<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span> not shrink from paradoxes in
-expression. The house of knowledge, the world of experience, is as
-self-centred and self-sustaining, and even more so, than the planetary
-system. It is a totality in which each part hangs upon and helps to
-hold up the others, but which needs no external help, resting and yet
-moving, self-poised and free.</p>
-
-<p>We may be spared, therefore, verbal criticism on the Absolute and
-Unconditioned. The Absolute, and Infinite, and Eternal is no mere
-negation:&mdash;the only pure negation is NOT, and even that has a flaw in
-its claim. It is perfectly true&mdash;and it can only be babes and sucklings
-that need to be reminded of the fact&mdash;that none of us realises and
-attains the <i>ne plus ultra</i> of knowledge and that all our systems
-have their day,&mdash;have their day and cease to be. 'The coasts of the
-Happy Isles of philosophy where we would fain arrive are covered only
-with fragments of shattered ships, and we behold no intact vessel in
-their bays<a name="FNanchor_10_104" id="FNanchor_10_104"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_104" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>.' So too the whole earth is full of graves; and yet
-humanity lives on, charged with the attainments of the past and full
-of the promise of the future. Let us by all means be critical and
-not dogmatic: let us never entirely forget that each utterance, each
-science, each system of ours falls short of what it wanted to be,
-and for a moment at least thought it was. But let us not carry our
-critical abstinence into dogmatic non-intervention: or, if so, let us
-silently accept the great renunciation of all utterance henceforth.
-System we all presuppose in our words and deeds, and should be much
-hurt if our defect in it were seriously alleged: the Absolute we all
-rest in, though amid so many self-imposed and other distractions we
-feel and see it not. The philosopher<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span> proposes for his task&mdash;or rather
-the philosopher is one on whom this task forces itself as for him the
-one thing inevitable&mdash;to determine what is that system and what that
-Absolute, or, if the phrase be preferred, the philosopher traces to its
-unity, and retraces into its differences that Experience&mdash;that felt,
-known, and willed synthesis of Reality,&mdash;that realised ideal world&mdash;on
-which and in which we live and move. He does not make the system, nor
-does he set up the Absolute. He only tries to discover the system, and
-to construe the Absolute.</p>
-
-<p>It may be said that the best of philosophers can do no more than
-give us <i>a</i> System and <i>an</i> Absolute. Undoubtedly that is so. Each
-philosophy is from one point of view a strictly individualist
-performance. It is not, in one way, <i>the</i> Absolute truth, which it
-promises or hopes to disclose. The truth is seen through one being's
-eyes; and his 'measure,' as Protagoras might have said, is upon it. Yet
-it is still <i>the</i> Absolute, as seen through those eyes; it is still
-in a marvellous measure that truth, that absolute truth, 'which the
-actual generations garble.' For both the artist and the philosopher,
-if they create, only re-create or imitate; if they are makers, they
-are still more seers: and their power of 'imitation' and of 'vision'
-rests on their capacity to de-individualise themselves of their
-eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, and to bring out only that in them
-which is the common truth of all essential thought and vision. In
-proportion as they purge themselves of this <i>evil</i> subjectivity are
-they true artists and philosophers. They are both&mdash;and so, too, is
-the religious genius&mdash;idealists: but the test of the value of their
-idealism is its power of including and synthetising reality. That is
-their verification: that, and not their concord with this or that
-opinion, this or that theory of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span> individuals or of groups. Not that the
-views either of groups or individuals are unimportant. But often they
-are but frozen lumps in the stream, temporary islands which have lost
-their fluidity, and which imagine themselves continental and permanent.</p>
-
-<p>Truth, then, reasoned truth, harmonious experience, absolute system,
-is the theme of philosophy. Or, in Hegelian language, its theme is
-the Truth, and that Truth, God. Not alum, an aggregate, or even what
-is ordinarily styled a system, of truths: but the one and yet diverse
-pulse of truth, which beats through all: the supreme point of view in
-which all the parts and differences, occasionally standing out as if
-independent, sink into their due relation and are seen in their right
-proportion.</p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_95" id="Footnote_1_95"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_95"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Schelling, iv. 231, 235, 236.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_96" id="Footnote_2_96"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_96"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Ibid. 244.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_97" id="Footnote_3_97"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_97"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'In things thou seest nought but the misplaced images of
-that absolute unity; and even in knowledge, so far as it is a relative
-unity, thou seest nought but an image&mdash;only drawn amiss in another
-direction&mdash;of that absolute cognition, in which being is as little
-determined by thought as thought by being.'</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_98" id="Footnote_4_98"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_98"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Schelling, iv. 252. See further, iv. 327: 'The pure
-subject, that absolute knowledge, the absolute Ego, the form of all
-forms, is the only-begotten Son of the Absolute, equally eternal with
-him, not diverse from his Essence, but one with it.'</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_99" id="Footnote_5_99"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_99"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Schelling, iv. 306. Cp. for actuosity, notes in vol. ii.
-396. Spinoza, Cogit. Met. ii. 11, speaks of the actuosa essentia of
-God.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_100" id="Footnote_6_100"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_100"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Schelling, iv. 305.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_101" id="Footnote_7_101"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_101"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Ibid. iv. 328.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_8_102" id="Footnote_8_102"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_102"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Ibid. iv. 306.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_9_103" id="Footnote_9_103"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_103"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Schelling, iv. 328.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_10_104" id="Footnote_10_104"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_104"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Hegel, Werke, i. 166.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>BOOK II</h5>
-
-<h4><i>IN THE PORCHES OF PHILOSOPHY</i></h4>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a><br /><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XV.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>THE TWO AGES OF REASON.</h4>
-
-
-<p>The eighteenth century&mdash;it has been often said&mdash;was a rationalising,
-unhistorical, age: and, in contrast, the nineteenth has been declared
-to be <i>par excellence</i> the founder and the patron of the historical
-method. In the one, the tendency governing the main movement of
-European civilisation was towards cosmopolitan and universal
-enlightenment. A common ideal, and, because common, necessarily rather
-general and abstract, perhaps even somewhat vulgarly utilitarian,
-pervaded Western Europe, and threw its influence for good and evil
-on literature and art, on religion and polity. It grew out of a
-revulsion, in many ways natural, from the religious extravagances
-of the century-and-a-half preceding, which had led prudent thinkers
-to reduce religion to a 'reasonable' minimum, and to reject all
-things that savoured of or suggested enthusiasm, fanaticism, and
-superstition. In politics the same one type or system of government
-and laws was aimed at, more or less, in all advancing states. National
-peculiarities and patriotism were looked at askance, as unworthy of
-the free 'humanity' which was set forward as the end of all training.
-To simplify, to level, to render intelligible, and self-consistent was
-the task of enlightenment in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span> dealing with all institutions. To remove
-all anomalies and inequalities, to give security for liberty and to
-facilitate the right to pursue happiness<a name="FNanchor_1_105" id="FNanchor_1_105"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_105" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>, was the chief watchword
-of this movement. Its questions were&mdash;Is religion, Is art and science,
-Is political organisation, a source of happiness? Are poetry, and a
-belief in divine things, and abstruse knowledge, upon the whole for
-human advantage and benefit? Only such civilisation can be justified
-as, taken all in all, is a blessing; if not (cried some) we may as well
-cling to the happiness of the barbarian.</p>
-
-<p>That these are important questions, and that the purposes
-above-mentioned are in many ways good, is clear. But before we can
-answer the questions, or decide as to the feasibility of the aims,
-there are some things to be brought and to be kept in view. And these
-things were not as a rule brought and kept in view. It was assumed that
-the standard of adjudication was found in the averagely educated and
-generally cultured individual among the class of more or less 'advanced
-thinkers' who asked the questions and set up the aims. That class,
-already denationalised by function, forming a commonwealth or rather a
-friendly fraternity throughout the capitals of Europe, had cut itself
-off from the narrower and the deeper sympathies of the national life.
-Forming a sort of mean or middle stratum in the social organisation,
-they tended to ignore or despise equally the depths below them and
-the heights above. They took themselves as the types of humanity, and
-what <i>their</i> understandings found acceptable they dubbed rational: all
-else was a survival<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span> from the ages of darkness. They forgot utterly
-that they were only a part, a class, a member in the social body:
-and that they could only be and do what they were and did, because
-what they were not and did not do was otherwise supplied. It takes
-all sorts of people to make a world: but each class&mdash;and the order of
-literature and intelligence is no exception&mdash;tends to set itself up as
-the corner-stone (if not something more) of the social edifice. What is
-more: in such a loose aggregate as the intelligent upper-middle class,
-the individual tends more and more to count as something, detached and
-by himself, to be an equal and free unit of judgment and choice, to be
-emancipated from all the bonds which hold in close affinity members
-of a group whose functions are unlike each other's, and yet decidedly
-complementary. Such a class, again&mdash;though there are of course
-conspicuous exceptions&mdash;is, by the stress of special interests, removed
-from direct contact with nature and reality, and lives what in the main
-may be styled an artificial life.</p>
-
-<p>When such a class asked what were the benefits of art or religion,
-it thought first of itself; and it looked upon art and religion&mdash;and
-the same would be true of philosophy and science, or of political
-sanctions&mdash;as <i>merely</i> objective and outward entities, foreign to the
-individual, yet by some mechanical influences brought into connexion
-with him,&mdash;as one might apply to him a drug or a viand. But clearly
-to a person of practical aims, bent on conveying information and
-enlightenment, bent on making all men as like each other as possible
-in the medium range of cultivation which he thinks desirable, the
-utility of some of these things is questionable and limited. It is
-only a little modicum of religion, of art and of science, which can be
-justified by its obvious pleasure-giving power; and it is easy to point
-the thesis<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span> against enthusiasm in these regions, by reference to the
-disastrous wars fanned by religion, to the license that has followed
-the steps of art, and to the lives wasted in the zeal for increasing
-knowledge. In his ideal of human life such a practical reformer
-will tend to suppress all that bears too clear a trace of natural,
-infra-rational, non-intelligent kindred,&mdash;all that ties us too closely
-to mother earth and universal nature.</p>
-
-<p>But if this was the dominant tone of the literary teachers who had
-chief audience from the public ear, there was no lack of dissentient
-voices who appealed to nature, who loved the past, who set sentiment
-and imagination above intellect, and who never bowed the knee to
-the great idols of enlightened middle-class utilitarianism. Even
-in the leaders of the enlightening host&mdash;amongst the chiefs of the
-<i>Aufklärung</i>&mdash;there is a breadth and a depth of human interest which
-sets them far above their average followers, and which should prevent
-us from joining without discrimination in the depreciatory judgments
-so often passed on the eighteenth century. The pioneers in the great
-emancipatory movement of modern times should not be allowed to suffer
-from the exaggerations and haste of their more vulgar imitators&mdash;still
-less refused the meed of gratitude we owe them. But when their ideas
-were violently translated into reality, when the levelling, unshackling
-process was set at work by vulgar hands, the shortcomings of their
-theories were made to show even greater than they were: and inevitable
-reaction set in. Even the revolutionist himself has come to admit that
-fraternity at that time came badly off in comparison with liberty and
-equality<a name="FNanchor_2_106" id="FNanchor_2_106"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_106" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>. But these drawbacks were accentuated when the cosmopolitan
-reform-movement, by its haste and intolerance, awakened the spirit
-of national jealousy.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span> The deeper instincts of life rose in protest
-against the supposed superiority of intellect: the heart claimed its
-rights against the head: the man of nature and feeling was roused up to
-meet the man of reasoning and criticism. The spirit of war evoked those
-energies of human nature&mdash;some of them not its least valuable&mdash;which
-had slumbered in times of easy-going peace. The days of adversity and
-humiliation taught men that the march of literary culture is not the
-all-in-all of life and history.</p>
-
-<p>It was made apparent, practically at least, that intelligence, with
-its hard and fast formulae, its logical principles, its keen analysis,
-was not deep enough or wide enough to justify its claim to the august
-title of reason. To be reasonable implies a more comprehensive,
-patient, many-sided observation than is necessary to prove the claim
-to mere intelligence. To be intelligent is to seize the right means
-to execute a given or accepted end&mdash;it is to be quick and correct in
-the practice of life, to carry out in detail what has been determined
-on in general. Understanding plays upon the surface of life and deals
-with the momentary case: and its greatest praise is to be fleet in
-the application of principles, apt to detect the point on which to
-direct action, correct in its estimate of means to ends. Clearsighted,
-prudent, and direct, it is the supreme virtue in a given sphere: but
-the sphere must be given, and its end constituted in the measured round
-of practical life, its system complete: or, understanding is bewildered
-before a hopeless puzzle. Understanding is&mdash;the improvident cynic might
-say&mdash;a certain animal-like sagacity&mdash;(such cynical philosophers were
-perhaps Hobbes and Schopenhauer<a name="FNanchor_3_107" id="FNanchor_3_107"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_107" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>)&mdash;a mere power of carrying out a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
-given rule in a new but similar case, and of doing so, perhaps, through
-a long chain of intermediate links and means.</p>
-
-<p>But there are more things in heaven and earth than are heard of in
-the philosophy of the logical intellect. The <i>subtilitas naturae</i><a name="FNanchor_4_108" id="FNanchor_4_108"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_108" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>
-far surpasses the refinements of the practical intellect: and if the
-latter is ever to overcome or be equal to the former, it must, so to
-speak, wait patiently upon it, as a handmaiden upon the hands of her
-mistress. Such a trained and disciplined intellect which has conquered
-nature by obedience is what the philosophers at the beginning of this
-century called <i>reason</i><a name="FNanchor_5_109" id="FNanchor_5_109"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_109" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>. It is in life as much as in our mind. It
-comes not by self-assertion, by the attempt to force our ends and
-views on nature, but by feeling and thinking ourselves in and along
-with nature. Or, briefly, it breaks down the middle wall of partition
-by which man had treated nature as a mere world of <i>objects</i>&mdash;things
-to be used and to minister to his pleasure&mdash;but always alien to him,
-always mere matter to be manipulated <i>ab extra.</i> Yet even to get full
-use and enjoyment out of a thing it is well to be in closer community
-with it, and on terms of friendly acquaintance. The function of this
-fuller reason cannot be performed without something analogous to
-sympathy and imagination. Sympathy, which realises the inner unity
-of the so-called 'thing' with ourselves: imagination, which sets it
-in the full circumstances of those relationships which the practical
-intelligence is inclined to abstract from and to neglect. Yet only
-something <i>analogous</i> to sympathy and imagination: if, as may well be
-the case, we attach to these terms any association of irregular or mere
-emotional operation. The imagination<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span> in question is the 'scientific'
-imagination&mdash;the power of wide large vision which sets the object fully
-in reality, and is not content with a mere name or abstract face of a
-fact&mdash;a name which represents a fact no doubt, but represents it, as
-many such 'agents' or deputies do, in a hard and wooden spirit. The
-sympathy in question is the transcending of the antithesis between
-subjective and objective; not a fantastic or fortuitous choice of one
-or a few out of many on whom to lavish locked-up stores of affection,
-but the full recognition of unity as pervading differences, and
-reducing them to no more than aspects in correlation.</p>
-
-<p>What has been said of sympathy and imagination, as the allies and
-ministers of reason, might be extended and applied to humour,
-to wit, to irony. These also it may be said&mdash;and with the same
-qualifications&mdash;are essential to a philosopher in the highest
-sense. The humour, viz., which strides over the barriers set up by
-institution and convention between the high and the humble, and
-sees man's superficial distinctions overpowered by a half-grim,
-half-jubilant <i>Ananke</i>,&mdash;which notes how human proposal is overcome,
-not without grace, by divine and natural disposal, how the deep inner
-identity in all estates breaks triumphantly through the fences of
-custom and deliberate intention. The wit, which upsets the hardened
-fixity of classes and groups, flits from one to another, shows
-glimpses of affinity between remote provinces of idea, and all this,
-without laboured and artificial search for analogies, though to the
-slower-following practical mind, hampered by its solid limits, these
-leaps from province to province seem paradoxical and whimsical.
-The irony, which notes the tragicomedy of life under its apparent
-regularity of prose,&mdash;which detects the vanity of all efforts to check
-the flux of vitality and make the volatile permanent; which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span> contrasts
-the apparent with the real, the obviously and officiously meant with
-the truly desired and willed, and shows how diplomatically-close design
-is dissipated in a jest, or the soul bent on many years of enjoyment
-is plunged into torment. Thus, in a way, imagination, sympathy, wit,
-humour, irony and paradox are elements that go to the making of a
-philosopher: but in the serenity of reasoned wisdom they lose their
-frolicsome and fantastic mood, and fill their minor place with sober
-cheer. Wedded to the lord of wisdom, the Muse of poesy and wit loses
-her sprightly laugh and her dancing step, becoming a subdued, yet
-gracious matron, who, with her offspring, sheds gleams of brightness
-and warmth and colour in the somewhat austere household. Yet still the
-free maiden of poesy, in the open fields where the shadow of reflective
-thought has not yet fallen, has the greater charm; and a certain
-jealousy not unfrequently reigns between the married sister and the
-virgin yet untamed.</p>
-
-<p>But though poetry and the allied arts of words were very helpful to
-philosophy&mdash;witness the services which, though in widely different
-ways, Goethe and Schiller rendered to the higher thinking of
-Germany&mdash;even more stimulative and fruitful was the research into
-nature and history. Nature <i>and</i> history: but they lie closer together
-than the conjunction suggests. It is true that in recent times we have
-been forcibly taught to separate civil from natural history, if we have
-not even been further taught that the latter is an improper application
-of the term. But when Aristotle said that 'Poetry is more philosophical
-than History' he was probably not restricting his remark to the story
-of nations and states; even as when Bacon set history as the field
-of memory beside the fields of imagination and reasoning, he was not
-solely referring to the records<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span> of the human past. The distinction
-between natural and civil history is no doubt for practical education
-a distinction of supreme importance. But it is so, because in this
-scholastic phase the conception of both, under these comprehensive
-names, was superficial and abstract. Natural history meant only the
-classificatory description of animals, plants, and minerals: civil
-history the tale composed to string together the succession of human
-actions on the public and national field of life.</p>
-
-<p>We have seen in an earlier chapter the advances which Lessing, Kant,
-and above all Herder, made in this direction<a name="FNanchor_6_110" id="FNanchor_6_110"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_110" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>. Emphasising in their
-several ways the great dictum of Spinoza that human passions, and the
-whole scheme of human life, are <i>res naturales, quae communes naturae
-leges sequuntur</i>, they gave to history a higher, more philosophical,
-more scientific scope than what the name used to connote. Neither in
-Spinoza himself, nor in these his followers, did this insistence on
-the unity of nature at all lead them to neglect the difference&mdash;almost
-equivalent, it may be said, in the end to an <i>Imperium in imperio</i>&mdash;by
-which rational man marks himself off to a special kindred with the
-divine<a name="FNanchor_7_111" id="FNanchor_7_111"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_111" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>. We have seen too what Schelling did to show that history, if
-in one aspect it be the product of free human volitions, is, in another
-and as he thought a superior aspect, the realm subject to a divine or
-natural necessity. The whole tendency of this epoch of thought&mdash;the
-tendency which entitles it above all to the name of speculative&mdash;is its
-impulse to over-ride this distinction between Nature and History; to
-over-ride it, however, not in the sense of simply ignoring or denying
-it, but of carrying it up into a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span> unity which would do justice to both,
-without exclusively favouring either, and hardly without clipping
-both of any extravagant claims. The distinction remains,&mdash;no longer
-an abrupt division, but now tempered and mellowed by the presence of
-a paramount unity. Nature now has a real history: no longer a mere
-factitious aggregate of classified facts, it is the phenomenon of
-a 'latent process,' due to a 'latent schematism,' and a 'form' or
-principle of organisation. Classification does not cease: but it ceases
-to be an end in itself, and becomes only subordinate or auxiliary to a
-higher scientific end. The main theme is to construe the complete cycle
-of life-change and the complete organisation of life-state from the
-evidence pieced out and put together from the various orders, classes,
-and species of living creatures. And on the other side the mere tale
-or narrative of history, with its gossip of personalities, and its
-accidents of war and intrigue, tends to become insignificant in the
-presence of the great popular life, in its deep and subtle connexion
-with agencies of nature hitherto unsurmised, in its dependence upon
-necessities and uniformities which envelope or rather permeate and
-constitute the human will. It is not indeed that the force of great
-personalities has come to be treated as a quantity we may neglect. The
-force of the great leader, of the genius, of the hero, is not less
-admirable to the wise philosophical historian to-day than it ever was
-to his story-telling predecessor. But he flatters himself that he
-understands better, and can better take account of, the conditions
-which make the genius and the hero possible. Achilles still counts for
-more than a thousand common soldiers, and Homer himself is not merely
-the composite image by which a long tradition has fused into a dim
-pictorial unity the countless bards who sang for ages on the isles of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
-Greece and the coasts of Ionia. Yet we feel sure that Achilles did
-what he did, because of the race he sprang from, the inspiration he
-felt around him, the companionship in body and spirit of his peers. We
-feel that the hero derives his strength from earth and air, from the
-spiritual and material substance in which he draws his breath. True,
-we cannot explain him, as if he and his heroisms were a mere product
-of mathematical and mechanical forces. But where we once recognise
-that behind the single visible deed and agent there is a spiritual
-nature&mdash;an underlying agency&mdash;which, unperceived, keeps the hearth-fire
-of public life burning in the celestial temple of Vesta, we can at
-least see that though genius is a marvel and a mystery, yet it is
-according to law, and no mere will-o'-the-wisp.</p>
-
-<p>But when we say that the actions and sayings even of the foremost
-individuals are to be comprehended only in the light of universal
-forces and laws, there is an error which is only too ready to
-substitute itself for the truth. It soon appears for example that,
-among the general causes which control the development of civilisation
-and the acts of individuals, the economical condition is of great and
-prominent effect. And, above all, it is easily measurable, and subject
-to palpable standards (such as statistics of exports and imports,
-&amp;c.). It was natural therefore that a school of historico-social
-philosophers should arise who maintained that the economical state of
-a given society was the fundamental principle or form of its life,
-of which all other phases of its civilisation, religious, aesthetic,
-&amp;c., were only variable dependent functions. This view, which comes
-out in the socialist theory of Marx, is clearly the exaggeration or
-abstract statement of a partial truth into a pseudo-complete theory.
-The truth is one which found expression as early as Plato. It is this:
-that in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span> economical system of a society we find the first and
-somewhat external or mechanical suggestion of the organism to which
-the state is yet to grow. In the economic law of reciprocity there is
-a 'certain faint image' of the principle of social organisation or
-political life. But when we go beyond, and interpret this first phase
-to mean the original foundation, we are stating a figment which has a
-plausibility only when by the economic state we mean a great deal more
-than abstractly economic facts include. And this again arises because
-it is really impossible to carry out thoroughly the abstraction of one
-aspect of social life from the others. There are no purely economic
-facts which are independent of other social influences,&mdash;of ideals, e.
-g. moral or aesthetic,&mdash;ideals which nobody would call economic, though
-they never quite part company from economical conditions.</p>
-
-<p>So again there is occasionally a tendency to magnify the influence of
-what in the narrowest sense may be termed political systems. Forms
-of government, and titles of sovereignty are regarded as forces to
-which individuals&mdash;even the highest&mdash;must bow. But here again the
-exaggeration of a principle need not tempt us to rush with Tom Paine
-into the opposite extravagance that government and state-power are
-superfluities, or quasi-ornamental additions to a social fabric, which
-can do without them and, like other beasts of low organisation, can,
-when shorn of them, reproduce them with ease. And thus though we may
-dissent from the view that laws and constitutions are omnipotent, we
-may admit that in them the central unity and controlling principle of
-social life finds its dominant expression in great outlines. We shall
-not agree with him who said 'Let who will make the laws of a nation
-if I may make its ballads': because we know that the nation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span> will in
-the end have the chief voice in determining what are to be its ballads
-no less than its laws. We shall not quite accept the dictum that the
-intellectual class which formulates ideas and sets up programmes of
-ideals gives the real lead to the process of civilisation; for we shall
-remember that real ideas are not formed by individuals, but are the
-slow work of concrete experience in the so-called inorganic masses,
-finding at length utterance through the lips of those appointed to that
-end by the natural and divine order. Yet we shall, on the other hand,
-see that the high things of the world are dependent on the lowly: that
-a song-maker is sometimes not less potent than a legislature: that
-pecuniary conditions are effective in the sanctuaries of religion and
-the high places of art: and that the noblest ideas of great thinkers
-draw their strength and life through roots that run unseen through very
-humble ground.</p>
-
-<p><i>La Raison</i>, says Leibniz, <i>est l'enchainement des vérités.</i><a name="FNanchor_8_112" id="FNanchor_8_112"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_112" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> Truth
-linked into truth, and so made truer: truth, with which all things
-harmonise and nothing cries dissent: truth, which is neither the
-prerogative of the mere <i>demos</i>, nor of the intellectual aristocracy,
-but of that rarer unity which, when they can exercise several and
-mutually-tendered self-abnegation, is the real spirit of both: truth,
-thus conceived, is that king of life, that sun of Reason which lighteth
-every man. Truth&mdash;to use again the language of Leibniz,&mdash;which is not
-merely the aggregate of monads,&mdash;but the monad of monads, their mutual
-penetration and corrective completion, in that Idea-reality where they
-retain their individuality, but retain it in the fullness and fruition
-of the absolute which each essentially or implicitly is. This kingdom
-of suffering and yet triumphant truth is the true age of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span> Reason&mdash;not
-outwardly-critical, individualistically-reforming, mere intellectual
-and abstract intelligence,&mdash;but intelligence, charged with emotion,
-full of reverence, reverent above all to the majesty of that divinity
-which, much disguised, and weather-beaten, like Glaucus of the sea,
-resides in common and natural humanity. This is the Reason of German
-idealism at the commencement of the century. To the clear-cut dogmas of
-the abstract intellect it savours of mysticism. If it is friendly to
-distinctions and constantly makes them, it is the pronounced enemy of
-hard and fast separations. Begin where you like, the reason of things,
-if you allow it to work, carries you round till you also see identity
-where you only saw difference, or effects where you only looked for
-causes. You begin, as the inductive logician, with the belief that
-the process is from the known to the unknown. You start with your
-basis of fact, as you called it. The nemesis of things forces you
-to admit that your facts were partly fictions which waited for the
-unknown to give them a truer and fuller reality. You talk at first of
-induction, as if it were a single and simple process, which out of
-facts builds up generalities and uniformities. You learn as you go on
-that the only induction that operates, except in cases which have been
-artificially simplified by supposing half the task done before you
-apply your experimental methods, is an induction of which the major
-part is deductive, and where your conclusion will be recurrently made
-your premiss. Your induction only works on the basis of a hypothesis,
-and must itself be linked in the 'concatenation of truths,'&mdash;a
-concatenation which is also a criticism and a correction.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_105" id="Footnote_1_105"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_105"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'We hold,' says the American Declaration of Independence
-(1776), 'these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created
-equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
-rights: that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
-happiness,' &amp;c.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_106" id="Footnote_2_106"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_106"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Louis Blanc, <i>History of the Revolution</i>, vol. i.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_107" id="Footnote_3_107"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_107"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Hobbes, <i>Leviathan</i>, Part I. chaps. 2 and 3; and
-elsewhere. Schopenhauer, <i>Welt als Wille</i>, Book I. § 6.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_108" id="Footnote_4_108"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_108"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Bacon, <i>Novum Organum</i>, i. 10.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_109" id="Footnote_5_109"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_109"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 400.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_110" id="Footnote_6_110"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_110"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> See Chapter XII.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_111" id="Footnote_7_111"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_111"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Cf. <i>Ethica,</i> iv. 37, Schol. I. contrasting <i>rerum
-externarum communis constitutio</i> with <i>ipsa hominis natura, in se sola
-considerata.</i></p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_8_112" id="Footnote_8_112"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_112"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> See the <i>Discours préliminaire</i> to the <i>Theodicee</i>.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XVI.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>THE NEW IDEALISM.</h4>
-
-
-<p>This new idealism which conjures by the name of Reason is a different
-thing from the pseudo-idealism of Jacobi, as it is from the
-'rationalism,' so-called, of the mere intellectualist. Its ideal is not
-a desperate refuge from the hard and bitter reality, only to be reached
-by the plunge of faith,&mdash;which seems rather the leap of despair: not
-a <i>mere</i> other-world,&mdash;always <i>other</i>, longed for, presaged, beheld
-in dreamy vision, but unperceived by the clear light of intelligence:
-clutched at, but elusive of every effort. It is not won by turning
-the back on reality and flying on the wings of morning faith to the
-better land and the presence of the divine: but by persistence in
-unfolding, expanding, adjusting, re-combining, and fortifying those
-partial glimpses of the unseen which occur in every vision of the seen.
-It is true the ideal is, in a way, always an other world: but not a
-<i>mere</i> other world; it is another, and yet not another, but the same,
-seen, if you like to say, transfigured, idealised. But idealisation,
-if so applied, means not an addition here and a subtraction there
-made in reality, from some source outside&mdash;from some indeterminable
-Whence (Whence indeed should such additions come?). It does not mean
-a correction of faults and failures in the real, at the will of an
-artist who is dissatisfied with his subject-model and would mend it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
-out of other faces and forms stored up in memory or sketch-book.
-This idealism does not in that sense idealise (so as to falsify). It
-means complete reality; absolute, systematic, unconditioned reality:
-nowhere fragmentary, nowhere referring outside, but completing itself
-in all its members. It means&mdash;to quote the Hegelian term&mdash;seeing all
-things in the Idea&mdash;their notion (or ideality), i. e. their unifying
-'grip,' reflecting itself in their objectivity, and their reality
-completing itself in art, religion, and philosophy to that ideal which
-to the non-artistic, non-religious, non-philosophic mood is only dimly
-suggested and partially supposed. Still less is it an idealism which,
-as popularly understood, turns reality and historic fact into <i>mere</i>
-ideas.</p>
-
-<p>But, as perhaps may have been apparent, to call this way of thought
-idealism need not keep us from acknowledging that the same philosophy
-is also realism. If it insists, so to say, on the idealism of&mdash;what
-we sometimes call material&mdash;nature, it no less insists on the realism
-of&mdash;what is supposed immaterial&mdash;mind. The mental or spiritual world
-loses its unsubstantial intangibleness, its mere supposedness, its
-'ideal' or <i>merely</i>-ideal character. To the older, and we may say
-vulgar, view the mind or soul was a mere 'thought,' something of
-which all that could be seen were certain acts or phenomena. It was
-a <i>mere idea</i>, which one could pretty well get on without&mdash;so long
-as he kept, as the phrase was, to the phenomena&mdash;phenomena without
-reality. How vague and aery again was the subject-matter of morals! A
-few virtues and vices, confessedly general descriptive titles, a talk
-about will and conscience,&mdash;all of them merely several predicates of an
-unknown, spoken of, postulated, but unproducible. Compared with this
-mere supposedness the spiritual world in Schelling and Hegel acquires
-the reality of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span> quasi-organism (really supra-organic), growing
-and constituting itself, and making room in it for a host of human
-relationships. The abstract faculties of mind get reality (not indeed
-sensible): the intangible notions of morals become almost palpable: the
-kingdom of mind becomes a real pendant to the kingdom of nature. And,
-on the other hand, the kingdom of nature gets its ideality recognised:
-its unity and continuity made effective in an Idea which embraces,
-co-ordinated and systematised, its disparate and unconnected portions.</p>
-
-<p>This new Idealism, if it led men back from the historical world to
-nature, was yet hardly in all respects a pupil of Rousseau. Not 'Back
-from civilisation and artificiality to nature and the freedom of the
-woodland,' was its cry: but rather 'Remember that man always rests
-on and grows out of nature, always has his ideals made directly or
-indirectly visible in physical (sensible) structures; and that, when
-culture turns away from sense and nature to some supposed higher, it is
-really entering on a path which leads to abysses,' Its voice, in fact,
-was much like the longing expressed in Schiller's <i>Gods of Greece;</i>
-it wished man more godlike and the divine more human. But instead of
-backward,&mdash;its motto was forward: or back to nature, only to resume the
-true starting-point, and retreat from a path of civilisation whose end
-is perdition. Man also was nature<a name="FNanchor_1_113" id="FNanchor_1_113"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_113" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>&mdash;if he is never <i>mere</i> nature, i.
-e. the nature unexalted to its truth&mdash;but he brought to expression,
-and might bring to ever clearer and fuller expression, a something
-which was in infra-human nature, but which nature elsewhere had
-failed adequately to present.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span> Thus the relation of Man to Nature was
-apparently twofold. On one hand, the physical world was essentially a
-world of reason and intelligence&mdash;though of intelligence petrified<a name="FNanchor_2_114" id="FNanchor_2_114"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_114" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>.
-So far Hegel agreed with Schelling. But, on the other hand (and here
-Hegel took up the great paradox of Fichte), man's place in the universe
-is to fulfil the promise and implication of Nature to the full reality
-of Spirit, to fulfil it by law and morality; but (here he completes
-Fichte by the help of Schelling) also in higher measure, by art,
-religion, and science. The world of intelligence and reason which man
-constructs as an ethical, artistic, and religious being, is the full
-truth of the natural world,&mdash;the higher meaning, and fuller, more
-consistent, and complete reality of the sensible: and it is so, because
-the lord of Nature is one with the lord of the human soul. The new way
-of philosophy therefore, if it could be ever charged with saying that
-the so-called real things of ordinary life were only ideas, or mental
-images, meant that, as taken by the unthinking or imperfectly thinking
-perception, they were something of which all that could be said was to
-describe their relations to something else, of which in turn the same
-remark might be made; so that&mdash;as far as they went&mdash;reality was never
-with us, but only an assurance (soon to be proved vain) that it was
-next door<a name="FNanchor_3_115" id="FNanchor_3_115"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_115" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>. On the contrary&mdash;in <i>its</i> use of the term Idea&mdash;what this
-idealism asserted rather was that the objects of Nature in their <i>prima
-facie</i> apprehension were not yet an Idea: if, i.e., an Idea is a mental
-or spiritual reality which explains and completes itself, instead of
-sending us on endless fool's errands elsewhere&mdash;,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span> is a concept which
-is exactly adequate to reality, and has gathered in it the power of
-reality.</p>
-
-<p>The new idealism is not subversive of realism, but includes it and
-makes it the reality it professed to be. It may therefore, as Schelling
-proposed<a name="FNanchor_4_116" id="FNanchor_4_116"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_116" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>, be called an ideal-realism, or a real-idealism. If any
-body likes, he may even, if he is no Greek scholar, call it Monism;
-but in that case he had better begin by admitting to himself that any
-Monism, which can stand its ground and serve for an explanation of the
-universe, will not exclude Dualism. All is indeed one life, one being,
-one thought; but a life, a being, a thought, which only exists as it
-opposes itself within itself, sets itself apart from itself, projects
-its meaning and relations outwards and upwards, and yet retains and
-carries out the power of reuniting itself. The Absolute may be called
-One: but it is also the All; it is a One which makes and overcomes
-difference: it is, and it essentially is, in the antithesis of Nature
-and Spirit, Object and Subject, Matter and Mind; but under and over the
-antithesis it is fundamental and completed unity. Monism, literally
-understood, is absurd&mdash;for it ignores, what cannot be ignored, the
-many: and Dualism, which is offered sometimes as a competitive scheme,
-is not much better; unless we understand the Dualism to be no fixed
-bisection, but an ever-appearing and ever-superseded antithesis which
-is the witness to the power and the freedom of the One,&mdash;which is not
-alone, but One and All, One in All, and All in One.</p>
-
-<p>The central or cardinal point of Idealism is its refusal to be kept
-standing at a fixed disruption between Subject and Object, between
-Spirit and Nature. Its <i>Idea</i> is the identity or unity (not without the
-difference) of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span> both. In its purely logical or epistemological aspect
-one can easily see that, as Schopenhauer was so fond of repeating,
-There is no Object without a Subject and no Subject without an
-Object<a name="FNanchor_5_117" id="FNanchor_5_117"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_117" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>. The difficulty arises in remembering these excellent truisms
-when one of the correlatives is out of sight, and the other seems
-to be independent and to come before us with a title to recognition
-apparently all its own. When the Subject figures as the individual
-consciousness, encased, it may perhaps be added, in an individual body,
-and the Object as a thing apparently out there in a world beyond all
-by itself, then the lapse from this rudimentary idealism becomes easy.
-In the practice of life and business, each of us, self-conscious and
-autonomous <i>subject</i> as he may be, comes to rank in the estimate of
-others, and ere long to some extent in his own, as also a part of the
-aggregate of objects. All reality and substance seem as it were to
-slide over into the object-side. The conscious subject counts as a mere
-onlooker or the passive spectator of a performance that goes on in an
-outside field of event,&mdash;yet that outside is his own object-mind; his
-mind counts as a mere idea, or rather as a succession of ideas, i. e.
-of mental pictures with a certain meaning in them. A little step more
-and the very subject-mind itself is turned into an object. There stands
-indeed&mdash;according to the ordinary introspective psychology&mdash;as it
-were in one corner, or at one loop-hole of vision, a mind looking on,
-observing and criticising another thing which is also called a mind;
-but the mind observing can only reflect or register, and the mind which
-is observed is very much thing-like, apparently acted upon by other
-things, and acting upon them in turn. This object-mind, a real among
-other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span> reals, in relations of cause and effect with them, does not,
-if we can trust the <i>words</i> of those who tell about it, see itself,
-but lies open to the inspection of this other mind, represented by the
-psychological observer, who is good enough to report to us something
-of its blind and dark estate. Its re-actions, he informs us, exhibit a
-remarkable peculiarity. They are equivalent to states of consciousness:
-and even to acts of will and knowledge. As when a violin is touched in
-certain ways by the bow, you get a musical note, so when certain agents
-come in contact with this peculiar real, they elicit a re-action,
-termed sense or idea.</p>
-
-<p>To distinguish in this manner between mental passivity and activity is
-natural and right. The basis of all consciousness and mental activity
-is an original division, a 'judgment' or dijudication of self from
-self. But, once the dijudication made for such ends, it is a mistake
-to forget its initiation and lose sight entirely of the fact that
-the observing mind is also the active, and that the object-self is
-not merely in relation to the subject-self, but in a higher unity is
-identifiable therewith. Still the thing is done, habitually done. We
-all profess this faith of ordinary realism in our first reflections
-upon ourselves. And the effect of the oblivion is that we seek
-elsewhere for the initial activity, which we have abstracted from and
-lost sight of. The receptive passive mind,&mdash;called subject still, but
-now become a subject in the sense of the anatomist,&mdash;has to be set in
-motion, to be impinged upon or impressed. The psychical event which you
-<i>call</i> knowledge, and which no doubt <i>means</i> knowledge,&mdash;the mental
-'state' which you observe&mdash;or, it may even, if your authority is a
-particularly obstinate and <i>intransigcant</i> realist, be the molecular
-change in brain cells,&mdash;requires an antecedent event to account for
-it. The origin of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span> movement which issued in the given psychical
-or molecular change is sought in a self-subsistent thing which <i>out
-there</i> gives rise to a series of movements which <i>in here</i> result
-in a sensation. Or, a thing somehow produces an attenuated image of
-itself in the brain, or in the mind; for, in this mythological tale
-of psychical occurrence, accuracy is unattainable, and one must not
-seek to be too precise. In any case the relationship between thing
-and idea is conceived after the analogy of the nexus of cause and
-effect, or original and copy; and the verbal imagination of the
-analogical reasoner is satisfied. What Hegel, after Schelling, teaches,
-on the other side, is that the process of sense-impression and the
-manipulations to which it is subjected by intellect presuppose, for
-their existence and their objective truth, a Reason which is the unity
-of subject and object, an original identity uniting knowledge to being.</p>
-
-<p>But the same defect of unphilosophic consciousness has another
-phase which philosophy has to remember. Popular language speaks of
-<i>things</i>,&mdash;of things here and things there, which act upon each other
-and upon the so-called mind: i. e. on this imagined and supposed
-passive mind. For things, a more 'scientific' conception has been
-substituted&mdash;that of <i>forces</i>; which, whether attached to atoms or not,
-are asserted to be the real sources of the change and event which fill
-the world of our experience. And as, according to some psychologists,
-the mind is only a vacant ground or space with more or less narrow
-limits of room, on which the entities called ideas are for that reason
-forced into more or less close relationships, without any nearer or
-more essential tie; so, too, the mind is apt to be treated by others
-only as a battle-field or wrestling-ground of opposing forces. Here
-the atom-forces,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span> as in the other case the atom-ideas, are, it is
-assumed, merely and purely independent: and yet such is the force of
-a limited environment&mdash;shall we say, in more popular language, the
-force of space and time?&mdash;that they must meet with one another, must,
-as it were, form associations, connexions, relationships. Great,
-verily, is the force of juxtaposition. Space and time, because they are
-essentially limiting, correlating, defining, weld links which the great
-prophet of this empirical school has not scrupled to call insoluble,
-ineradicable, inseparable. Space and time, says his great successor,
-are infinite. But they are infinite only in the sense that they can
-never be exhausted: they are everywhere, and for ever: but as real they
-are only here and now. Time can precede time, and space fade away into
-remoter space: but every space and every time is finite, defining,
-limiting, relative, and synthetic. And, if we look closer, space and
-time may come to seem the visible, ghostly, abstract outline&mdash;on one
-hand stiffening and bodying-out the ideal synthesis of thought and
-intelligence, on the other, faintly reproducing or fore-casting the
-real synthesis of organisation and living nature.</p>
-
-<p>In saying this we give the reasonable interpretation of
-'association':&mdash;so far at least as association is supposed to be
-brought about by juxtaposition in time and space. Time and space, as
-Kant might say, give the schema&mdash;the sensible and visible reflex of the
-eternal and universal thought-relation: they are <i>a priori</i> because
-they are in the physical world the <i>primitive</i>, the first phase and the
-lowest manifestation of that unity which as we know it in nature and
-mind always blends with sense, or displays itself in sensible forms.
-They are the first stamp of reality, of real Nature: with them we are
-in Nature, but it is an abstract shadowy nature. They mark<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span> the ascent
-(which only from the mere logician's standpoint shall we call the
-descent) of the abstract (pure) idea into the element of multiplicity,
-of opposition, of life and consciousness. In the psychical and
-intellectual world, again, as it rises to more perfect ideality (as it
-elicits more <i>meaning</i> from crude <i>fact</i>) they lose their prominence;
-they sink into the powers of memory and imagination, which build up
-past and future into the unity of the ever present, until in their
-consummation they leave as their residual product the abstract element
-of pure thought: a thought which claims the attributes of universality
-and eternity, which claims, i. e., to merge or submerge in it all space
-and all time<a name="FNanchor_6_118" id="FNanchor_6_118"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_118" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>.</p>
-
-<p>It is evident therefore that if an associationist theory, like that of
-Hume, proposes to explain the actual field of mental life by elements
-given in it, and by no other, it can only do so on certain assumptions,
-which may be summed up in the proposition that the mind&mdash;the real
-mental space and time even (and not its supposed 'image')&mdash;is at once
-subjective and objective, at once real and ideal, at once the field
-of operation, the force which directs operations, and the mind which
-is aware of itself and its acts. To say, as Hume appears to do, that
-an unintermittent long-established custom breeds <i>in us</i> certain
-irresistible and essential habits of thought, can only refer to an
-unexplained and unnoticed duplication of the self. There is here, one
-self, which is only a bundle of fragments, of ideas intrinsically
-separate and only incidentally connected by outside pressure, which
-enter into ties, peradventure necessary or indissoluble, though not
-due to inner affinity. And there is another self which is a self-same
-unity, dividing and growing, or assimilating, acted upon but only
-because it solicits action, and in a way controlling the process<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span> going
-on within it. The difficulty for the investigator is to realise that
-these two selves are one. No amount of ingenuity will ever succeed in
-honestly showing unity to be the mere resultant&mdash;even should it be
-a fictitious or phenomenal unity&mdash;of the collisions and fortuitous
-attachments or detachments of different and independent reals. The
-reals which behave in such a way as to engender unities, to cause
-syntheses, are reals in a mind; and the mind must not merely, as it
-were, flow around them, but have them fluid members of itself. If they
-are reals, they are ideal-reals. You must begin with an ideal-unity
-which is also a real-unity, in which variety can play and by which it
-is controlled.</p>
-
-<p>'Forces,' no less than 'things,' are terms of thought, names of reality
-indeed, but inadequate because due to an abstraction and leaving
-their correlatives out of sight&mdash;names of momentary elements seized
-in the flux, and made with more or less success to indicate 'moments'
-and 'factors' or 'aspects' in the total sum and power of reality.
-Explanation by permanent and separate forces labours under the same
-disadvantages as that by things. Science, grown more self-critical,
-begins to see that in forces, &amp;c., it has names and formulae which
-are not the full reality, but only useful (<i>if</i> useful) abstractions.
-Neither things nor forces, though called real, are so in the full
-sense. Hume said,&mdash;and said not untruly, though with some relish of
-paradox,&mdash;that we never had any real impression or idea of power
-and force. The statement should be taken along with another that
-what we mistake for power in things is only our own want of power to
-overcome a suggested association, or to break a customary train of
-ideas. Lotze, again, has remarked that the supposed consciousness of
-power exerted in voluntary movement is confused with a feeling<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span> of
-work done, or inertia overcome. Whatever may be the truth about the
-psychological experience, there can be no doubt for the epistemologist
-that the so-called perception of force is an interpretation of one
-aspect of experience which, with a certain amount of arbitrary arrest
-and simplification, renders it intelligible and real by means of an
-antithesis and correlation. Force in fact only exists, or arises, in
-relation or opposition to a counter-force: action and re-action are
-always equal and opposite, says the mathematical formula. Two forces
-are as little independent as an up and a down, or as a west and a
-north; force solicits force, and force only <i>is</i> in so far as it is
-solicited. The soliciting can only solicit because it is solicited.
-In other words, it is not enough to say that the forces which thus
-confront each other are correlatives. The relationship must be carried
-up a stage higher: the forces themselves get their pseudo-real
-character, only so long as they are kept apart forcibly or by inertia.
-Carry out their implications: and they re-unite (not however to the
-loss of all distinction) in a higher idea, an intelligible unity which,
-by its division and return to unity, makes possible and real their
-contention. It is this carrying-out of implications to their explicit
-truth which is at the root of Schopenhauer's playing fast and loose
-with the distinction between force and will. But with him the two terms
-are taken up vague and indefinite, in the haze of popular conception or
-want of conception, and are without effort or justification identified:
-whereas in Hegel, there is, on the lowest estimate, an <i>attempt</i> made
-to trace the somewhat intricate steps which mediate the metamorphosis.</p>
-
-<p>The new idealism thus maintains the organic and even supra-organic
-nature of thought and being. The world of experience, when taken in its
-reality and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span> fullness, is an organism which lives and knows and wills,
-and which is life, action, knowledge; its own means and its own end.
-The subject acting, living, knowing is action, knowledge, life. In the
-ordinary organism there is a subject of functions, a being in relation
-to an inorganic world. In the world-organism (if the inadequate name
-is still to be retained) there is no outside world, no inorganic
-or extra-organic thing. In the world-organism the organ and its
-environment is combined in one, re-united: the plant or animal is not
-without its place, and its place is not without plant or animal. They
-are not merely in correlation, but essentially and actually one. <i>Quid
-prosunt leges sine moribus?</i> asks the moralist: but in the Absolute or
-the supra-organic Idea, law and morality are not apart: the necessity
-is also freedom: the law is not severed from its phenomenon. Such an
-organism which is life, thinking, will, is what Hegel calls the Idea:
-an organism which is completely organic, with no mere matter: and that
-Idea is the foundation of his Idealism. Conceived under its conditions,
-the forces which are sometimes represented as struggling with each
-other on the field of man's life, are no longer independent; still less
-completely separable forces. They are the inner division by which the
-spirit re-establishes and makes secure its unity: their antagonisms
-are the breath of life. And they have their relations in their common
-service, building up one life. They form a certain hierarchy of
-organisation; in which however the higher or more developed does not
-merely supervene upon the cruder, but in a way supersedes it, and yet
-contrives to retain its worth and its real truth.</p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_113" id="Footnote_1_113"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_113"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Cf. Spinoza's remark on Body, <i>Eth.</i> III. pr. 2 Schol.:
-'Etenim quod corpus possit, nemo hucusque determinavit; hoc est neminem
-hucusque experientia docuit quid corpus ex solis legibus naturae
-quatenus corporea tantum consideratur possit agere,' &amp;c.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_114" id="Footnote_2_114"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_114"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> See vol. ii, notes and illustrations, p. 392.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_115" id="Footnote_3_115"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_115"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Schopenhauers well-known description of this recurrent
-throwing back of the responsibility of reality on something else is
-here suggested ('World as Will and Idea,' § 17).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_116" id="Footnote_4_116"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_116"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> See p. 157 (chap. xiii).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_117" id="Footnote_5_117"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_117"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>Satz vom Grunde,</i> § 16: <i>Welt als Wille und Vorstellung:
-Ergänzungen.</i> Cap. i.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_118" id="Footnote_6_118"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_118"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> See later, chapter xxvi.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XVII.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>METHODS, ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL.</h4>
-
-
-<p>When modern philosophy took its first steps, it was disdainful and
-depreciatory to the past, both Medieval and Old-Greek. Bacon and
-Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza,&mdash;be their other differences what they
-may&mdash;all echo the same disparagement. Like Wordsworth's <i>Rob Roy</i>, they
-cry&mdash;</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-<span style="margin-left: 4em;">'What need of books?</span><br />
-Burn all the statutes and their shelves.<br />
-<br />
-We'll show that we can help to frame<br />
-<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">A world of other stuff.'</span><br />
-</p>
-
-<p>On this iconoclastic age supervenes the attempt of Leibniz to combine
-in one all that was good in the new corpuscular philosophy with
-all that was precious in the old Platonic idealism as expanded by
-Aristotle. So, at the later philosophic crisis towards the close of
-the eighteenth century, the somewhat destructive and revolutionary
-tendencies of Kant and Fichte lead up by a natural revulsion and
-complement to the reconstructive systems of Schelling and Hegel. In
-them the conservative instinct comes to supplement the defects of
-the radical go-ahead. Instead of tossing the past away to the winds,
-and crying out <i>Écrasez l'infâme</i>,&mdash;instead of throwing medievalism
-behind, breaking all the restrictions on individual liberty which
-feudal Europe had created to secure and safeguard the communities that
-housed its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span> early freedom, the new spirit of the time saw that the
-problems of modern life were not solved by merely throwing overboard
-as encumbrances and refuse all checks and forms. On the contrary, the
-reflective mind saw that forms and checks so-called there must be, and
-that the art of statesmanship, though it could not entirely consist in
-copying the old, had still to work in some way after the analogy of the
-old methods: i. e. to do under new circumstances what would solve the
-same requisites, as the old constitution had done for its time. The
-change is well illustrated by the attitude towards state organisation
-shown by William von Humboldt at different epochs of his life.</p>
-
-<p>People talk glibly of the Historical Method, and what it has done for
-us. To hear what is sometimes said it might be supposed that this was
-the method that had been always habitual in history, but which in
-these latter days had been applied to other topics, and had proved its
-value on the new ground by achieving results that had hitherto been
-mere desiderata. This however is pretty nearly to reverse the true
-state of the case. It was long till history came to have any method
-worthy of the name. In most of those who figure as great historians
-the object had been to tell a good tale, to keep the thread of events
-distinct, to subordinate incidents to the main issue, to portray
-personal and public character and its influence on events. History was
-practised&mdash;we may even say&mdash;more as an art than as a science. If it
-dealt with causes, it dealt with individual, concrete, living causes,
-not with cold, dead abstractions of forces, laws, or tendencies. If it
-did not altogether ignore the suggestions of a quest for principles to
-be found in Thucydides and Polybius, it was much more enamoured of the
-art of Livy and Tacitus, or even of the naïveté of Herodotus. Of such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span>
-history who has not felt the power; who has not admired the genius that
-reconstructs the men and circumstances of the past, and makes them
-live over again their deeds, and again in the end yield the palm to
-inevitable fate! But it was not from such history that the historical
-method arose.</p>
-
-<p>The historical method was the product of the new conception of nature
-and mind in their mutual relations which has been already noted. To
-estimate the labours of thinkers towards this view of history would
-be an interesting but complex inquiry. Leibniz in particular by
-his principles of development, of continuity, of general analogy,
-should have made two things for ever clear. And these two results
-that might have been supposed secure were, first, that the present
-existence (which at first seems to be alone real) is only a narrow
-transition line between a past and a future,&mdash;a line of points
-intersecting a complex movement or development; and secondly, that
-all development is of something which is essentially infinite, which
-requires nothing external, no fillip from circumstances or from an
-external providence, to set it going, but is in itself a synthesis of
-active and passive force in a something at least analogous to an Ego.
-The first principle is embalmed in Leibniz's maxim: 'The present is
-laden with the past, and full of the future': and the second, in the
-maxim 'the Monads have no doors or windows.' In virtue of the first,
-the existent (of this instant) is only a stage or grade, rooted in
-what has been, and insignificant unless in reference to what is to
-come. In virtue of the second, all development is from within, and
-presupposes therefore that the developing individual includes within
-it a great deal which a cursory view would at first sight assume to
-be without it, and only accidentally in contact with it. It might
-indeed be well<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span> to add a third principle&mdash;what Leibniz has sometimes
-called the Law of Continuity&mdash;the law that, as he says, distinct and
-noticeable perceptions are the resultants of an infinite number of
-insensible or little perceptions. But continuity proper is not this:
-continuity proper or identity is a pure idea. The visible or sensible
-discontinuity reposes on, and is to be explained by, an invisible or
-ideal continuity. Each body, for instance, in nature, appearing to have
-a separate existence of its own, is only a stage isolated or insulated
-in a continuing process: and that process, binding, as it does, past
-to future, is the process of a Mind. <i>Omne Corpus</i>, wrote Leibniz in
-1671, <i>est mens momentanea seu carens recordatione.</i> Every physical
-and material object is an intelligence, but an intelligence which
-neither looks before nor after, but is limited <i>for itself</i> to the mere
-instant: an intelligence which has no history. Yet to the intelligent
-observer it has a past,&mdash;it has a memory, it bears in it the traces
-of its antecedent. Yet to read that book of memory, to decipher the
-'insensible perceptions' which are buried beneath the momentary
-present, beneath its unspiritual reality, and to knit present with past
-and future, is the work of an intelligence, in and to whom the material
-discloses its store of meaning, or in whom it is re-spiritualised. In
-other words, the presupposition of this historical method is the ideal
-continuity of being, transcending and absorbing the differences of time.</p>
-
-<p>But the teaching of Leibniz&mdash;even more perhaps than that of
-Spinoza&mdash;fell on an evil age: if it was not actually choked with
-thorns, it found a soil with little depth, and its brief verdure was
-soon followed by a fearful withering. Anxious as Leibniz was to commend
-his theories to all men,&mdash;and not least perhaps to win the suffrages
-of some illustrious and intelligent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span> women&mdash;he was led to present them
-under forms and phrases which were to each correspondent specially
-familiar. And the natural consequence was not absent. The forms of
-accommodation were what told: they stuck, and the truth they were
-meant to convey slipped away: the Leibnitian theory was re-interpreted
-into the doctrines it had been meant to supersede. As with Spinoza,
-so with Leibniz, a keen apprehension of his meaning came first to the
-thinkers on the borderland of literature and philosophy, to Lessing and
-Herder, and found an appreciative welcome in the more academic systems
-first from Schelling and Hegel. Above all, this theory of 'petites
-perceptions' so closely bound up (as was to be expected) with his
-mathematical discoveries in the Calculus, is what marks him as having a
-finer ear for the secret harmonies and principles of existence than the
-coarser organs of popular philosophy could catch up or appreciate.</p>
-
-<p>'In order,' says Leibniz, 'to get a clearer idea of the little
-perceptions which we cannot distinguish in the crowd, I am accustomed
-to employ the example of the roar or noise of the sea which strikes
-us upon the shore. To hear this sound, as we do hear it, we must hear
-the parts which compose this total, i. e. the sounds of each wave,
-though each of these little sounds only makes itself perceptible in the
-confused assemblage of all the others together, (that is to say, in
-that same roar,) and would not be noticed if this wave which causes it
-were alone. For we must be a little affected by the movement of that
-wave, and we must have some perception of each of these sounds, however
-small they may be; otherwise we should never have the perception of
-a hundred thousand waves, since a hundred thousand zeros would never
-make anything.... These little perceptions are of greater efficiency by
-their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span> consequences than we suppose. It is they which form that <i>Je ne
-sais quoi</i>, those tastes, those images of sensible qualities, clear in
-the assemblage, but confused in the parts; those impressions made upon
-us by surrounding bodies which envelop the infinite, that <i>nexus</i> which
-each being has with all the rest of the universe. It may even be said
-that in virtue of these little perceptions the present is big with the
-future and laden with the past, that everything conspires together: and
-that in the least of substances, eyes as piercing as those of God could
-read the whole sequel of the things of the universe.</p>
-
-<p>'These insensible perceptions, further, mark and constitute the
-same individual, who is characterised by the traces or expressions
-which they preserve of the preceding states of that individual, thus
-forming the connexion with his present state. These may be known by
-a superior spirit, though that individual himself should not feel
-them, i. e. though express memory should no longer be there. But these
-perceptions also supply the means of rediscovering that memory, at
-need, by periodic developments, which may one day happen.... It is
-also by these insensible perceptions that I explain that admirable
-pre-established harmony of mind and body, and even of all monads or
-simple substances,&mdash;which takes the place of the impossible influence
-of one upon another.... After this, I should add but little if I
-said that it is these small perceptions which <i>determine</i> us in many
-conjunctures without our thinking of it, and which deceive the vulgar
-by the appearance of an <i>indifference of equilibrium</i>, as if we were
-entirely indifferent whether we turned, e. g., to right or to left.</p>
-
-<p>'I have remarked also that in virtue of insensible variations two
-individual things could never be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span> perfectly alike, and that they ought
-always to differ more than <i>numero.</i> And with this we have done once
-for all with the empty tablets of the mind, a soul without thought,
-a substance without action, the void of space, the atoms, and even
-parcels not actually divided in matter; we have done with pure repose,
-entire uniformity in a portion of time, of place or of matter,...
-and a thousand other fictions of philosophers which come from their
-incomplete notions, fictions which the nature of things does not
-suffer, and which our ignorance and the little attention we have for
-the insensible lets pass, but which could never be rendered tolerable,
-unless we confine them to abstractions of the mind which protests that
-it does not deny what it puts aside and considers out of place in any
-present consideration. Otherwise, if we took it quite in earnest, to
-mean that things which we do not perceive do not exist in the soul or
-body, we should fail in philosophy as in politics by neglecting τὀ
-μικρόν, insensible steps of progress:&mdash;whereas an abstraction is not an
-error provided we know that what we put out of sight is still there.'</p>
-
-<p>This was the conception which Bacon had shadowed out, which Leibniz
-had presented under many names and with many applications, as the
-olive-branch between Plato and Democritus; it now became through
-philosophical and extra-philosophic acceptance a current maxim in the
-general field of knowledge. Nature assimilated to history, and history
-assimilated to nature: freedom built upon necessity, and efficient
-causes rounded off, though not entirely merged, in final. It is the
-recognition of law, order, causality in the psychical world, yet not
-of <i>mere</i> so-called natural law; and therefore without reducing it to
-a merely physical and material world. It is in fact the new method
-which is inevitable and necessary, as soon as it is manifest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span> that
-life, organisation, development is the underlying truth and central
-notion of things. You look at the world at first, let us say, as a mere
-collection of separate things in varying degrees of juxtaposition:
-and all that you think of doing to them, either by way of theory or
-practice, is to put them together, to link them closer, or separate
-them more widely. You do so from outside by an arranging force; for
-they are assumed to be purely passive, waiting to be touched, each set
-in its place&mdash;from which it can only be moved by a push or a pull.
-This is the method of mathematics or mechanics. It shows the dexterity
-of the agent or of the expositor: but you feel that it is artificial,
-and arbitrary. It is analytic or synthetic&mdash;but not auto-analysis
-or auto-synthesis. The director of the movement (we may call it
-'construction') may no doubt have the real secret: he may work the
-things well and fairly, and unite or divide them according to inner
-affinities; but we cannot, as matters stand, be sure of this. The
-things, in fact, he deals with have been already emptied of all life
-and peculiarity of their own: they are alike in quality, only differing
-by a more or less,&mdash;a difference which at any moment may be altered by
-an act of subtraction or addition. No doubt you can build up what are
-<i>called</i> systems&mdash;compounds of a kind&mdash;in this way: but they do not
-really hang and grow together; they are only prevented from breaking
-up by the absence of any empty place to which the parts may withdraw.
-Bit holds up bit; but how all the bits have found themselves so caged
-up without exit is a mystery. Absolute neutrality or indifference of
-each part to others, and yet absolute equilibrium<a name="FNanchor_1_119" id="FNanchor_1_119"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_119" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> in the total
-composite,&mdash;such is the situation.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>The chemical method (taking chemistry as a type of the sciences
-like optics, electricity, &amp;c.) is a revelation of a different state
-of affairs. The elements of things are here seen to be unique and
-incomparable; yet in each there is a latent sympathy ready to break out
-when the proper occasion arrives. Bring two things together, and their
-affinity suddenly, in the proper circumstances, leads to their complete
-fusion: a product arises which, when formed, hardly betrays its origin
-and composition. In a way this is the converse of the mechanical or
-mathematical method. In it was no fusion, no inner mixture: each part
-after composition lay beside the other, and their union was only in the
-ideas of the onlooker. It was mere juxtaposition still,&mdash;though now
-closer: an abnormally keen eye would still have been able to descry the
-dividing lines and measure the gaps. At least mere mechanical physics
-tends so to conceive it. Here, on the contrary, there is union&mdash;but
-only at the moment of fusion: once that is accomplished, the result is
-apparently simple, and bears no suggestion of being a compound. In the
-mechanical union the result is exactly equal to the sum of the elements
-which go to make it: in the chemical there is something positively new,
-something, i. e., of which the premises gave no indication and made no
-promise.</p>
-
-<p>Either of these methods,&mdash;of these conceptions of existence&mdash;works
-well in a certain region. But both of them only do their work on a
-certain hypothesis, or with a certain abstraction. The mechanical
-method supposes that objects are all qualitatively alike, differing
-only in quantity or weight: all therefore entirely comparable with
-each other, and capable of being substituted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span> for each other in an
-equation. Where this assumption holds good, the method of addition and
-division, the method of the calculus does its work<a name="FNanchor_2_120" id="FNanchor_2_120"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_120" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>. The chemical
-method works on another assumption,&mdash;the assumption of a number of
-qualitatively-differenced elements, of elements which also are, so to
-speak, set on edge against some, and ready to leap into the arms of
-others. If the observer in the first case had the game entirely in his
-own hand,&mdash;could build up and separate at his pleasure, could determine
-results <i>a priori</i>: he is here baffled by the unexpected, and can only
-wait and watch to learn <i>a posteriori</i> the behaviour of the bodies
-possessed of this occult and non-predictable affinity. At the best he
-can only formulate what he observes, try to classify it, ascertain
-any common principles running through it, any serial recurrences,
-or the like: and that is all that chemical philosophy can achieve.
-Chemical affinity&mdash;the fact that certain elements combine in certain
-ways, and refuse to enter into certain alliances&mdash;is a great fact:
-but to <i>a priori</i> reasoning or abstract syllogising it is an entire
-inexplicability, one of the accidents in the universe which must be
-reckoned with, but cannot be understood.</p>
-
-<p>It is probably evident that, if we want to get a comprehension of
-the life and concrete reality of things, neither of these methods
-will quite answer the purpose. With the first alone, if it could be
-universally carried out, the universe would be thoroughly explained:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>
-everything would be exactly equivalent to some sum or multiple of
-every other: there would be no mystery, nothing unique, and strictly
-individual. Given time, we could find a formula for every reality,
-and a predicate exactly fitted to any subject. Yet even mathematics
-has to confess the existence of irrationals, surds, infinite series,
-and the like. For our unities and standards are always arbitrary,
-artificial, and one-sided, and fall short of the subtlety of nature.
-Even our simpler types of surfaces&mdash;the circle and the square&mdash;remain
-irreducible to each other: and we only avoid the collision by the
-remark that practically and with any required amount of exactness
-the discrepancy between the two can be adjusted. If we turn to the
-chemical method, again, there is a nearer approach to actuality in the
-recognition of the presence of something more than mere composition
-and juxtaposition. It is not that there is something which is <i>not</i>
-juxtaposition: but rather it is much <i>more than mere</i> juxtaposition.
-There may be degrees of this something more: but it is only to a gross
-or abstract view that it is not present at all. Mere cohesion even
-shows a unity in things juxta-posed. Mere contact is contagious: it
-infects. 'When a violin has been played on frequently by a tyro,' says
-G. H. Lewes, 'its tone deteriorates, its molecules become re-arranged,
-so that one mode of vibration is more ready than another<a name="FNanchor_3_121" id="FNanchor_3_121"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_121" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>.' 'Toute
-impression,' he quotes from Delboeuf, 'laisse une certaine trace
-ineffaçable.' So-called chemical composition is only a conspicuous
-instance, with peculiarities, of this alteration in state produced
-by what, from the mechanical standpoint, are called inner molecular
-displacements. But to recognise a fact is one thing: to give its
-explanation is another. Yet, on the other hand, to recognise the fact
-is to note<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span> an important point which had been omitted by the mechanical
-construction of things. There the result could hardly be called new:
-it was exactly equal to its constituent elements: and the equation was
-transparent. And it was transparent because the whole process, analysis
-and synthesis, was not a work or process of the observed thing, but
-the work of the observing mind: it makes the (artificial) unities,
-numbers them, and adds them or subtracts. But with the chemical result,
-though it also is equal to its elements, there is something new.
-Water, no doubt, is oxygen and hydrogen, but here, at least, there
-is no doubt that the <i>plus</i> sign unduly simplifies the relationship,
-and rather indicates or represents a nexus than accurately defines
-it. And yet, there is nothing in water which was not, in some&mdash;shall
-we say mysterious?&mdash;way, in the oxygen and the hydrogen. Chemical
-physics, therefore, brings out clearly, or comparatively clearly,
-something which the ordinary and coarser simplicity-loving theory is
-obliged and is able to neglect: it realises the virtue that lies in
-juxtaposition, and shows that the mere outer change of quantity goes
-with a deeper inward and qualitative one. The result does more than
-sum up and condense what was spread out in extension and dispersed
-in parts before: it brings out or reveals something which previously
-was unsurmised. Always, in a liberal interpretation of the maxim, it
-is true that <i>Ex nihilo nihil fit:</i> but here, especially, the effect
-actually discloses what was&mdash;but was latent or unperceived&mdash;in the
-premises. The maxim, to be fairly treated, must be read backwards as
-well as forwards.</p>
-
-<p>But we must go a step further if we wish the full explanation. If the
-premises are to be adequate to support the conclusion, they must be
-restated in terms which hint at the conclusion&mdash;which in a way contain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
-it, but contain it in potentiality and promise, not in act. This is
-the method of development, which is the method that is applicable to
-full concrete reality, not like the others to parts abstracted from
-or insulated in reality. So long as you deal with these selected
-bits of fact&mdash;abstracted from their surroundings, subject to strict
-observation or strict experiment, you can apply a comparatively simple
-and straightforward method. You are dealing with abstracted, mutilated,
-prepared fact. You are guided in these cases by the canons of identity
-and difference: you add and subtract, or subtract and add; and that
-is all. You use what are called the rules of experimental method. But
-these canons do not directly apply&mdash;except by happy accident&mdash;to the
-real world, where antecedent and consequents are not separate and
-tabulated, as the logical canons, the rules of formal logic, require.
-In dealing with this concrete reality, a much more complex method is
-needed, a method which has to blend induction with deduction, and
-to start from both ends in the series of causation at once. You can
-apply observation or experiment, only when the issues have already
-been extremely simplified and narrowed down: when the question has
-been rendered so definite that it is next-door to the answer, and the
-removal of a slight partition-wall will as it were make the two one
-clear space. Where observation and experiment are available, indeed, is
-where the general outlines and principles of the subject are settled,
-where the scheme of reality is defined in large, but a variety of minor
-issues still remains to be settled. Unless this general framework is
-fixed, neither observation nor experiment, with their canon of identity
-and difference, are of any avail. These methods, therefore, only apply
-in sciences which are in principle or substantially complete, though
-admitting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span> of possibly infinite extension in details and particulars.
-Where the science is yet to constitute, i. e. in dealing with the
-kinds of real things in their completeness, and not as viewed in
-some definite aspect, induction and deduction must go hand in hand
-and help each other at every step: and if they, as they must, have
-recourse to experiment and observation, it will be at first in a very
-unsatisfactory and tentative way.</p>
-
-<p>Such is the way the contrast between the simplicity belonging to an
-artificial method dealing with picked instances, and the complexity
-that real concrete organic nature demands, presented itself to J. S.
-Mill as he advanced in his inquiry. The only complete method for the
-investigation of unsophisticated nature, not yet mapped out and defined
-in general departments, is the deductive-inductive method in which
-induction and deduction separately have a subordinate place,&mdash;using
-induction in the narrow sense the term has been hitherto allowed to
-bear. And that sense, it may be added, is, as in some passages of
-Aristotle, little else than a reverse of syllogism, or to speak more
-accurately, it is a syllogism which goes up to generals instead of
-descending from them. It is like the syllogistic deduction formal and
-abstract in character. The (deductive) syllogism assumes the existence
-of major premises&mdash;of general propositions which in the last resort,
-if they are real bases, must be primary and true, or self-evident
-facts. But a critic, like Mill, had little difficulty in showing
-that a general truth rests upon and presupposes the very particular
-conclusions which it is used to establish. Unless every singular is
-true, the universal which embraces or unifies them cannot really be
-true. Therefore the conclusion is really implied and presupposed in
-the principles of its premises. But, unfortunately for the application
-and supposed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span> sequel of this not unjust remark, a similar remark may
-be made on the ordinary exposition of the inductive method. Induction,
-it is said, infers from or on a basis of single facts. But if a single
-truth is really, i. e. unconditionally true, it is indistinguishable
-from the universal. If it is really true once, it is true for ever.
-The assertion of the individual proposition as true, if it can be
-supported&mdash;(and unless it be true, what basis can it afford for
-the general conclusion?)&mdash;implies the truth of the universal it is
-sometimes used to establish. The inductive logician tells us to build
-on singular and definite facts, on truths of definite and individual
-experience: but a definite or determinate truth rests upon universality
-(indeed is a universal), and cannot be found unless we have already
-found the special total or organism of truth in which it forms a part.
-Individuals and universals presuppose each other, and do not, as the
-first impression leads us to think, stand apart as two unconnected
-termini, from either of which, if we happen to be so located, we can
-without road or railway make a legitimate passage to the other.</p>
-
-<p>If it be urged, as it may naturally be, that on this showing there is
-no solid or 'absolute' starting-point at all, the contention may be
-conceded. The only fixed and steady points in knowledge are points
-hypothetically fixed,&mdash;certified, that is, for the time and in the
-circumstances we employ them. But in the open field&mdash;or rather in
-the wilderness&mdash;of knowledge, where the ground of fact is not staked
-off, and the unexpected may always turn up, the only test of truth is
-the corroboration given by the consilience of paths initiated from
-different points: it is only by an undesigned coincidence in the
-results of independent operations that you can succeed in orienting
-yourself. You begin your road at two ends, and you meet: you locate
-or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span> fix your point by drawing its co-ordinates to two direction-lines
-taken anyhow at first, and only in formed science diverging at a fixed
-angle. And in the absolute your direction-lines cannot be supposed
-fixed: you can only gradually adjust them to each other as you
-proceed. Intelligence, says Aristotle, is a principle, a beginning;
-and intelligence, he says again, supplies beginnings<a name="FNanchor_4_122" id="FNanchor_4_122"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_122" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>. Science, in
-the technical sense, only comes into operation,&mdash;or, in other words,
-deduction and (in the narrower sense used by Mill, and proceeding by
-<i>pure</i> observation and experiment) induction only find a way,&mdash;where
-beginnings and principles have been set up, where an approximate order
-or provisional system has been established. And if logic, in its
-stricter sense, is the method of sciences already made and in their
-essentials constituted, then logic can be asked to do no more than
-to provide a theory of such formal processes. If it traces the path
-which leads 'from the known to the unknown,' if it always proceeds on
-the hypothesis of a given knowledge, then such induction or deduction
-(from certain and approved singular facts, or from certain and approved
-general truths) fully satisfies the practical need of the scientific
-reasoner. But if Logic be, as it sometimes is, and may very reasonably
-be, taken in the wider sense of an epistemology,&mdash;a theory of the
-nature and origin of knowledge as a whole, and not of mere inference
-or syllogism;&mdash;if it does not merely ask how we can satisfactorily
-get from one piece of knowledge (we are supposed to have) to another
-(not yet supposed to be), but how we come to have knowledge at all;
-then its problem must go behind the rudiments of vulgar induction and
-deduction. It must ask&mdash;what, so far as one can see, Mill and his
-mere followers have never seriously<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span> asked at all&mdash;what induction
-is, what are its relations with deduction, and what is the place of
-either in the process of knowledge. And as the process of knowledge
-is the path to reality, it must also ask about the nature of this
-goal,&mdash;reality and truth. It is all very well for the narrower Logic
-to formulate in terms the methods actually employed in sciences: to
-state in abstract canons what is there seen in life and action. But
-a <i>Science of Logic</i>&mdash;an epistemology&mdash;(and a genuine epistemology
-cannot claim to be anything short of an ontology) must face the fact of
-science itself&mdash;must ask how the ideas of the knower must&mdash;or otherwise
-they are not knowledge&mdash;embrace and contain the reality of the known.
-The other and narrower Logic is and will remain a theory of forms of
-reasoning-a transcript in fainter terms of the procedure of science in
-any given step it takes upward to generals or downward to particulars:
-but the logic which deals with knowledge as such, in its systematic
-entirety,&mdash;the transcendental Logic, in short, must have a real value,
-an invincible relation to reality. The formal Logic&mdash;the logic of Mill
-and Hamilton&mdash;must be carried back to its principles, to its first
-step: and that first step which will also be the last step, and the
-inspiring principle of every intermediate step, is that of Intelligence
-(Aristotle's Νοῡς), of which the products or manifestations are λόγοι,
-i. e. definite conceptions, categories, formulations of rules and
-principles of definite range,&mdash;determinations or special types of unity.</p>
-
-<p>Mill really faced the problem of method to better effect when he came
-to deal with a class of questions in which he was really interested,
-and which moreover have for epistemological purposes the advantage of
-being as yet unreduced into the rank and file of disciplined science.
-These questions are those dealing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span> with man, his mental and moral
-nature, and history. Even its advocates or patrons occasionally admit
-that there is no accepted idea of what Sociology is or does. Its name
-at least expresses a longing towards a unity, or a presentiment that
-there is some underlying unity and common method in the group of what
-are loosely called the moral, or the historical, or the social and
-political sciences. But sociology is, as most people will allow, the
-name of a science unrealised&mdash;the felt and consciously-apprehended
-need of a science, and the dissatisfaction with the existing state of
-knowledge in certain departments. And undoubtedly it was with problems
-of social science,&mdash;problems of politico-economic and socio-ethical or
-socio-religious matters, that Mill's interests were mainly engaged.
-Like his master in this department, Auguste Comte, he wanted to carry
-into the topics which he was chiefly bent upon that 'scientific'
-precision which they by pretty general admission lacked, and which
-revolutionary movements had shown they greatly needed. But he could
-not help seeing that the 'induction' of dynamics and physics was not
-exactly the instrument he was in search of. Theory and hypothesis
-here demanded a much larger share in the process than in the more
-mathematical sciences. Causes and effects in reality here rolled round
-into each other, instead of remaining calmly fixed, one set here, and
-the other there. Of course even here&mdash;i. e. in organic and concrete
-sciences&mdash;it is possible to introduce observation and experiment,&mdash;no
-doubt, with greater effort and constraint, but still not altogether
-impracticable. But the artificial and mutilative character of such
-experimentation is felt here in a way different from its pressure in
-other cases. And what is more important, to institute an experiment or
-set on foot a scientific observation (and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span> to observe means to <i>watch</i>
-a definitely restricted natural process with a view to answer some
-question about it), presupposes&mdash;as we have already seen&mdash;a tolerably
-definite provisional theory as to the general lie of the country to be
-investigated. Only when the country has been reasonably well mapped out
-in provinces and provided with some system of roads, can these problems
-of detail&mdash;questions to be answered Yes or No&mdash;be profitably put. And
-it is&mdash;in some parts of the historical sciences at least&mdash;somewhat
-premature to put questions requiring a categorical reply. There is
-only the vague <i>malaise</i> of felt difficulty to guide us. We do not,
-in many cases, know what it is that we want to know; for, it demands
-a good deal of wisdom and trained art to put the proper or reasonable
-question,&mdash;so much so, indeed, that to succeed in formulating your
-question fully is equivalent or nearly equivalent to being able to
-answer it. The value of observations and experiments&mdash;which are ways of
-putting nature to the question and it may be to the torture&mdash;depends
-entirely upon the knowledge and the command of general ideas possessed
-by the observer and experimenter. And the same may be said of the
-reduced and tabulated conspectuses of the results of many observations
-and experiments which are called Statistics. Their value depends on
-the truth and breadth of view which presided at their collection and
-arrangement<a name="FNanchor_5_123" id="FNanchor_5_123"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_123" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>.</p>
-
-<p>The historical or genetic method is the method of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span> Science in general,
-but considered and employed under a limited aspect. And under its
-more comprehensive aspect it may be called&mdash;though no name is
-unimpeachable&mdash;the method of development. Now the essence of the idea
-of development&mdash;as was clearly shown by Leibniz&mdash;is the refusal to
-admit external interference, and the resolve to let a thing explain
-itself by itself. It does not, like the mechanical method, manipulate
-the thing from outside&mdash;try to add it up out of factors or items
-fashioned and fabricated after some external standard. Nor does it,
-like the chemical, look at the result as an inexplicable alteration,
-due apparently to a mere stroke of combination or disintegration&mdash;yet
-not obviously reducible to a mere equivalent of its elements. On
-the contrary, it recognises in the object a certain independence or
-originality, yet also the presence of an immanent law which does not
-wait for the outsider to put it together, but constructs itself, as it
-were, after a plan of its own. There is in the so-called object, though
-we do not at first sight recognise it, the same originative principle
-both analytic and synthetic, as we own in thought. The object is&mdash;in
-a true logic&mdash;a process, a self-completing process, and not merely an
-object, mechanical, or other object. It changes, grows or decays, while
-we observe, unless for brief instants we cut it off from its connexions
-and arrest its development. And our observation, if truly scientific,
-must be sympathetic with its process of change. It is neither a mere
-thing to be explained and construed <i>ab extra</i>: nor a mystery of sudden
-transformation to be passively accepted; but a growth, a history, to be
-sympathetically watched and understood,&mdash;understood, because it follows
-the same order<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span> as the movement of our own thought in the process of
-knowledge. <i>Similia similibus cognoscuntur</i><a name="FNanchor_6_124" id="FNanchor_6_124"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_124" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>.</p>
-
-<p>One sometimes hears it asked by paradoxical critics at which end
-a history should begin. And to ordinary dogmatic recklessness,
-paradoxical the question may well seem. Begin at the beginning, no
-doubt, is the vulgar reply; which in this case is understood to
-mean from the earliest point in date (that, of course, being easily
-ascertained, and a thing known to all men). But,&mdash;so Plato long ago
-well raised the difficulty which will always confront us,&mdash;are we to go
-from the beginnings, or towards the beginnings? And it does not quite
-solve the question to say that we are to begin with what is known:
-for under that word the same difficulty re-appears. Can you really
-know one end without the other? To the vulgar partisan of historical
-method, its precept means Go to the earlier, if you wish to understand
-the meaning, the value, and the elements constitutive of the later and
-subsequent. Begin with origins, with the earliest elements, the phases
-that first appear; and thus you will get light to see the later as they
-really stand. That this is a common interpretation of the historical
-method is notorious. To explain <i>Homo sapiens</i>, one is told to study
-the ape,&mdash;the nearest analogue of his lost or missing progenitor: to
-understand the contemporary horse, go to eohippus, or hipparion, or
-however his early prototype may be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span> at present named and recognised.
-And in all this there is a truth&mdash;or least a half-truth. But let us
-equally recognise the other half of the truth. If past throws light on
-present, present throws not less light on past. You propose, let us
-say, to write a history of Greece. A wordy philosophy, wise in its own
-conceit and in fine phrases, will advise you to approach the subject
-without prepossession or prejudice. So far, good. But what is meant
-by the absence of prepossession or prejudice? Not a blank openness
-to impression, not a mere passivity; but if passivity at all, a wise
-passivity: if openness, the openness of the trained judge.</p>
-
-<p>The advice, so often associated with Francis Bacon, to get rid of all
-false pre-conceptions, of all <i>idola,</i> is one which it is easy to
-mistake in an over-zeal to follow it. That mere negation of prejudices
-which we call childish innocence is no match for the craft by which
-Nature seeks to keep or disguise her secrets. The free consciousness,
-the unbiassed mind, is not the easy result of one great act of
-renunciation, but the work of continued self-discipline, self-conquest,
-self-realisation. If you are not to impose upon the thing a
-pre-conception alien to it, neither must you rashly give yourself away
-to the thing, or to the first whims which accident puts upon you as the
-thing. What seems a fact or thing is only a candidate for the post of
-thing or fact: and its credentials need to be examined, and compared
-with other evidences. To detect a fact, therefore, is only possible for
-a tried and tested consciousness which by patience and self-mastery has
-won the key of interpretation. What Bacon apparently meant&mdash;though,
-as often happens, in his eagerness to combat a prevailing folly, he
-sometimes overshot himself in statement&mdash;was to insist on the eternal
-wedlock of the mind and things, of things and the mind, as the sole
-and sufficient<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span> condition for the reality of knowledge and truth. The
-mind may not presume to do without things, or things to domineer the
-mind;&mdash;or the result is a windy and frothy vanity. And the wedlock
-is eternal: in his own eloquent words, 'the mind itself is but an
-accident to knowledge<a name="FNanchor_7_125" id="FNanchor_7_125"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_125" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>,' and he might have added, so also are things:
-for, as he says, 'the truth of being and the truth of knowing is all
-one': only in the bond of knowledge are things true and real,&mdash;being
-otherwise only 'permanent possibilities,' or possibilities barely even
-permanent&mdash;or not even possibilities. Yet he scarcely realised that
-his 'due rejections and exclusions' and negations were a fundamental
-<i>constitutive</i> element in those facts of which he habitually emphasises
-only the positive side.</p>
-
-<p>He therefore who would understand&mdash;or would write&mdash;the history of
-Greece must really in his studies begin at both ends&mdash;both at the
-Greece of to-day, and at the Greece of Solon, or what earlier period
-may be taken as the start of Greek history. With perhaps the least
-qualified dogmatism, one may assert that he will begin with the
-Greece of to-day; or if he deals solely with Ancient Greece he will
-begin with the full blaze of Hellenic civilisation which still has a
-pale reflection in the modern world, and gradually work back to the
-beginnings. It is no doubt customary to begin Greek history, say, with
-the Homeric Age, and work downwards, as it is customary to begin a
-formal treatise on geography with the general features of the earth's
-shape and surface. But that beginning represents really the temporarily
-accredited and accepted result of a process which, starting from the
-other end, has worked backwards to commencements or origins.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span> And the
-teacher, in particular, will do well not to imitate too slavishly the
-method of the formal treatise. A day may come&mdash;or may have come&mdash;for
-example, for Greek history to start from periods long anterior to the
-supposed or traditional date of the wars around the wall of Troy. But
-when it does so, it will have done so by more thoroughly ransacking
-the Greece of to-day: and so disclosing the secrets of what is termed
-pre-historic Greece. Then, conversely, when modern diggings on Greek
-soil reveal the features of an earlier than what was erewhile to older
-historians its earliest past, the reconstruction of that early people's
-life reflects a new light on the directions and the limitations of
-its subsequent civilisation. We see better into the reality of Homer,
-and even of Demosthenes&mdash;into their ideal glory and their historical
-limitations, when we explore the cradle in which their race's life was
-erst fostered, and the rock out of which they and nature hewed them.
-And this is no peculiarity of Greece. The deepest research into the
-social institutions which control the England of to-day is the best
-propaedeutic for the study of Anglo-Saxon times; and the same is true
-<i>vice versa</i>.</p>
-
-<p>Nor, again, is the truth of the proposition confined to what we
-ordinarily mean by history. The Greek poet has said 'Art had to wait on
-and welcome chance, and chance to wait on Art': or as we may paraphrase
-it, if every invention and discovery is in a measure a lucky chance,
-it is a luck that only falls to the wisely prepared head and hand. The
-casual event falls as a germ of new construction or theory only on an
-intelligence ready to welcome it,&mdash;prepared with its complement in the
-spirit of an idea, eager to take shape. The means again, in the arts
-and crafts, is not only a means to something else; it is also a means
-to its own end,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span> to realise or perfect itself. The rude tool of the
-savage, for instance, is not merely a means to supply his wants: it
-is also a means towards completing and improving itself, and towards
-perfecting itself by constructing an ampler tool, which supersedes it,
-because it can do all and more than all the work of the earlier, or
-can do it more economically. All progress that deserves the name is
-an incessant and continuous revision of a first step: a re-adaptation
-of an old instrument: a repeated and unending self-correction. It
-is only a partially-true symbol of human advance to speak of it as
-a line: unless we add, by another piece of symbolism, that the line
-is only the protracted or extended phase in which the form of time
-drags out for us the magnified and organised point-nucleus. It is a
-truth&mdash;which we are only too ready to forget or discount&mdash;that the
-savage (and he bears with justice both epithets, 'the noble savage,'
-and 'the brute barbarian') is not something left happily behind us, in
-the onward march of civilisation; but that he is, however much we may
-fancy him suppressed and superseded, still present, at least 'ideally'
-in the finest products of humanity, and may hap only too likely&mdash;as
-the Russian is said, when scratched, to betray his original Tartar
-breed&mdash;to burst put on provocation into a grim reality. The Pullman
-car of to-day retains within it for the archaeologically-trained eye
-the rudiments of the primitive wain of the primitive nomade: and
-the careful study of either end of the scale will not merely throw
-a marvellous light on the excellencies or the defects of the other,
-but will probably also tend in the impartial observer to moderate the
-self-gratulations of modern advance. For it is only those whose view
-ranges within narrow limits that are over-impressed by the magnitude of
-the advance made in the 'last new thing.'</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>If progress were but the addition of bit to bit, of new bits to what
-is already there, or if we could change <i>this,</i> and leave <i>that</i>
-unchanged,&mdash;as the word perhaps verbally means, and as many people at
-any rate seem to understand it, progress might indeed seem an easy
-thing, and to be undertaken with a light heart. For, it would appear
-as if we could lose nothing, and might probably (indeed, as enthusiasm
-and forgetfulness of the merits of the past are in certain periods
-ready to urge, must certainly) gain. But it is a more serious matter
-when we realise that we must move altogether, if we really are to move
-at all; i. e. really are to make progress, and not merely change, so
-to speak, from one foot to rest on another. For progress,&mdash;if it be
-what it is expected to be, and what it must be if it does what it is
-expected to do&mdash;is an organic, and not merely a mechanical or chemical
-change. A mechanical change is only a nominal or formal change: a
-chemical is more than change; but in organic change, that which changes
-also abides, and the new is not merely other than the old, and not
-merely a re-arrangement of the old, but the old transmuted,&mdash;the same
-yet not the <i>mere</i> same<a name="FNanchor_8_126" id="FNanchor_8_126"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_126" class="fnanchor">[8]</a>. Progress in short is always the unity of
-differentiation and integration. It must not be an externality, nor a
-mere dead product of a transformation scene, but a continuous growth,
-inwardly digested, made part and parcel of the collective life, which
-it has thereby rendered more full, real, and not merely made less
-intense at the cost of some extension. In true progress, which is only
-another name for true growth, nothing is quite lost, but only changed,
-retained in a richer shape and a fuller reality. How far such progress
-is possible,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span> except in limited and finite spheres: how far progress in
-one involves necessarily deterioration in another and how, therefore,
-progress is not attributable to the Absolute, are questions we need not
-here discuss. But so far at least we may go as to say that a progress
-which does not follow the natural law of development and carry on into
-the future the worth and substance of the past, is not a progress which
-any general enthusiasm ought to be spent upon.</p>
-
-<p>Development then has two faces, one to the future and another
-to the past. And what is called the historical method is apt to
-emphasise only one of the two aspects, just as, it may be added,
-practical considerations are often likely to produce an opposite but
-equally partial bias in favour of the future. The historical method
-in incapable hands is liable to lead to unprofitable sighs,&mdash;not
-unaccompanied by a certain luxury of tears&mdash;over the lowly hole of
-the pit&mdash;it may even be the filth and brutishness, out of which so
-much of noble humanity (for thither the interest of development
-always reverts) has been dug; and in empty heads the practical,
-the vulgarly-utilitarian satisfaction is liable to equally vain
-fits of self-applause on our magnificent progress. But both the
-self-depreciation of him who loiters regretfully round the beggarly
-rudiments, and the self-laudation of glorious 'improvements' looking
-derisively on less glorious days, are unworthy of the reasonable and
-scientific spirit. The philosophical method does not allow itself to
-be imposed upon by the lapse of time, and insists that in a sense
-the past contained the present&mdash;that, as the poet says, the child
-is father of the man. Not indeed contained in any grosser or more
-delicate mechanical way. The coming development does not necessarily
-lie prefigured&mdash;if we had the proper microscope to see it&mdash;as a germ
-in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span> first and original state. That may be, or may not be. Yet
-prefigured it is by the law of its structure, or in the intelligible
-unity by which only can its existence be understood and construed.</p>
-
-<p>But if this be the method of real development, in the growth of nature,
-and the progress of history, it is also the method of that supreme
-product of historical progress, the spirit and system of philosophy.
-Thought, also, the culminating stage in which the spirit of man becomes
-conscious of itself and of its universe, will move or grow on the same
-lines as that of which it is the comprehension and theory. It will
-begin at the two ends, and each beginning will complete and presuppose
-the other. Nature will suppose and yet lead up to Spirit or Mind:
-Spirit or Mind will throw light on the mystery of Nature: Being will
-point to knowledge or Idea; and Idea show itself the basis of Being.
-Or, if we consider the triple division of the philosophic system, as it
-runs in Hegel's <i>Encyclopaedia</i>, we can see how misleading it may be to
-take that one order as absolute. To understand it thoroughly we must
-begin with each of the three in turn: so as thus to realise that each
-does not except figuratively succeed the other, but that in each an
-aspect of the whole truth is presented which had been put by the other
-parts somewhat in the background. In each part there is a definition
-and a revelation of the Absolute. But each is also, as it were, a
-projection, a perspective view, a condensed or expanded image of the
-other. In each the Absolute is one and whole, in some more veiled,
-more restricted, and more meagre than in others; but the veil, and the
-restriction, and the emptying, are self-imposed: and for that reason
-the veil is really transparent, the restriction is negatived, and the
-emptying is not only a self-humiliating but a self-ennobling irony&mdash;the
-irony of the Absolute.</p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_119" id="Footnote_1_119"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_119"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Of course the term 'equilibrium' may be used loosely to
-mean a great deal more than this,&mdash;how much will depend on the context.
-These quasi-mathematical analyses have great fascination: their
-apparent simplicity imposes upon us.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_120" id="Footnote_2_120"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_120"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> The distinction, it will be observed, lies between the
-method of mathematical physics and that of physics which has learned
-something from the researches of electricity or chemistry. If the
-method or principles of chemistry are thus said to be reduced to those
-of physics, this is because the conceptions of physics have been
-revolutionised from the side of chemistry, &amp;c., and even of biology.
-This tendency of modern science is precisely in the line indicated by
-Schelling and Hegel.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_121" id="Footnote_3_121"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_121"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Problems of Life and Mind</i>, iii. p. 58.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_122" id="Footnote_4_122"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_122"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>Eth.</i> vii. 7 ὁ νοῡς ἀρχὴ: 6. 6 νοῡς ἐστι τῶν ἀρχῶν.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_123" id="Footnote_5_123"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_123"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Statistics only define&mdash;and primarily for the
-imagination&mdash;the general laws and principles on which they rest. The
-clear-cut mathematical form strikes and 'catches on,' where a more
-universal statement sounds vague and glides off. Hence, as one says,
-they may prove <i>anything.</i> The fact is, they prove <i>nothing.</i> They only
-illustrate in diagrammatic form the theory which presided at their
-collection. To emphasise the fundamental nature of ethics for human
-development you need only say that conduct is three-fourths or (as to
-some minds the precision rises with the denominator of the fraction
-17/20) of human life.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_124" id="Footnote_6_124"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_124"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> The resolute misinterpretation&mdash;as it often seems&mdash;of
-the maxim that like is known by like,&mdash;is a curious chapter in the
-history of Logic. All knowledge is based upon,&mdash;or, to speak more
-simply, <i>is</i>&mdash;the identity of differents: of differents, which in
-knowledge are identified,&mdash;of identity which in knowledge is put under
-difference. And yet the ordinary meaningless talk on this matter seems
-to assimilate knower and known to two separate things (or persons),
-who casually and, we may add, inexplicably know each other: which is
-mythology, perhaps, but not epistemology.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_125" id="Footnote_7_125"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_125"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Bacon: 'In Praise of Knowledge' (a mere leaflet of much
-significance towards estimating his true grandeur). On the <i>Conjugium</i>
-of <i>Mens</i> and <i>Universus</i> see <i>Novum Organum</i>, distrib. op.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_8_126" id="Footnote_8_126"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_126"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> The said <i>mere</i> same is not really the same at all.
-Nobody in his senses predicates sameness except where he also sees
-differences: or, the term always implies relation.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XVIII.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>THE RANGE OF PERSONALITY.</h4>
-
-
-<p>The difference between the conceptions of reality held by Aristotle and
-Plato respectively is that where Plato said Being, Essence or Substance
-(οὐσία), Aristotle said Activity (ἐνέργεια). To be is to act, to be
-active. To the outsider&mdash;the plain man of philosophic legend, it seems
-at first that a thing must <i>be</i> before it can <i>do</i>: that you must have
-an agent before you get an action. And, in a way, Aristotle admits
-this not quite satisfactory criticism. Every activity presupposes, he
-allows, a power to act, a potentiality: every actual presupposes an
-implicit or a mere possibility. Existence seems, as it were, to be
-doubled; or the mere surface-being is turned into a subject which has
-a predicate. But if the existence is to be real, it has to include
-both elements, and with the latter or the actuality, as its crown.
-Nor is this all. The possibility which issues forth in action may be
-fairly called self-realisation. That is to say: A&mdash;the hypothetical
-agent&mdash;acts, does something: and in so doing, seems to go forth and
-beyond itself, to externalise itself. Or, A is acted upon, and thus
-seems to be diminished. But what it externalises, or puts forth, is
-after all what it <i>is</i>: it puts forth itself: and, on the other hand,
-if it be a patient, it is no less an agent and self-limitative. What a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
-thing really is, is what it <i>makes</i> itself be: what it allows itself to
-be made, that it really is. Yet further, if the word self-realisation
-be taken in its fullness of meaning,&mdash;if there be really a <i>self,</i>
-and it be realised, then this self-realisation, which is the truth
-or more developed conception of being, seems to imply or postulate
-in it a self-consciousness, an awareness of the process of completed
-being,&mdash;completed in its return from utterance of possibility to
-self-fruition or in its re-assumption of itself.</p>
-
-<p>To us, of course, as beings aware of what we do and achieve, this
-is simple enough: but it is also true of <i>things,</i> that we only
-understand them, in so far as we put them in, or invest them with, the
-same activity and apperception of activity as we are familiar with
-in our own experience. The veriest materialist cannot help speaking
-of things as agents, as behaving, as having a function. He would, no
-doubt, if he were to be cross-examined, refuse to identify himself
-with the primitive anthropomorphism, or at least zoömorphism of the
-natural man who sees the river run and the clouds sweep the sky; and
-he would probably mutter something referring to people who cannot see
-when they ride a metaphor to death. Still less, perhaps, would he
-be inclined to adopt the spiritualistic or animistic hypothesis of
-philosophising physicists, like Fechner, who would accredit even the
-plants at our feet, and the stars in the sky, with souls, or soul-like
-centres of their life. But, however he may shrink from what we may call
-the ontological consequences of his language, there is no doubt that
-for him the meaning of the world, its reality and truth, is obtained
-by an interpretation in terms which, rigidly employed, imply their
-environment by a self-consciousness to which they are relative. Take
-from him the tacit assumption (which he often finds it difficult to
-realise just because it is the foundation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span> of all his language) that
-reality is in the last resort a self-conscious reality, and his words
-become meaningless, or what he might think worse, metaphorical.</p>
-
-<p>To Bacon, who, though not without a strong speculative impulse,
-approached philosophic dicta from the standpoint of an average
-intelligent Englishman (and it is on that account that his remarks are
-often so instructive), it seemed a grave fault of the Stagirite to
-define the soul, that 'most noble substance,' by words of the second
-intention. Without substance&mdash;a solid something as basis of act and
-event&mdash;the reality of the soul seemed likely to fare badly. Behind
-consciousness he, like many others, felt there must be a something of
-which consciousness is the state, act, or predicate and attribute. The
-thinking must come from a thinker. There must be a permanent subject of
-thought&mdash;a persistent substance which does not disappear when thinking
-for the nonce stops. And thinking is according to common experience
-very liable to stops and interruptions. Both Bacon and Locke felt that
-without this refuge to fall back upon, personal identity was in a bad
-way, or personality itself little better than a delusion. And therefore
-when Aristotle, and his modern followers, treated soul and mind as
-essentially definable by the terms activity, self-realisation, it has
-been freely urged against them that they are tampering with the pearl
-of great price which all our hopes and aspirations fondly guard.</p>
-
-<p>And this is a subject on which there is inevitably a good deal of
-misunderstanding. And the misunderstanding will probably last so long
-as one set of writers flaunts over it that blessed word Personality
-as a holy, a sacrosanct thing, like the visionary cross with its
-inscription <i>In hoc signo vinces</i>: and as another set treats it as a
-mere fetish, under which is hidden nothing<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span> better than stock or stone,
-or a heap of old bones. Perhaps some concessions might well be made
-on both sides. And the first of them would be to try to come to some
-clearer understanding what the term in question means. And, on that
-point, if we follow the example of Aristotle and examine popular usage,
-to see if it can help us to any consistent use of the term, we shall
-find that by personal as opposed to real we mean something peculiarly
-attached to the individual, of which he cannot divest himself as
-of other outward things, though it also is an outward thing<a name="FNanchor_1_127" id="FNanchor_1_127"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_127" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> The
-person in this narrowest sense means the body; and if the epithet
-is further extended it still expresses what is directly manipulated
-through the members of the living agent, and is more or less closely
-attached to it. Yet if it means the body, we must be careful to add
-that it is the body, regarded not as such but as the representative,
-the outward manifestation, the inseparable sign or symbol of a spirit,
-an intelligence and a will. The person is the visible or tangible
-phenomenon of something inward,&mdash;the phase or function by which
-an individual agent takes his place in the common world of human
-intercourse and interaction&mdash;his peculiar and definite part in the
-general or universal world and field.</p>
-
-<p>Personality thus mingles or unifies in it an universal and an
-individual aspect or element: it hints that the universal work always
-has in reality an individually-determinate tone,&mdash;that nothing in
-the world, even if it be called the same, is really and actively
-the same. <i>Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem quod faciunt.</i> Thus,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>
-what separates personality from individuality is simply that in the
-narrower or abstracter use of the latter term there is an absence
-of the due subordination of all individuality to universality, and
-of all universality to individuality. Personality, in short, is an
-individuality which is not a mere freak, not merely different from
-other things, but also in itself charged with a universal meaning
-or function. Yet even this is not enough to describe it. It is the
-individuality of an intelligence: the flesh and blood, and, in a
-secondary degree, the outward things, stamped with intelligence.
-Every member of a kind, every natural existence, has this double
-character; this convergence or union of universal and individual. In
-being this individual object, it is at the same time a universal, and
-<i>vice versa.</i> But in the attribution of personality there is involved
-something beyond what is common to all creatures. And that something,
-we may first of all say, is this. Whereas in the case of other <i>things</i>
-the individuality is distinctly subordinate, and each is reckoned
-primarily by its kind, in the case of <i>persons</i> we can almost declare
-that the universality is subordinate to the individuality. This
-union of individuality and universality in a single manifestation,
-with the implication that the individuality is the essential and
-permanent element to which the universality is almost in the nature
-of an accident, is what forms the cardinal point in Personality. And
-one can understand, when the distinction is thus put, the obvious and
-palpable antagonism in which the view stands to the central principles
-of Spinoza<a name="FNanchor_2_128" id="FNanchor_2_128"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_128" class="fnanchor">[2]</a><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span> We speak of a man as a Personality when we wish to note
-the fact that he is no mere manufactured article, the representative
-of a common type, with nothing to choose between him and a thousand
-others, but that he is, as it were, one of a thousand, one 'Whom
-nature printed and then broke the type,' that he has in the highest
-sense 'distinction,' the nobility of nature's own patent. Other things
-exist, so to speak, for the sake of their kind, and for the sake of
-other things; a person, in the strictest sense, is never a mere means
-to something beyond, but always at the same time an end in itself
-or himself. Other things are mere examples in illustration of a law
-that rides superior to them and overrules them: the person is a law
-unto himself. He has the royal and divine right of creating law&mdash;of
-starting by his exception a new law which shall henceforth be a canon
-and a standard. For in such a personality when he claims his full
-rights there is the visible immanence of the divine and universal&mdash;or
-there is the visible unity of the eternal and the temporal. He rules
-as the natural king, the great ruler whose judgment and authority are
-better than the complex code of common laws: he guides as the artistic
-genius who sees truth steadily in a single intuition and in that single
-picture sees it whole<a name="FNanchor_3_129" id="FNanchor_3_129"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_129" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>.</p>
-
-<p>But when we ask if such a personality is found in the field of
-actual experience and history, there arises a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span> divergence of
-opinions. It is at any rate matter of common experience that there
-is a good deal of unjustified identification of the self with the
-universal&mdash;identification in which the universal suffers violence and
-is taken by force. There are only too often cases where the personal
-interest is allowed to disguise itself under a semblance of zeal for
-the common good, and that even without conscious intent or act of
-deception. No good and noble deed, Hegel has said, can ever be done
-without faith in its goodness, and zeal for its attainment: without a
-holy passion and fervour of devotion, which exceeds the cold service of
-duty rendered for duty's sake<a name="FNanchor_4_130" id="FNanchor_4_130"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_130" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>. But it is equally true and equally
-to be remembered that this interference of personal passion and
-disinterested interest has defaced the noblest causes and made flow
-endless torrents of fanaticism and persecution. A personality in which
-the universal was perfectly incarnated in the individual would be in
-truth a God amongst men. And it is probably a more likely occurrence
-that where the individual as such arrogates to himself the privilege of
-the universal, there should be seen not the deeds of the god, but the
-ebullitions of the beast that is in man.</p>
-
-<p>A personality, then, in popular language, and perhaps also in popular
-philosophy, is the living and conscious individual in whom general
-forces, truths, or ideas become real, active, efficient forces,
-truths, and ideas. And the importance of the conception resides in the
-safeguard thus supposed to arise, which will prevent the realities of
-the world from being dissipated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span> away into the endless and restless
-flux of the terms of thought,</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-'La bufera infernal che mai non resta.'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>To such a common frame of mind ideas, truths, forces are vacant,
-ghostly forms, devoid of true life and reality: to get such they need
-blood and flesh to clothe them, to give them substance and power. Now
-Hegel, no less than those who offer this criticism, regards ideas
-(in the ordinary sense of that term), truths and forces, also as
-abstractions which need something to make them powers in the real
-world of nature and the ideal world of mind. Hegel, like Schelling,
-has a sublime contempt for mere universals. But as to the something
-else, there is a divergence of view. Two well-known answers are given
-by the popular philosophy known as materialism or spiritualism: two
-systems which are probably not so wide apart as the contrast of
-their names might imply. According to the former, thinking, ideas,
-truths, goodness and beauty are special functions (the grosser
-materialists say secretions) of a special kind of matter&mdash;of something
-which is accessible to ordinary mechanical and chemical tests, but
-which exhibits also, in certain cases, the exceptional phenomena of
-consciousness. Here the essential reality is a something, permanent
-and essentially indestructible,&mdash;something which no man has seen,
-nor indeed can see,&mdash;but which is called Matter. The spiritualistic
-philosopher (as distinguished from the <i>idealist</i>) regards as the
-essential realities in the universe what he calls spirits. What these
-are, also, nobody has as yet (any more than in Kant's time<a name="FNanchor_5_131" id="FNanchor_5_131"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_131" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>) given
-any very authoritative account, but so far as the quasi-scientific
-expositions in regard to them throw<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span> any general light on the subject,
-we may say that they suggest only a differently-constituted matter, a
-matter e. g. of less or more dimensions than that we are most familiar
-with.</p>
-
-<p>Now the advocate of spiritual reality, who protests most strongly
-against the injury done to personality by reducing it to something
-fluid and not fixed, something in process and not in persistent
-substance, seems mostly to lean to a quasi-spiritualistic hypothesis,
-or to the&mdash;so-called&mdash;higher materialism. He is an advocate of what we
-may describe as the soul-thing, of a permanent, (he would even hold,
-an absolutely permanent) substance or substratum of psychical reality
-which, no doubt, exhibits certain properties, but is always more than
-any one, or any mere series of its phenomena. It has been said, indeed,
-by one who spoke with authority that he that will save his soul shall
-lose it, and he that will lose it shall find it. But this has always
-been a hard saying, which has been as far as possible explained away
-by exegesis. Yet its moral import is not so very far removed from its
-philosophical equivalent. The true life is not that of self-seeking
-pleasure, but the life spent in the service of truth and love, the
-life dedicated to impersonal interests, and ideal good. So also the
-reality of the human soul as we first know it lies not in itself, but
-in its transfiguration, its purification, and liberation to higher
-forms of being. The Soul, in its first avatar in each of us, is after
-all of the earth, earthy, unless it continue on that path of growth
-and development on which it has entered. It is as Aristotle said, and
-said well, the first actualisation<a name="FNanchor_6_132" id="FNanchor_6_132"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_132" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>&mdash;the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span> proximate ideality of an
-organic body. In soul organic body carries out its promise: in soul we,
-the observers, or untrained psychologists, note our first awareness of
-mental life in its organic environment. But there are other grades,
-other heights of achievement, yet set before the principle of life,
-which is more than mere life and mere soul: or soul contains a germ
-which must bear higher fruit. To be itself, or to become all that it in
-promise and potency contains, it must dispossess itself of what clings
-to it and possess itself of what is its own; and so transmute its first
-phase into one more adequate. The soul is, as Hegel has said, the
-awakening of mind from the sleep of nature<a name="FNanchor_7_133" id="FNanchor_7_133"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_133" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>: it is nature gathering
-itself out of its absorption in its dispersion, the breath of life and
-feeling striving through the scattered members of the material world,
-and finding itself at first half-asleep, a pervading, unifying current
-that flows through and makes continuous the various portions of the
-universe. It is the earliest real, felt unity in which the logical or
-synthetic pulse&mdash;as yet purely potential in Nature, and only surmised
-by science&mdash;re-appears in the actual concrete world. And as the
-earliest, it is, like first loves, what one clings to hardest as our
-prime and fundamental <i>differentia.</i> Here at least we are something&mdash;a
-centre of being, and not a mere centreless expanse of extension:
-something emerging from the world of silence and of night&mdash;something in
-which each feels</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-'I am not what I see,<br />
-And other than the things I touch.'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>And that something we would not lose, at any cost.&mdash;But the only way
-not to lose it, is to use it as a stepping-stone<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span> to higher things. The
-metaphor, indeed, like metaphors in general, must not be pressed too
-far. For it is more than a stepping-stone and it is never left behind
-as a mere dead self: there is</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-'Nothing of it that doth fade<br />
-But doth suffer a sea-change<br />
-Into something rich and strange.'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>And that richer result into which it is transformed is the
-consciousness of a self, and the intelligence which wills and knows.</p>
-
-<p>If it be asked in what respects the result is richer, the answer is
-as follows. The soul,&mdash;this 'first entelechy&mdash;is exclusive, and it
-is immersed in its natural limits of organic life. It has yet to go
-through the school of self-detachment, the process of 'erecting itself
-above itself'; and of thus extending its view and its range of control
-over a wider field of objects. Gradually it attains to the rank of a
-consciousness before which is unrolled the spectacle of a world of
-objects set over against it, and even of a world within it; itself as
-an object deposed to the rank of something to be surveyed. As such,
-it seems almost to have left all immersion in corporeity completely
-behind, and to have completely divested itself of any limitation. It
-floats freely above the real psychical life out of which it emerged&mdash;a
-detached but somewhat shadowy self, not burdened by any restrictions
-of nature or circumstance. As such a mere Ego, or logical self&mdash;as the
-mere theatre on which the play of ideas takes place, it surveys its
-real psychical self far below; it finds itself as a strange sort of
-thing, and says <i>This was me</i> (which however is not exactly the same
-as <i>I am I</i>, I = I). Yet it was a great step to have thus ceased to be
-absorbed in its qualities, to be the mere breath of life and feeling,
-stirring in its several affections and modifications.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span> In order to
-get forward, it was necessary to recoil a little: to save itself&mdash;and
-that must mean to get itself in fuller and richer being&mdash;the mind had,
-as it were, to measure and realise the full depth of its nonentity,
-and to surrender all that it had hitherto clung to as its own. In an
-attitude of reflection upon itself it fancies that it is the empty
-room, the <i>tabula rasa</i>, on which experience is to write itself: but
-in its secret heart it retains the faith and acts upon it, that it is
-the power of intelligent and intelligible unity which makes the writing
-intelligible, if it does not even itself play the writer. What it now
-seems to find&mdash;what fills up its consciousness, presumed empty and
-merely receptive,&mdash;it gradually recognises to be its very and original
-own. Through labour and experiment it fills up the vacant form (the
-passive half of itself to which it deposed itself) of consciousness;
-and thus, as an intelligent self, a true mind, it has for itself and
-realises as in itself all the life and reality which in its earlier
-stage of soul it only was and felt itself naturally to be. But on this
-stage of free intelligence it is no longer bound up with its natural
-being in such a way as to feel itself a fixed and restricted centre,
-sunk in the living environment so as to see no further, and to deem
-itself in its seclusion the permanent reality, the exclusive fact.
-It is no longer exclusive and self-concentrated, but inclusive and
-all-embracing. It is no longer a mere consciousness&mdash;a mere receptive
-and synthetic unity of apperception&mdash;but a reason and a mind. And a
-reason and a mind already refuse to be narrowed and confined by the
-same limits as seem appropriate to the soul. In the province of free
-self-realised intelligence we at least seem to occupy a ground on
-which others can equally come,&mdash;to have nothing peculiar or merely
-individual. In Knowledge, which is reasoned perception,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span> and in Will,
-which is reasoned impulse, there is a king's highway, a public forum,
-where souls meet and converse and perform a collective work;&mdash;and
-in both <i>mere</i>, i. e. essentially restricted, individuality is at a
-discount<a name="FNanchor_8_134" id="FNanchor_8_134"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_134" class="fnanchor">[8]</a>.</p>
-
-<p>Such would be the course of development if we looked at it only in the
-inwardness or subjectivity of psychical, conscious, and intelligent
-life. But an analogous or parallel development may be observed if we
-look at man as an active, i. e. a practical and moral being, a being
-who makes Nature his own, stamps it with his title of possession, and
-who gives to his fellowship with other souls an objective, outward
-existence in the forms and institutions of social life. Here too
-his first achievement is the affirmation of his individuality, the
-distinction in outward and tangible shape of the Mine from the Thine:
-the creation of property, and the projection of himself in a world of
-mutually-recognised personalities. As the individual soul in the inner
-life, so the personal being with its property is the solid, insoluble
-basis of the life in public&mdash;the field of social ethics. The same
-instinct, which in its dread of dissolution clings to the perpetuity
-of the inner nucleus of soul, upholds the other as containing the
-stable and eternal security of all social well-being. The immortality
-of soul in the inner world: the sacro-sanctity of property in the
-outer. But if these postulates are to be permitted, if individuality
-and personality are to abide, they must, in the one case as in the
-other, bow to the law of development, the law of history and of life.
-They must correct themselves, re-adjust themselves,&mdash;include what they
-excluded, and re-combine their elements, transmute themselves into
-what we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span> have, after Hegel, called their <i>truth</i>: must redintegrate
-themselves with suppressed correlatives, and carry out their
-implications of larger unity. The soul, exclusive and fast-clad in
-its mere organic vestment, in which it is as yet only the name and
-form of intellectual life, has first of all to retract itself into
-the bare abstract consciousness, or mere self, on which the masses
-of reality stream, to fill its vacant rooms and empty forms up with
-ideas. So too the person&mdash;that close concretion or coalescence of mind
-with material&mdash;that identification of self with its 'clothes,' its
-property and all it can vulgarly be said to <i>own,</i> is only an aspect
-of truth which tends to be over-estimated when it is reflected upon,
-and must notwithstanding be over-ridden and merged. Withdrawing itself
-from its clothing of earth and water, and even perhaps from its inner
-mansion of flesh and bone, personality floats in the free air as the
-impersonal personality of conscience,&mdash;the ethereal realm where pure
-practical reason rules. In that ether where morals reign absolutely is
-the home of the categorical imperative, of the Stoical law of duty,
-of the conscience which, here at least, has might as it has right. It
-too, like its parallel, consciousness, in the inner mental life, has,
-or seems to have, all its fulfilment from without. As even Kant admits,
-it is itself a vacant form; yet a form of such influence as to impress
-on whatever comes within its range an obligation to be universal and to
-be uniform. Here too, as in the parallel stage, it was of inestimable
-importance that mind should, in the socio-ethical sphere, see itself
-supreme in its innermost dignity and personality,&mdash;the personality
-which lies within,&mdash;even though that supremacy were at first no better
-than as a law, a form, a category, recognised as authoritative and
-imperative. For conscience, like the field of consciousness, is after<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>
-all only a quasi-passive self&mdash;a remarkable property or endowment,
-a sort of innate principle or idea by which the mind was seen to be
-distinguished in a unique way from all things else. To realise once
-for all the fact that consciousness and conscience form an absolute
-tribunal from which there can be no appeal: that the 'synthetic unity
-of apperception' in the theoretical, and the 'autonomy of the rational
-will' in the practical sphere, are the ultimate and final <i>a priori</i>:
-this is a great thing to do,&mdash;even though it only expands and defines
-the Cartesian principle of clear and distinct ideas, and will remain as
-Kant's title of honour in the history of philosophy. He thus fenced off
-or consecrated the sanctuary of the mental and moral life.</p>
-
-<p>But it was not enough to set apart the sacred principle, the central
-hearth-fire of truth and goodness. If at an earlier stage,&mdash;earlier,
-i.e. in this logical analysis,&mdash;the formal was wholly sunk in the
-material, if i. e. the mere series of legal formulae in their hard
-and brittle outlines were absolutely identified&mdash;without doubt or
-hesitation&mdash;with the morally and socially good; the formal side, or
-mere spirit and will of good, the abstract principle of morality,
-is now invested with an equally undue prominence. The actual or
-concrete ethical community&mdash;be it family or state, or other social
-organisation&mdash;is animated and maintained by a spirit which transcends
-and includes alike the outward shell of civil law and the inward law
-of conscience. For, curiously enough, as it may seem at first, both
-conscience and civil legislation assume the form of imperative and
-definite commands&mdash;laws political or civil, and laws moral. Both fall
-therefore into an inflexibility, a rigorous and mechanical hardness in
-their enouncements. Both worship the lord of what men call logic, i.
-e. of formal consistency and formal uniformity, to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span> an excess which
-sometimes issues in fantastic irregularities. Their several maxims of
-legal conformity and of duty for duty's sake are in first appearance
-excellent: but a further reflection shows that the Law covers a good
-many inconsistent or at least unrelated laws within its code, and Duty
-is often sadly to seek in presence of the collisions between what offer
-themselves as <i>prima facie</i> duties in any given case. The amplest code
-of laws that ever existed will always leave lots of loop-holes for
-negligence and villainy, and would never work for an instant, were it
-not for ever supplemented by the spirit of faith and love, by social
-piety and political loyalty, by the thousand ties of sentiment and
-feeling which really vivify its dry bones. So too the abstractions
-of the conscientious imperative, of the law of duty, of the moral
-tribunal, of the man within the breast, and of the dignity and beauty
-of human nature, would effect nothing unless they could always tacitly
-count on the support of recognised and authoritative social law and
-usage. Outward rests upon inward; and rules direct feelings.</p>
-
-<p>Here, again, as in the purely intellectual or cognitive sphere, it
-is evident that the spirit of man has its source of life neither in
-its abstract self-hood (in consciousness and conscience) nor in its
-mere natural environment and organic endowment (in sense-affections,
-and social law and usage), but in the unity of both,&mdash;a unity which
-transcends either. Both individual and society live and grow, because
-they are continuous and one: because they presuppose an ideal unity
-or a living Idea at the root of their being, as their inner and
-essential guiding-principle, at once constitutive and regulative of
-their action. The machinery of language supplies to the intellectual
-sphere a sort of sensible meeting-ground and common field in which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>
-the development of knowledge becomes possible: and the same purpose
-is subserved in the social sphere by the machinery of ethical and
-political forms and institutions. These are the field, the home of
-freedom, as the other are of knowledge. It is in these collective and
-objective structures that we get the expression of the law of human
-development: the visible sign, viz. of the essentially universal nature
-of the individual. The individual in these attains his relative truth:
-for they show the weakness of the individuality of the mere individual.
-They show that his exclusiveness, his quasi-originality, is only an
-appearance:&mdash;confronted, no doubt, by an appearance of an opposite
-character, as if the originality and the reality lay in the environment
-and the collective body. They point therefore beyond and behind both
-foci to a common centre or inclusive unity of life.</p>
-
-<p>But they do not destroy personality and individuality: they only
-transform it and made it a more adequate and consistent representation
-of reality, by giving in it a place to factors or 'moments' which,
-though always effective, were not recognised as constitutive elements,
-and treated only as externally interfering agencies. It may be a
-question, of course, how far it is wise to retain the term after
-its meaning has thus been altered by expansion and redistribution
-of elements. On the whole it seems impracticable&mdash;and it would be
-undesirable, perhaps, even if it were more feasible&mdash;to be too hard
-and fast in our use of denotations. It is hardly the province of
-philosophy to coin new terms in which to deposit the results of her
-researches. A term no doubt&mdash;particularly if, as the phrase runs, it be
-luckily discovered, or judiciously selected&mdash;may save the expenditure
-of thought. But it is hardly the business of philosophy to encourage
-economy in this direction.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span> Much more is it the perpetual task of
-philosophy to counteract the ossification that sets in in terms,&mdash;to
-reinterpret the meaning which is absorbed in these 'counters of
-thought,' and make them once more sterling money for the market of
-life. What, for instance, is the work of Aristotle's Ethics, but to
-set free the genii which the black magic of every-day intercourse has
-incarcerated in the non-significant Greek term Εὐδαιμονία? Like our own
-Happiness, it flits from lip to lip, little better than a mere name,
-which is still prized, but&mdash;except for a few synonyms that are equally
-vague with itself&mdash;is attached to things which a little reflection
-shows it cannot truly denote. Aristotle seeks&mdash;we may say&mdash;to define
-it. But the phrase 'definition' seems barely applicable to the complex
-process thus implied,&mdash;a process of which definition, as ordinarily
-understood, is only one small portion. For to define happiness, is to
-reconstruct the conception. Or, to be more accurate, it is really to
-construct it or reproduce in consciousness its construction. As it
-stands, the thing to be defined is a name and a thing, of which certain
-relations to other things soon begin to show themselves, which is more
-or less similar to one thing, and more or less to be distinguished from
-another. To mark it off from these co-terminous things, and to show how
-they are related to it on different sides,&mdash;this would be what we may
-perhaps call strict, or formal, or nominal, or <i>mere</i> definition.</p>
-
-<p>Now whatever be the other uses of such definitions&mdash;and they are
-serviceable at the outgoing in any branch of enquiry,&mdash;they are
-not precisely the work we expect a philosopher to do for us. And
-assuredly it is not Aristotle who would stop short at that sort of
-definitions. We find accordingly that for the purpose of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span> realising
-what happiness&mdash;the common name for human good&mdash;means, he is obliged
-to bring into the field the whole system of his thought in its
-cardinal notions of Energy, Soul, &amp;c. Aristotle here as elsewhere
-retraces the path of thought which carries us from mere, vulgar,
-inadequately-apprehended happiness (he follows the same process in his
-treatment of pleasure, friendship &amp;c.&mdash;to take only ethical examples)
-to true, essential and completely-apprehended happiness,&mdash;or, to use
-Hegel's technical phrases, from happiness as it is <i>an-sich</i> (in or
-at itself) or as it is <i>für-sich</i> (for or to itself), to happiness as
-it is <i>an-und-für-sich.</i> In so 'defining' happiness Aristotle is thus
-obliged to bring in his conceptions of man and of society, of human
-life and its powers, of natural and acquired faculty, of mind in its
-relations to nature; and if not to expound, at least to employ, his
-fundamental categories of philosophical thought. Such a machinery can
-hardly be called less than a construction, i. e. a re-construction by
-conscious effort of the latent but actual concatenation of the elements
-in the fact.</p>
-
-<p>In this case we traverse the distance which separates mere happiness
-from true happiness, from happiness imperfectly or abstractly conceived
-to happiness adequately and concretely conceived. Of course when we say
-real or true happiness, we use these terms as they are used within the
-ordinary range of human speech. An ultimate and absolute in truth and
-reality is for us at any given time only a comparatively or relatively
-ultimate and absolute. It is that which, so far as we can see and
-think (all philosophising presumably goes on under this stipulation,
-tacit or express), gives an expression, an interpretation, a meaning
-and a construction to reality which leaves no feature unrecognised, no
-contradiction unsolved, no discord<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span> unreconciled, which leaves nothing
-outside and alien to it, and suppresses without acknowledgment nothing
-that has ever been recognised within it. It is, if you like so to
-call it, the completest, or (if you are really in earnest with your
-philosophising and have carried it on to what for you is the end) the
-complete formula of the Absolute&mdash;of that which in a transcendent sense
-<i>is,</i> is <i>all,</i> is the infinite and eternal <i>one.</i> Yet, after all, it
-is a formula. But here that undying adversary of all thought steps
-in and says A <i>mere</i> formula. And to that we must here as elsewhere
-rejoin: No, not a mere formula. A mere formula would be not even a
-formula,&mdash;a formula only in name&mdash;and with no reality which it served
-to formulate. It is a real and true formula, if it be a formula at all,
-and not something which merely swaggers about under that title. Nay
-more, if it be a true and real formula, it is the truth and the reality
-in its day and generation, until at least a truer truth and a more real
-reality shall have been discovered. Let us by all means be modest: but
-there is a false humility which becomes no man and is the guise of
-hypocrisy or insincere sincerity. Let us&mdash;in other words&mdash;never assume
-that 'we are the men, and that wisdom will die with us': but equally
-let us hold fast the faith of reason that what we know as true and
-real can never be false, i. e. utterly false, however much it may turn
-out one day to be surmounted. And, on the other hand, let us equally
-remember that in the mere and abstract commencement&mdash;the unreal and
-the untrue, as we must perforce style it by contrast with the (<i>pro
-tempore</i>) truth and reality&mdash;there is no utter and sheer error or
-unreality. It has always been felt to be one of the most loveable sides
-of Aristotelianism&mdash;this recognition of the reasonableness of all
-actual fact, or of the truth latent in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span> the honest, though narrow and
-ill-defined judgments of the mass.</p>
-
-<p>Thus, coming back to personality, let us admit that the <i>mere</i>
-personality which at first sight seemed only worth rejecting, is
-an element, at least, in true personality,&mdash;or is a part which,
-because an organic member and no mere mechanical part, is full of
-traces and indications which involve and postulate the whole. The
-true personality and the true individuality of being is something
-which presupposes for its completeness the social state&mdash;the organic
-community. It is no doubt familiar to us that, according to an old
-but never quite dormant view, the collective community is but the
-aggregate or congeries of individuals. But the individuals whose
-aggregation makes the community are themselves products of the social
-union. Complete, all-round, harmonious personality, it is sometimes
-said, is the highest fruit to be yielded by social development. Or,
-as the last century would have preferred to put it, the main or sole
-aim of the State is furtherance towards Humanity&mdash;to the stature of
-the perfect man. And these are true sayings,&mdash;but perhaps only half
-true. If all must grow so that one and each may grow, so and not less
-must each one grow so that the all&mdash;the commonwealth of reason and
-the kingdom of God&mdash;may be more and more present, 'may come.' And
-that kingdom only comes when All is in Each, and Each is in All: and
-when, without loss or diminution, each is each and all is all. Then
-and not till then does personality become true and infinite, free and
-harmonious individuality, which is in the same instant universality.
-The monad&mdash;to use the language of the great Idealist who did not find
-individuality at all incompatible with universality&mdash;never ceases to
-be a monad: it is eternal and indestructible, an absolute centre of
-being. The monad<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span> in its individual measure 'expresses' or 'envelops'
-the Infinite or Absolute: it is, i. e. under a subjective limitation,
-identical with the absolute, a concentration or condensation of it
-into an impenetrable, i. e. literally an individual, point,&mdash;but a
-point which is in the psychical or intellectual world never entirely
-<i>carens recordatione,</i> or oblivious of its essential totality. But if
-the monad 'expresses' the Absolute, it no less concords or sympathises
-in harmonious development with all its congeners, the other monads: so
-that while it neither interferes with them, nor suffers violence from
-them, it yet exists and acts in an ideal identity, that is, in a real
-fellowship, with them. Again, the monad has what may be called its
-side of passivity, but passivity here does not mean <i>mere</i> passivity,
-but rather the essential limitation due to its special and peculiar
-stand-point&mdash;a limitation which in the higher orders of being becomes
-transparent or is transcended. How far Leibniz succeeds in reconciling
-this apparent contradiction&mdash;how far even any one can reveal the mystic
-indwelling of universal and individual in each other, this is a serious
-question in its place: but it is only bare justice to Leibniz to say
-that he at least never failed to emphasise both aspects of reality,
-and that if one 'moment' is predominant and fundamental in his work it
-is not the monad, but the Monad of Monads. If necessity be the right
-word to express the relation of the Universal Law to the individual
-being and to affirm that the individual is not a loose self-supporting
-unit (and Leibniz, far from thinking so, always uses in its stead the
-phrase <i>inclinat, non necessitat</i><a name="FNanchor_9_135" id="FNanchor_9_135"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_135" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>, to emphasise the immanence of
-law, or the autonomy of every completed being), then Leibniz is not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>
-less, but more necessitarian than Spinoza. His difference from Spinoza,
-in fact, lies mainly, if not solely, in his clearer recognition of
-the transcendence, no less than the immanence, of the Absolute, which
-Spinoza has somewhat veiled under the apparent insignificance of the
-difference between <i>natura naturans</i> and <i>natura naturata.</i> Yet the
-Monad of Monads is no supra-mundane, or <i>merely</i> transcendent God.</p>
-
-<p>But if we further ask whether such personality is attainable in the
-world of experience and describable in terms of thought&mdash;whether there
-be any actual and visible agent possessed of this true personality,
-as we have agreed to call it, we are in face with a higher stage of
-the problem of personality. And that question in other words brings
-us back to where we began. A true and real personality, a complete
-individuality is something which so transmutes all that we are most
-accustomed to call by that name that it is hardly any use clinging to
-it, unless to protest against the danger of mistaking such expansion
-and transmutation to be only a blank negation. Yet to cling to it too
-much involves a danger for the true recognition of that transcendent's
-universality. All human personality, all natural individuality is, as
-Lotze has eloquently pointed out<a name="FNanchor_10_136" id="FNanchor_10_136"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_136" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>, something which falls far short
-of what it professes to be. But in the general failure to unite the
-universal with the particular, or the fact with the idea, there are
-degrees; and we can at least affirm so much as this that the truest
-individuality and the most real personality is not that which is least
-permeated by thought, but that in which thought has had the largest
-share. Individuality is something more than a mere sum of general
-qualities;&mdash;that is certainly the fact; but it is not less the fact,
-that for us an individuality and personality is more perfect<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span> and true
-in proportion as more general function and universal character coalesce
-into harmony and power in it. Assert then the initial presence and
-virtue of individuality and personality in the human soul: but remember
-that it has this virtue, not for what it is, but for what it promises
-and may reasonably be expected to be, and that, to realise the promise,
-it has to behave inclusively, rather than exclusively, gather up into
-itself and make its own all content, rather than set itself up in
-reserve and isolation.</p>
-
-<p>We have seen that the social organisation, animated as it is by the
-moral idea, is rather the arena on which the true union of mind and
-matter, of idea and nature, of thought and fact may be worked for, than
-itself the fruition of such an effort. All-important is the State;
-all-important the ethical idea which pervades it. But the world of
-freedom&mdash;the ideal world so far made actual&mdash;is not what it promised
-to be. 'Is it not,' said Plato, 'the nature of things that the actual
-should always lack the perfection of theory?' In the visible world the
-State, indeed, rules supreme: 'it is,' as Hegel might say in the words
-of his great predecessor in political theory, 'that Leviathan or mortal
-God to whom under the immortal God we owe our welfare and safety.' But
-there is something in the State which the State in its palpable reality
-cannot adequately express. If it is highest in the hierarchy of this
-world, the lowest in the ideal kingdom of the Absolute is higher than
-it. Above the State as the embodiment and the guarantee of the moral
-life, there is the realm of Art, Religion, and Philosophy. In them
-man's craving for individuality and personality finds a satisfaction it
-could never hope for below them: they at least restore the truth and
-reality of man's life and of the universe in a measure far exceeding
-what even morality could do.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span> If we ask then what Art, Religion, and
-Science have to show of Personality or true realised individuality,
-the answer is briefly as follows. Had it not been that august names
-have spoken of imitation as the essence of Art-work, we should hardly
-have deemed it possible that men should speak of Realistic Art. Yet
-here, as in Religion and in Science, the epithet is introduced to guard
-against a misconception of the province of Idealism. All Art, all
-Religion, all Science, are and must be idealistic: but they can never
-be&mdash;as the familiar phrase puts it&mdash;merely idealistic, i. e. visionary,
-fantastic, unreal. All of them, in other words, may be said to show
-us 'the light that never was on sea or land'&mdash;the heavenly city&mdash;the
-eternal truth of things. But they must, on their peril, show it here
-and now, and not in a pretended or other world. They must&mdash;no less than
-law and morality&mdash;work in terrestrial materials, and not with superfine
-celestialities. <i>Mentem mortalia tangunt.</i> It is out of the oldest and
-commonest realities of life and death that the poet and the painter
-make the melodies of heaven sound in our ears, and gladden us with
-the rays of the empyrean. It is out of the hard rock of the real that
-the artist's rod must strike the well-spring of the ideal. So too, in
-like manner, a religion must show the Divine, but show Him immanent:
-an immanence which, on one hand, shall not drag Godhead down to the
-level of casual reality, nor on the other set Him far off in lonely
-transcendence.</p>
-
-<p>The aesthetic faculty, awakened as it is by the natural response of
-man's perceptions to the harmonies of existence, to the spontaneous
-coherency of its many parts in a united whole, and stimulated by the
-creative work of human art, which moulds even the naturally discordant
-or unconnected into a concordant expression (sometimes it may be,
-as in handicraft, only to satisfy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span> human needs), lifts us above the
-imperfections and fragmentariness of things, above our selfish interest
-in them, into a frame of mind where they are seen whole and perfect,
-and yet one and veritably individual. In its supreme or comprehensive
-phase it does not deal merely with the beautiful, nor merely with
-the beautiful and sublime. All true art, whether it awakes awe or
-admiration, laughter or tears, whether it melts the soul, or steels it
-to endurance, has a common characteristic; and that is to raise the
-single instance, the prosaic or commonplace fact, into its universal,
-eternal, infinite significance. It frees the fact from the limitations
-which our distractions, our practicality, our temporary hopes and
-fears, have deeply stamped upon it. It is still, after art has dealt
-with it, to all appearance a single fact: but it now has the universe
-behind it and within it. It carries us away from the incompleteness,
-the pressure of externals, the solicitude for the future and the
-regrets for the past, into a self-contained, self-satisfying totality,
-into freedom and leisure, rest which is not stolid, and action which
-involves no toil. Such a result is partly, as was said, the gift
-of common nature, which speaks peace, comfort, joy, self-possessed
-fruition for all her children when their sense is open and free: partly
-it comes through those select ones among these children who have a
-larger perception of the meaning and inner truth of her works, and who
-can by a sensible reconstruction, which if it is fair and successful
-will only bring out more clearly the unity and harmony which deeper
-insight detects, help others to see and enjoy what they have felt and
-rejoiced over. Such are the poets&mdash;in the widest sense&mdash;the makers, the
-seers, who in verse, in music, in picture and sculpture&mdash;who, in human
-lives, it may be even in the conduct of their own, show us how divine a
-thing is nature and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span> humanity: show us the secret and unheard harmonies
-that to the full-opened ear absorb and transmute the lower discords of
-life and vulgar reality. It is they who give immortality and divinity,
-who make heroes and demigods<a name="FNanchor_11_137" id="FNanchor_11_137"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_137" class="fnanchor">[11]</a>. Or, if they may not be said to make
-them, they half-reveal and half-construct the ideal figures which stand
-high and beneficent in the history of the world. And by those who
-thus half-construct, and half-reveal, are meant not merely the single
-artists in whom the process culminates to final outline and publicity,
-but the many-voiced poesy of the collective human heart which out of
-its myriad elemental springs constitutes the total figure, the august
-image of the hero, and the saint, lending him from its plenitude all
-that his abstract self seemed to want. It is on the tide of national
-and human enthusiasm that the individual artist is lifted up to realise
-the full significance of his ideal figure, and his imaginative craft
-can only be inspired by the vigour and warmth of the collective passion
-for noble ends and high action.</p>
-
-<p>Nowhere it would seem is the ideal of personality and many-sided
-individuality more adequately realised. Here, at last, the whole truth
-of life, the indwelling of individual and universal in one body, seems
-to be realised. But it is realised in an ideal. It is&mdash;if we analyse
-it&mdash;a synthesis of three elements; partly in the material reality which
-serves as bodily vehicle; partly in the conception and technique of the
-artist; partly in the general mind which inspires both the material
-and the form with its own larger life. It is&mdash;as its name implies&mdash;an
-artificial product&mdash;a synthesis of elements which tend to fall apart.
-Technique varies, conceptions lose their interest, the tone of general
-culture alters,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span> and materials are dependent on locality. When that
-happens, the work of art is left high and dry: no longer a living
-God, but a dead idol, still wondrous, but speaking no more its human
-language.</p>
-
-<p>So it is with the heroic figures who rise into the purer air of
-universal history. They also&mdash;so far as they live with a personal
-power&mdash;are works of art: works of real-idealism. For all history which
-deserves the name, and is not mere abstract dry-as-dust chronicle (as
-to the possibility of which utter aridity there may be legitimate
-doubts), is a work of fiction or invention, of reconstruction. It
-seeks to understand its characters. But to understand them it is not
-(and as historical art cannot be) content with a mere reference to
-motives acting on them from outside. It seeks to understand them with
-and in their times&mdash;to see in them the full measure of contemporary
-life and thought which elsewhere has found so meagre expression. Such
-is the artistic completion of personality in the ideal,&mdash;whether in
-what is called history, or what is called art. It exaggerates a truth,
-because it loses sight of the background. And that background, which
-helps to constitute such ideal personality, is no constant element.
-The centuries and generations as they roll contribute their varying
-quota to set, as they say, the historical character in its true light,
-in its fulness and truth of reality. And thus this personality of
-the great leaders of human life is only an image and a sign&mdash;a fruit
-of development, no bare fact which remains unchanged and always the
-same. It is rather a personification than a personality. It incarnates
-the living spirit who is universal and eternal in the limits of a
-sensuously-defined individual, and indeed incarnates there only so much
-as the generation it speaks to can see of complete truth. It is only
-after all a vehicle of truth; though<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span> a nobler vehicle than social and
-personal ethics can afford.</p>
-
-<p>As it is felt that the treasure of the idea&mdash;that the full power of
-spiritual life&mdash;cannot be adequately stored in the earthen vessels
-of mortality, the consummation of personality is forced to recede
-into the invisible if it would be still conceived as attainable.
-'True personality,' says Lotze, 'is with the Infinite,' What here is
-fragmentary, is there a rounded total, a perfect unity: He alone is
-absolutely self-determining, self-explaining: is all that He means to
-be, and means all that He is. In a sense, philosophy does not hesitate
-to countersign all this. But, in adopting it, philosophy must reserve
-the right of noting the danger and the ambiguity of such language.
-Religion does well, philosophy may say, in thus insisting upon the
-dependence of all appearance on one Absolute reality; but it is well
-also not to forget that all appearance is also the appearance of that
-reality or Absolute. And in so saying, be it added, philosophy assumes
-no essential superiority to religion. Religion in its fulness, and
-apart from any theories that may grow up under its wing, is more than
-theory, more than mere philosophy: it is the consummating unity of
-life&mdash;the enthusiasm and supreme power of life, its consecration and
-divinisation by its assured immanence in the eternal and universal.
-It is, in short, as was long ago said of it, the true life, the light
-which is the light and life of men; and its inspiring principles are
-faith, hope, and love. But when unassisted religion proceeds to set
-before itself the meaning and lesson of its life, when it proceeds to
-formulate a theory of the world and set out a scheme of world-history,
-it trespasses on the field of knowledge, and is amenable to the
-criticisms of the reflective spirit&mdash;the spirit of philosophy. And
-that criticism briefly is to the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span> effect that the religious theory
-in its ordinary form is an imperfect interpretation of the religious
-experience. Nor is this to derogate from the prerogative of the friends
-of God. It is only to criticise the formulae and phrases of dogmatic
-theology&mdash;a theology, however, which is as old as religion itself,
-and which takes different forms from age to age, and from one level
-of thought to another, always in its measure translating religious
-reality, truth, or experience into the categories, naive or artificial,
-simple or complex, of the science (it may be the pseudo-science) of
-the time. Philosophy, therefore, is the criticism of the science of
-God&mdash;that is of theology&mdash;as it is the criticism of other sciences.
-For criticism philosophy always is: always the reflection upon fixed
-dogma, and the discussion of it till it becomes sensible of its
-defects, and stands upon another and higher plane. And to some it may
-seem that this is the sole function which philosophy can legitimately
-undertake. 'Yet,' as Aristotle remarked, 'the good critic must know
-what he criticises.' He must not merely reflect upon it from outside,
-but deal with it from the plenitude of experience, from the abundance
-of the heart. If he be a critic then, he cannot be a mere critic, but
-also an agent in the work of reconstruction. Or, if we put the thing
-otherwise; though, as Fichte said (p. 28), philosophy is a different
-thing from life, the true philosopher can never be a mere philosopher,
-but must, if he is to reach the height of his vocation, have also
-entered into the full experience of reality, into the whole truth of
-life. His philosophy will then not be outside of religion and aesthetic
-perception. In its comprehension of all grades and forms of reality and
-truth, goodness, holiness, beauty, will have their place. He also will
-be among the theologians.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>And when the philosopher deals with personality in this high, this
-supreme sphere, he will submit that the truth of personality is
-subordinate to the truth of spirituality. He will argue that by
-sticking too closely and fixedly to personality we are running a risk
-of bringing down the divine to the level of the human. If, with Dante,
-he can say that in its very heart the Light Eternal</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-'Mi parve pinta della nostra effige;'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>he will undoubtedly add with Dante</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-'Oh quanto è corto 'l dire e come fioco<br />
-<span style="margin-left: 2.5em;">Al mio concetto;'</span><br />
-</p>
-
-<p>or, with the first philosophical theologian who interpreted the
-experience of Christian life, he will rise from the historical Jesus to
-the inward witness of the Spirit.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_127" id="Footnote_1_127"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_127"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> The legal use of the distinction between 'real' and
-'personal' is only partly 'logical,' and largely retains traces of
-the larger logic of life and history. Yet, roughly speaking, personal
-property is what we can, so to speak, carry on our backs or in our
-pockets.</p></div>
-
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_128" id="Footnote_2_128"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_128"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> See Spinoza, <i>Cogitata Metaph</i>., Pars II. cap. 8: 'Nec
-fugit nos vocabulum (<i>Personalitatis</i> scilicet) quod theologi passim
-usurpant ad rem explicandam: verum quamvis vocabulum non ignoremus
-eius tamen significationem ignoramus: quamvis constanter credamus, in
-visione Dei beatissima Deum hoc suis revelaturum.' For Hegel, it may be
-noted, Person, so far as he uses the term at all, bears its restricted
-legal and juridical sense. A person is a free intelligence, which
-realises that independence by appropriating an external thing as its
-sign and property. It probably belongs therefore to a world in which
-people count rather by what they <i>have</i> than by what they <i>are</i>; the
-world of law where rights and duties tend to oppose each other. This is
-not the highest kind of world for human beings.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_129" id="Footnote_3_129"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_129"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> This one may call the Platonic ideal of the State, where
-Equity rules supreme in the incarnate spirit of wisdom,&mdash;a guide
-adapting its measures to circumstances, not tied down to the inflexible
-letter of one law in an incoherent and imperfect code. See the
-<i>Politicus</i>, p. 294; <i>Phaedrus,</i> p. 275; and compare Aristotle's Wise
-man whose conduct is not κατὰ λόγον but μετὰ λόγου.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_130" id="Footnote_4_130"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_130"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> See e. g. <i>Encyclopaedia</i>, § 475.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_131" id="Footnote_5_131"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_131"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> See his 'Dreams of a Spirit-seer, illustrated by Dreams of
-Metaphysics.' (<i>Werke,</i> ed. Ros. und Schub. Bd. VII. p. 38 sqq.)</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_132" id="Footnote_6_132"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_132"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> It is perilous and misleading (said the ancient Graiae,
-who dwell on the way to the Hesperides of philosophy) to interpret an
-old system by the language of modern (and especially German) idealism.
-It is much worse, replied Perseus, not to interpret it at all, but to
-repeat its magic <i>ipsissima verba</i>,&mdash;carefully Latinised, as if they
-belonged to a cabinet of fossils.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_133" id="Footnote_7_133"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_133"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> <i>Encyclopaedia</i>, §§ 387, 389.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_8_134" id="Footnote_8_134"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_134"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> The above is an attempt to give a very condensed synopsis
-of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (<i>Encyclopaedia</i>).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_9_135" id="Footnote_9_135"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_135"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> See especially in the <i>Theodicee,</i> part I. § 43 seqq. Cf.
-Nouv. Ess. II. § 9, <i>incline sans necessiter:</i> I. § 13, <i>La nécessité
-ne doit pas être confondue avec la détermination.</i></p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_10_136" id="Footnote_10_136"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_136"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <i>Microcosmus</i>, Book IX. chap. 4.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_11_137" id="Footnote_11_137"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_137"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> See the well-known passage in <i>Wilhelm Meisters
-Lehrjahre</i><i>,</i> Book II. chap. a.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XIX.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>GENESIS IN MENTAL LIFE.</h4>
-
-
-<p>Aristotle, who saw into the nature of abstract entities, remarked that
-the mind was nothing before it exercised itself<a name="FNanchor_1_138" id="FNanchor_1_138"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_138" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>. The mind,&mdash;and
-the same will turn out true of many things else where it is at first
-unsurmised,&mdash;is not a fixed thing, a sort of exceedingly refined
-substance, which we can lay hold of without further trouble. It is what
-it has become, or what it makes itself to be. This point, that 'To be'
-= 'To have become,' or rather to have made itself, is an axiom never
-to be lost sight of in dealing with the mind. It is easy to talk of
-and about conscience and freewill, as if these were existing things
-in a sort of mental space, as hard to miss or mistake as a stone and
-an orange, or as if they were palpable organs of mind, as separately
-observable as the eye or ear. One asks if the will is free or not, as
-glibly as one might ask whether an orange is sweet; and the answer can
-be given with equal ease, affirmatively or negatively, in both cases.
-Everything in these cases depends on whether the will has made itself
-free or not, whether indeed we are speaking of the will at all, and
-on what we mean by freedom. To ask the question in an abstract way,
-taking no account of circumstances, is one of those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span> temptations which
-lead the intellect astray and produce only confusion and wordy war&mdash;as
-a good deal of so-called popular metaphysics has done. The mind and
-its phenomena, as they are called, cannot be dissected with the same
-calmness of analysis as other substances which adapt themselves to the
-scalpel: nor is dissection after all more than a part of the scientific
-process, subject to the control of the synthesis in physiology.</p>
-
-<p>The ordinary metaphysician makes his own task easy and his thoughtful
-reader's a burden, by plunging too lightly <i>in medias res.</i> He wants
-patience&mdash;often, perhaps, because he thinks too much of his reader's
-impatience at analysis&mdash;to unravel the tangled mass which human
-experience, when first looked at, presents. He is apt to catch at any
-end which promises to effect a temporary clearance. True philosophy,
-on the contrary, must show that it has got hold of what it means to
-discuss: it has to construct its subject-matter: and it constructs it
-by tracing every step and movement in its construction shown in actual
-history. The mind is what it has been made and has made itself; and
-to see what it is we must consider it not as an Alpha and Omega of
-research, as popular conception and language tend to represent it,
-but in the stages constituting its process, in the fluidity of its
-development, in the elements out of which it results. We must penetrate
-the apparent fixity and simplicity under which it comes forward,
-and see through it into the process which bears it into being. For,
-otherwise, the object of our investigation is taken, as if it were
-the most unmistakable thing of sense and fancy,&mdash;as if everybody were
-agreed that this and no other were the point in question.</p>
-
-<p>But in this matter of stability and the reverse, there<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span> is a broad
-distinction between the natural and the spiritual world. In Nature
-every step in the organisation, by which the Cosmos is developed,
-has an independent existence of its own: and the lowest formation
-confronts the highest, each standing by itself beside the other.
-Matter and motion, for example, are not merely found as subordinate
-elements entering into the making of a plant or an animal. They have
-a free existence of their own: and the free existence of matter in
-motion is seen in the shape of the planetary system. So, too, chemical
-or electrical phenomena can be observed by themselves, operating in
-spheres where they are untrammeled by the influence of biological
-conditions. It seems, at least at first sight, to be different in
-the case of mind. There the specific types or several stages in the
-integrating process of mental development seem to have no substantive
-existence in the earlier part of the range, and to appear only as
-states or factors entering into, and merged in, the higher grades
-of development. This causes a peculiar difficulty in the study of
-mind. We cannot seize a formation in an independent shape of its
-own: we must trace it in the growth of the whole. Mental fusion and
-coalescence of elements is peculiarly close, and hardly leaves any
-traces of its constituent factors<a name="FNanchor_2_139" id="FNanchor_2_139"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_139" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span> Sensation, for instance, in its
-purity, as mere sensation, is apparently something which we can never
-study in isolation. All the sensation which we can, in the strictly
-psychological (as opposed to the physiological) mode of study, examine,
-i. e. which we can reproduce in ourselves, is more than mere sensation:
-it includes elements of thought, and probably of desire and will.
-This, of course, makes the difficulties of so-called introspection:
-difficulties so great and real that they have provoked in natural
-reaction a set against introspection altogether, and the adoption of
-the external observation (physiological or so-called psycho-physical)
-employed in the 'objective' sciences. And hence when we accept the
-name, such as intellect, conscience, will, &amp;c., as if it expressed
-something specially existent in a detached shape of its own, we make
-an assumption which it is impossible to justify. We are reckoning
-with paper-money which belongs to no recognised currency, and may be
-stamped as the dealer wills. The consequence is that the thing with
-which we begin our examination is an opaque point,&mdash;a mere <i>terminus a
-quo</i>, from which we start on our journey of explication, leaving the
-<i>terminus</i> itself behind us unexplained.</p>
-
-<p>The constituents of mind do not lie side by side tranquilly
-co-existent, like the sheep beside the herbage on which it browses.
-Their existence is maintained in an inward movement, by which, while
-they differentiate themselves, they still keep up an identity. In
-our investigations we cannot begin with what is to be defined. The
-botanist, if he is to give us a science of the plant, must begin with
-something whose indwelling aim it is to be itself and to realise its
-own possibility.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span> He must begin with what is not the plant, and end
-with what is; begin, let us say, with the germ which has the tendency
-to pass into the plant. The speculative science of biology begins with
-a cell, and builds these cells up into the tissues and structures out
-of which vegetables and animals are constituted. The object of the
-science appears as the result of the scientific process: or, <i>a science
-is the ideal construction of its object</i>. As in these cases, so in the
-case of thought. We must see it grow up from its simplest element, from
-the bare point of being, the mere speck of being which, if actually no
-better than nothing, is yet a germ which in the air of thought will
-grow and spread; and see it appear as a result due to the ingrowing and
-outgrowing union of many elements, none of which satisfies by itself,
-but leads onward from abstractions to the meeting of abstractions in
-what is more and more concrete. The will and conscience, understanding
-and reason, of man are not matter-of-fact units to be picked up and
-examined. You must, first of all, make sure what you have in hand: and
-to be sure of that is to see that the mind is the necessary outcome
-of a course of development. The mind is not an immediate <i>datum,</i>
-with nothing behind it, coming upon the field of mental vision with
-a divinely-bestowed array of faculties; but a mediated unity, i. e.
-a unity which has grown up through a complex interaction of forces,
-and which lives in differences through comprehending and reconciling
-antagonisms.</p>
-
-<p>If the mind be not thus exhibited in its process, in the sum and
-context of its relations, we may mean what we like with each mental
-object that comes under our observation: but with as much right another
-observer may mean something else. We may, of course, define as we
-please: we may build up successive definitions into a consistent total:
-but such a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span> successful arrangement is not a real science. Unless we
-show how this special form of mind is constituted, we are dealing with
-abstractions, with names which we may analyse, but which remain as they
-were when <i>our</i> analysis is over, and which seem like unsubstantial
-ghosts defying our coarse engines of dissection. They are not
-destroyed: like immaterial and aery beings they elude the sword which
-smites them, and part but to re-unite. The name, and the conception
-bodied forth in it, is indeed stagnant, and will to all appearance
-become the ready prey of analysis: but there is something behind
-this materialised and solidified conception, this worn-out counter
-or sign, which mere analysis cannot even reach. And that underlying
-nature is a process or movement, a meeting of elements, which it is
-the business of philosophy to unfold. The analyst in this case has
-dealt with ideas as if they were a finer sort of material product, a
-fixed and assailable point: and this is perhaps the character of the
-generalised images, which take the place of thoughts in our customary
-habits of mind. But ideas, when they have real force and life, are
-not hard and solid, but, as it were, fluid and transparent, and can
-easily escape the divisions and lines which the analytical intellect
-would impose. Perhaps some may think that it is unwise to fight with
-ghosts like these, and that the best plan would be to disregard this
-war of words altogether. But, on the other hand, it may be urged that
-such unsubstantial forms have a decided reality in life: that men will
-talk of them and conjure by their means, with or without intelligence;
-and that the best course is to understand them. It will then be seen
-that it is our proper work as philosophers to watch the process, by
-which the spiritual unity divides and yet retains its divided members
-in unity.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span> Even in the first steps we take to get a real hold of an
-object we see this. To understand it, we must deprive it of its seeming
-independence. Every individual object is declared by the logician to
-be the meeting of two currents, the coincidence of two movements. It
-concentrates into an undecompounded unit,&mdash;at least such it appears to
-representative or material thought,&mdash;two elements, each of which it is
-in turn identifiable with. The one of these elements has been called
-the self-same (or identity), the universal, the genus, the whole: while
-the second is called the difference, the particular, the part. And by
-these two points of reference it is fixed,&mdash;by two points which are
-for the moment accepted as stationary. What has thus been stated in
-the technical language of Logic is often repeated in the scientific
-parlance of the day, but with more materialised conceptions and in
-more concrete cases. The dynamic theory of matter represents it as a
-unity of attraction and repulsion. A distinguished Darwinian remarks
-that 'all the various forms of organisms are the necessary products
-of the unconscious action and reaction between the two properties of
-adaptability and heredity, reducible as these are to the functions of
-nutrition and reproduction<a name="FNanchor_3_140" id="FNanchor_3_140"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_140" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>. The terms 'action and reaction' are
-hardly sufficient, it may be, to express the sort of unity which is
-called for: but the statement at least shows the reduction of an actual
-fact to the interaction of two forces, the meeting of two currents.
-The one of these is the power of the kind, or universal, which tends
-to keep things always the same: the other the power of localised
-circumstances and particular conditions, which tends to render things
-more and more diversified. The one may be called a centripetal, the
-other a centrifugal force. If the one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span> be synthetic, the other is
-analytic. But such names are of little value, save for temporary
-distinction, and must never be treated as permanent differences which
-explain themselves. The centre is relative, and so is the totality.</p>
-
-<p>Thus it is that the so-called Evolutionist explains the origin of
-natural kinds. They are what they severally are by reason of a process,
-a struggle, by alliances and divisions, by re-unions and selections.
-They are not independent of the inorganic world around them: it has
-entered into their blood and structure, and made them what they are.
-To understand them we must learn all we can of the simpler and earlier
-forms, which have left traces in their structure: traces which,
-without the existence of such more primitive forms, we might have
-misunderstood, or have passed by unperceived. And, again, we learn
-that our hard and fast distinctions are barely justified by Nature.
-There, kind in its extreme examples seems to run into kind, and we do
-not find the logically-exact type accurately embodied anywhere. Our
-classifications into genera and species turn out to be in the first
-instance prompted by a practical need to embrace the variety in a
-simple shape. But though perfectly valid, so far as we use them for
-such ends, they tend to lead us false, if we press them too far.</p>
-
-<p>And when we have seen so much, we may learn the further lesson that
-the variety of organisation, animal and vegetable, is only the
-exhibition in an endless detail by single pictures, more or less
-complementary, more or less inclusive of each other, of that one
-vital organisation in principle and construction which we could not
-otherwise have had presented to us. In a million lessons from the vast
-ranges of contemporary and of extinct life there is impressed upon
-the biological observer the idea of that system of life-function and
-life-structure<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span> which is the goal of biological science. The interest
-in the mere variety whether of modern or of primeval forms of life is
-as such merely historical; its truer use is to enable the scientific
-imagination to rise above local or temporary limitations. And thus in
-the end the records and guesses of evolution in time and place serve
-to build up a theory of the timeless universal nature of life and
-organisation.</p>
-
-<p>And what is true of Nature is equally true of the Mind. For these
-two, as we have already seen, are not isolable from each other.
-Neither the mind nor the so-called external world are either of them
-self-subsistent existences, issuing at once and ready-made out of
-nothing. The mind does not come forth, either equipped or un-equipped,
-to conquer the world: the world is not a prey prepared for the spider,
-waiting for the mind to comprehend and appropriate it. The mind and
-the world, the so-called 'subject' and so-called 'object,' are equally
-the results of a process: and it is only when we isolate the terminal
-aspects of that process, and in the practical business of life forget
-the higher theoretical point of view, that we lose sight of their
-origin, and have two worlds facing each other. As the one side or
-aspect of the process gathers feature and form, so does the other. As
-the depth and intensity of the intellect increases, the limits of the
-external world extend also. For the psychical life is just the power
-which maintains a continuing correlation between the body and its
-environment, and between the various elements in that environment. It
-is the unity in which that correlation lives and is aware of itself.
-It is the subject-object, which sets one element against another, and
-gives it quasi-independence. The mind of the savage is exactly measured
-by the world he has around him. The dull, almost animal, sensation
-and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span> feeling, which is what we may call his mental action, is just the
-obverse of the narrow circumference that girdles his external world.
-The beauty and interest of the grander phenomena of terrestrial nature,
-and of the celestial movements, are ideally non-existent for a being,
-whose whole soul is swallowed up in the craving for food, the fear of
-attack, and the lower enjoyments of sense. In the course of history we
-can see the intellect growing deeper and broader, and the limits of the
-world recede simultaneously with the advance of the mind. This process
-or movement of culture takes place in the sequence of generations, and
-in the variety of races and civilisations spread over the face of the
-world. But here too, the higher science, not resting in the merely
-historical inquiry, takes no interest in the medium of time, and merely
-uses it to supply material for the rational sequence of ideas<a name="FNanchor_4_141" id="FNanchor_4_141"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_141" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>.</p>
-
-<p>The objective world of knowledge is really at one with the subjective
-world: they spring from a common source, what Kant called the 'original
-synthetic unity of apperception.' The distinction between them flows
-from abstraction, from failure to keep in view the whole round of
-life and experience. The subjective world&mdash;the mind of man&mdash;is really
-constituted by the same force as the objective world of nature: the
-latter has been translated from the world of extension, with its
-externality of parts in time and space, into an inner world of thought
-where unity, the fusion or coalescence of all types and forms, is the
-leading feature. The difficulty of passing from the world of being to
-the world of thoughts, from notion to thing, from subject to object,
-from Ego to Non-ego, is a difficulty which men have unduly allowed to
-grow upon them. It grows by talking of and analysing <i>mere</i> being,
-<i>mere</i> thought,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span> <i>mere</i> notion, or <i>mere</i> thing. And it will be
-dispelled when it is seen that there is no <i>mere</i> being, and no <i>mere</i>
-thought: that these two halves of the unity of experience&mdash;the unity
-we divide and the division we unify in every judgment we make&mdash;are
-continually leaning out of themselves, each towards the other. But
-men, beginning as they must from themselves, and failing to revise and
-correct their stand-point till it became an <i>ἀρχὴ ἀνυπόθετος,</i> argued
-from a belief that the individual mind was a fixed and absolute centre,
-from which the universe had to be evaluated. In Hegel's words, they
-made man and not God the object of their philosophy<a name="FNanchor_5_142" id="FNanchor_5_142"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_142" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>. So that Kant
-really showed the outcome of a system which acted on the hypothesis
-that man in his individual capacity was all in all. Hegel, on his own
-showing, came to prove that the real scope of philosophy was God;&mdash;that
-the Absolute is the 'original synthetic unity' from which the external
-world and the Ego have issued by differentiation, and in which they
-return to unity.</p>
-
-<p>If this be so, then there is behind the external world and behind the
-mind an organism of pure types or forms of thought,&mdash;an organism which
-presents itself, in a long array of fragments, to the senses in the
-world of nature, where all things lie outside of one another, and which
-then is, as it were, reflected back into itself so as to constitute the
-mind, or spiritual world, where all parts tend to coalesce in a more
-than organic unity. The deepest craving of thought, and the fundamental
-problem of philosophy, will accordingly be to discover the nature and
-law of that totality or primeval unity,&mdash;the totality which we see
-appearing in the double aspect of nature and mind, and which we first
-become acquainted with as it is manifested in this state of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span> dis-union.
-To satisfy this want is what the Logic of Hegel seeks. It lays bare
-the kingdom of those potent shades,&mdash;the phases of the Idea&mdash;which
-embodies itself more concretely in the external world of body, and the
-inward world of mind. The psychological or individualist conditions,
-which even in the Kantian criticism sometimes seem to set up mind as an
-entity parallel to the objects of nature, and antithetic to nature as
-a whole, have fallen away. Reason has to be taken in the whole of its
-actualisation as a world of reason, not in its bare possibility, not in
-the narrow ground of an individual's level of development, but in the
-realised formations of reasonable knowledge and action, as shown in Art
-and Life, Science and Religion. In this way we come to a reason which
-might be in us or in the world, but which, being to a certain extent
-different from either, was the focus of two orders of manifestations.</p>
-
-<p>To ascertain that ultimate basis of the world and mind was the chief
-thing philosophy had to see to. But in order to do this, a good deal
-of preliminary work was necessary. The work of Logic, as understood
-by Hegel, involves a stand-point which is not that of every-day life
-or reflection on experience. It presupposes the whole process from
-the provisional starting-point which seems at first sight simplest
-and universally acceptable, upwards to the unhypothetical principle
-which&mdash;though at a long distance&mdash;it involves and leads up to, or
-presupposes. We all know Aristotle's dictum ᾽Εν τοῐς αὶσθητοῐς τὰ
-νοητά ἐστιν: <i>Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu.</i> The fact
-of sense and feeling <i>is</i> the fact of experience: or rather the fact
-and reality of experience is the underlying truth which the expression
-of it in terms of sense and perception inadequately interprets. Even
-in the principles of sensation there is judgment, thought, reasoning:
-but it needs eliciting, re-statement,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span> opening up, and explanation.
-The Phenomenology of Mind is, as Hegel himself has said, his voyage of
-discovery. It traces the path, and justifies the work of traversing
-it, from the ill-founded and imperfect certainties of sense and
-common-sense, up through various scientific, moral, and religious modes
-of interpreting experience and expressing its net sum of reality,
-till it culminates in the stand-point of 'pure thought,' of supreme
-or 'absolute' consciousness. It is certainly not a history of the
-individual mind: and equally little is it a history of the process of
-the intellectual development of the race. In a way it mixes up both.
-For its main interest is not on the purely historical side. It indulges
-in bold transitions, in sudden changes of scene from ancient Greece
-and Rome to modern Germany, from public facts and phases of national
-life to works of fiction (compare its use of Goethe's <i>Faust</i> and his
-version of <i>Rameau's Nephew).</i> It lingers&mdash;for historical accuracy and
-proportion unduly&mdash;over the period of Kant and Fichte, and reads Seneca
-by the light of the <i>Sorrows of Werther.</i> For its aim is to gather from
-the inspection of all ways in which men have attempted to reach reality
-the indication of their several content of truth, and of the several
-defects from it, so as to show the one necessary path on which even all
-their errors converge and which they serve to set out in clearer light.</p>
-
-<p>Hegel's philosophy is undoubtedly the outcome of a vast amount of
-historical experience, particularly in the ancient world, and implies
-a somewhat exhaustive study of the products of art, science, politics,
-and religion. By experience he was led to his philosophy, not by
-what is called <i>a priori</i> reasoning. It is curious indeed to observe
-the prevalent delusion that German philosophy is the 'high <i>priori</i>
-road,'&mdash;to hear its profundity admired, but its audacity and neglect of
-obvious<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span> facts deplored. The fact is that without experience neither
-Hegel nor anybody else will come to anything. But, on the other hand,
-experience is in one sense only the yet undeciphered mass of feeling
-and reality, the yet unexpounded psychical content of his life; or,
-taken in another acceptation, it is only a form which in one man's case
-means a certain power of vision, and in another a different degree. One
-man sees the idea which explains and unifies experience as actuality:
-to the other man it is only a subjective notion. And even when it is
-seen, there are differences in the subsequent development. One man
-sees it, asserts it on all hands, and then closes. Another sees it,
-and asks if this is all, or if it is only part of a system. An appeal
-to 'my experience' is very much like an appeal to 'my sentiments' or
-'my feelings': it may prove as much or as little as can be imagined:
-in other words, it can prove nothing. The same is true of the appeal
-to consciousness, that oracle on whose dicta it has sometimes been
-proposed to found a system of philosophy. By that name seems meant the
-deliverances of some primal and unerring nucleus of mind, some real
-and central self, whose voice can be clearly distinguished from the
-mere divergent cries of self-interest and casual opinion. That such
-discernment is possible no philosophy will seek to deny: but it is a
-discernment which involves comparison, examination, and reasoning.
-And in that case the appeal to consciousness is the exhortation to
-clear and deliberate thinking. While, on another side, it hints that
-philosophy does not&mdash;in the end&mdash;deal with mere abstractions, but with
-the real concrete life of mind. And if an appeal to other people's
-experience is meant, that is only an argument from authority. What
-other people experience is their business, not mine. Experience
-<i>means</i> a great deal for which it is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span> not the right name: and to give
-an explanation of what it is, and what it does, would render a great
-service to English methodologists.</p>
-
-<p>There are, however, two modes in which these studies to discover the
-truth may appear. In the one case they are reproduced in all their
-fragmentary and patch-work character. They are supposed to possess a
-value of their own, and are enunciated with all the detail of historic
-incident. The common-place books of a man are, as it were, published
-to instruct the world and give some hint of the extent of his reading.
-But, in the other case, the scaffolding of incident and externality
-may be removed. The single facts, which gave the persuasion of the
-idea, are dismissed, as interesting only for the individual student on
-his way to truth: or, if the historical vehicle of truth be retained
-at all, it is translated into another and intellectual medium. Such a
-history, the quintessence of extensive and deep research, is presented
-in the Phenomenology. The names of persons and places have faded from
-the record, as if they had been written in evanescent inks,&mdash;dates
-are wanting,&mdash;individualities and their biographies yield up their
-place to universal and timeless principles. Such typical forms are
-the concentrated essence of endless histories. They remind one of the
-descriptions which Plato in his Republic gives of the several forms
-of temporal government. Or, to take a modern instance, the Hegelian
-panorama of thought which presents only the universal evolution of
-thought,&mdash;that evolution in which the whole mind of the world takes the
-place of all his children, whether they belong to the common level,
-or stand amongst representative heroes,&mdash;may be paralleled to English
-readers by Browning's poem of <i>Sordello.</i> There can be no question
-that such a method is exposed to criticism, and likely to excite<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
-misconception. If it tend to give artistic completeness to the work,
-it also tantalises the outsider who has a desire to reach his familiar
-standing-ground. He wishes a background of time and space, where the
-forms of the abstract ideas may be embodied to his mind's eye. In most
-ages, and with good ground, the world has been sceptical, when it
-perceived no reference to authorities, no foot-notes, no details of
-experiments made: nor is it better disposed to accept provisorily, and
-find, as the process goes on, that it verifies itself to intelligence.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_138" id="Footnote_1_138"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_138"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>De Anima,</i> iii. 4.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_139" id="Footnote_2_139"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_139"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> A philological parallel may make this clearer. 'The
-Indo-German,' says Misteli <i>(</i><i>Typen des Sprachbaues,</i> p. 363),
-'embraces or condenses several categories in a single idea in a
-way which though less logical is more fruitful; for in this way he
-procures graspable totals with which he can work further, and not
-patch-work which would crumble away in his hands. Our <i>He</i> includes
-four grammatical categories, which work not separately, but as a
-whole:&mdash;third person, masculine gender, singular, nominative; whereas
-the Magyar <i>ö</i> is the vehicle only of one category, the third person,
-which is either determined as singular by the context, or as plural
-by the addition of <i>k</i>: gender in these languages does not exist: and
-as subject again <i>ö</i> is specially interpreted from the context. The
-unification of the four categories makes <i>He</i> an individual and a word;
-the generality and isolation of one category makes <i>ö</i> an abstract and
-a stem.'</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_140" id="Footnote_3_140"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_140"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Häckel, <i>Natürliche Schöpfungs-Geschichte</i>, p. 157.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_141" id="Footnote_4_141"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_141"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> See above, pp. <a href="#Page_155">155</a>, <a href="#Page_198">198</a>.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_142" id="Footnote_5_142"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_142"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Hegel's <i>Werke,</i> vol. i. p. 15.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XX.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>GENERAL LAW OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.</h4>
-
-
-<p>'The order and concatenation of ideas,' says Spinoza, 'is the same as
-the order and concatenation of things<a name="FNanchor_1_143" id="FNanchor_1_143"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_143" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>.' The objective world at least
-of acts and institutions develops parallel with the growth and system
-of men's ideas. In the tangled skein which human life and reality
-present to the observer, the only promising clue is to be found in the
-process by which in history the past throws light on the present and
-gets light in return. There in the stream of time and in the expanses
-of space the condensed results, the hard knots, which present life
-offers for explanation, are broken up into a vast number of problems,
-each presenting a different aspect, and one helping towards a fairer
-and clearer appreciation of another.</p>
-
-<p>The present medium of general intelligence and theory in which we live
-embraces in a way the results of all that has preceded it, of all the
-steps of culture through which the world has risen. But in this body of
-intellectual beliefs and ideas with which our single soul is clad,&mdash;in
-this common soil of thought,&mdash;the several contributions of the past
-have been half or even wholly obliterated, and are only the shadows of
-their old selves. What in a former day was a question of all-engrossing
-interest has left but a trace: the complete<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span> and detailed formations
-of ancient thought have lost their distinctness of outline, and have
-shrunk into mere shadings in the contour of our intellectual world.
-Questions, from which the ancient philosophers could never shake
-themselves loose, are now only a barely perceptible <i>nuance</i> in the
-complex questions of the present day. Discussions about the bearings of
-the 'one' and the 'many,' puzzles like those of Zeno, and the casuistry
-of statesmanship such as is found in the Politics of Aristotle, have
-for most people little else than an antiquarian interest. We scarcely
-detect the faint traces they have left in the 'burning questions'
-of our own age. We are too ready to forget that the past is never
-altogether annihilated, and that every step, however slight it may
-seem, which has once been taken in the movement of intellect, must be
-traversed again in order to understand the constitution of our present
-intellectual world. To outward appearance the life and work of past
-generations have so completely lost their organic nature, with its
-unified and vital variety, that in their present phase they have turned
-into hard and opaque atoms of thought. The living forces of growth,
-as geologists tell us, which pulsed through the vegetables of one
-period are suspended and put in abeyance: and these vegetables turn
-into what we call the inorganic and inanimate strata of the earth.
-Similarly, when all vitality has been quenched or rendered torpid in
-the structures of thought, they sink into the material from which
-individuals draw their means of intellectual support. This inorganic
-material of thought stands to the mind, almost in the same way as the
-earth and its products stand to the body of a man. If the one is our
-material, the other is our spiritual <i>substance</i>. In the one our mind,
-as in the other our body, lives, moves, and has its being.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>But in each case besides the practical need, which bids us consume the
-substance as dead matter, and apply it to use, there is the theoretical
-bent which seeks to reproduce ideally the past as a living and fully
-developed organism. 'This past,' says Hegel, 'is traversed by the
-individual, in the same way as one who begins to study a more advanced
-science repeats the preliminary lessons with which he had long been
-acquainted, in order to bring their information once more before his
-mind. He recalls them: but his interest and study are devoted to other
-things. In the same way the individual must go through all that is
-contained in the several stages in the growth of the universal mind:
-but all the while he feels that they are forms of which the mind has
-divested itself,&mdash;that they are steps on a road which has been long
-ago completed and levelled. Thus, points of learning, which in former
-times tasked the mature intellects of men, are now reduced to the level
-of exercises, lessons, and even games of boyhood: and in the progress
-of the schoolroom we may recognise the course of the education of the
-world, drawn, as it were, in shadowy outline<a name="FNanchor_2_144" id="FNanchor_2_144"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_144" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>.'</p>
-
-<p>The scope of historical investigation therefore is this. It shows
-how every shading in the present world of thought, which makes our
-spiritual environment, has been once living and actual with an
-independent being of its own. But it also reveals the presence of
-shades and elements in the present which if our eyes had looked on the
-present alone we should scarcely have suspected: and it thus enables us
-to interpolate stages in development of which the result preserves only
-rudimentary traces. And, when carried out in a philosophical spirit,
-it shows further, that in those formations, which are produced in
-each period of the structural<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span> development of reason, the universe of
-thought, or the Idea, is always whole and complete, but characterised
-in some special mode which for that period seems absolute and final.
-Each form or 'dimension' of thought, in which the totality is grasped
-and unified, is therefore not so simple or elementary as it may seem
-to casual observers regarding only the simplicity of language: it is
-a total, embracing more or less of simpler elements, each of which
-was once an inferior total, though in this larger sphere they are
-reduced to unity. Thus each term or period in the process is really
-an individualised whole, with a complex interconnexion and contrast
-included in it: it is <i>concrete.</i> No single word or phrase explains it:
-yet it is one totality,&mdash;a rounded life, from which its several spheres
-of life must be explained. But when that period is passing away, the
-form of its idea is separated, and retained, apart from the life and
-mass of the elements which constituted it a real totality; and then the
-mere shading or shell, with only part of its context of thought, is
-left <i>abstract.</i> When that time has come, a special form, a whole act
-in the drama, of humanity has been transformed into an empty husk, and
-is only a name.</p>
-
-<p>The sensuous reality of life, as it is limited in space and time, and
-made palpable in matter and motion, is however the earliest cradle
-of humanity. The environment of sense is prior in the order of time
-to the environment of thought. Who, it may be asked, first wrought
-their way out of that atmosphere of sense into an ether of pure
-thought? Who first saw that in sense there was yet present something
-more than sensation,&mdash;that the deliverances of sense-perception rest
-upon and involve relations, ties, distinctions, which contradict its
-self-confidence and carry us beyond its simple indications?. Who laid
-the first foundations of that world<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span> of reason in which the civilised
-nations of the modern period live and move? The answer is, the Greek
-philosophers: and in the first place the philosophers of Elea. For
-Hegel the history of thought begins with Greece. All that preceded the
-beginnings of Greek speculation, and most that lies outside it, has
-only a secondary interest for the culture of the West.</p>
-
-<p>But 'many heroes lived before the days of Agamemnon,' The records of
-culture no longer begin with Greece. Even in Hegel's own day, voices,
-like those of the poet Rückert (in his 'habilitation'-exercise), were
-heard declaring that the true fountain of European thought, the real
-philosophy, was to be sought in the remoter East. Since the time of
-Hegel, the study of primitive life, and of the rise of primitive ideas
-in morals and religion, has enabled us to some extent to trace the
-early gropings of barbarian fancy and reason. The comparative study
-of languages has, on the other hand, partly revealed the contrivances
-by which human reason has risen from one grade of consciousness to
-another. The sciences of language and of primitive culture have
-revealed new depths in the development of thought, where thought is
-still enveloped in nature and sense and symbols,&mdash;depths which were
-scarcely dreamed of in the earlier part of the present century. Here
-and there, investigators have even supposed that they had found the
-cradle of some elements in art, religion, and society, or, it may be,
-of humanity itself.</p>
-
-<p>These researches have accomplished much, and they promise to accomplish
-more. They help us perhaps to take a juster view of the early Greek
-thinkers, and show how much they still laboured under conditions
-of thought and speech from which their struggles have partly freed
-us. But for the present, and with certain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span> explanations to be given
-later, it may still be said that the birthday of our modern world
-is the moment when the Greek sages began to construe the facts of
-the universe. Before their time the world lay, as it were, in a
-dream-life. Unconsciously in the womb of time the spirit of the world
-was growing,&mdash;its faculties forming in secresy and silence,&mdash;until
-the day of birth when the preparations were completed, and the young
-spirit drew its first breath in the air of thought. A new and to us
-all-important epoch in the history of thought begins with the Greeks:
-and the utterances of Parmenides mark the first hard, and still
-somewhat material, outlines of the spiritual world in which we live.
-Other nations of an older day had gathered the materials: in their
-languages, customs, religions, &amp;c., there was an unconscious deposit of
-reason. It was reserved for the Greeks to recognise that reason: and
-thus in them reason became conscious.</p>
-
-<p>For us, then, it was the Greek philosophers who distinctly drew the
-distinction between sense and thought, and who first translated the
-actual forms of our natural life into their abbreviated equivalents in
-terms of logic. The struggle to carry through this transition, this
-elevation into pure thought, is what gives the dramatic interest to
-the Dialogues of Plato and keeps the sympathy of his readers always
-fresh. Socrates, we are told, first taught men to seek a general
-definition: not to be content with having&mdash;like Pythagoreans&mdash;their
-meaning wrapped up inseparably in psychical images and quasi-material
-symbols. He taught them to refer word to fellow word, to elicit the
-underlying idea by the collision and comparison of instances, to get
-at the 'content' which was identical in all the multiplicity of forms.
-He taught them, in&mdash;brief, to think: and Plato carried out widely and
-deeply<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span> the lesson. The endeavour to create an ideal world, which, at
-its very creation, seems often to be transformed into a refined and
-attenuated copy of the sense-world, meets us in almost every page of
-his Dialogues. In Aristotle this effort, with its concomitant tendency
-to give 'sensible' form to the ideal, is so far over and past; and
-some sort of intellectual world, perhaps narrow and inadequate,
-is reached,&mdash;the logical scheme in which immediate experience was
-expressed and codified. What these thinkers began, succeeding ages have
-inherited and promoted.</p>
-
-<p>In the environment of reason, therefore, which encompasses the
-consciousness of our age, are contained under a generalised form and
-with elimination of all the particular circumstances, the results won
-in the development of mind and morals. These results now constitute
-the familiar joints and supports in the framework of ordinary thought:
-around and upon them cluster our beliefs and imaginations. During each
-epoch of history, the consciousness of the world, at first by the mouth
-of its great men, its illustrious statesmen, artists, and philosophers,
-has explicitly recognised, and translated into terms of thought,&mdash;into
-logical language,&mdash;that synthesis of the world which the period had
-practically secured by the action of its children. That activity went
-on, as is the way of natural activities, spontaneously, through the
-pressure of need, by an immanent adaptation of means to ends, not in
-conscious straining after a result. For the conscious or reflective
-effort of large bodies of men is often in a direction contrary to
-the Spirit of the Time. This Spirit of the Time, the absolute mind,
-which is neither religious nor irreligious, but infinite and absolute
-in its season, is the real motive principle of the world. But that
-Spirit of the Time is not always<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span> the voice that is most effective at
-the poll, or rings loudest in public rhetoric. It is often a still
-small voice, which only the wise, the self-restrained, the unselfish
-hear. And he who hears it and obeys it, not he who follows the blatant
-crowd, is the hero. It is only to a mistaken or an exaggerated
-hero-worship, therefore, that Hegel can be said to be a foe. Great
-men are great: but the Spirit of the Time is greater: their greatness
-lies in understanding it and bringing it to consciousness. The man,
-who would act independently of his time and in antagonism to it, is
-only the exponent of its latent tendencies. Nor need the synthesis
-be always formulated by a philosopher in order to leaven the minds
-of the next generation. The whole system of thought,&mdash;the theory of
-the time,&mdash;its world, in short, influences minds, although it is not
-explicitly formulated and stated: it becomes the nursery of future
-thought and speculation. Philosophy in its articulate utterances only
-gives expression to the silent and half-conscious grasp of reason over
-its objects. But when the adaptation is not merely reached but seen and
-felt, when the synthesis or world of that time is made an object of
-self-consciousness, the exposition has made an advance upon the period
-which preceded. For that period started in its growth from the last
-exposition, the preceding system of philosophy, after it had become
-the common property of the age, and taken its place in their mental
-equipment.</p>
-
-<p>Each exposition or perception of the synthesis by the philosopher
-restores or re-affirms the unity which in the divided energies of
-the period, in its progressive, reforming, and reactionary aspects,
-in its differentiating time, had to a great extent been lost. By the
-reforming, progressive, and scientific movement of which each period
-is full, the unity or totality with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span> which it began is shown to be
-defective. The value of the initial synthesis is impaired; its formula
-is found inadequate to comprehend the totality: and the differences
-which that unity involved, or which were implicitly in it, are now
-explicitly affirmed. But the bent towards unity is a natural law
-making itself felt even in the period of differentiation. And it
-makes itself felt in the pain of contradiction, of discord, of broken
-harmony. And that pain&mdash;which is the sign of an ever-present life that
-refuses to succumb to the encroaching elements&mdash;is the stimulus to
-re-construction. Only so far as pain ceases to be pain, as it benumbs,
-and deadens, does it involve stagnation: as pain proper, felt as
-resistance to an inner implicitly victorious principle, it stimulates
-and quickens to efforts to make life whole again. The integrating
-principle is present and active. There is then an effort, a re-action;
-the feeling has to do something to make itself outwardly felt: the
-implicit has to be actually put in its place, forced as it were into
-action and set forth<a name="FNanchor_3_145" id="FNanchor_3_145"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_145" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>: and the existing contrasts and differences
-which the re-forming agency has called into vigorous life are lifted
-from their isolation, and show of independence, and kept, as it were,
-suspended in the unity<a name="FNanchor_4_146" id="FNanchor_4_146"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_146" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>. The differences are not lost or annihilated:
-but they come back to a centre, they find themselves, as it were,
-at home: they lose their unfair prominence and self-assertion, and
-sink into their places as constituents in the embracing organism<a name="FNanchor_5_147" id="FNanchor_5_147"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_147" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>.
-The unity which comes is not however the same as the unity which
-disappeared, however much it may seem so. The mere <i>notion</i>&mdash;the
-inner sense and inner unity&mdash;has put itself forward into the real
-world: it is no longer a mere subjective principle, but as moulded
-into actuality, into the objective world,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span> it has become an Idea.
-(<i>Begriff</i> is now <i>Idee.</i>) For the Idea is always more than a notion:
-it is a notion translated into objectivity, and yet in objectivity
-not sinking into a mere congeries of independent parts, but retaining
-them 'ideally'&mdash;united by links of thought and service&mdash;in its larger
-ideal-reality. It is all that the object ought to be (and which in a
-sense it must be, if it is at all), and all that the subject sought to
-be and looked forward to.</p>
-
-<p>The mind of the world moves, as it were, in cycles, but with each new
-cycle a difference supervenes, a new tone is perceptible. History,
-which reflects the changing aspects of reality, does and does not
-repeat itself. The distinctions and the unity are neither of them the
-same after each step as they were before it: they have both suffered a
-change: it is a new scene that comes above the horizon, however like
-the last it may seem to the casual observer. Thus when the process
-of differentiation is repeated anew, it is repeated in higher terms,
-multiplied, and with a higher power or wider range of meaning<a name="FNanchor_6_148" id="FNanchor_6_148"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_148" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>. Each
-unification however is a perfect world, a complete whole: it is the
-same sum of being; but in each successive level of advance it receives
-a fuller expression, and a more complexly-grouped type of features<a name="FNanchor_7_149" id="FNanchor_7_149"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_149" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>.
-Such is the rhythmic movement,&mdash;the ebb and flow of the world, always
-recurring with the same burden but, as we cannot but hope, with richer
-variety of tones, and fuller sense of itself. The sum of actuality, the
-Absolute, is neither increased nor diminished. The world, the ultimate<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>
-reality of experience and life, was as much a rounded total to the
-Hebrew Patriarchs as it is to us: without advancing, it has been, we
-may say, in its expression deepened, developed, and organised. In one
-part of the sway of thought, however, there is a harder, narrower,
-insistance (by practical and business minds) on the sufficiency of
-a definite principle to satisfy all wants and to make all mysteries
-plain, and a disposition to ignore all other elements of life: at
-another, there is a fuller recognition of the differences, gaps, and
-contradictions, involved in the last synthesis,&mdash;which recognition
-it is the tendency of scientific inquiry, of reforming efforts, of
-innovation, to produce: and in the last period of the sway, there is
-a stronger and more extended grasp taken by the unity pervading these
-differences,&mdash;which is the work appointed to philosophy gathering up
-the results of science and practical amendments.</p>
-
-<p>To this rhythmical movement Hegel has appropriated the name of
-Dialectic. The name came in the first instance from Kant, but
-ultimately from Plato, where it denotes the process which brings the
-'many' under the 'one,' and divides the 'one' into the 'many.' But how,
-it may be asked, does difference spring up, if we begin with unity, and
-how do the differences return into the unity? In other words, given a
-universal, how are we ever to get at particulars, and how will these
-particulars ever give rise to a real individual? Such is the problem,
-in the technical language of the Logic of the 'Notion.' And we may
-answer, that the unity or universal in question is either a true and
-adequate or an imperfect unity. In the latter case it is a mere unit,
-amid other units, bound to them and serving to recall them by relations
-of contrast, complement, similarity. It is one of many,&mdash;a subordinate
-member in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span> a congeries, and not <i>the One</i>. If, on the contrary, it be
-a true Unity, it is a concrete universal,&mdash;the parent of perpetual
-variety. The unity, if it be its genuine shape which is formulated by
-philosophers, is not mere monotony without differences. If it is a
-living and real Idea, containing a complex inter-action of principles:
-it is not a single line of action, but the organic confluence of
-several. No one single principle by itself is enough to state a life,
-a character, or a period. But as the unity comes before the eye of the
-single thinker, it is seldom or never grasped with all its fulness of
-life and difference. The whole synthesis, although it is implicitly
-present and underlies experience and life as its essential basis,
-is not consciously apprehended, but for the most part taken on one
-side only, one emphatic aspect into which it has concentrated itself.
-And even if the master could grasp the whole, could see the unity of
-actuality in all its differences, (and we may doubt whether any man
-or any philosopher can thus incarnate the prerogative of reason,) his
-followers and the popular mind would not imitate him. While his grasp
-of comprehension may possibly have been thorough, though he may have
-seen life whole through all its differences, inequalities, and schisms,
-and with all these reduced or idealised to their due proportions,
-into the unity beyond, the crowd who follow him are soon compelled
-to lay exclusive stress on some one side of his theory. Some of them
-see the totality from one aspect, some from another. It is indeed the
-whole which in a certain sense they see: but it is the whole narrowed
-down to a point. While <i>his</i> theory was a comprehensive and concrete
-grasp, including and harmonising many things which seem otherwise wide
-apart, theirs is abstract and inadequate: it fixes on a single point,
-which is thus withdrawn from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span> its living and meaning-giving context,
-and left as an empty name. Now it is the very nature of popular
-reasoning to tend to abstractions, in this sense of the word. Popular
-thought wants the time and perseverance necessary to retain a whole
-truth, and so is contented with a partial image. It seeks for simple
-and sharp precision: it likes to have something distinctly before
-it, visible to the eye of imagination, and capable of being stated
-in a clear and unambiguous formula for the intellect. And popular
-thought&mdash;the dogmatic insistence on one-sided truth&mdash;is not confined
-to the so-called non-philosophic world: just as, on the other hand,
-the inclusive and comprehensive unity of life and reality is seen and
-felt and recognised by many&mdash;and felt by them first&mdash;who have no claim
-to the technical rank of philosophers. Popular thought is the thought
-which skims the surface of reality, which addresses itself to the level
-of opinion prevalent in all members of the mass as such, and does not
-go beyond that into the ultimate and complex depths of experience.</p>
-
-<p>Thus it comes about that the concrete or adequate synthesis which
-should have appeared in the self-conscious thought of the period,
-when it reflected upon what it was, has been replaced by a narrow
-and one-sided formula, an abstract and formal universal, a universal
-which does not express all the particulars. One predominant side of
-the synthesis steals the place of the total: what should have been
-a comprehensive universal has lowered itself into a particular. Not
-indeed the same particular as existed before the union: because it has
-been influenced by the synthesis, so as to issue with a new colouring,
-as if it had been steeped in a fresh liquid. But still it is really
-a particular: and as such, it evokes a new particular in antagonism
-to it and exhibiting an element latent in the synthesis. If the
-first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span> side of the antithesis which claims unduly to be the total, or
-universal, be called Conservative, the second must be called Reforming
-or Progressive. If the first step is Dogmatic, the second is Sceptical.
-If the one side assumes to be the whole, the other practically refutes
-the assumption. If the one agency clings blindly to the unity,&mdash;as
-when pious men rally round the central idea of religion, the other as
-tenaciously and narrowly holds to the difference,&mdash;as when science
-displays the struggle for existence and the empire of chance among
-the myriads of aimless organisms. They are two warring abstractions,
-each in a different direction. But as they are the offspring of one
-parent,&mdash;as they have each in their own way narrowed the whole down to
-a point, it cannot but be that when they evolve or develop all that
-is in them, they will ultimately coincide, and complete each other.
-The contradiction will not disappear until it has been persistently
-worked out,&mdash;when each opposing member which was potentially a total
-has become what it was by its own nature destined to be. And this
-disappearance of the antithesis is the reappearance of the unity in all
-its strength, reinforced with all the wealth of new distinctions.</p>
-
-<p>Thus on a large scale we have seen the law of growth, of development,
-of life. It may be called growth by antagonism. But the antagonism
-here is over-ruled, and subject to the guidance of an indwelling
-unity. <i>Mere</i> antagonism&mdash;if there be such a thing&mdash;would lead to
-nothing. A mere positive or affirmative point of being would lead
-to no antithesis, were it not, so to speak, a point floating in an
-ether of larger life and being, whence it draws an outside element
-which it overcomes, assimilates and absorbs. A bare national mind
-only grows to richer culture, because it lives in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span> a universal human
-life, and can say <i>Nihil humani a me alienum puto.</i> So too the mere
-unit is always tainted with a dependence on outside: or it is always
-implicitly more than a mere unit: and what seems to come upon it from
-outside, is really an enemy from within, and it falls because there is
-treason within its walls. The revolution succeeds because the party
-of conservative order is not so hard and homogeneous as it appears.
-So, too, it is the immanent presence of the complete thought, of the
-Idea, which is the heart and moving spring that sets going the pulse
-of the universal movement of thought, and which reappears in every one
-of these categories to which the actualised thought of an age has been
-reduced. In every term of thought there are three stages or elements:
-the original narrow definiteness, claiming to be self-sufficient,&mdash;the
-antagonism and criticism to which this gives rise,&mdash;and the union which
-results when the two supplement and modify each other. In the full life
-and organic unity of every notion there is a definite kernel, with
-rigid outlines as if it were immovable: there is a revulsion against
-such exclusiveness, a questioning and critical attitude: and there is
-the complete notion, where the two first stages interpenetrate.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_143" id="Footnote_1_143"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_143"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Eth.</i> ii 7.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_144" id="Footnote_2_144"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_144"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Phenomenologie</i><i>des Geistes</i>, p. 22.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_145" id="Footnote_3_145"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_145"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Gesetzt.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_146" id="Footnote_4_146"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_146"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Aufgehoben.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_147" id="Footnote_5_147"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_147"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Idee: Ideeller Weise.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_148" id="Footnote_6_148"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_148"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Potenz.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_149" id="Footnote_7_149"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_149"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'Nicht nur die Einsicht in die Abhängigkeit des Einzelnen
-vom Ganzen ist allein das Wesentliche; ebenso dass jedes Moment selbst
-unabhängig vom Ganzen das Ganze ist, und dies ist das Vertiefen in die
-Sache.' (Hegels <i>Leben</i>, p. 548.)</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XXI.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE I AND THE ORDINARY LOGIC.</h4>
-
-
-<p>The ordinary logic-books have made us all familiar with the popular
-distinction between Abstract and Concrete. By a concrete term they mean
-the name of an existence or reality which is obvious to the senses, and
-is found in time and place;&mdash;or they mean the name of an attribute when
-we expressly or tacitly recognise its dependence upon such a thing of
-the senses. When, on the contrary, the attribute is forcibly withdrawn
-from its context and made an independent entity in the mind, the term
-expressing it becomes in the usual phraseology abstract. Any term
-therefore which denotes a non-sensible or intelligible object would
-probably be called abstract. And there is something to be said for the
-distinction, which, though unsuccessful in its expression, has some
-feeling of the radical antithesis between mere being and mere thought.
-It is true, that in the totality of sense and feeling, in the full
-sense-experience, there is a concrete fulness, as it were, an infinite
-store of features and phases waiting for subsequent analysis to detect.
-In the real kind of actual nature there is an inexhaustible mine of
-properties, which no artificial classification and description can
-ever come to the end of. Every quality<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span> which we state, every relation
-which we predicate, is a partial and incomplete element in this
-presupposed reality, this implicit concrete; and as such is abstract,
-and comparatively unreal. It is something forcibly torn out of and held
-apart from its context. But on the other hand the concrete reality is
-not at first real, but implicit: it becomes really concrete only as it
-re-embraces, and re-constitutes in its totality the elements detected
-by analysis. But the popular distinction forgets this, and gives the
-title and rank of concrete to what very poorly deserves the name, viz.
-to the yet undiscerned reality denoted by a substantive name. Yet
-there can be little doubt that the popular use of these terms, or the
-popular apprehension of what constitutes reality,&mdash;for that is what it
-comes to,&mdash;is sufficiently represented by the ordinary logic-books.
-So that, if the whole business of the logician lies in formulating
-the distinctions prevalent in popular thought, the ordinary logic is
-correct.</p>
-
-<p>Now the popular logic of the day,&mdash;the logic which has long been
-taught in our schools and universities&mdash;has three sources.&mdash;In the
-first place, but in a slight degree, it trenches upon the province
-of psychology, and gives some account of the operation by which
-concepts or general ideas are supposed to be formed, and of the errors
-or fallacies which naturally creep into the process of reasoning.
-This is the more strictly modern, the descriptive part of our
-logic-books.&mdash;But, secondly, the logic of our youth rests in a much
-higher degree upon the venerable authority of Aristotle. That logic,
-within its own compass, was a masterpiece of analysis, and for many
-centuries maintained an ascendency over the minds of men, which it
-well deserved. But it was not an analysis of thought or knowledge as a
-whole, and it treated its subject in fragments. It<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span> gave in one place
-an analysis of science and in another an analysis of certain methods,
-which could be observed in popular discussions and practical oratory.
-As Lord Bacon remarked, it did little else than state and, it may be,
-exaggerate the <i>rationale</i> of argumentation. A high level of popular
-thought it unquestionably was, which Aristotle had to investigate,&mdash;a
-level which many generations of less favoured races were unable to
-reach. But there were defects in this Logic which fatally marred its
-general usefulness, when the limited scope of its original intention
-had been lost sight of. The thoughts of Greece, it has been said, were
-greatest and most active in the line of popular action for the city and
-the public interest, in the discussions, the quibbles, the fallacies,
-and rhetorical arts of the barber's shop and the 'agora.' The aim
-of such exercises was to convince, to demonstrate, to persuade, to
-overcome;&mdash;it might be for good and truth, but also it might not. And
-accordingly the Logic of Aristotle has been said to have for its end
-and canon the power to convince and to give demonstrative certainty.
-There is some ground, it may be, for this charge. The ancient logician
-seems to luxuriate in a rank growth of forms of sophism, and in an
-almost childlike fondness for variety of argumentative method. He
-seems resolved to trace the wayward tricks of thought and its phases
-through every nook and cranny, to exhaust all the permutations and
-complications of its elements. But let us be just, and remember that
-all this was in the main a speculative inquiry&mdash;for the sake of theory.
-It developed the powers of judgment and inference, just as the modern
-research for new metals, new plants, or new planets, develops the
-powers of observation. Both have some value in the material results
-they discover: but, after all, the mental culture they give is the main
-thing. And<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span> the talents quickened by deductive research are no whit
-less valuable than those owed to the other. Forms are essential, even
-if it be possible to make the terrible mistake of regarding them as
-all-important to the exclusion of matter.</p>
-
-<p>And then, this is not the whole truth. There is a perfectly serious
-Greek science&mdash;Mathematics&mdash;a science of many branches: a science
-which, from Plato downwards, always stood in alliance with the studies
-of philosophy. Now, it might be said, perhaps with ground, that the
-conception of mathematical method too much dominated all attempts to
-get at the rationale of science, and led to the supremacy of syllogism.
-It would be fairer perhaps to put this objection in another shape.
-We should then say that the logic of Aristotle,&mdash;the <i>Analytics</i>&mdash;is
-too much restricted to dealing with the most general and elementary
-principles of reasoning. But this is not in itself a fault. It
-becomes a fault only where there is no growth in philosophy&mdash;when
-it is merely handed on from master to pupil; and where there is a
-tendency to put philosophic doctrine to immediate use. To expend the
-whole energy of intellect in laying bare the general principles, the
-fundamental method, of knowledge and inference, is precisely what the
-founder of a science has a duty to do. But the beginning thus made
-requires development&mdash;and development which is fruitful must proceed
-by correction and antithesis, no less than by positive additions. It
-was not given to Aristotle's logic to be so carried on. His logic,
-like his system in general, had no real successor to carry it on in
-the following generation: and when in the less original ages of early
-Byzantine rule it again found students, it had become a quasi-sacred
-text which could only be commented on, not modified and developed. From
-the great <i>Exegetai</i> of Greece it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span> passed westward to Boethius and
-eastward to the Syrian and Persian commentators in the early centuries
-of the Caliphate. From these, and from other intermediaries, it may be,
-it finally culminated in the work of the Latin Schoolmen of the later
-Middle Ages. But the very reverence which all these expositors felt for
-the text of <i>the</i> Philosopher rendered true development impossible.</p>
-
-<p>Then, on the other hand, the lust of practical utility caused a
-grave misconception of what logic can do. For Aristotle, logic
-is a scientific analysis of the modes of inference; its uses are
-those which follow intrinsically from all noble activity freely and
-zealously prosecuted. But with the death of Aristotle the great days
-of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and divine wisdom were over.
-The Stoics into whose hands the chief sceptre of philosophy, directly
-or indirectly, passed never rose above the conception of life as a
-task and a duty, and of all other things, literature, science, and
-art, as subservient to the performance of that task. The conception is
-an ennobling one: but only with a relative or comparative nobility.
-It ennobles, if it is set beside and against the view that life is a
-frivolous play, a sport of caprice and selfishness. But it darkens and
-narrows the outlook of humanity, when it loses sight of life as a joy,
-a self-enlarging and self-realising freedom, of life as in its supreme
-phase <i>θεωρία</i>&mdash;or the enjoyment of God. To the Stoic, therefore,&mdash;and
-to the dominant Christian theory which entered to some extent on the
-Stoic inheritance&mdash;logic, like the rest of philosophy, was something
-only valuable because ultimately it helped to save the soul.</p>
-
-<p>It thus sunk into the position of an Organon or instrument. To the
-Stoic,&mdash;for instance to Epictetus&mdash;its value was its use to establish
-the doctrines of the Stoic<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span> faith, by confuting the ill-arranged and
-futile inferences on which were founded the aims and approvals of
-ordinary worldly life. To the Christian, again, it served as a method
-for putting into systematic shape (under the guidance of certain
-supreme categories or principles also borrowed from Greek thought) the
-variety of fundamental and derivative aspects which successive minds,
-pondering on the power and mystery of the Christian faith, had set
-forward as its essential dogmas. It thus helped to build up (out of
-the leading ideas of Greek metaphysics, and the principles emerging in
-the earliest attempts to formulate the law of Christ) that amalgam of
-the power of a divine life with the reflective thought of the teachers
-of successive generations, which constitutes the dogmatic creed of
-Christendom. Such a reconstruction in thought of the reality which
-underlies experience&mdash;(in this case the experience of the Christian
-life), is inevitable if man is to be man, a free intelligence, and
-not a mere animal-like feeling. But its success is largely, if not
-entirely, dependent on the value of the logic and metaphysics which it
-employs: and it would be a bold thing to say that the subtle, abstract,
-and unreal system of Neo-Platonist and Neo-Aristotelian thought was an
-organon adequate to cope with the breadth and depth, latent if not very
-explicit, in the fulness and reality of the religious life.</p>
-
-<p>Yet even as an Organon, Logic had to sink to a lower rank. As
-traditionalism grew supreme, and religion ossified into a stereotyped
-form of belief and practice, logic had less to do as an organiser
-of dogma. It sank, or seemed to sink (for it would be rash to speak
-too categorically of an epoch of thought so far removed from modern
-sympathy and understanding as the age of the Schoolmen), into a futile
-(and as it seems<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span> occasionally almost a viciously-despairing) play with
-<i>pro</i> and <i>contra</i>,&mdash;into a lust of argumentation which in masters
-like Ockam comes perilously close to scepticism or agnosticism. More
-and more, Scholastic thought, which, at one time, had been in the
-centre of such intellectual life as there was, came to be stranded on
-the shore, while the onward-flowing tide spread in other directions.
-These were the great days of logical sway, when it seemed as if logic
-could create new truth: as if forms could beget matter. So at least
-ran an outside rumour, which was probably based on some amount of real
-folly. But the more important point was that the old logic had lost
-touch with reality. New problems were arising, which it was&mdash;without
-a profound reconstruction&mdash;quite incapable of solving. Of these there
-were obviously two&mdash;not unconnected perhaps, but arising in different
-spheres of life. There was the revival of religious experience, growing
-especially since the thirteenth century with an ever-swelling stream
-in the souls of men and women, till it burst through all bounds of
-outward organisation in the catastrophe of the Reformation. Luther may
-have been historically unjust (as Bacon afterwards was) to the 'blind
-heathen master,' as he called Aristotle: but he was governed by a true
-instinct when (unlike the compromise-loving Melanchthon) he found the
-traditional system of logic and metaphysics no proper organon for
-the new phase of faith and theory. So, too, the new attempts at an
-inception and instauration of the sciences grew up outside the walls
-of old tradition, and were at first perhaps discouraged and persecuted
-as infidel and heretical, and were, even without that burden, pursued
-at much hap-hazard and with much ignorance both in aims and methods.
-Intelligent onlookers,&mdash;especially if inspired by an enthusiasm for
-the signs of an age<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span> happier for human welfare&mdash;could not but sec how
-needful it was to come to some understanding on the aims and methods of
-the rising sciences.</p>
-
-<p>This want, which he keenly felt, Francis Bacon tried to satisfy. He
-pointed out, vaguely, but zealously and in a noble spirit, the end
-which that new logic had to accomplish. Bacon, however, could not do
-more than state these bold suggestions: he had not the power to execute
-them. He imagined indeed that he could display a method, by which
-science would make incredible advances, and the kingdom of truth in a
-few years come into the world. But this is a sort of thing which no
-man can do. Plato, if we take his <i>Republic</i> for a political pamphlet,
-had tried to do it for the social life of Athens. What Plato could
-not do for the political world of Greece, Bacon could not do for the
-intellectual world in his time: for as the Athenian worked under the
-shadow of his own state, over-mastered even without his knowledge by
-the ordinances of Athens, so the Englishman was evidently enthralled
-by the medieval conceptions and by the logic which he condemned. What
-Aristotle had for ages been supposed to do, no philosopher could do for
-the new spirit of inquiry which had risen in and before the days of
-Bacon. That spirit, as exhibited in his great contemporaries, Bacon,
-as he has himself shown, could not rightly understand or appreciate.
-He failed, above all, to recognise the self-corrective, tentative,
-and hypothetical nature, of all open inquiry. But one need not for
-this disparage his work. It showed a new sense of the magnitude of the
-modern problem: it set prominently forward the comprehensive aim of
-human welfare: and by its conception of the 'forma' it kept science
-pledged to a high ideal. But Bacon could only play the part of the
-guide-post: he could not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span> himself lay down the road. And negatively he
-could warn against the belief that mathematics could <i>generate</i> or do
-more indeed than <i>define</i> the sciences. The spirit of free science, of
-critical investigation, of inductive inquiry, must and did constitute
-its forms, legislation, and methods for itself. For no philosopher can
-lay down laws or methods beforehand which the sciences must follow.
-The logician only comes after, and, appreciating and discovering the
-not always conspicuous methods of knowledge, endeavours to gather
-them up and give them their proper place in the grand total of human
-thought, correcting its inadequacies by their aid, and completing their
-divisions by its larger unities. Or rather this is a picture of what
-English logic might have done. But it does not do so in the ordinary
-and accepted text-books on the subject. What it does do, is rather as
-follows. To the second and fundamental part which it subjects to a few
-unimportant alterations,&mdash;i. e. to the doctrine of terms, propositions,
-and reasonings,&mdash;it subjoins an enumeration of the methods used in the
-sciences.</p>
-
-<p>To the rude minds of the Teutonic peoples the logical system of
-Aristotle had seemed almost a divine revelation. From the brilliant
-intellect of Greece a hand was stretched to help them in the
-arrangement of their religious beliefs. The Church accepted the aid of
-logic, foreign though logic was to its natural bent, as eagerly as the
-young society tried for a while to draw support from the ancient forms
-of the Roman Empire. So with the advance of the Sciences in modern
-times some hopeful spirits looked upon the Inductive Logic of Mill in
-the light of a new revelation. The vigorous action of the sciences
-hailed a systematic account of its methods almost as eagerly as the
-strong, but untaught intellect of the barbarian world welcomed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span> the
-lessons of ancient philosophy. For the first time the sciences, which
-had been working blindly or instinctively, but with excellent success,
-found their procedure stated clearly and definitely, yet without
-any attempt to reduce their varied life to the Procrustean bed of
-mathematics, which had once been held to possess a monopoly of method.
-The enormous influence of the physical sciences saw itself reflected
-in a distinct logical outline: and the new logic became the dominant
-philosophy. Such for a while was the proud position of the Inductive
-Logic. Enthusiastic students of science in all countries, who were not
-inaccessible to wider culture, used quotations from Mill to adorn and
-authorise their attempts at generalisation and theory. A period of
-speculation in the scientific world succeeded the period of experiment,
-in which facts had been collected and registered. A chapter on Method
-became a necessary introduction to all higher scientific treatises. In
-our universities methodology was prodigally applied to the study of
-ancient philosophy. And so long as the scientific epoch lasts in its
-one-sided prominence, so long the theory of inductive and experimental
-methods may dominate the intellectual world.</p>
-
-<p>But the Inductive Logic hardly rose to the due sense of its situation.
-It has not held to the same high ideal as Bacon set before it. It has
-planted itself beside what it was good enough to call the Deductive
-Logic, and given the latter a certain toleration as a harmless lunatic,
-or an old pauper who had seen better days. Retaining the latter with
-certain modifications, although it has now lost its meaning in the
-changed outlines of the intellectual world, Inductive Logic adds a
-methodology of the sciences, without however founding this methodology
-upon a comprehensive analysis of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span> knowledge as a whole, when
-enlarged and enlightened by the work of the sciences. Hence the two
-portions,&mdash;the old logic, mutilated and severed from the Greek world it
-grew out of, and the new Inductive or specially-scientific logic, not
-going beyond a mere classification of methods,&mdash;can never combine, any
-more than oil and water. And the little psychology, which is sometimes
-added, does not facilitate the harmony.</p>
-
-<p>But Inductive Logic should have adopted a more thorough policy. There
-can only be one Logic, which must be both inductive and deductive, but
-exclusively, and in parts, neither. To achieve that task however Logic
-must not turn its back indifferently on what it calls metaphysics, and
-it must rise to a higher conception of the problems of what it calls
-psychology.</p>
-
-<p>In these circumstances the ordinary logic, in its fundamental terms,
-is more on the level of popular thought, than in a strictly scientific
-region, and does not attempt to unite the two regions, and examine the
-fundamental basis of thought on which scientific methods rest. The case
-of Concrete and Abstract will illustrate what has been said. To popular
-thought the sense-world is concrete: the intellectual world abstract.
-And so it is in the ordinary logic. To Hegel, on the contrary, the
-intellectual interpretation of the world of reality and experience
-is a truer and thus a more concrete description of it than that
-contained in a series of sense-terms. Now the difference between the
-two uses of the term is not a mere arbitrary change of names. When the
-philosopher denies the concreteness of the sense-world, and declares
-that it, as merely sensible, is only a mass of excluding elements, a
-'manifold,' and in the second instance a series of abstractions, drawn
-out of this <i>congeries</i> by perception, the change of language marks
-the total change of position between<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span> the philosophic and the popular
-consciousness. Reality and concreteness as estimated by the one line of
-thought are the very reverse of those of the other. A mere sense-world
-to the philosopher is a world which wants unity, which is made up of
-bits imperfectly adjusted to each other, and always leading us to look
-for an explanation of them in sources outside them. The single things
-we say we perceive,&mdash;the here and the now we perceive them in&mdash;are
-found, upon reflection and analysis, to depend upon general laws, on
-relations that go beyond the single,&mdash;on what is neither here nor
-now, but everywhere and timeless. The reality of the thing is found
-to imply a general system of relations which make it what it is.
-Sense-perception in short is the beginning of knowledge: and it begins
-by taking up its task piecemeal. It rests upon a felt totality: and to
-raise this to an intelligible totality, it must at first only isolate
-one attribute at a time.</p>
-
-<p>The apprehension of a thing from one side or aspect,&mdash;the apprehension
-of one thing apart from its connexions,&mdash;the retention of a term or
-formula apart from its context,&mdash;is what Hegel terms 'abstract.'
-Ordinary terms are essentially abstract. They spring from the
-analysis of something which would, in the first stage of the process,
-in strictness be described not as concrete, but as chaos:&mdash;as the
-indefinite or 'manifold' of sensation. But the first conceptions, which
-spring from this group when it is analysed, are abstract: they are
-each severed from the continuity of their reality. To interpret our
-feeling, our experience as felt, we must break it up. But the first
-face that presents itself is apt to impress us unduly, and seems more
-real, because nearer feeling: on the other it is more unreal, because
-less adequate as a total expression of the felt unity. In the same
-sense we call Political Economy<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span> an abstract science, because it looks
-upon man as a money-making and money-distributing creature, and keeps
-out of sight his other qualities. Our notions in this way are more
-abstract or more concrete, according as our grasp of thought extends
-to less or more of the relations which are necessarily pre-supposed by
-them. On the other hand, when a term of thought owns and emphasises
-its solidarity with others, when it is not circumscribed to a single
-relation, but becomes a focus in which a variety of relations converge,
-when it is placed in its right post in the organism of thought,
-its limits and qualifications as it were recognised and its degree
-ascertained,&mdash;then that thought is rendered 'concrete.' A concrete
-notion is a notion in its totality, looking before and after, connected
-indissolubly with others: a unity of elements, a meeting-point of
-opposites. An abstract notion is one withdrawn from everything that
-naturally goes along with it, and enters into its constitution. All
-this is no disparagement of abstraction. To abstract is a necessary
-stage in the process of knowledge. But it is equally necessary to
-insist on the danger of clinging, as to an ultimate truth, to the
-pseudo-simplicity of abstraction, which forgets altogether what it is
-in certain situations desirable for a time to overlook.</p>
-
-<p>In a short essay, with much grim humour and quaint illustrations,
-Hegel tried to show what was meant by the name 'abstract,' which in
-his use of it denotes the cardinal vice of the 'practical' habit of
-mind. From this essay, entitled 'Who is the Abstract Thinker<a name="FNanchor_1_150" id="FNanchor_1_150"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_150" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>?'
-it may be interesting to quote a few lines. A murderer is, we may
-suppose, led to the scaffold. In the eyes of the multitude he is a
-murderer and nothing more. The ladies perhaps may make the remark that
-he is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span> a strong, handsome, and interesting man. At such a remark the
-populace is horrified. "What! a murderer handsome? Can anybody's mind
-be so low as to call a murderer handsome? You must be little better
-yourselves." And perhaps a priest who sees into the heart, and knows
-the reasons of things, will point to this remark, as evidence of the
-corruption of morals prevailing among the upper classes. A student
-of character, again, inquires into the antecedents of the criminal's
-up-bringing: he finds that he owes his existence to ill-assorted
-parents; or he discovers that this man has suffered severely for some
-trifling offence, and that under the bitter feelings thus produced
-he has spurned the rules of society, and cannot support himself
-otherwise than by crime. No doubt there will be people who when they
-hear this explanation will say "Does this person then mean to excuse
-the murderer?" In my youth I remember hearing a city magistrate
-complain that book-writers were going too far, and trying to root out
-Christianity and good morals altogether. Some one, it appeared, had
-written a defence of suicide. It was horrible! too horrible! On further
-inquiry it turned out that the book in question was the <i>Sorrows of
-Werther.</i></p>
-
-<p>'By abstract thinking, then, is meant that in the murderer we see
-nothing but the simple fact that he is a murderer, and by this single
-quality annihilate all the human nature which is in him. The polished
-and sentimental world of Leipsic thought otherwise. They threw their
-bouquets, and twined their flowers round the wheel and the criminal
-who was fastened to it.&mdash;But this also is the opposite pole of
-abstraction.&mdash;It was in a different strain that I once heard a poor
-old woman, an inmate of the workhouse, rise above the abstraction
-of the murderer. The sun shone, as the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span> severed head was laid upon
-the scaffold. "How finely," said the woman, "does God's gracious sun
-lighten up Binder's head!" We often say of a poor creature who excites
-our anger that he is not worth the sun shining on him. That woman saw
-that the murderer's head was in the sunlight, and that it had not
-become quite worthless. She raised him from the punishment of the
-scaffold into the sunlit grace of God. It was not by wreaths of violets
-or by sentimental fancies that she brought about the reconciliation:
-she saw him in the sun above received into grace.'</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_150" id="Footnote_1_150"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_150"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Wer denkt abstrakt!' (<i>Vermischte Schriften</i>, vol. ii. p.
-402.)</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XXII.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>FROM SENSE TO THOUGHT.</h4>
-
-
-<p>Induction and Experience are names to which is often assigned the
-honour of being the source of all our knowledge. But what induction
-and experience consist in, is what we are supposed to be already
-aware of; and that is&mdash;it may be briefly said&mdash;the concentration
-of the felt and sense-given fragments into an intimate unity. The
-accidents and fortunes that have befallen us in lapses of time, the
-scenes that have been set before and around us in breadths of space,
-are condensed into a mood of mind, a habitual shading of judgment,
-or frame of thought. The details of fact re-arrange themselves into
-a general concept; their essence gets distilled into a concentrated
-form. Their meaning disengages itself from its embodiment, and floats
-as a self-sustaining form in an ideal world. Thus if we look at the
-larger process of history, we see every period trying to translate the
-sensuous fact of its life into a formula of thought, and to fix it in
-definite characters. The various parts of existence, and existence as
-a whole, are stripped of their sensible or factual nature, in which we
-originally feel and come into contact with them, and are reduced to
-their simple equivalents in terms of thought. From sense and immediate
-feeling there is, in the first place, generated an image or idea which
-at least represents and stands for reality; and from that, in the
-second place, comes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span> a thought or notion proper, which holds the facts
-in unity.</p>
-
-<p>The phenomenon may, perhaps, be illustrated by the case of numbers. To
-the adult European, numbers and numbering are an obvious and essential
-part of our scheme of things that seems to need no special explanation.
-But the experience of children suggests its artificiality, and the
-evidence from the history of language corroborates that surmise. If
-number be in a way describable as part of the sense-experience, or
-total impression, it certainly does not come upon us with the same
-passivity on our part as the perception of taste or colour, or even
-of shape. It postulates a higher grade of activity. As Plato says, it
-'awakes the intelligence': it implies a question and looks forward
-to an answer: it is thus the first appearance of what in its later
-fullness will be called 'Dialectic,' To put it otherwise: Numbering
-can only proceed where there is a unit, and an identity: it implies a
-one, and it implies an infinite repetibility of that one<a name="FNanchor_1_151" id="FNanchor_1_151"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_151" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> It thus
-postulates the double mental act, first of reducing the various to
-its basis of identity, and, secondly, of performing a synthesis of
-the identical units thus created. In the highly artificial world in
-which we live all this seems simple enough. The products of machinery,
-articles of furniture, dress, &amp;c., &amp;c., are already uniform items: and
-the strokes of a clock seem almost to invite summation. But in free
-nature this similarity is much less obviously stamped on things: and
-the products of primitive art&mdash;of literal <i>manu</i>-facture&mdash;display an
-individuality, an element of personal taste, even, which is necessarily
-lacking in things turned out by machinery. Thus it was necessary,
-before we could number, to reduce the qualitatively different to
-a quantitative equality or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span> comparability. There are indeed some
-instances, in that nearest of things to us, the human body, which
-might help. There is the obvious similarity of organs and limbs which
-go in pairs, and which might easily suggest a dual, as, so to speak,
-a sensuous fact amongst other facts. Again, there is the hand and its
-five fingers, or the two hands and the ten fingers. The five or ten,
-as a whole naturally given, suggest a grouping of numbers in natural
-aggregates. The fingers, again, (and here we may keep at first to the
-fingers proper, minus the thumb,) may be without much ingenuity said
-to give us a set of four, naturally distinct, yet naturally alike,
-and needing, so to speak, the minimum of intelligence to create the
-numerical scale from one to four. It is by them, indeed, that Plato, it
-may be unconsciously, illustrates the genesis of number. Here in short
-you have the natural abacus of the nations, but one restricted, first,
-perhaps to the group 1-4, secondly to the group 1-10.</p>
-
-<p>We have seen how the dual was, in certain instances, almost a natural
-perceptive fact. But when it is so envisaged, it is hardly recognised
-as number strictly so called. It is only a fresh and peculiar sensuous
-attribute of things: a thing which has the quality of duplication, not
-a thought which is the synthesis of two identical units. It is a sort
-of accident, not part of a regular system or series. So again with
-the plural, which may appear in several shapes before it is assigned
-to its proper place as a systematic function of the singular. If the
-Malay, in order to say 'the king of all apes' has to enumerate one
-after another the several sub-species of ape, or if to express 'houses'
-he has to reduplicate the singular, to insert a word meaning 'all'
-or 'many,' we can see that the conception of number is for him still
-in the bonds of sense. It is not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span> a synthetic category, but only a
-material multitude. But in other cases the plural proper is almost
-confounded with the so-called 'collective.' It is not an unfamiliar
-fact in Greek and Latin that the plural has acquired a meaning of
-its own,&mdash;not the mere multiple of its singular; as also that the
-collective term is occasionally used as an abstract, occasionally
-as the more or less indeterminate collection of the individuals.
-Such plurals and such collectives represent a stage of language and
-conception when the aggregate of singulars form a uniquely-qualified
-case of the object. And the peculiarity of them is seen in the way
-the plurality is immersed in and restricted to the special class of
-objects: as e. g. when in English the plurality of a number of ships
-is verbally stereotyped as against the plurality of a number of sheep,
-or of partridges (fleet, flock, covey). In such instances the category
-of number is completely pervaded and modified by the quality of the
-objects it is applied to. So, in the Semitic languages, the so-called
-'broken plural' is a quasi-collective, which grammatically counts as
-a feminine singular (like so many Latin and Greek collectives): and
-whereas the more regular plural is generally shown by separable affix,
-this quasi-collective plural enters the very body of the word by
-vowel-change, indicating as it were by this absorption the constitution
-of a specifically new view of things. On the other hand, it may be
-said, there is in this collective a trace of the emergence of the
-universal and identical element through the generalisation due to the
-conjunction of several similars all acting as one<a name="FNanchor_2_152" id="FNanchor_2_152"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_152" class="fnanchor">[2]</a></p>
-
-<p>In a true plural, on the contrary, it is required that the sign of
-number be clearly eliminated from any peculiarities of its special
-object, and be distinctly separated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span> from the collective. And similarly
-the true numeral has to be realised in its abstractness, as a category
-<i>per se.</i> And to do this requires some amount of abstraction. In
-Greek, for example, we meet the distinction between numbers in the
-abstract, pure numbers (such as four and six), and bodily or physical
-numbers (such as four men, six trees)<a name="FNanchor_3_153" id="FNanchor_3_153"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_153" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>. The geometrical aspect
-under which numbers were regarded by the Greeks, e. g. as oblong or
-square numbers, bears in the same direction. But another phenomenon
-in language tells the tale more distinctly<a name="FNanchor_4_154" id="FNanchor_4_154"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_154" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>. Abundantly in Sanscrit
-and Greek, more rarely in Zend and Teutonic, and here and there in
-the Semitic languages, we meet with what is known as the dual number,
-a special grammatical form intended to express a pair of objects.
-The witty remark of Du Ponceau<a name="FNanchor_5_155" id="FNanchor_5_155"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_155" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> concerning the Greek dual, that it
-had apparently been invented only for lovers and married people, may
-illustrate its uses, but hardly suffices to explain its existence in
-language. But a comparison of barbarian dialects serves to show that
-the dual is, as it were, a prelude to the plural,&mdash;a first attempt to
-grasp the notion of plurality in a definite way, which served its turn
-in primitive society, but afterwards disappeared, when the plural had
-been developed, and the numerals had attained a form of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span> their own. If
-this be so, the dual is what physiologists call a rudimentary organ,
-and tells the same story as these organs do of the processes of nature.</p>
-
-<p>The language of the Melanesian island of Annatom, one of the New
-Hebrides, may be taken as an instance of a state of speech in which
-the dual is natural. That language possesses a fourfold distinction of
-number in its personal pronouns, a different form to mark the singular,
-dual, trial, and plural: and the pronoun of the first person plural
-distinguishes in addition whether the person addressed is or is not
-included in the 'we-two,' 'we-three,' or 'we-many' of the speaker<a name="FNanchor_6_156" id="FNanchor_6_156"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_156" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>.
-The same language however possesses only the first three numerals, and
-in the translation of the Bible into this dialect it was necessary
-to introduce the English words, four, five, &amp;c. The two facts must
-be taken together: the luxuriance of the personal pronouns and the
-scanty development of numerals in such languages are two phenomena
-of the same law. The numeral 'four' to these tribes is said to bear
-the meaning of 'many' or 'several,' Another fact points in the same
-direction. In many languages, such as those of China, Further India and
-Mexico, it is customary in numbering to use what W. von Humboldt has
-called class-words. Here it is felt that an artificial unity has to
-be created, a common denominator found, and all reduced to it, before
-any summation can be carried out. Scholars and officials, in Chinese,
-can only be classed under the rubric of 'jewel' or dignity: and
-animals or fish by 'tails,' as if thereby only could one get a handle
-to hold<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span> them and count them. (The idiom still lingers in western
-languages: as in English, heads of cabbage, or of cattle: or German,
-<i>sechs Mann Soldaten.</i>) So in Malay, instead of 'five boys' the phrase
-used is 'boy five-man': in other words, the numerals are supposed to
-inhere as yet in objects of a special kind or common occurrence<a name="FNanchor_7_157" id="FNanchor_7_157"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_157" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>.
-And among the South Sea Islanders the consciousness of number is
-decidedly personal: that is to say, the distinction between one and
-two is first conceived as a distinction between 'I' and 'we two.' Even
-this amount of simplification surpasses what is found amongst some
-Australian tribes. There we find four duals: one for brothers and
-sisters: one for parents and children: one for husbands and wives: and
-one between brothers-in-law<a name="FNanchor_8_158" id="FNanchor_8_158"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_158" class="fnanchor">[8]</a>. Each pair has a different form. We
-thus seem to see to what early language is applied: not to designate
-the objects of nature, but the members of the primitive family and
-their interests. The consciousness of numbers was first awakened by the
-need of distinguishing and combining the things that belonged to and
-specially interested men and women in the narrow circle of barbarian
-life<a name="FNanchor_9_159" id="FNanchor_9_159"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_159" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>. It is not altogether imaginative in principle, though it may
-be occasionally surmise in details, to connect the rise of grammatical
-forms with the temperament and character of the people, and therefore
-with its social organisation. If the Bantoo or Caffir languages of
-Southern Africa instead of a single third personal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span> pronoun and third
-personal termination to the verb use the separate forms corresponding
-to the ten class-prefixes of the nouns, it must be in accordance with
-the general spirit and system of these tribes. The various plural
-forms, if they persist, will reflect contemporary modes of life.</p>
-
-<p>Numbers were at first immersed in the persons, and then, as things
-came to be considered also, in the things numbered. The mind seems to
-have proceeded slowly from the vague one to definite numbers. And the
-first decided step was taken towards an apprehension of numbers when
-two was distinguished from one, and the distinction was made part of
-the personal terminations. The plural was a further step in the same
-direction: the real value of which, however, did not become apparent
-until the numerals had been separately established in forms of their
-own. When that was accomplished, the special form of the dual became
-useless: it had outlived its purpose, and henceforth it ceased to have,
-any but that poetical beauty of old association which often adorns the
-once natural, but now obsolete growths of the past. When the numerals
-were thus emancipated from their material and sensuous environment,
-quantity was translated from outward being in its embodiments into a
-form of thought. At first, indeed, it was placed in an ethereal or
-imaginative space, the counterpart as it were of the sensuous space
-in which it had been previously immersed. It became a denizen of the
-mental region, as it had been before a habitant of the sense-world.</p>
-
-<p>The mind was informed with quantity in the shape of number: but it does
-not follow from this, that the new product was comprehended, or the
-process of its production kept in view. Like all new inventions (and
-numeration may fairly be classed under that head), it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span> was laid hold
-of, and all its consequences, results, and uses estimated and realised
-by the practical and defining intellect. In one direction, it became,
-like many new inventions in the early days of society, a magic charm,
-and was invested with mystery, sacredness, and marvellous powers. But
-the intelligent mind,&mdash;the understanding,&mdash;resolved to make better use
-of the new instrument: and that in two ways, in practical work and in
-theory. On the one hand it was applied practically in the dealings
-of life,&mdash;in commerce, contracts, legislation, and religion. On the
-other hand, the new conception of number, which common sense and the
-instinctive action of men had evolved, was carried out in all its
-theory: it was analysed in all directions, and its elements combined
-in all possible ways. The result was the science of arithmetic,
-and mathematics in general. Such consequences did the reflective
-understanding derive from the analysis of its datum,&mdash;the fact of
-quantity freed from its sensuous envelope.</p>
-
-<p>The general action of understanding, and of practical thought, is of
-this kind. It accepts the representative images which have emerged from
-sensation, as they occur: and tries to appreciate them, to give them
-precision, to carry them into details, and to analyse them until their
-utmost limits of meaning are explored. Where they have come from, and
-where they lead to,&mdash;the process out of which they spring, and which
-fixes the extent of their validity,&mdash;are questions of no interest
-to the understanding<a name="FNanchor_10_160" id="FNanchor_10_160"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_160" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>. It takes its objects, as given in popular
-conception, as fixed and ultimate entities to be expounded in detail.</p>
-
-<p>We have taken number as one example of the transference of a sensible
-or sense-immersed fact into a form of thought: but a form which is
-still placed in a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span> superior or mental space. One advantage of taking
-number as illustration, is that numbered things are distinguished from
-numbers in an emphatic and recognised way. Nobody will dispute that
-the abstraction, as it is called, has an existence of its own, and
-can be made a legitimate object of independent investigation. But if
-the process be more obvious in the case of the numerals, there must
-have been a similar course of development leading to the pronouns, the
-prepositions, and the auxiliary verbs&mdash;to what has been called the
-'formal' or 'pronominal' or 'demonstrative' element, the connective and
-constructive tissue of language. Whether these pronominal 'roots' form
-a special and originally-distinct class of their own, or are derived
-from a transmutation of more material or substantial elements, is a
-question on which linguistic research casts as yet no very certain
-light. It is true that on the one hand etymology is mainly silent on
-the origin of pronouns, numerals, and the more fundamental prepositions
-(i. e. cannot refer them to roots significant of qualitative being):
-and one need not lay much stress on remarks, like that of Gabelenz<a name="FNanchor_11_161" id="FNanchor_11_161"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_161" class="fnanchor">[11]</a>,
-that in the Indo-Chinese languages the words for <i>I, five, fish</i>
-have a like sound, as do those for <i>thou, two, ear</i>, or that <i>I am,</i>
-originally means <i>I breathe</i>. In all languages&mdash;though with immense
-diversities of degree, this formal element has attained a certain
-independence. And in many instances we can more or less trace the
-process by which there grew up in language an independent world of
-thought: we can see the natural existence passing out of the range of
-the senses into spiritual relations. Before our eyes a world of reason
-is slowly constituting itself in the history of culture: and we, who
-live now, enter upon the inheritance which past ages have laid up for
-us.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>There is, however, a difference between the way in which these
-results look to us now, and the way in which they originally
-organised themselves. The child who begins to learn a language in the
-lesson-books and the grammars finds the members of it all, as it were,
-upon one level: adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and verbs confront
-him with the same authority and rank. This appearance is deceptive:
-it may easily suggest that the words are not members in an organism,
-in and out of which they have developed. And this organism of thought
-has its individual types, expressed in the great families of human
-speech. Its generic form (as drawn out in a logical system) appears
-in different grades, with different degrees of fullness, in Altaic
-and Dravidian from what it does in Malay, or in Chinese, and these
-again have their own predominant categories as compared with those
-used in the American or African languages, or in Indo-Germanic and
-Semitic. If the Altaic languages e. g. are wanting in the verb proper,
-and manage with possessive suffixes and nouns; if the Semitic tenses
-display a poverty which contrasts with their wealth in Greek; and
-yet each group performs its function, we may infer that each speech
-has a complete organism, though it does not bring all its parts to
-adequate expression. All this distinction of 'parts of speech,' of
-forms, prefixes and suffixes, &amp;c., is part of the life of language,
-embodying in more or less distinct organs the organisation of thought
-in the individual form it reached in that speech-type. Thus in Chinese
-there are strictly speaking no isolated words, nouns, or verbs: there
-are only abstract parts of a concrete sentence; and grammar in Chinese
-therefore has no accidence (no declensions, conjugations, &amp;c.) but
-only syntax. Yet it is these abstract fragments which exist and seem
-to have independence and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span> inherent meaning: whereas the unity in which
-they cohere to form a concrete context is the fleeting sentence of
-the moment. At the opposite extreme, again, the Mexican family of
-languages tend to incorporate relations to subject and object with
-the verb, in such a degree that the word almost becomes a sentence.
-Facts like these suggest that a science of the forms of language, in
-proportion as it generalises, tends to approach logic; and that logic
-will have a converse tendency to elevate to an unduly typical position
-the grammatical form of the languages with which the logician is best
-acquainted.</p>
-
-<p>If these points were remembered, there would be less absurd employment
-of the grammatical categories of one group of languages to systematise
-another. Greek and Sanscrit grammar plays sad havoc with the organism
-of a Semitic tongue, and it is not less out of place as a schema
-for delineating e. g. South African dialect. Isolated words even in
-an Indo-Germanic language&mdash;even, we may say, in such a language as
-English&mdash;are still fractional, and do not get life and individuality
-except in their context. And it needs but a little experience to show
-how various that individuality may be. It needs perhaps still more
-meditation to realise that it is in this individuality that the real
-life of language lies: in the words said and written to express the
-thought of a personality. But, first, because language has its material
-and mechanical side, and secondly, because in civilised countries it
-further acquires a more stereotyped mechanism in written and printed
-language, its parts tend to gain a pseudo-independence. It is one aim
-of a philosophical dictionary to restore the organic interconnexion
-which in the mere sequence of vocables in juxtaposition is apt to be
-lost. What we call the meaning of a word is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span> something which carries us
-beyond that mere word,&mdash;which restores the connexions which have been
-broken off and forgotten. In the form of a dictionary, of course, this
-can only be done piece-meal: but if each piece is done thoroughly, it
-can hardly fail to bring out certain comprehensive connexions. The mere
-word seems a simple thing; and one is at first disposed to get rid of
-its difficulty by substituting a so-called synonym. But a deeper study
-reveals the fact that an exact synonym is a thing one can no more find
-than two peas which are absolutely indistinguishable. A synonym is only
-a practical <i>pis aller</i>. But every word is really as it were a point
-in an infinitely complex organic life, with its essence or meaning
-determined by the currents to and fro which meet in it.</p>
-
-<p>Words as we see them <i>prima facie</i> in a printed page do look separate
-entities. They stand, one here and another there, in a quasi-extension,
-with marks of direction and connexion pointing from one to another,
-but of connexion apparently extraneous to the more solid points which
-are represented by nouns and verbs, or names of substances, actions,
-and attributes. Results, as they are, of that practical analysis which
-the need of writing down language has led to, they are treated as
-complete wholes, which by the speaker are forced into certain temporary
-connexions. But this is an illusion which, because a thing changes
-its relationships, assumes that it can exist out of all relationships
-whatever. Every word of Language is such an abstraction, isolated from
-its context. But amid these contexts there are certain similarities:
-identical elements are detected: and these identical elements are the
-common names of language, the terms of general significance. In all
-cases, however, what an utterance of language<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span> describes or expresses
-is a definite individual event or scene, conceived as a concrete
-of several parts. Each separate vocable is a contribution to the
-total: a step towards the real redintegration of the whole out of its
-several parts. But the total itself&mdash;the content of fact in any single
-sentence&mdash;is only an abstraction,&mdash;a part of the universe which human
-interest and need have isolated from the comprehensive scope of things.
-Thus, in two degrees, we may say, the picture produced in the sentence
-falls short of the truth of things. Each statement is an arbitrary or
-accidental cutting out of the totality: each element of the cutting is
-dependent on that abstraction, and relative to it. But&mdash;as in a given
-group of speech, the same sets of circumstances will naturally be
-selected, and tend to recur again and again,&mdash;the terms which describe
-them will acquire a certain association with the objects, and will come
-to be called the common names of these agents, acts, and qualities.
-They denote or 'represent' the things and acts, conceived however in
-certain aspects and relations, and not in their entirety and totality
-of nature.</p>
-
-<p>In this product of intellectual movement above the limits of sensation
-we have the 'representation'<a name="FNanchor_12_162" id="FNanchor_12_162"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_162" class="fnanchor">[12]</a> as Hegel calls it, on which the
-Understanding turns its forces. We have one product of the organic
-whole of thought taken by itself as if it were independent, set
-forth as a settled nucleus for further acquaintance: and this one
-point discussed fully and with precision, elaborated in all detail
-and consequence, to the neglect of its context, and the necessary
-limitations involved in the notion. The process of name-giving may
-illustrate this tendency in human thought to touch its objects only in
-one point. The names given to objects do not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span> embrace the whole nature
-of these objects, but give expression only to one striking feature
-in them. Thus the name of the horse points it out as 'the strong' or
-'the swift': the moon is 'the measurer' or 'the shining one'; and so
-in all cases. The object as expressed in these names is viewed from
-one aspect, or in one point: and the name, which originally at least
-corresponds to the conception, meets the object, properly speaking,
-on that side only, or in that relation. The object is not studied in
-its own nature, and in its total world, but as it specially enters the
-range of human interest, and serves human utilities. One can at least
-guess why it should be so: why a name should, in logical language,
-express an 'accidens' and not the 'essentia' of the object. For the
-investigation of primitive language seems to show that words, as we
-know them in separate existence, are a secondary formation: and that
-the first significant speech was an utterance intended to describe a
-scene, an action, a phenomenon, or complex of event. In point of time,
-the primary fact of language is an agglomeration or aggregate,&mdash;we
-may call it either word or clause (λόγος in short)&mdash;which describes
-in one breath a highly individualised action or phenomenon. The
-spirit or unifying principle in this group might be the accent. Such
-a word-group denotes a highly specialised form of being: and if we
-call it a word, we may say that the earliest words, and the words of
-barbarous tribes, are ingeniously special.<a name="FNanchor_13_163" id="FNanchor_13_163"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_163" class="fnanchor">[13]</a> But it would be more
-correct to say, that in such a group the elements of the scene enter
-only from<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span> a single aspect or in a single relation. Accordingly when
-disintegration begins, the result is as follows. The elements of the
-group, having now become independent words held together by the syntax
-of the sentence, are adopted to denote the several objects which
-entered into the total phenomenon. But these words, or fragments of the
-word-group, 'represent' the objects in question from a certain point
-of view, and not in their integrity. The names of things therefore
-touch them only in one point, and express only one aspect. And thus,
-although different names will arise for the same thing, as it enters
-into different groups, in each case the name will connote only a
-general attribute and not the nature of the thing. These names are in
-the Hegelian sense of the term 'abstract.' In popular phraseology, they
-are only 'signs' of things: i. e. not 'symbols' (though they may have
-been in some cases symbolic in origin), for in a symbol there is a
-<i>natural</i> correspondence or sensible analogy to the thing symbolised,
-but something 'instituted,' due to an 'understanding' or convention.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_151" id="Footnote_1_151"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_151"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> See vol. ii. p. 190, (Logic, § 102).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_152" id="Footnote_2_152"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_152"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> See Max Müller in Mind, vol. i. 345.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_153" id="Footnote_3_153"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_153"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Pure number is ἀριθμὸς μοναδικός: applied number is
-αριθμὸς φυσικὸς or σωματικός. Aristotle, <i>Metaph</i>. N. 5, speaks of
-αριθμὸς πύρινος ἤ γήϊνος. But this is only Greek idiom: as we say
-'Greek history' instead of 'History of Greece:' or vice versa, when we
-translate <i>Populus Romanus</i> by 'people of Rome.' Aristotle is speaking
-of 'proportions' or 'amounts' of fire or earth in the compounds of
-these elements.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_154" id="Footnote_4_154"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_154"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> See L. Geiger, <i>Ursprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen
-Sprache und Vernunft</i> (vol. i. p. 380). And Gabelenz 'Die melanesischen
-Sprachen' in the <i>Abhandlungen der Sächsischen Gesellschaft der
-Wissenschaften</i> (VIII), 1861, pp. 89-91.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_155" id="Footnote_5_155"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_155"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>Mémoire sur le Systeme grammatical</i>, &amp;c. p. 155.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_156" id="Footnote_6_156"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_156"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Cf. <i>nous</i> and <i>nous autres</i>. The same distinction is
-found in some American languages. There is a dual in the language of
-the Greenlanders; but it is not, however, used when a natural duality
-seems to call for it, but in cases when, though there might have been
-several things, only two are actually found.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_157" id="Footnote_7_157"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_157"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> W. von Humboldt, <i>Verschiedenheit des menschlichen
-Sprachbaues</i>, p. 423 (ed. 1841); Misteli, <i>Typen des Sprachbaues</i>
-(1893).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_8_158" id="Footnote_8_158"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_158"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Capt. Grey, <i>Vocabulary of the dialects of S. W.
-Australia</i>, pp. xxi and 104 (1840).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_9_159" id="Footnote_9_159"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_159"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> The sharp distinction between the first and second
-personal pronouns and the third: the want of any apparent connexion
-in the Indo-Germanic languages between the first and second persons
-singular and the plural form seems to point in the same direction.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_10_160" id="Footnote_10_160"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_160"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> Cf. vol. ii. <i>Notes and Illustrations</i>, p. 400.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_11_161" id="Footnote_11_161"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_161"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> <i>Die Sprachwissenschaft</i>, p. 168.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_12_162" id="Footnote_12_162"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_162"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> 'Vorstellung,' as distinguished from 'Begriff.'</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_13_163" id="Footnote_13_163"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_163"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> Thus in Malay, there are about twenty words for
-strike, according as it is done with thick or thin wood, downwards,
-horizontally, or upwards, with the hand, with the fist, with the
-flat hand, with a club, with the sharp edge, with a hammer, &amp;c. (See
-Misteli, <i>Typen des Sprachbaues</i>, p. 265.)</p></div>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span></p>
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XXIII.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>FIGURATE OR REPRESENTATIVE THOUGHT.</h4>
-
-
-<p>The compensating dialectic whereby reason, under the guise of
-imagination, overthrows the narrowness of popular estimates, makes
-itself observed even in the popular use of the terms abstract and
-concrete. Terms like state, mind, wealth, may from one point of view
-be called abstract, from another concrete. At a certain pitch these
-abstractions cease to be abstract, and become even to popular sense
-very concrete realities. In the tendency to personification in language
-we see the same change from abstract to concrete: as when Virtue is
-called a goddess, or Fashion surnamed the despot of womankind. In
-such instances, imagination, more or less in the service of art and
-religion, upsets the narrow vulgar estimates of reality. But it upsets
-them, so to speak, by giving to the abstraction (through its creative
-power) that sensuous concreteness which the mere abstract lacks and
-which the ordinary mind alone recognises as real. It 'stoops to
-conquer.' Such a representation is, as Hegel says<a name="FNanchor_1_164" id="FNanchor_1_164"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_164" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>, 'the synthetic
-combination of the Universal and Individual': 'synthetic,' because not
-their free, spontaneous, and essential unity, but the supreme product
-of the artistic will and hand, which, rather than let the universal
-perish by neglect,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span> build for it, the eternal and omnipresent, 'a
-temple made with hands.' In mythology we can see the same process: by
-which, as it is phrased, an abstract term becomes concrete: by which,
-as we may more correctly say, a thought is transformed into, or rather
-stops short at, a representative picture. The many gods of polytheism
-are the fixed and solidified shapes in which the several degrees of
-religious growth have taken 'a local habitation and a name': or they
-bear witness to the failure of the greater part of the world to grasp
-the idea of Deity in its unity and totality apart from certain local
-and temporary conditions. So, too, terms like force, law, matter,&mdash;the
-abstractions of the mere popular mind&mdash;are by certain periods reduced
-to the level of sensuous things, and spoken of as real entities,
-somewhere and somehow existent, apart from the thinking medium to
-which they belong. Such terms, again, as property, wealth, truth, are
-popularly identified with the objects in which they are for the time
-and place manifested or embodied.</p>
-
-<p>In these ways the abstract, in the ordinary meaning, becomes in the
-ordinary meaning concrete. The distinction between abstract and
-concrete is turned into a distinction between understanding and sense,
-instead of, as Hegel makes it, a distinction in the adequacy and
-completeness of thought itself. Thought (the Idea), as has been more
-than once pointed out, is the principle of unification or unification
-itself: it is organisation plus the consciousness of organisation:
-it is the unifier, the unity, and the unified,&mdash;subject as well as
-object, and eternal copula of both. An attempt is at first made in
-two degrees to represent the thought in terms of the senses as a sort
-of superior or higher-class sensible. When the impossibility of that
-attempt is seen, common sense ends by denying what it has learned to
-call the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span> super-sensible altogether. These three plans may be called
-respectively the mythological, the metaphysical, and the positive or
-nominalist fallacies of thought. In the mythological, or strictly
-anthropomorphic fallacy, thought is conceived under the bodily shape
-and the physical qualities of humanity, as a separate unifying,
-controlling, synthetic agent, through whose interference the several
-things, otherwise dead and motionless, acquire a semblance of life
-and action, though in reality but puppets or marionettes: that is to
-say, it is identified with a subject of like passions with ourselves,
-a repetition of the particular human personality, with its narrowness
-and weakness. The action of the Idea is here replaced by the agency
-of supposed living beings, invested with superhuman powers. In the
-metaphysical or realist fallacy we have a feeble ghostly reproduction
-of the mythological. The living personal deity is replaced by a faint
-scare-crow of abstract deity. The cause of the changes that go on in
-nature is now attributed to indwelling sympathies and animosities,
-to the abhorrence of a vacuum, to selection, affinity, and the like:
-to essences and laws conceived of as somehow existent in a mystic
-space and time. In the positive or nominalist fallacy, the failure of
-these two theories begins to be felt: and the mind, which had only
-heard of unifying reason under these two phases and is meanwhile sure
-of its sense-perceptions, treats the objective synthesis as a dream
-and a delusion. Or, at best, it regards the synthesis as essentially
-subjective&mdash;as a complementary idealising activity of ours which
-ekes out the defects of reality, and brings continuity into the
-discontinuous. Our thought&mdash;(it is only <i>our</i> thought)&mdash;is but an
-instrument, distinct from us and from the reality: yet acting as a
-bridge to connect these two opposing shores&mdash;a bridge however which
-does not really reach<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[Pg 326]</a></span> the other side, but only an artificial image,
-which simulates to us, and will for ever simulate, the inaccessible
-reality. This last view is the utterance of the popular matter-of-fact
-reason, when in weariness and tedium it turns from the attempt to grasp
-thought pure and simple, and instead of reducing the metaphysical
-antitheses to the transparent unity of comprehension, relapses into
-mere acceptance of a given reality.</p>
-
-<p>In some of these cases the full step into pure thought is never
-made. The creations of mythology, for example, display an unfinished
-and baffled attempt to rise from the separation of sense to the
-unity and organisation of thought. The gods of heathenism are only
-individuals&mdash;and individuals only <i>meant to be,</i> and by the act of
-faith and devotion set forth as reality before the worshipper: but they
-are individuals in which imagination embodies a unified and centralised
-system of forces or principles. They <i>mean</i> the powers of nature and of
-mind, but the sceptre in their hands is only a sign of power attributed
-by the believer; and far away, encompassing alike them and him, is the
-great relentless necessity. In other cases there is a relapse: when
-the higher stage of thought has been attained, it is instantaneously
-lost. Terms which are really thoughts are again reduced to the level of
-the things of sense, individualised in some object, which, though it
-is only a representation or sign, is allowed to usurp the place of the
-thought which it but partially and by extraneous institution embodies.
-The intuition of the sensuous imagination at every step throws its
-spells on the products of thought, and turns them into a representative
-picture, which in popular use and wont occupies the place of the
-notion. Instead of being retained in their native timelessness, the
-terms of the Idea are brought under the laws of Sense-perception, under
-the conditions of space and time.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[Pg 327]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>The term 'representation,' which Hegel employs to name these
-picture-thoughts or figurate conceptions, corresponds to the facts
-of their nature. A 'representation' is one of two things: either a
-particular thing sent out accredited with general functions, or a
-universal narrowed down into a particular thing. Thus, as it has been
-seen, a general name implies or connotes a universal relation or
-attribute, but confines it to denote a particular object or class.
-'Swift,' for example, was an epithet tied down to express the horse. In
-the first instance we may suppose the name to be a sort of metaphor:
-differing only by its simplicity and frequency of suggestion from those
-endless epithets, which in Norse or Arabic poetry veil and adorn the
-object which they are meant to designate. That is, we conceive the
-object as an embodiment or representation of the quality, as an eagle
-is the emblem of strength: only in the latter case we distinguish
-between the object and its metaphorical signification. In the second
-place, however, the object of experience is allowed completely to
-coincide with the aspect discriminated by the selective epithet, and we
-can no longer in ordinary thought separate the imaging object from the
-general relation which it images forth. This is the level of thought to
-which Hegel appropriates the term 'representation.' It includes under
-it the three fallacies of thought already noted and saves the trouble
-of comprehending the reality. In the Hegelian sense, a representation
-is abstract; because it solidifies, hardens, and isolates the term of
-thought, makes it a particular, and never rises above the single case
-to the general notion embodied in it.</p>
-
-<p>The world of representative thought is a world of independent points
-in juxtaposition, which we arrange as seems best to us. It lies in
-an undefinable borderland<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[Pg 328]</a></span> between us and things. It is a would-be,
-but not an actual, reality. It is not like a true Idea&mdash;the unity of
-subjective and objective: but only a make-believe. We have put it
-there, and yet we credit it with an effective existence. When our mind
-moves amongst these picture-thoughts, it can only institute external
-relations between the terms. A judgment, in that case, is interpreted
-to mean the conjunction of two terms, which at once step into the rank
-of subject and predicate by means of the copula. A sentence is an
-arrangement of words <i>ab extra</i> in conscious or unconscious conformity
-with the rules of grammar. The world of knowledge, or the Idea, as
-a whole is turned into a plane surface with its typical terms,&mdash;the
-members of the organism of reason,&mdash;like dots put in co-ordination and
-juxtaposition, not spontaneously affected towards each other. Even if
-they are not embodied and reduced to a sensuous level of existence,
-they are held to be originally separate and unconnected. How they
-all came into being, and whether they do not all by gradations and
-differentiation-proceed from one root, are questions neither asked nor
-answered.</p>
-
-<p>The level of representative thinking&mdash;thinking i. e. which is not
-the grasp (<i>Begriff</i>) of the reality, but only the apprehension of
-something which stands for and represents it&mdash;is the level on which we
-all come, more or less, to stand in our non-philosophic moments. It
-is, in essentials, the realm of what Plato called <i>δόξα</i>,&mdash;the level
-of consciousness which fails to rise to see the unity of essence in
-the many single goods and beauties, which holds its knowledge (such
-at is) at the mercy of accidents, not bound by the conclusions of
-reasoning,&mdash;the realm which is not without reality, but an immature
-and uncertain reality. It is, in essentials, the same as what, as
-opposed to <i>intellectus</i>, Spinoza styled <i>imaginatio.</i><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[Pg 329]</a></span> Imagination,
-to Spinoza, is an understanding under the bondage of particular
-passions and temporary interests, which loses sight of the great
-bond of being or <i>Substantia</i>, and fixes its glance on the parts in
-subordinate and infra-essential relationships: which is always finite,
-i. e. never really comprehensive and self-sustaining in its view, but
-always limited by a tacit reference to something outside itself. The
-'Representation' is the idea, in the loose and inexact use of that
-word, which goes with the phrase <i>mere idea</i>,&mdash;i. e. a mere mental
-image, which is not the reality, though it is believed to do duty for
-and to represent it<a name="FNanchor_2_165" id="FNanchor_2_165"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_165" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>. Yet it is not a mere thought: rather its whole
-aim and meaning is to refer to reality, to suggest it, to bring it
-nearer us. Its fault is that it is an imperfect, partial, one-sided,
-or even one-pointed idea. It is really an instance and phase of
-the <i>ignava ratio</i>, to which a date or name serves as a ποῦ στῶ of
-explanation.</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-'At Kilne there was no weathercock,<br />
-And that's the reason why.'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>Such 'representation,' according to Hegel, is, e. g., the mode of
-intelligence accessible to those who cling to the mere, or abstractly,
-religious mood, and who cannot or will not rise to the comprehension
-of their creed. Its facts or dogmas present themselves to such a
-restricted conception as the parts of a picture or the stages of a
-history, in visible or imaginatively-construable space, and in a
-succession of times. The essence of religion, of course, for Hegel as
-for other exponents of its inmost nature, is a feeling of certitude
-or faith which transcends the gulfs and separations of the secular
-consciousness, which sees with the believing soul the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[Pg 330]</a></span> inner peace,
-the absolute harmony of the true reality. <i>Pectus facit theologum.</i>
-The sense of utter dependence on God, in complete identity with the
-sense of absolute independence in God&mdash;that strength of faith is the
-very life of religion. But when religion seeks to give an intelligent
-expression of her faith, when she tries to give a reason acceptable to
-the outside world, she is apt, unless specially trained in the high
-things of the spirit, to base her creed not on the rock of ages, but
-on the signs and miracles of the times. She has tried to theorise the
-faith: but, although her faith may be sound and true, the religious
-spirit, unless it be also the spirit of wisdom and reasoned truth, runs
-a risk of falling into the fallacy of <i>Post hoc</i>, <i>ergo propter hoc.</i>
-She descends therefore to the region of representation: she uses the
-language of sense and analogy; she presents the spiritual under the
-guise of the natural. Yet in her heart of hearts these things are only
-a parable,&mdash;they are but</p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 10%;">
-<span style="margin-left: 8em;">'Flesh and blood</span><br />
-To which she links a truth divine.'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>Hegel&mdash;in the introduction to his lectures on the Philosophy of
-Religion&mdash;is reported to have given the following characteristics of
-'representation,' (<i>a</i>) It is still trammeled by the senses. Thought
-and sensation strive for the mastery in it. Thought is bound fast to
-an illustration: and of this illustration it cannot as representative
-thought divest itself:&mdash;the eternally living idea is chained to the
-transient and perishable form of sense. It is metaphorical and material
-thinking, which is helpless without the metaphor and the matter. (<i>b</i>)
-Representative thought envisages what is timeless and infinite under
-the conditions of time and space. It loses sight of the moral and
-spirit of historical development under the semblance of the names,
-incidents, and forms in which it is displayed. The historical and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[Pg 331]</a></span>
-philosophical sense is lost under the antiquarian. Representative
-thought keeps the shell, and throws away the kernel. (<i>c</i>) The terms
-by which such a materialised thought describes its objects are not
-internally connected: each is independent of the other; and we
-only bring them together for the occasion by an act of subjective
-arrangement<a name="FNanchor_3_166" id="FNanchor_3_166"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_166" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>.</p>
-
-<p>The thing&mdash;the so-called <i>subject</i> of the properties, of which it is
-really no more than the <i>substratum</i>&mdash;affords no sufficient ground
-for the unity of the properties attached to it. The substratum or
-subject of the proposition is given, and we then look around to see
-what other properties accompany the primary characteristic for which
-the name was applied. But the term of popular language is not a real
-unity capable of supporting differences; it is only one aspect of a
-thing, a single point fixed and isolated in the process of language
-by the action of natural selection. And so, to ask how the properties
-are related to the thing, is to ask how one aspect, taken out of its
-setting, is related to another isolated aspect: which is evidently an
-unanswerable question. Science is right in rejecting the 'thing' of
-popular conception. If <i>a</i> is <i>a,</i> and nothing more, as the law of
-Identity informs us, then it is for ever impossible to get on to <i>b,
-c, d</i>, and the rest. The union between the thing divided or defined,
-and its divided or defining members, is what is termed extra-logical;
-in other words, it is not evident from what is given or stated in the
-popular conception. That union must be sought elsewhere, and deeper.</p>
-
-<p>And when <i>we</i> step in to overcome the repugnance which the point of
-conception, or what is supposed the subject, shows against admitting
-a diversity of predicates,&mdash;when <i>we</i> force it into union with these
-properties: or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[Pg 332]</a></span> when we try to remove the separation which leaves
-the cause and effect as two independent things to fall apart; our
-action, by which we effect a unification of differences, may, from
-another and a universal point of view, be said to be the notion, or
-grasp of thought, coming to the consciousness of itself. Thought,
-as it were, recognises itself and its image in those objects of
-representative conception, which seem to be given and imposed upon
-the intellect. The two worlds, which the understanding accepts
-as each solid and independent,&mdash;the world of external objects or
-conceptions, and the world of self,&mdash;meet and coincide in the free
-agency of thought, developing itself under a double aspect. It is
-the 'original synthetical unity of apperception' (to quote Kant's
-words), from which the Ego or thinking subject, and the 'manifold'
-or body and world, are simultaneously differentiated. Thus, on the
-one hand, we ourselves no longer remain a rigid unity, existing in
-antithesis to the objects presupposed or referred to by representative
-thought: and on the other hand the so-called thing loses its hardness
-and fragmentary independence, as distinguished from our apprehension
-of it. <i>Our</i> action, as we incline to call it, which mends the
-inadequacies of terms, is from a philosophic point of view, the notion
-itself coming to the front and claiming recognition. The process of
-thought is then seen to be a totality, of which our faculties, on
-the one hand, and the existing thing, on the other, are isolated
-abstractions, supposed habitually to exist on their own account.
-To view either of these systems, the mental, on the one hand, and
-the objective world, on the other, as self-subsistent, has been the
-error in much of our metaphysics, and in the popular conceptions of
-what constitutes reality. The idealism of metaphysicians has been
-often as narrow and insufficient as the realism of common sense. An<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[Pg 333]</a></span>
-adequate philosophy, on the contrary, recognises the presence of both
-elements, in a subordinate and formative position. Representations
-may be compared to the little pools left here and there by the sea
-amongst the rocks and sand: the notion, or grasp of thought, is the
-tidal wave, which left them there to stagnate, but comes back again to
-restore their continuity with the great sea. In our thinking we are
-only the ministers and interpreters of the Idea,&mdash;of the organic and
-self-developing system of thought.</p>
-
-<p>The difference between a representative conception and a thought proper
-may be illustrated by the case of the term 'Money.' Money may be
-either a materialised thought, i. e. a Representative Conception, or
-a Notion Proper. In the former case, money is identified with a piece
-of money. It is probably, in the first instance, embodied in coins of
-gold, silver, and bronze. In the second place, a wide gulf is placed
-between it and the other articles for which it is given in exchange.
-If other things are regarded as money, they are generally treated on
-the assumption that they can in case of need be reduced to coinage. The
-conception of money by the unscientific vulgar considers it separately
-from other commodities: and the laws which forbade its exportation
-gave a vigorous expression to the belief that it was something <i>sui
-generis</i>, and subject to conditions of its own. The scientific notion
-of money modifies this belief in the peculiarity and fixity of money.
-Science does so historically, when it can point to a time and a race
-where money in our sense of the word does not exist, and where barter
-takes the place of buying and selling. Science does so philosophically,
-when it expounds what may be called the <i>process</i> of money,&mdash;the
-inter-action or meeting of conditions to which the existence of money
-is due. The notion of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[Pg 334]</a></span> money, as given in the <i>Ethics</i> of Aristotle,
-says that it is the common measure of utility or demand. When we leave
-out of sight the specific quality of an object, and consider only its
-capacity of satisfying human wants, we have what is called its worth
-or value. This value of the thing,&mdash;the psychological fact which is
-left, when all the qualities marking the objective thing are reduced
-to their social efficiency&mdash;is the notion, of which the currency is
-the representation, reducing thought to the level of the senses, and
-embodying the 'ideality' of value in a tangible and visible object.
-So long as this 'idea' of value is kept in view, the currency is
-comprehended: but when the perception of the notion disappears, money
-is left a mere piece of currency, the general notion being narrowed
-down to the coinage. Thus the notion of money, like other notions in
-their ideal truth, is not in us, nor in the things merely: it is what
-from a minor point of view, when we and the things are regarded under
-the head of want or need, may be called the <i>truth</i> of both, the unity
-of the two sides. Thus considered, money falls into its proper place in
-the order of things.</p>
-<hr class="r5" />
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_164" id="Footnote_1_164"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_164"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Werke,</i> ii. 529, 555.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_165" id="Footnote_2_165"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_165"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Hegel's <i>Werke</i>, ii. 431: '<i>Wobei das Selbst nur
-repräsentirt</i> und vorgestellt ist, da ist es nicht wirklich: we es
-vertreten ist, ist es nicht.' Cf. <i>ib.</i> 416.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_166" id="Footnote_3_166"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_166"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Philosophie der Religion,</i> i. p. 137 seqq.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[Pg 335]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XXIV.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>FROM SUBSTANCE TO SUBJECT.</h4>
-
-
-<p>'It is, in my view, all important,' says Hegel<a name="FNanchor_1_167" id="FNanchor_1_167"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_167" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>, 'to apprehend and
-express the True not as <i>Substance,</i> but equally much as <i>Subject</i>.'
-Substance, as Spinoza defines it, is that which is in itself and
-which is conceived through itself, something which does not need the
-conception of something else by which its concept may be formed<a name="FNanchor_2_168" id="FNanchor_2_168"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_168" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>.
-Substance, in other words, is something which serves to explain
-itself, which is <i>causa sui.</i> The mind, looking out on the wide world
-of mutable and manifold objects, finds its rest in the great calm of
-a something at their base, the eternal nature which, itself unmoved,
-is the one foundation, complete and sufficient, of all things,&mdash;a
-<i>res aeterna et infinita,</i> which can feed the mind with joy alone<a name="FNanchor_3_169" id="FNanchor_3_169"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_169" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>.
-These words suggest only an object&mdash;a transcendent object&mdash;the basis
-of an objective order. They seem to leave little for the contemplating
-subject to do save to discern it and, so discerning, to rest in it
-and to love. They seem to leave substance a mere datum, a far-off
-all-embracing end in which the variety of human effort can find a
-central object and a final close. Yet, in the end it appears<a name="FNanchor_4_170" id="FNanchor_4_170"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_170" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> that
-this <i>Res aeterna</i> loves himself with an intellectual<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[Pg 336]</a></span> love, and
-this love is identified with the love of man to God, so far at least
-as man's mind, considered <i>sub specie aeternitatis</i>, can be said to
-'explicate' Deity. From this conclusion it might be said that Spinoza
-rises above the mere category of substance: God is no longer the mere
-foundation of things&mdash;the absolute object of all objects. He rises in
-human spirit (regarded in its eternal significance) to the rank of
-a true subject. He is not merely known as the True; but He himself,
-living and moving in the essential spirit of man, knows himself and
-acquiesces in his infinite beatitude. But if this be the legitimate
-inference to be drawn from the closing sections of the <i>Ethics</i>, it is
-not the view ordinarily suggested by the mention of Spinoza's doctrine.
-That doctrine, on the contrary, seems, as it first confronts us, and
-as it has taken its place in history, to omit the subjectivity which
-had found so decided a recognition in the commencement of Cartesianism.
-In the <i>cogito ergo sum</i> so much at least is clearly stated: true
-being&mdash;the true&mdash;is not merely known, but itself knows; not a mere
-object, but a subject: a subject-object, or, an Idea. It is to be
-admitted, indeed, that Descartes hardly remains at this altitude, but
-he touches it for a moment. Even when he finds in the conception of God
-a security for truth and reality, and thus seems to base these on a
-one-sidedly objective standard, he regards God as, on the other hand,
-the truth and reality postulated and presupposed by the structural
-system of our ideas. God&mdash;such seems the tendency of his so-called
-'proof'&mdash;is the inevitable prius and presupposition of our thought and
-being: He makes us know, as much as He is ultimately the object known:
-He is the unity and the creator of subject and object.</p>
-
-<p>But it is hardly possible to get in philosophy the full recognition of
-the antithesis between subject and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[Pg 337]</a></span> substance and the inclusion of both
-in the fuller Idea, till after the time of Kant. Kant himself is, in
-essentials, the antithesis of Spinoza, but it is not till Fichte that
-the full force of that antithesis is expressly recognised. With Hegel,
-the two opposite points of view are equally insisted on: the immanence
-and the transcendence of the True, the Real, the Absolute: or, in
-other words, the unity in it of subject and object, or of thought and
-existence. Or, in the words of the religious spirit, though heaven and
-the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him, He dwells in the spirit of
-the righteous, and is not far from any one of us. The truth is not the
-correspondence or agreement of an idea with a further reality which it
-represents. Such an idea or 'representation' is a projection which has
-escaped from our hands, which has slipped from our grip, and which,
-while owning its mere vicarious character, at the same time beckons
-us on to seek a reality we can never find. The 'representation' is in
-a way objective&mdash;it is set over against us: but yet it is not truly
-objective, not self-subsistent and self-possessed. Its objectivity is
-the objectivity of a name: a quasi-objectivity, which requires to be
-dipped in the living waters of intelligence before it can really exist
-and act. It seems, to the untrained observer, to point only outwards to
-the real object which it copies or designates: to a deeper reflection,
-it is seen to point equally inward to the mind which informed it and
-projected it. Thus the knowing subject, and the known object, with the
-representation which acts as a perpetual mediator to connect and yet
-not unify the one of these terms with the other,&mdash;all at last take
-their place, reduced and transfigured, in the unity of the Idea.</p>
-
-<p>According to the Spinozist point of view, thought, it might seem by
-a sort of miracle, dispels the mists that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[Pg 338]</a></span> envelop and bewilder it,
-sees through the multeity of modes, and the isolated pictures of
-imagination, to the true reality, one, infinite and eternal. Before
-that august vision of absolute wholeness the only attitude of a finite
-mind would seem to be resignation, worship, reverence,&mdash;deeply shading
-into the submission of absorption. For in it intellect and will are
-declared to have no place<a name="FNanchor_5_171" id="FNanchor_5_171"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_171" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>. With such a statement, we get that first
-aspect of religion which has found its most imposing representative
-in the faith of Islam. In every religion there must, however, be more
-than this: or it would fail to do what all religion essentially does.
-Sheer dependence<i>&mdash;Schlechthinnige Abhängigkeit</i> (as Schleiermacher
-has named it)&mdash;can never be the whole burden of a religious teacher's
-message. Always&mdash;at least in the background&mdash;there is a contradictory
-element&mdash;in apparent discrepancy with the first&mdash;the deification of the
-worshipper. And as the Ethics of Spinoza&mdash;like every complete system
-of speculative truth&mdash;deals with a problem parallel to, if not even
-identical with, that of religion, its initial definitions and main
-programme must never let us forget the tacit presuppositions worked out
-to explicitness, as they are partly, in its conclusion. When Intellect
-and Will are denied to the <i>Deus = Natura = Substantia,</i> it is meant
-that the Absolute is and has more than intellect and will can well
-name, and that in Him (or Her, or It, for the pronominal distinctions
-of gender matter nothing here), the separation of will from intellect
-is a fallacy which can have no place. What Spinoza casts out are the
-lower passions, the affections of weakness; these <i>as such,</i> i. e. as
-elements of weakness, can have no place in Him. But in God, as in the
-free man who most resembles God, and in whose love He loves himself,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[Pg 339]</a></span>
-there is&mdash;but that also in terms we cannot fathom&mdash;abundance of
-joy&mdash;the joy of infinite self-realisation.</p>
-
-<p>Partly by the complementary theory of Leibniz, partly by the antagonist
-theories of Kant, the way had been prepared for setting forth, and
-in fuller outline, the implications so tardily admitted by Spinoza.
-It was only by a misuse or mal-extension of a word that Herder's
-God&mdash;a God who is Force&mdash;and the Force of Forces&mdash;could be supposed
-an advance upon Spinoza. There is in Force an analogue of Life; but
-it is life in dependence, life not self-centred, always going forth,
-and when it goes forth dissipated. It is as it were pushed from
-behind, and is lost in what comes after it. If a Force of Forces means
-anything, it means something more than Force: it means a master of
-force, a force-controller and force-adjuster, a unity and principle
-of forces. And Substance, as Spinoza understood it, is more than
-this variability, this deification of instability. It is the unity
-in which the variety and disparity of existence, the multiplicity of
-vicissitude, is merged and lost, only again to issue from it, and yet
-not leave it behind, in the infinitely-various modes of its two great
-and conspicuous attributes of consciousness and extensionality. If
-Hegel then sought to go beyond Spinoza, he sought to find a formula
-which would lose nothing that Spinoza had reached, but would at the
-same time bring out what Spinoza had left an implication, or noted in
-a partial rectification. As in religion, besides the utter dependence
-on God (so that, God failing, I perish), there must be also an absolute
-union, complete reconciliation&mdash;complete as culminating in unity and
-identity (so that God shall not be God, unless I am I): so it is in
-philosophy. The Absolute cannot merely <i>be</i>, and be far away&mdash;the last
-goal in which the variety of life is made one, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[Pg 340]</a></span> the turmoil of the
-passionate existences laid to rest. The Soul which is (as some of the
-medieval Christians would say) still <i>in itinere</i>, a wayfarer, is such
-because its glance is turned on outward circumstances: but country is
-no accident: the soul even here carries with it that <i>patria</i>, 'which
-is the heavenly,' in its longings, and has it, even while yet on
-pilgrimage, in that strong possession of all things by itself, which
-the theologian styles Faith. This goal determines the pilgrimage, fixes
-its direction, gives progress to its steps.</p>
-
-<p>In the myth-loving language of Plato (and of Wordsworth in his Platonic
-ode) the Soul has in other spheres of being dwelt with the gods and
-seen the secret of the world: it is itself one of the immortals, and
-as it is here and now, is in a land of exile. At the morning of birth,
-the living sample of humanity has left his original glory behind; and
-a deep forgetfulness&mdash;only short of absolute&mdash;cuts it off from his
-every-day consciousness. In his present reality he finds himself in a
-land of darkness, fast bound in a hollow of the rock, looking out only
-on the ghostly images that flit across his prison wall, cast there by
-the objects that move between his back and the light of a mysterious
-fire behind him and them. Such is his natural estate, as it meets the
-bodily eye: the estate of the lowly savage, whom superstition and
-ignorance seem to hold as their captive for ever. But, though his
-high home and his glory of other days have left no conscious memory
-in the soul, asleep and imbruted in its fleshly house, they have not
-departed without leaving a trace behind. For forgetfulness is not
-blank non-existence. The sample of humanity inherits the birthright
-of his fathers&mdash;he has hopes and fears, duties and rights, which are
-his, if he can mature himself to take possession of them. He<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[Pg 341]</a></span> suffers
-from the pains of growth, from the sense of disparity between what
-he is and what he may and should be&mdash;from the noble uneasiness and
-dissatisfaction of a being who feels&mdash;if he does not know&mdash;his infinite
-potentialities. For these potentialities&mdash;otherwise they have no title
-even to that name&mdash;are also actualities, yet actualities which protest
-their own incompleteness, and crave imperiously for what they lack.
-What he has is his right, but his right only in so far as it is also
-his duty. It is as such, and only as such, that he still retains the
-soul in all its prerogatives: as the right, which is the duty, of
-knowledge. Such a pre-figured and promised, but yet to be realised,
-possession is what Plato has called <i>Eros</i>, or Love. But it is a Love
-whose wings are at first invisible, and who often seems rather to crawl
-among ignoble things than to soar in the free fresh air.</p>
-
-<p>The process of experience has been by Plato called Anamnesis or
-Recollection. But Recollection is not always an easy, and never a
-merely passive, process; and sometimes the forgetfulness seems so deep
-that no extraneous stimulus can at all move it. We have seen already
-one of these stimuli which rouse the sleeping sense&mdash;the mystery of
-numbers: and there are many others. But, we have also learned, that
-in the psychical sphere items of memory are not, as reckless fancy
-puts it, stored up in compartments, sorted and arranged, ready to be
-pulled out. The process of recollection is a complicated affair: an
-affair of give and take, of comparison and selection and rejection,
-of construction and reconstruction. You cannot haul up ready-made
-memories from the mine. And this perhaps was sometimes forgotten by
-Plato; it certainly has been by more than one of his commentators.
-You may, no doubt, call up ideas from the vasty deep: but they come
-by laws<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342">[Pg 342]</a></span> and principles of their own. Even when they come, which they
-sometimes do unexpectedly, they come as an echo of the calling mind.
-Recollection involves intellectual process: as Kant said, the synthesis
-of imagination reposes upon the synthesis in the concept. Yet&mdash;and this
-is the point which Plato's title of <i>Anamnesis</i> accentuates&mdash;unless
-'the soul had been such as to be affected in this way' (the words are
-those of Aristotle), unless the soul had been implicitly intellectual
-in tone and faculty, it would not have grasped the presented universe
-under the categories which it uses. There is, says Aristotle, in the
-barest act of sensation a congenital power of judgment; there is, says
-Plato, an eye of the soul&mdash;a natural virtue of intelligence, which can
-never be put into it, and must always be presupposed in any theory of
-its processes.</p>
-
-<p>There are, therefore, no innate ideas, says Cudworth in explanation of
-Plato, if these ideas mean formed and completed products of knowledge.
-All ideas in this sense begin and grow within the range of experience,
-and the history of their growth or development in literature and art
-can be at least approximately traced. We can trace, that is, the
-successions and connexions of the various types of beauty, or goodness:
-can show how the idea at one time dwelt in one of its aspects, at
-another in a different one. We can observe the variation, and it may
-be the progress, in men's conception of God. But it is another matter
-when we seek to explain these ideas themselves out of other elements,
-heterogeneous to them. When that question is asked, then with Plato we
-seem, in the absence of any theory of origins, obliged to own that it
-is by the Beautiful that beautiful things come to be beautiful. The
-μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένοs&mdash;the crossing of essential boundaries&mdash;which
-Aristotle forbids to science, still<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343">[Pg 343]</a></span> raises its eternal barrier in
-the logical, if it cease to hold good (as has been suggested) in the
-physical sphere. In the totality which we call the world and experience
-of reality there are, so to say, ultimate and irreducible provinces.
-The utmost that philosophy, i. e. science, can do with these is to
-co-ordinate them,&mdash;to show their mutual filiations, adaptations, and
-harmonies,&mdash;to note their inadequacies and discrepancies. They are
-not all of equal rank, perhaps; they have to yield to each other, it
-may be in turn: but none of them can be arbitrarily expunged from
-the totality, and none of them shown to be a mere phase of others.
-To do that is to strip the universe of its variety and&mdash;it may be
-added&mdash;of its beauty and its interest. If it be a false philosophy
-that does it, there is a good deal of false philosophy abroad. There
-is a lust of explanation which is never content till it has found an
-equation for everything, till it has expressed everything in terms of
-the common-place, till it has emptied everything of all that made it
-individual and real, and turned it into an abstract, identical (as
-only abstracts can be) with some other abstract. Such abstractions
-are of course useful, and therefore need no excuse, when restricted
-to a special sphere. So long, that is, as we remember that it is an
-abstraction we are making, and that we are arbitrarily simplifying
-the real natural problem, no harm is done by these artificial
-constructions; and they are important steps in a larger process. But
-what is correct and useful within a range whose limits we can define,
-becomes dangerous when carried beyond all bounds. Its approximate truth
-then becomes misleading error.</p>
-
-<p>It is these irreducible elements&mdash;these great provinces in human
-experience, in reality, in the system of reason&mdash;that correspond to
-the more important of what<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[Pg 344]</a></span> are known as Platonic ideas. As ultimate
-constituents of the actual world they are in the narrower sense
-inexplicable. One does not amount to an exact sum of some others, nor
-is one got from another by the simple process of subtraction. But
-if they cannot be explained, by being reduced to multiples of some
-one basis, they can be comprehended in the respective implication
-and explication they exhibit with their co-realities. They can be
-correlated, reduced, and unified: we may even say, they can be
-identified; but if we use such a term, we must mean that there is
-some totality beyond and above them in which they all find a place
-and all are harmonious; in which all when brought to their Truth are
-really one and the same. This birthright of human nature in all ages
-and countries&mdash;this central essence of man's spirit&mdash;is the realm of
-Platonic ideas. They are the great elements, or constituent members, of
-humanity and of reality: the framework of his mind and of the world.
-How in each case they may be wrought out in detail, to what degree
-they may here be evolved, and there stunted, is a matter of historical
-research. And, in a sense, even it is not wrong to try to trace them
-one to another: to explain them, as the phrase is, one by another. For
-they are essentially connected: they are members of one system: they
-are unified and harmonised in a way for which even the word 'organism'
-is wholly insufficient. They are the poles and lines on which the tent
-of human life, of intelligent life, is stretched: but they are also the
-invisible ties which bind together the earth and heavens, and all that
-is therein.</p>
-
-<p>These ideas therefore are immanent in man: for they are the basis
-of human nature. But to name, to disentangle them, to measure out
-their bounds and describe their connexions&mdash;that is no easy work.
-And that is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[Pg 345]</a></span> the work of Platonic recollection. That is the process
-of historical experience. But it is a small thing for Plato to say
-that these ideas are innate in man. What he is more concerned to make
-clear is that in the possession or vision of these eternal forms, the
-human soul is a partner of the gods, a citizen of the heavens. In
-less mythical language, man, as an intelligent, artistic, moral, and
-religious being, is not a mere accidental on-looker on the surface of
-things, but near their central and abiding truth. The forms of his
-mind, to speak after the manner of Kant, are the objective essences of
-the real world of experience. Degrees there may be in the reality which
-they possess&mdash;less or larger measures of truth to full experience&mdash;but
-true and real they are: never mere falsity or emptiness. To estimate
-the amounts of that reality is a problem Plato often tried. At one time
-it seems as if the Good were in his estimate the form of forms, the
-real of reals: but when we look closely, we see that it is a goodness
-which is synonymous with real reality or perfect being. At another time
-truth, i. e. reality, seems to be lord of all: at another, beauty:
-and again he seems to confess his inability to lay down the order
-of precedence in this hierarchy. Of one thing only he is perfectly
-clear: and that is the unreality, the non-entity of the sense-world
-as merely perceived, and the true being of the world of reason. But
-he has no doubts as to the central truth that in the good, the true,
-and the beautiful, there is a higher reality&mdash;a more far-reaching and
-deep-piercing influence than in all the mere variety of sensation, the
-mere multitude of sensible fact.</p>
-
-<p>What Plato has sometimes called the act of reminiscence, what he has
-sometimes called the instinct of Love, is also known to him as the
-process of Dialectic. For reminiscence has to watch and wrestle with
-the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[Pg 346]</a></span> inertia of oblivion, has to set the imagined beside the real, and
-to correct percepts by concepts, concepts by percepts, has to brace
-up its energies, and to advance not by mere pressing onward, but by
-tacking and zigzagging through contrary difficulties finally realise
-itself. And love too is a battle, where the craving for union has to
-measure its force with the instinct of independence, where selfishness
-and self-surrender seek a reconciliation, and where in the close, if
-the close be love, each is self-retained only as self-abandoned, and
-each rises to a higher union in which lower selfhoods are absorbed.
-Even so in the course of Dialectic. It is the art which divides
-and conjoins, which unifies and distinguishes: the art of asking
-and answering. To Plato it appears in the main as an action of the
-intelligent subject: but an action which, as he hints, is almost a
-natural instinct, which through discipline has become an art. In the
-hands of its typical artist, it proceeds, or seems to proceed, as if
-unconscious of its principle and end. Socrates has, as he professes,
-no overt conception of the result: he has no knowledge of the positive
-conclusion to be reached. It is the Logos&mdash;the logic of reality&mdash;which
-sustains the movement. Abandoning any subjective humour of carrying
-the argument to a preconceived end, one is swept on by the current of
-real logic&mdash;the reason in things. The dogma we have set up and seemed
-to see before us, will, if we are dispassionate, carry us on beyond
-itself, and suggest aspects calling for recognition and acceptance. If
-only we refrain from arresting the movement of criticism,&mdash;a course
-to which prudence, ease, custom, and every form of the <i>ignava ratio</i>
-counsel us,&mdash;truth will reveal itself in us, and by us. It is because
-other aims, personal and particular, are so ever-present with us, that
-speculative free inquiry seems so hard. It is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[Pg 347]</a></span> we who insist on closing
-up the door, not the truth that is reluctant to show itself.</p>
-
-<p>Truth, then, is self-revelation or development. Not a result which is
-to be accepted, bowed to, and reverenced: but the result issuing (and
-only valuable as issuing) from a process in which we and objectivity
-are fellow-workers. The truth may no doubt be presented&mdash;as Spinoza
-does present it&mdash;in definitions, stating the net result as fundamental
-fact. Fundamental fact it is; but as so stated, as Substance, it comes
-as a stranger, almost as an enemy: the great vision, suddenly offered
-to untrained eyes, overwhelms and alarms the living sense of self, of
-personality. Hegel wishes to show it as a friend, as our very own,&mdash;as
-Subject (but not merely subject). It is for this that philosophy runs
-through its cycle and returns into itself. Man points to nature and
-nature to man: universal to individual: thought to things: the self to
-God, and God to the human soul.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_167" id="Footnote_1_167"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_167"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Hegel, <i>Werke</i>, ii. 14.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_168" id="Footnote_2_168"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_168"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Spinoza, <i>Eth.</i> Def. 3.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_169" id="Footnote_3_169"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_169"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Spin. <i>De inteil. Em.</i> i. 10.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_170" id="Footnote_4_170"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_170"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Spin. <i>Eth.</i> v. 35.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_171" id="Footnote_5_171"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_171"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>Eth.</i> i. 17 schol.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[Pg 348]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XXV.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>REASON AND THE DIALECTIC OF UNDERSTANDING.</h4>
-
-
-<p>Representative conceptions, besides being the burden of our ordinary
-materialising consciousness, are also the data of science, accepted
-and developed in their consequences. Because they are so accepted,
-as given into our hand, scientific reasoning can only institute
-relations between them. Its business as thus conceived is progressive
-unification, comparing objects with one another, demonstrating the
-similarities which exist between them, and combining them with each
-other. The exercise of thought which deals with such objects is limited
-by their existence: it is only formal. It is finite thought, because
-it is only subjective: it begins at a given point and stops somewhere,
-and never gets quite round its materials so as to call them truly its
-own. Each of the objects on which it is turned seems to be outside
-of it, and independent of it. Each point of fact, again, when it is
-carried out to its utmost, meets with other thoughts which limit it,
-and claim to be equally self-centred. Such knowledge creeps on from
-point to point. To this thinking German philosophy from the time of
-Kant and Jacobi applied a name, which since the days of Coleridge has
-been translated by 'Understanding'<a name="FNanchor_1_172" id="FNanchor_1_172"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_172" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>. This degree or mode of thinking<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[Pg 349]</a></span>
-&mdash;not a faculty of thought&mdash;is the systematised and thorough exercise
-of what in England is called 'Common Sense.' In the first place, it is
-synonymous with practical intelligence. It takes what it calls facts,
-or things, as given, and aims only at arranging and combining them and
-drawing from them counsels of prudence or rules of art. Seeing things
-on a superficies, as it were so many unconnected points, here itself
-and there the various things of the world, it tries to bring them into
-connexion. It accepts existing distinctions, and seeks to render them
-more precise by pointing out and sifting the elements of sameness.
-Its greatest merit is an abhorrence of vagueness, inconsistency, and
-what it stigmatises as mysticism: it wishes to be clear, distinct, and
-practical. In its proper sphere,&mdash;and it has an indispensable function
-to perform even in philosophy: wherever, that is, it is unnecessary
-to go into the essential truth of things, and one has only to do good
-work in a clearly defined sphere,&mdash;the understanding has an independent
-value of its own<a name="FNanchor_2_173" id="FNanchor_2_173"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_173" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> Nor is this true merely of practical life, where
-a man must accommodate himself to facts: it is equally applicable
-in the higher theoretic life,&mdash;in art, religion, and philosophy. If
-intelligent definiteness does not make itself apparent in these, there
-is something wrong about them.</p>
-
-<p>It is only when this exercise of thought is regarded as a <i>ne plus
-ultra,</i> and its mandates to restrict investigation by the limits of
-foregone conclusions find obedience, that understanding deserves
-the reproachful language which was lavished upon it by the German
-philosophers at the close of the last century. The understanding is
-abstract: this sums up its offences in one word. Its objects, that
-is the things it deals with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[Pg 350]</a></span> and believes utterly real, are only
-partly so, and when that incompleteness is unrecognised, are only
-abstractions. Both in its contracted forms, such as faith and common
-sense, and in its systematic form, the logical or narrowly-consistent
-intellect, it is partial and liable to be tenacious of half-truths.
-Only that whereas in feeling and common-sense there is often a great
-deal which they cannot express,&mdash;whereas the heart is often more
-liberal than its interpreting mind will allow&mdash;the reverse is true of
-the logically-consistent intellect. The narrowness of the latter is,
-in its own opinion, exactly equal to the truth of things: and whatever
-it expresses is asserted without qualification to be the absolute
-fact. Its business is, given the initial point (which is assumed to be
-certain and perspicuous), to see all which that point will necessarily
-involve or lead to. For example, Order may be supposed to be the chief
-end of the State. Let us consider, says the intelligent arguer (without
-wasting time on abstruse inquiries as to what Order is or means, and
-what sort of Order we want), to what consequences and institutions
-this conception will lead us. Or, again, the chief end of the State
-is assumed to be Liberty. To what special forms of organisation will
-this hypothesis (also assumed a self-evident conception) lead? Or we
-may go a step further. It is evident, some will say, that in a State
-there must be a certain admixture of Order and Liberty. How are we to
-proceed&mdash;what laws and ordinances will be necessary, to secure the
-proper equilibrium of these two principles? The two must be blended,
-and each have its legitimate influence.</p>
-
-<p>These are examples of the operation of Understanding. It can only reach
-a synthesis (or conjunction), never a real unity, because it believes
-in the omnipotence of the abstractions with which it began: but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[Pg 351]</a></span> must
-either carry out one partial principle to its consequences, or allow
-an alternate and combined force to two opposite principles. Its canon
-is identity: given something, let us see what follows when we keep the
-same point always in view, and compare other points with the one which
-we are supposed to know. Its method is analytic: given a conception
-in which popular thought supposes itself at home, and let us see all
-the elements of truth which can be deduced from it. Its statements are
-abstract and narrow: or, in the words of Anaxagoras, one thing is cut
-off from another with a hatchet<a name="FNanchor_3_174" id="FNanchor_3_174"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_174" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>. In its excess it degenerates into
-dogmatism, whether that dogmatism be theological or naturalistic.</p>
-
-<p>The fact is that the Understanding, as this analytic, abstract, and
-finite action of mind is called,&mdash;the thought which holds objective
-ideas distinct from one another, and from the subjective faculties of
-thought as a whole,&mdash;that this Understanding is, when it claims to be
-heard and obeyed in science, not sufficiently thorough-going. It begins
-at a point which is not so isolated as it seems, but is a member of a
-body of thought: nor is it aware that the whole of this body of thought
-is in organic, and even more than organic, union. It errs in taking too
-much for granted: and in not seeing how this given point is the result
-of a process,&mdash;that in it, in any thought or idea, several tendencies
-or elements converge and are held in union, but with the possibility
-of working their way into a new independence. In other words, the
-Understanding requires, as the organon and method of philosophy, to
-be replaced by the Reason<a name="FNanchor_4_175" id="FNanchor_4_175"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_175" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>,&mdash;by infinite thought,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[Pg 352]</a></span> concrete, at
-once analytic and synthetic. How then, it may be asked, can we make
-the passage from the inadequate to the adequate? To that question the
-answer may be given that it is our act of arbitrary arrest which halts
-at the inadequate: that in complete Reason, which is the constituent
-nature both of us and of things, the Understanding is only a grade
-which points beyond itself, and therefore presupposes and struggles up
-to the adequate thought. In other words, it is Reason which creates or
-lays down for behoof of its own organisation the aims, conditions, and
-fixed entities,&mdash;the objects, by which it is bound and limited in its
-analytic exercise as understanding. Reason, therefore, is the implicit
-tendency to correct its own inadequacy: and we have only to check
-self-will and prejudice so far that the process may be accomplished.</p>
-
-<p>The movement is not at one step: it has a middle term or mean which
-often seems as if it were a step backward. Progress in knowledge is
-usually described as produced by the mode of demonstration or the
-mode of experience. Formal Logic prefers the first mode of describing
-it: Applied Logic prefers the second. Either mode may serve, if we
-properly comprehend what demonstration and experience mean. And that
-will not be done unless we keep equally before us the affirmative and
-the negative element in the process. The law of rational progress in
-knowledge, of the dialectical movement of consciousness, or in one
-word of experience, is not simple movement in a straight line, but
-movement by negation and absorption of the premisses. The conclusion
-or the new object of knowledge is a product into which the preceding
-object is reduced or absorbed. Thus the movement from faith (which
-is concentrated and wholly personal knowledge) to open and universal
-knowledge, which is capable of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[Pg 353]</a></span> becoming the possession of a
-community,&mdash;truth and not merely conviction, must pass through doubt.
-The premisses from which we start, and the original object with which
-we begin, are not left <i>in statu quo</i>: they are destroyed in their
-own shape, and become only materials to build up a new object and a
-conclusion. It is on the stepping-stones of discarded ideas that we
-rise to higher truth: and it is on the abrogation of the old objects
-of knowledge that the new objects are founded. Not merely does a new
-object come in to supplement the old, and correct its inadequacies by
-the new presence: not merely do <i>we</i> add new ranges to <i>our</i> powers of
-vision, retaining the old faculties and subjoining others. The whole
-world&mdash;alike inward and outward,&mdash;the consciousness and its object&mdash;is
-subjected to a thorough renovation: every feature is modified, and
-the system re-created. The old perishes: but in perishing contributes
-to constitute the new. Thus the new is at once the affirmation and
-negation of the old. And such is the invariable nature of intelligent
-progress, of which the old and not a few modern logicians failed to
-render a right account, because they missed the negative element, and
-did not see that the immediate premisses must be abolished in order to
-secure a conclusion,&mdash;even as the grapes must be crushed before the
-wine can be obtained.</p>
-
-<p>This is the real meaning of Experience, when it is called the teacher
-of humanity: and it was for this reason that Bacon described it as
-'far the best demonstration.'<a name="FNanchor_5_176" id="FNanchor_5_176"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_176" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> Experience is that absolute process,
-embracing both us and things, which displays the nullity of what is
-immediately given, or baldly and nakedly accepted, and completes it
-by the rough remedy of contradiction. The change comes over both<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[Pg 354]</a></span>
-us and the things: neither the one side nor the other is left as it
-was before. And it is here that the advantage of Experience over
-demonstration consists. Demonstration tends to be looked upon as
-subjective only (<i>constringit assensum, non res</i>): whereas Experience
-is also objective. But Experience is more than merely objective: it
-is the absolute process of thought pure and entire; and as such it
-is described by Hegel as Dialectic, or Dialectical movement. This
-Dialectic covers the ground of demonstration,&mdash;a fragment of it
-especially described and emphasised in the Formal Logic,&mdash;and of
-Experience,&mdash;under which name it is better known in actual life, and in
-the philosophy of the sciences<a name="FNanchor_6_177" id="FNanchor_6_177"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_177" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>.</p>
-
-<p>Dialectic is the negative or destructive aspect of reason, as
-preparatory to its affirmative or constructive aspect. It is the spirit
-of dissent and criticism: the outgoing as opposed to the indwelling:
-the restless as distinguished from the quiet: the reproductive as
-opposed to the nutritive instinct: the centrifugal as opposed to the
-centripetal force: the radical and progressive tendency as opposed
-to the conservative. But no one of these examples sufficiently or
-accurately describes it. For it is the utterance of an implicit
-contradiction,&mdash;the recognition of an existing and felt, but hitherto
-unrecognised and unformulated want. Dialectic does not supervene from
-without upon the fixed ideas of understanding: it is the evidence of
-the higher nature which lies behind them, of the dependence on a larger
-unity which understanding implicitly or explicitly denies. That higher
-nature, the notion or grasp of reasonable thought, comes forward, and
-has at first, in opposition to the one-sided products of understanding,
-the look of a destructive agent. If<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[Pg 355]</a></span> we regard the understanding and
-its object, as ultimate and final,&mdash;and they are so regarded in the
-ordinary estimation of the world,&mdash;then this negative action of reason
-seems utterly pernicious, and tends to end in the subversion of all
-fixity whatever, of everything definite. In this light Dialectic
-is what is commonly known as Scepticism; just as the understanding
-in its excess is known as Dogmatism. But in the total grasp of the
-rational or speculative notion, Dialectic ceases to be Scepticism, and
-Understanding ceases to be Dogmatism.</p>
-
-<p>Still there can be no doubt that the Dialectic of reason is dangerous,
-if taken abstractly and as if it were a whole truth. For the thoughts
-of ordinary men tend to be more abstract than their materials warrant.
-Men seek to formulate their feelings, faith, and conduct: but the
-<i>rationale</i> of their inmost belief,&mdash;their creed,&mdash;is generally
-narrower than it might be. Out of the undecomposed and massive
-'substance,' on which their life and conduct is founded, they extract
-one or two ingredients: they emphasise with undue stress one or two
-features in their world, and attach to these partial formulae a value
-which would be deserved only if they really represented the whole
-facts. Hence when the narrow outlines of their creed are submitted
-to dialectic,&mdash;when the inlying contradictions are exposed, men feel
-as if the system of the world had sunk beneath them. But it is not
-the massive structure of their world, the organic unity in which they
-live, that is struck by dialectic: it is only those luminous points,
-the representative terms of material thought, which float before their
-consciousness, and which have been formulated in hard and fast outlines
-by the understanding. These points, as so defined and exaggerated, are
-what dialectic shakes. Not an alien force, but the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[Pg 356]</a></span> inherent power of
-thought, destroys the temporary constructions of the understanding. The
-infinite comes to show the inadequacy of the finite which it has made.</p>
-
-<p>In philosophy this second stage is as essential as the first.
-The one-sidedness of the first abstraction is corrected by the
-one-sidedness of the other. In the Philosophy of Plato, as has been
-noted, the dialectical energy of thought is sometimes spoken of
-under the analogy of sexual passion&mdash;the Love which, in the words of
-Sophocles, 'falls upon possessions' and makes all fixed ordinance of
-no account, and finds no obstacles insuperable to its strong desire.
-But Love, as the speaker explains, is a child of Wealth and Want:
-he is never poor, and never rich: he is in a mean between ignorance
-and knowledge<a name="FNanchor_7_178" id="FNanchor_7_178"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_178" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>. Thus is described the active unrest of growth, the
-'<i>inquietude poussante</i>,' as Leibniz called it,&mdash;the quickening force
-of the negative and of contradiction.</p>
-
-<p>At the word 'contradiction' there is heard a murmur of objection,
-partly on technical, partly on material grounds. There are, it is said,
-other ways of getting from one idea to another than by contradiction:
-and it is not right to give the title to mere cases of contrast and
-correlation. Now it may be the case that the relations of ideas are
-many and various. In particular there is to many people a decided
-pleasure in the mere accumulation of bits of knowledge. In their mental
-stock there are only aggregates,&mdash;conjunctions due to accidents of
-time and place,&mdash;associations and fusions which do not reach organised
-unity. In all of us, perhaps, there are more or less miscellaneous
-collections of beliefs, perceptions, hopes, and wishes, in no very
-obvious connexion with one another. An united self, one, harmonious,
-and complete, is probably rather<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_357" id="Page_357">[Pg 357]</a></span> an ideal of development than a fact
-realised. There are in each two or three discordant selves,&mdash;among
-which it might sometimes be difficult to select the right and true
-one (for that will depend on the momentary point of view). The deeper
-consciousness may go on entirely independent of the train of the more
-superficial ideas: the world of reality may glide past without touching
-the world of dream or of fiction: our business part may live in a
-region parted off from our religion by gulfs inscrutable. In all these
-cases there cannot be said to be any contradiction.</p>
-
-<p>But Hegel speaks of the essential progress of knowledge, and of that
-true self or real mind which has attained complete harmony&mdash;the self
-and mind that is implicitly or explicitly Absolute. In such a mind
-where the finite has passed or is passing into the infinite, in a mind
-that is really becoming one and total, its parts must meet and modify
-each other. At each phase, if that phase is earnest, self-certain, and
-real, it claims to be complete, and can brook no rival. The bringer
-of new things must appear as an enemy: for the old system, however
-imperfect as a mere form, has behind it the strength of an infinite
-and perfect content: it is more than it has explicated: but as it
-(from its imperfection and honesty) identifies itself with its form,
-it is resolved to resist change. Progress then must be by antagonism:
-it cannot be real progress otherwise, but only the mere shifting of
-dilettante doubt and dilettante toleration. Both new and old are worth
-something, and they must prove their value by neither being lost, but
-both recognised, in a completer scheme of things.</p>
-
-<p>Yet there is a difference in the measure of contradiction at different
-stages of thought. It is always greatest when there is least to be
-opposed about. The more meagre an idea, a creed, a term of thought,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_358" id="Page_358">[Pg 358]</a></span>
-the more violent the antitheses to it. The more abstractly we hold a
-doctrine, the more readily are we disposed to sniff opposition. And as
-in more concrete belief, so in the more abstract terms of thought. They
-seem so wide apart&mdash;like 'Is' and 'Is not'&mdash;and yet, taken alone, they
-are really so ready to recoil into one another. As thought deepens,
-contradiction takes a more modified form. The relativity of things
-becomes apparent: and what were erewhile opposed as contradictory,
-turn out as pairs of correlatives, neither of which is fully what it
-professed to be, unless it also is all that seemed reserved for the
-other. Lastly, and in the full truth of development, progress is seen
-to be not merely a sudden recoil from one abstraction to another,
-nor merely a continual reference to an underlying correlative, but
-the movement of one totality which advances by self-opposition,
-self-reconciliation, and self-reconstruction. In this stage, the
-weight and bulk of unity keeps the contradiction in its place of due
-subordination. But both elements are equally essential, and if the
-unity is less palpable in the abstract beginnings, and the divergence
-less wide at the close, at neither beginning nor close can either be
-absent.</p>
-
-<p>But if we merely look at the differentiation or negation involved
-in the action of reason, we miss the half of its meaning: and the
-new statement is as one-sided as the old. We have not grasped the
-full meaning until we see that what, as understanding, affirmed a
-finite, denies, as dialectic, the absoluteness or adequacy of that
-finite. Both the partial views have a right to exist, because each
-gives its contribution to the science of truth.<a name="FNanchor_8_179" id="FNanchor_8_179"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_179" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> If we penetrate
-behind the surface,&mdash;if we do not look at the two steps in the process
-abstractly and in separation,&mdash;it will be seen that these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_359" id="Page_359">[Pg 359]</a></span> two elements
-coincide and unite. But we must be careful here. This coincidence or
-identification of opposites has not annihilated their opposition or
-difference. That difference subsists, but in abeyance, reduced to an
-element or 'moment' in the unity. Each of the two elements has been
-modified by the union: and thus when each issues from the unity it
-has a richer significance than it had before. This unity, in which
-difference is lost and found, is the rational notion,&mdash;the speculative
-grasp of thought. It is the product of experience,&mdash;the ampler
-affirmative which is founded upon an inclusion of negatives.</p>
-
-<p>We began with the bare unit, or simple and unanalysed point,
-which satisfied popular language and popular imagination as its
-<i>nucleus</i>:&mdash;the representation which had caught and half-idealised a
-point, moment, or aspect in the range of feeling and sensation. In this
-stage the notion or thought proper is yet latent. In the first place,
-the <i>nucleus</i> of imagination was analysed, defined, and, as we may
-surmise, narrowed in the Intellect. And this grade of thought is known
-as the Understanding. In the second place, the definite and precise
-term, as understanding supposes it, was subjected to criticism: its
-contradictions displayed; and the very opposite of the first definition
-established in its place. This is the action of Dialectic. In the third
-place, by means of this second stage, the real nature or truth was seen
-to lie in a union where the opposites interpenetrate and mould each
-other. Thus we have as a conscious unity,&mdash;conscious because it, as
-unity, yet embraces a difference as difference&mdash;what we started with
-as an unconscious unity, the truth of feeling, faith, and inspiration.
-The first was an immediate unity:&mdash;that is to say, we were in the midst
-of the unity, sunk in it, and making a part of it: the second is a
-mediated<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_360" id="Page_360">[Pg 360]</a></span> unity, which has been reached by a process of reflection, and
-which as a conscious unity involves that process.</p>
-
-<p>Reason, then, is infinite, as opposed to understanding, which is finite
-thinking. The limits which are found and accepted by the analytic
-intellect, are limits which reason has imposed, and which it can
-take away: the limits are in it, and not over it. The larger reason
-has been laying down those limits, which our little minds at first
-tend to suppose absolute. Let us put the same law in more concrete
-terms. It is reason,&mdash;the Idea,&mdash;or, to give it an inadequate and
-abstract name, Natural Selection&mdash;which has created the several forms
-of the animal and vegetable world: it is reason, again, which in
-the struggle for existence contradicts the very inadequacies which
-it has brought into being: and it is reason, finally, which affirms
-both these actions,&mdash;the hereditary descent, and the adaptation&mdash;in
-the provisionally permanent and adequate forms which result from the
-struggle.</p>
-
-<p>The three stages thus enumerated are therefore not merely stages
-in our human reason as subjective. They state the law of rational
-development in pure thought, in Nature, and in the world of Mind,&mdash;the
-world of Art, Morals, and Science. They represent the law of thought
-or reason in its most general or abstract terms. They state, mainly
-in reference to the method or form of thought, that Triplicity, which
-will be seen in those real formations or phases to which thought
-moulds itself,&mdash;the typical species of reason. They reappear hundreds
-of times, in different multiples, in the system of philosophy. The
-abstract point of the Notion which parts asunder in the Judgment, and
-returns to a unity including difference in the Syllogism:&mdash;the mere
-generality of the Universal, which,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_361" id="Page_361">[Pg 361]</a></span> by a disruption into Particulars
-and detail, gives rise to the real and actual Individual:&mdash;the Identity
-which has to be combined with Difference in order to furnish a possible
-Ground for Existence:&mdash;the baldness and nakedness of an Immediate
-belief, which comes to the full and direct certainty of itself, to
-true immediacy, only by gathering up the full sense of the antithesis
-which can separate conviction from truth, or by realising the Mediation
-connecting them:&mdash;all these are illustrations of the same law really
-applied which has been formally stated as the necessity for a defining,
-a dialectical, and a speculative element in thought. The three parts
-of Logic are an instance of the same thing: and when the Idea, or
-organism of thought, appears developed in the series of Natural forms,
-it is only to prepare the kingdom of reason actualised in the world of
-Mind. The Understanding, on the field of the world, corresponds, says
-Hegel<a name="FNanchor_9_180" id="FNanchor_9_180"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_180" class="fnanchor">[9]</a>, to the conception of Divine Goodness. The life of nature
-goes on in the independence and self-possession of all its parts, each
-as fixed and proud of its own, as if its share of earth were for ever
-assured. The finite being then has his season of self-satisfied ease:
-while the gods live in quiet, away from the sight of man's doings.
-The dialectical stage, again, corresponds to the conception of God as
-an omnipotent Lord: when the Power of the universe waxes terrific,
-destroying the complacency of the creatures and making them feel their
-insufficiency,&mdash;when the once beneficent appears jealous and cruel, and
-the joyous equanimity of human life is oppressed by the terrors of the
-inscrutable hand of fate. The easy-minded Greek lived for the most part
-in the former world: the uneasy Hebrew to a great extent in the latter.
-But the truth lay neither in the placid<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_362" id="Page_362">[Pg 362]</a></span> wisdom of Zeus, leaving the
-world to its own devices, nor in the jealous Jehovah of Mount Sinai:
-the true speculative union is found in the mystical unity of Godhead
-with human nature. In this comprehensive spirit did Hegel treat Logic.</p>
-
-<p>This Triplicity runs through Hegel's works. If you open one, the main
-divisions are marked with the capitals A, B, C. One of these, it may
-be, is broken up into chapters headed by the Roman numerals I, II, III.
-Under one or more of these probably come severally the Arabic numerals
-1, 2, 3. Any one of these again may be subdivided, and gives rise to
-sections, headed by the small letters a, b, c. And, lastly, any one
-of these may be treated to a distribution under the three titles α,
-β, γ. Of course the division is not in each case carried equally far:
-nor does the subject always permit it: nor is Hegel's knowledge alike
-vigorous, or his interest in all directions the same.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_172" id="Footnote_1_172"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_172"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> 'Verstand,'</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_173" id="Footnote_2_173"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_173"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> 'Die Vernunft ohne Verstand ist Nichts; der Verstand doch
-Etwas ohne Vernunft.' Hegel's <i>Leben</i>, p. 546.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_174" id="Footnote_3_174"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_174"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Ὃτι οὐ κεχώρισται ἀλλήλων τὰ ἐv τῷ ἑvi κόσμῳ ἀὐδὲ
-ἀποκέκοπται πελέκεϊ. Simplic. Phys. fol. 38 a (ed. Diels, p. 176).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_175" id="Footnote_4_175"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_175"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> 'Vernunft.'</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_176" id="Footnote_5_176"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_176"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> <i>Novum Organum</i>, Book I. 70.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_177" id="Footnote_6_177"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_177"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> <i>Phenomenologie des Geistes</i>, p. 67.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_178" id="Footnote_7_178"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_178"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Plato, <i>Symposion,</i> 203.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_8_179" id="Footnote_8_179"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_179"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Cf. Dante, <i>Parad.</i> iv. 130.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_9_180" id="Footnote_9_180"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_180"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> See in the <i>Logic</i> (vol. ii. p. 145).</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_363" id="Page_363">[Pg 363]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-
-<h5>BOOK III</h5>
-
-<h4><i>LOGICAL OUTLINES</i></h4>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_364" id="Page_364">[Pg 364]</a><br /><a name="Page_365" id="Page_365">[Pg 365]</a></span></p>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XXVI.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>THOUGHT PURE AND ENTIRE.</h4>
-
-
-<p>The English reader may probably be taken to be familiar with the
-conception of Logic as the Science of the <i>Form</i> of Thought. He may
-also have heard this explained as equivalent to the Science of Thought
-as Thought, or of Thought as Form, or of Formal Thought. But, probably,
-also, he brings to the lesson no very high estimate of <i>form</i> as
-such. In the old language of Greek philosophy, transmitted through
-the Schoolmen of the West, and still lingering in the phraseology of
-Bacon and Shakespeare<a name="FNanchor_1_181" id="FNanchor_1_181"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_181" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>, Forms and substantial forms were powers in
-the world of reality. But a generation arose which knew them not: to
-which they were only belated survivals of the past. The forms had lost
-connexion with matter and content, and had come to seem something
-occult, transcendent, and therefore, to a practical and realistic age,
-something fantastic and superfluous. Yet it may be well to recall
-that the same author who has put on record his view that forms are
-only mental figments, unless they be fully 'determinate in matter,'
-has equally laid it down that the so-called 'causes' of vulgar
-philosophy&mdash;the matter and the agent&mdash;are only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_366" id="Page_366">[Pg 366]</a></span> 'vehicles of the form,'
-Thus spontaneously did Bacon reconstruct the Aristotelian theory of the
-interdependence of form and matter, that form is always form <i>of</i> (or
-<i>in</i>) matter, and that matter is always <i>for</i> form.</p>
-
-<p>The relativity of form and matter, or of form and content, is indeed
-almost a commonplace of popular discussion on logical subjects.
-But like other uncritical applications of great truths, this is
-both carried beyond its proper bounds, and is not carried out with
-sufficient thoroughness. There cannot&mdash;it is said&mdash;be a formal logic,
-because every exercise of thought is internally affected or modified by
-the material&mdash;the subject-matter&mdash;with which it deals. It is implied
-in such an argument that the 'subject-matter' finds no difficulty
-in existing by itself, but that the 'thought' is a mere vacuity or
-un-characterised something which owes its every character to the
-said matter. But a subject-matter which has content and character
-has therefore form: it is already known, already thought. And as to
-this thought, which is said to approach its matter with a self so
-blank, so impartial, so neutral&mdash;what is it? It is a thought or a
-thinking which has never as yet thought,&mdash;which is only named 'thought'
-by right of expectation, but is itself nothing actual. Of such
-&mdash;fictitious&mdash;thought there can hardly be a science.</p>
-
-<p>On the other hand, that may be easily called a formal logic, which is
-much more than formal: and that may be called material, which is only
-a species of formal. Great indeed is the virtue of names, to suppress
-and to replace thought. When forms hang on as mysterious names after
-their day is passed&mdash;when they are retained in a certain honour, while
-the real working methods have assumed other titles; then these forms
-become purely formal and antiquated. Thus the Logic of Aristotle seemed
-in its unfamiliar language to a later<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_367" id="Page_367">[Pg 367]</a></span> generation to be purely formal
-and superfluous. It was only another side of the same mistake when
-the new forms&mdash;the forms efficient and active in matter,&mdash;were not
-recognised as formal, but were boldly styled material: and the Logic
-which discussed such matter-marked forms was called a material Logic.</p>
-
-<p>The phrase Matter of Thought, like its many congeners, is a fruitful
-mother of misconceptions. Caught up by the pictorial imagination, which
-is always at hand to anticipate thought, it suggests a matter, which is
-not thought, but is <i>there,</i> all the same, lying in expectation of it.
-It suggests two things&mdash;(for are there not two words, and a preposition
-or term of relation between them?). But there are not two things.
-This <i>matter</i> is just as much a nonentity as the aforesaid <i>thought</i>:
-a matter of thought is a thought matter,&mdash;matter, thought once, and
-possibly to be thought again.</p>
-
-<p>All this talk about the Relativity of form and matter is insincere,
-and semi-conventional. It is (like the well-known antithesis between
-Matter and Mind, of which indeed it is only a variation) a halting
-between two views. That which it chiefly leans to, is that there can
-be no form without matter, though there may well be matter which is
-not yet formed. At the best it goes no further than to admit or assert
-that <i>besides</i> the one there is <i>also</i> the other. It establishes a
-see-saw, and is proud of it. This is Dualism. Its maxim is, Don't
-forget that there is an Other. You have explored the One: you have
-perhaps done well. But there is also and always the Other. The second
-view is not the mere negation of this dualism. That there is a
-dualism is a fact which it acknowledges.<a name="FNanchor_2_182" id="FNanchor_2_182"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_182" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> All life and reality is
-manifested in dualism&mdash;in antithesis: but the life and the reality
-is one. Mind&mdash;<i>Geist</i>&mdash;actualised and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_368" id="Page_368">[Pg 368]</a></span> intelligent experience&mdash;is
-the one ultimate and essential reality.<a name="FNanchor_3_183" id="FNanchor_3_183"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_183" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> In the face of its unity,
-mere matter is only a half-truth, and mere thought is only another.
-The reality, the unity, and the truth, is matter as formed, nature as
-reflected in mind. In the reality of experience there is always the
-presence of thought: and thought is only real when it is wedded with
-nature in the truth of man's mind. So far Bacon and Hegel coincide.
-Man&mdash;in so far as he is Mind&mdash;and of course Mind in its fullness is not
-merely subjective nor merely objective, but absolute&mdash;is the measure of
-all things, the central and comprehensive reality. Such a man&mdash;and such
-a mind&mdash;is, we need hardly add, not the man in the street, nor the man
-in the study: but the infinite, universal, eternal mind in whom these
-and all others essentially have their being. Such truth of Man&mdash;such
-Mind&mdash;is the Absolute: it is sometimes named God: it is the ideal of
-all aspiration, and the fountain of all truth.</p>
-
-<p>'Logic,' says Hegel<a name="FNanchor_4_184" id="FNanchor_4_184"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_184" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>, 'is the science of the Idea in the medium of
-mere thought.' It exhibits the truth in one partial aspect, or shows
-one appearance of the total unity of the world,&mdash;the aspect it would
-wear if we could for a moment suppose the reality of Nature to vanish
-out of sight, and the ideality of Mind reduced to a ghost. It dissects
-the underlying organisation&mdash;the scheme of unification&mdash;which the world
-of mental or spiritual experience presents in all its concreteness.
-And it does so because it exhibits the last result of the ever clearer
-and clearer experience which Mind achieves as it comes to see and
-realise itself. The logical skeleton is the sublimated product of
-a rich concrete experience. It has been a curious delusion of some
-who were probably satisfied by a casual glance at Hegel's <i>Logic</i>,
-especially in its earlier chapters, to suppose that the Logic was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_369" id="Page_369">[Pg 369]</a></span>
-meant to be the absolute beginning: and that pure or mere thought was
-the congenital endowment of the heaven-born philosopher<a name="FNanchor_5_185" id="FNanchor_5_185"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_185" class="fnanchor">[5]</a>. To Hegel,
-on the contrary, Logic was an abstraction from a fuller, more concrete
-reality. He did not indeed suppose that the symbolical conception of
-Movement&mdash;in its popular pictorialness&mdash;would be an adequate substitute
-or representative for thought; but he knew that the energy of mental
-development was the fact, and the truth, of which 'becoming' is a
-meagre, abstract phase.</p>
-
-<p>Logic, then, is not the Science of mere or pure thought, but of the
-Idea (which is co-terminous with reality)&mdash;of the Mind's synthetic
-unity of experience&mdash;looked at, however, abstractly, in the medium
-of pure thought. Just so, Nature-philosophy is the same Idea, as it
-turns up bit after bit distracted, fragmentary, and more or less
-mutilated, in the multiplication, the time and space division, of
-physical phenomena. But as science requires us to go from the simple
-to the more complex, as the truth has to prove itself true, by serving
-in its conclusion as the corroboration of all its premisses or
-presuppositions; so the system of philosophy begins with the Logic.
-Yet it can only begin there, because it has already apprehended itself
-in its completeness: and it can only move onward because it is the
-concentrated essence&mdash;the implicit being&mdash;of all that it actually and
-explicitly is. It may appear to emerge from a point: but that point
-has at its back the intellectual unity of a philosophy which embraces
-the world. It presupposes the complete philosopher who shall be the
-complete organ of absolute intelligence, of universal and eternal
-Spirit.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_370" id="Page_370">[Pg 370]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>A satisfactory Logic then presupposes or implies a complete system of
-philosophy. No doubt, for a logic which deals with the minor problems
-of ratiocination or formal induction, all that is needed is a certain
-general acquaintance with popular conceptions, and with the results or
-methods of physical science. But if logic takes its business seriously,
-it must go behind these presuppositions. It must trace back reasoning
-to its roots, fibres, and first principles. And to do that it is not
-enough to put at the front a psychological chapter. Far from helping,
-psychology in these matters is much more in need of being helped
-itself. Till it has learned a little of the puzzle of the one and the
-many, the same and the diverse, being, quality, and essence, psychology
-will be as little use to Logic as blind guides generally are. Nor need
-this prevent us from saying that when psychology has thoroughly learned
-these mysteries, it will give fresh life and reality to the logic which
-it touches upon. The principles of Logic lie in another field,<a name="FNanchor_6_186" id="FNanchor_6_186"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_186" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> and
-are deeper in the ground, than obvious psychological gossip.</p>
-
-<p>If Logic then deals with form, it deals with a form of forms&mdash;the
-form of the world, of life, and of reality. It is a form, which
-is a unity in diversity, an organism,&mdash;a form which is infinitely
-manifold, and yet in all its multiplicity one. Logic is the morphology
-of thought,&mdash;of that thought which in Nature is concealed under
-the variety and divisions of things, and which in the theory of
-mental and spiritual life is resumed into a complete biology of the
-world-organism. The problem of Logic then demands an abstraction&mdash;an
-effort of self-concentration&mdash;an effort by which the whole machinery
-of the sensible universe shall be left behind, and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_371" id="Page_371">[Pg 371]</a></span> accustomed
-clothing of our thoughts be removed. To move in this ether of pure
-thought is clearly one of the hardest of problems.</p>
-
-<p>Like Plato, we may occasionally feel that we have caught a glimpse of
-the super-sensible world unveiled; but it disappears as the senses
-regain their hold. We can probably fix a firm eye on one term of
-reason, and criticise its value: but it is less easy to survey the
-Bacchic dance from term to term<a name="FNanchor_7_187" id="FNanchor_7_187"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_187" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>, and allow them to criticise
-themselves. The distracting influence of our associations, or of
-outside things, is always leading us astray. Either we incline to treat
-thoughts as psychological products or species, the outcome of a mental
-process, which are (<i>a</i>) given to us from the beginning, and so <i>a
-priori</i> or innate, or which (<i>b</i>) spring up in the course of experience
-by mutual friction between our mind and the outside world, and so are
-<i>a posteriori</i> or derivative. Or disregarding the subjective side of
-thoughts, we act as if they were more correctly called things: we
-speak of relations between phenomena: we suppose things, and causes,
-and quantities to form part of the so-called external universe, which
-science explores. The one estimate of thought, like the other, keeps in
-view, though at some distance, and so as not to interfere with their
-practical discussions, the separate and equal existence of thoughts
-and things. The psychologists or subjectivists of logic scrutinise the
-world within us first of all, and purpose to accomplish what can be
-done for the mind as possessing a faculty of thought, before they turn
-to the world of things. The realists or objectivists of logic think it
-better for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_372" id="Page_372">[Pg 372]</a></span> practical work to allow thought only the formal or outside
-labour of surveying and analysing the laws of phenomena out of the
-phenomena which contain them. Neither of them examines thought&mdash;'the
-original synthetic unity'&mdash;in its own integrity as a movement in its
-own self, an inner organisation, of which subject and object, the
-mind and the things called external, are the vehicles, or, in logical
-language, the accidents.</p>
-
-<p>If it is possible to treat the history of the English Constitution as
-an object of inquiry in itself and for its own sake, without reference
-to the individuals who in course of time marred and mended it, or
-to the setting of events in which its advance is exhibited, why not
-treat the thought, which is the universal element of all things, of
-English Constitution, and Italian Art, and Greek Philosophy, in the
-same way,&mdash;absolutely, i. e. in itself and for its own sake? When
-that is done, distinctions rigidly sustained between <i>a priori</i> and
-<i>a posteriori</i> become meaningless because now seen to belong to a
-distinction of earlier and later in the history of the individual
-consciousness. There is at best only a modified justification for such
-mottoes and cries, as 'Art for Art's sake,' or 'Science must be left
-free and unchecked,' or 'The rights of the religious conscience ought
-always to be respected': but there can be no demur or limitation to the
-cry that Thought must be studied in Thought by Thought and for the sake
-of Thought. For Art, and Science, and Religion are specialised modes
-in which the totality or truth of things presents itself to mankind,
-and none of them can claim an unconditioned sway: their claims clash,
-and each must be admitted to be after all a partial interpretation, a
-more or less one-sided interpretation of the true reality of the world.
-Thought on the other hand is unlimited: for it exists not merely in
-its own abstract<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_373" id="Page_373">[Pg 373]</a></span> modes, but interpenetrates and rules all the other
-concrete forms of experience, manifesting itself in Art and Religion,
-not less than in Science. And thus when we study Thought, we study that
-which is in itself and for itself,&mdash;we study Absolute Being. On the
-other side it must be noted that in Logic it is Absolute Being, only
-when and as it is <i>thought,</i> which we study. The two sides, Being and
-Thought, must both come forward: and come in unity, although in some
-phases of the Idea the thought-element, in others the being-element is
-more pronounced.</p>
-
-<p>Thought, too, is Being. An old distinction of the Stoics, which not
-inaptly represents popular views on this matter, set on one side ὄντα,
-existences (which were always corporeal, whether they were the things
-we touch and feel, or the words and breathings by which we utter them),
-and on the other side the meanings or thoughts proper or σημαινόμενα
-(which were incorporeal). These λεκτά, as they were otherwise called,
-were to the Stoics the proper sphere of Logic. In the sense therefore
-which the Stoics and popular consciousness give to being, the object of
-logic does not possess being. It is not corporeal. It cannot however
-be said to be in the sphere of non-being. It is rather a part of
-reality&mdash;of concrete being&mdash;which can be considered apart, as if it
-stood alone. Alone it does not stand. And yet it holds a position so
-fundamental,&mdash;is the same theme again and again repeated under endless
-variations,&mdash;is so obviously the universal of things&mdash;that it may
-properly form the subject of independent study.</p>
-
-<p>It is, moreover, a part of Reality, which may well claim to stand for
-the whole. It is, so to say, the score of the musical composition,
-rolled up in its bare, silent, unadorned lineaments; the articulated
-theme, besides, and not the mere germinal concept, of all the variety
-of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_374" id="Page_374">[Pg 374]</a></span> melody. But it is only laid up there <i>in abstracto</i>, because in
-the soul of the composer it had already taken concrete form, due to
-his capacity and training, his mental force, his art and science. It
-is there that the score has its source. But secondly, the musical work
-exists in the performance of the orchestra: in the manipulations of the
-several instruments, in the notes of the singers, in all the diversity
-of parts which make up the mechanism for unfolding the meaning or
-theme&mdash;that unreality, that mere thought, which to the stricter Stoic
-might be said to have no ὔπαρξις, or bodily subsistence. And there are
-still people who will be disposed to assert that it is only in the
-multitude of notes of violin, trombone, flute, &amp;c., that the music is
-real:&mdash;though perhaps these hardy realists do not quite mean what they
-say. For what they probably mean, and what is the fact, is that the
-music exists as a complete reality in those who have ears and minds
-capable of comprehending and enjoying it: in those who can reunite
-meaning and theme to execution and orchestration: and we may even add
-that it is more and more real, in proportion to the greater power with
-which they can bring these two into one.</p>
-
-<p>We shall rather say then that thought points to reality, and that mere
-nature seeks for interpretation: that mere thought and mere being both
-seek for reunion. Yet if in the complete reality we thus distinguish
-two elements, we may follow Hegel in setting the pure Idea first. It
-is no doubt in a way true that, as has been said, Hegel may be often
-read most easily if we first begin with his concluding paragraphs. In
-psychology and ethics the fundamental principles have assumed a more
-imposing, a larger, a more humanly-interesting shape, than they bear
-in the intangible outlines of Logic. There they are written in blacker
-ink<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_375" id="Page_375">[Pg 375]</a></span> and broader lines than in the grey on grey. But after all, it is
-only for those who have grasped the faint&mdash;yet fixed&mdash;outlines that the
-full-contoured figure speaks its amplest truth. The true sculptor must
-begin with a thorough study of anatomy. For those therefore who do not
-care merely for results, it is indispensable to begin&mdash;or at least to
-turn back to the beginning&mdash;to the Logic. No doubt the full tones of
-the heard and sounded harmony are the true and adequate presentation
-of the composer's purpose: but they will be best comprehended and
-appreciated by those who have thoroughly grasped the score.</p>
-
-<p>In Logic, so regarded, thought is no longer merely our thought. It is
-the constructive, relational, unifying element of reality. Without it
-reality would not articulately be anything for us: and such thoughts
-seem to be its net extract, its quintessence, its concentrated meaning.
-But really they are only the potent <i>form</i> of reality. Or, more
-exactly, in its limits, under its phases, must come all reality if it
-is to be part and parcel of our intelligent possession, our certified
-property. Such a thought is the frame-work, the shape-giver of our
-world, of our communicable experience. It is the formative principle of
-our intelligent life, as it is the principle through which things have
-meaning for us, and we have meaning for and fellowship with others.
-It is not so rich as religion and art, perhaps it does not have the
-intensity of feeling and faith: but it is at the very basis of all of
-these, or it is the concentrated essence of what in them is explicated
-and developed. Humanity in these its highest energies is more than mere
-thought&mdash;more than mere logic: but it is still at the root thought, and
-it is still governed by the laws and movement of this higher logic. For
-this is a logic which is no mere instrument of technical reasoning,
-for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_376" id="Page_376">[Pg 376]</a></span> proof or disproof: no mere code of rules for the evaluation of
-testimony. It is a logic which deals with a thought&mdash;or an Idea in
-thought-form&mdash;which is the principle of all life and reality: the way
-of self-criticism which leads to truth: a thought which is at home in
-all the phases and provinces of experience.</p>
-
-<p>Under the same name, Logic, therefore, we find something quite
-different from what the example of Aristotle and his ancient and modern
-followers had accustomed us to.<a name="FNanchor_8_188" id="FNanchor_8_188"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_188" class="fnanchor">[8]</a> Under the auspices of Kant and his
-'Transcendental logic' there has emerged the need of something more
-corresponding to the title. For the word itself was not used either by
-Aristotle or the Stoics. Neither the Analytics and Topics of the one,
-nor the Dialectic of the other, exhaust the conception of the science,
-or, to put it more accurately, they are only inceptions of a science,
-the fulfilment of which was reserved for a later time. Bacon and Locke,
-Descartes and Spinoza, all the thinkers of modern Europe call for a
-deeper probing of the logical problem: for a grasp of it which shall
-be more worthy of its conventional name, Logic, the theory of Reason.
-And we may even say that what is wanted is a unification of the problem
-of the Organon with that of the first philosophy, a unification of
-Logic with Metaphysics: a recognition that the problem of reason is
-not merely the method of reasoning, but the whole theory as to the
-correlations of perception and conception, of thinking and reality.</p>
-
-<p>This conception of Logic as the self-developing system of Thought
-pure and entire, is the distinctive achievement of Hegel. 'I cannot
-imagine,' he says, 'that the method which I have followed in this
-system of Logic, or rather the method which this system follows<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_377" id="Page_377">[Pg 377]</a></span> in
-its own self, is otherwise than susceptible of much improvement, and
-many completions of detail: but I know at the same time that it is the
-only genuine method. This is evident from the circumstance that it is
-nothing distinct from its object and subject-matter: for it is the
-subject-matter within itself, or its inherent dialectic, which moves it
-along.'<a name="FNanchor_9_189" id="FNanchor_9_189"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_189" class="fnanchor">[9]</a></p>
-
-<p>But how is this universe of thought to be discovered, and its law of
-movement to be described? From times beyond the reach of history,
-from nations and tribes of which we know only by tradition and vague
-conjectures, in all levels of social life and action, the synthetic
-energy of thought has been productive, and its evolution in the field
-of time has been going on. For thousands of years the intellectual city
-has been rearing its walls: and much of the process of its formation
-lies beyond the scope of observation. But fortunately there is a help
-at hand, which will enable us to discover at least the main outlines in
-the system of thought.</p>
-
-<p>The key to the solution was found somewhat in the same way as led
-to the Darwinian theory concerning the Origin of Species. When the
-question touching the causes of variation and persistence in the
-natural kinds of plants and animals seemed so complex as to baffle all
-attempts at an answer, Darwin found what seemed a clue likely to lead
-to a theory of descent. The methods adopted in order to keep up, or to
-vary, a species under domestication were open to anybody's inspection:
-and those principles, which were consciously pursued in artificial
-selection by the breeder, suggested a theory of similar selection
-in free nature. In studying the phenomena of thought, of which the
-species or types were no less numerous and interesting than<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_378" id="Page_378">[Pg 378]</a></span> those in
-organic nature, it was perhaps impossible to survey the whole history
-of humanity. But it was comparatively easy to observe the process of
-thought in those cases where its growth had been fostered consciously
-and distinctly. The history of philosophy records the steps in the
-conscious and artificial manipulation of what for the far greater part
-is transacted in the silent workshops of nature. Philosophy, in short,
-is to the general growth of intelligence what artificial breeding is to
-the variation of species under natural conditions. In the successive
-systems of philosophy, the order and concatenation of ideas was, as it
-were, clarified out of the perturbed medium of real life, and expressed
-in its bare equivalents in terms of thought, and thus first really
-acquired. Half of his task was already performed for the logician,
-and there remained the work, certainly no slight one&mdash;of showing the
-unity and organic development which marked the conscious reasoning,
-and of connecting it with the general movement of human thought. The
-logician had to break down the rigid lines which separated one system
-of philosophy from another,&mdash;to see what was really involved in the
-contradiction of one system by its successor,&mdash;and to show that the
-negation thus given to an antecedent principle was a definite negation,
-ending not in mere zero or vacuity, but in a distinct result, and
-making an advance upon the previous height of intelligence.</p>
-
-<p>To say this was to give a new value to the history of philosophy.
-For it followed that each system was no <i>mere</i> opinion or personal
-view, but was in the main a genuine attempt of the thinker to give
-expression to the tacit or struggling consciousness of his age. Behind
-the individual&mdash;who is often unduly regardless of his contemporaries
-and predecessors, and who writes<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_379" id="Page_379">[Pg 379]</a></span> or thinks with little knowledge or
-sympathy for them, there is the general bearing and interest of the
-age, its powerful solidarity of purpose and conception. The philosopher
-is the prophet, because he is in a large part the product of his age.
-He is an organ of the mind of his age and nation; and both he and it
-play a part in the general work of humanity.</p>
-
-<p>On the other hand, it is dangerous to insist too forcibly on the
-rationality of the history of philosophy. For it may be taken to
-mean&mdash;probably only by blinded or wooden commentators&mdash;that each
-step in the evolution and concatenation of the logical idea is to be
-identified with some historical system, and that these systems must
-have appeared in this precise order. And this would be to expect
-too much from the 'impotence of nature' which plays its part in the
-historical world also: as that on one side forms part of the Natural.
-There is Reason in the world&mdash;and in the world of history; but not in
-the pellucid brightness and distinct outlines proper to the Idea in
-the abstract element of thought. It may take several philosophers to
-make one step in thought; and sometimes one philosopher of genius may
-take several steps at once. There may even be co-eval philosophies:
-and there may be philosophies which appear to run on in independent
-or parallel lines of development. It may well be that Hegel has
-underestimated these divergencies, and that he has been too apt to see
-in all history the co-operation to one dominant purpose. But these
-errors in the execution of a philosophy of history, and especially of
-the history of philosophy, should not diminish our estimate of its
-principle.<a name="FNanchor_10_190" id="FNanchor_10_190"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_190" class="fnanchor">[10]</a></p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_380" id="Page_380">[Pg 380]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>At first this process was seen in the medium of time. But the
-conditions of time are of practical and particular interest only. The
-day when the first leaves appear, and the season when the fruit ripens
-on a tree, are questions of importance to practical arboriculture. But
-botany deals only with the general theory of the plant's development,
-in which such considerations have to be generalised. So logic leaves
-out of account those points of time and chance which the interests of
-individuals and nations find all-important. And when this element of
-time has been removed, there is left a system of the types of thought
-pure and entire,&mdash;embalming the life of generations in mere words. The
-same self-identical thought is set forth from its initial narrowness
-and poverty on to its final amplitude and wealth of differences. At
-each stage it is the Absolute: outside of it there is nothing. It is
-the whole, pure and entire: always the whole. But in its first totality
-it is all but a void: in its last a fully-formed and articulated
-world,&mdash;because it holds all that it ever threw out of itself resumed
-into its grasp.</p>
-
-<p>In these circumstances nothing can sound higher and nobler than the
-Theory of Logic. It presents the Truth unveiled in its proper form and
-absolute nature. If the philosopher may call this absolute totality
-of thought ever staying the same in its eternal development,&mdash;this
-adequacy of thought to its own requirements&mdash;by the name of God, then
-we may say with Hegel that Logic exhibits God as He is in His eternal
-Being before the creation of Nature and a finite Mind.<a name="FNanchor_11_191" id="FNanchor_11_191"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_191" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> But the
-logical Idea is only a phantom Deity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_381" id="Page_381">[Pg 381]</a></span>&mdash;the bare possibility of a God
-or of absolute reality in all the development of its details.</p>
-
-<p>The first acquaintance with the abstract theory is likely to dash
-cold water on the enthusiasm thus awakened, and may sober our views
-of the magic efficacy of Logic. 'The student on his first approach
-to the Science,' says Hegel, 'sees in Logic at first only one system
-of abstractions apart and limited to itself, not extending so as
-to include other facts and sciences. On the contrary, when it is
-contrasted with the variety abounding in our generalised picture of
-the world, and with the tangible realities embraced in the other
-sciences,&mdash;when it is compared with the promise of the Absolute Science
-to lay bare the essence of that variety, the inner nature of the mind
-and the world, or, in one word, the Truth,&mdash;this science of Logic
-in its abstract outline, in the colourless cold simplicity of its
-mere terms of thought, seems as if it would perform anything sooner
-than this promise, and in the face of that variety seems very empty
-indeed. A first introduction to the study of Logic leads us to suppose
-that its significance is restricted to itself. Its doctrines are not
-believed to be more than one separate branch of study engaged with the
-terms or dimensions of thought, besides which the other scientific
-occupations have a proper material and body of their own. Upon these
-occupations, it is assumed, Logic may exert a formal influence, but
-it is the influence of a natural and spontaneous logic for which the
-scientific form and its study may be in case of need dispensed with.
-The other sciences have upon the whole rejected the regulation-method,
-which made them a series of definitions, axioms, and theorems, with the
-demonstration of these theorems. What is called Natural Logic rules
-in the sciences with full sway, and gets along without any special
-investigation<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_382" id="Page_382">[Pg 382]</a></span> in the direction of thought itself. The entire materials
-and facts of these sciences have detached themselves completely
-from Logic. Besides they are more attractive for sense, feeling, or
-imagination, and for practical interests of every description.</p>
-
-<p>And so it comes about that Logic has to be learned at first, as
-something which is perhaps understood and seen into, but of which the
-compass, the depth, and further import are in the earliest stages
-unperceived. It is only after a deeper study of the other sciences that
-logical theory rises before the mind of the student into a universal,
-which is not merely abstract, but embraces within it the variety
-of particulars.&mdash;The same moral truth on the lips of a youth, who
-understands it quite correctly, does not possess the significance or
-the burden of meaning which it has in the mind of the veteran, in whom
-the experience of a lifetime has made it express the whole force of its
-import. In the same way, Logic is not appreciated at its right value
-until it has grown to be the result of scientific experience. It is
-then seen to be the universal truth,&mdash;not a special study beside other
-matters and other realities, but the essence of all these other facts
-together.<a name="FNanchor_12_192" id="FNanchor_12_192"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_192" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_181" id="Footnote_1_181"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_181"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> E. g. 'formal' in <i>Hamlet</i>, iv. 5. 215; 'informal' in
-<i>Measure for Measure,</i> v. 236.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_182" id="Footnote_2_182"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_182"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Encycl.</i> § 574 (<i>Philosophy of Mind,</i> p. 196).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_183" id="Footnote_3_183"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_183"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Encycl.</i> § 377.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_184" id="Footnote_4_184"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_184"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>Logic</i>, vol. ii. p. 30.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_185" id="Footnote_5_185"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_185"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> The criticisms of A. Trendelenburg, in his <i>Logische
-Untersuchungen,</i> rest on such assumptions. 'Trendelenburg,' says
-Hartmann, 'means low-water mark in German philosophy.'</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_186" id="Footnote_6_186"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_186"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> See above all Bradley's <i>Principles of Logic</i>, and
-Bosanquet's <i>Logic</i>, &amp;c.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_187" id="Footnote_7_187"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_187"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'Das Wahre ist der bacchantische Taumel, an dem kein Glied
-nicht trunken ist; und weil jedes, indem es sich absondert, ebenso
-unmittelbar sich auflöst,&mdash;ist es ebenso die durchsichtige und einfache
-Ruhe.' <i>Phenom. des Geistes,</i> p 35.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_8_188" id="Footnote_8_188"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_188"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> Prantl, <i>Geschichte der Logik,</i> i. 87.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_9_189" id="Footnote_9_189"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_189"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> <i>Wissenschaft der Logik</i>, i. p. 39.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_10_190" id="Footnote_10_190"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_190"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> See <i>Encyclop.</i> § 549 <i>(Philosophy of Mind</i>, pp. 148
-seqq.). It is, of course, quite another question&mdash;to be answered by
-intelligent research&mdash;how far in particular cases Hegel has accurately
-studied a thinker, and faithfully interpreted him. Some of his critics
-in this line appear to mistake philology&mdash;which is a highly important
-authority in its own field&mdash;for philosophy: and will no doubt go on
-doing so.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_11_191" id="Footnote_11_191"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_191"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> Hegel's <i>Werke</i>, iii., 33.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_12_192" id="Footnote_12_192"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_192"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> <i>Wissenschaft der Logik</i>, i. p. 43.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_383" id="Page_383">[Pg 383]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XXVII.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE: OR THE CATEGORIES.</h4>
-
-
-<p>According to the strict reasonings of Kant in his <i>Criticism of Pure
-Reason</i>, and the somewhat looser discussions of Mr. Spencer in his
-<i>First Principles</i> a science of Metaphysics or theory of the Infinite,
-Absolute, or Unconditioned is impossible. As a result of the criticism
-by Kant, Jacobi claimed the Absolute for Faith: and Spencer banishes
-the Absolute or Unknowable to the sphere of Religion to be worshipped
-or ignored, but in either case blindly. As we have already seen, Hegel
-does not accept this distribution of provinces between religion and
-philosophy. There is only one world, one reality: but it is known more
-or less fully, more or less truly and adequately. It is presented in
-one way to the sensuous imagination: in another to the scientific
-analyst: in a third to the philosopher. To the first it is a mere
-succession or expanse of pictures, facts, appearances: and outside
-it&mdash;somewhere, but not here,&mdash;there is a land, a being of perfect
-wholeness and harmony. To the second it is an unending chain of causes
-and effects, of one thing simplified by being referred to another till
-at last a mighty all-explaining nullity, called an 'Ultimate Cause,'
-is presumed to linger, eternally unperceived at the infinitely-distant
-end of the series. To the third<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_384" id="Page_384">[Pg 384]</a></span> everything is seen in connexion, but
-not a mere uni-linear connexion: each, when studied, more and more
-completes itself by including those relations which seemed to stand
-outside: each fully realised, or completely invested with its ideal
-implications, is seen no longer to be an incident or isolated fact, but
-an implicit infinite, and a vice-gerent of the eternal. Philosophy thus
-releases both ordinary and scientific knowledge from their limitations;
-it shows the finite passing into the infinite. And Hegel, accordingly,
-purposes to show that this unfathomable Absolute is very near us, and
-at our very door: in our hands, as it were, and especially present
-in our every-day language. If we are ever to gain the Absolute, we
-must be careful not to lose one jot or tittle of the Relative<a name="FNanchor_1_193" id="FNanchor_1_193"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_193" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>. The
-Absolute&mdash;this term, which is to some so offensive and to others so
-precious&mdash;always presents itself to us in Relatives: and when we have
-persistently traced the Proteus through all its manifestations,&mdash;when
-we have, so to speak, seen the Absolute Relativity of Relation, there
-is very little more needed in order to apprehend the Absolute pure and
-entire. One may say of the Absolute what Goethe<a name="FNanchor_2_194" id="FNanchor_2_194"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_194" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> says of Nature: 'She
-lives entirely in her children: and the mother, where is she?'</p>
-
-<p>It is a great step, when we have detected the Relativity of what had
-hitherto seemed Absolute,&mdash;when a new aspect of the infinite fullness
-of the world, the truth of things, dawns upon us. But it is even a
-greater step when we see that the Relativity which we have<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_385" id="Page_385">[Pg 385]</a></span> thus
-discovered is itself Relative. And this is one advantage of first
-studying the value of the categories of ethics and physics on Logical
-ground. On the concreter region of Nature and Mind, the several grades
-and species into which reality is divided have a portentous firmness
-and grandeur about them, and the intrinsic dialectic seems scarcely
-adequate to shaking the foundations of their stability. They severally
-stand as independent self-sustaining entities, separate from each
-other, and stereotyped in their several formations. But in the ether of
-abstract Idea, in the fluid and transparent form of mere thoughts, the
-several stages in the development of the Absolute, the various grades
-of category, clearly betray their Relativity, and by the negation of
-this Relativity lead on to a higher Absolute.</p>
-
-<p>To the practical man,&mdash;so long as his reflection does not go deep,&mdash;the
-concepts on which his knowledge and faith are built seem eternal,
-unshifting rock, parts of the inmost fabric of things. He accepts them
-as ultimate validities. To him matter and force, cause and effect,
-distinctions between form and content, whole and part, quantity and
-quality, belong to the final constitution of the world. (And so, in a
-sense, they do.) If he ever overcome the absoluteness which popular
-thought attributes to the individual things of sense and imagination,
-and show their relativity, he does so only to fall under the glamour
-of a new deception. Causes and matters, forces and atoms, become new
-ultimates, new absolutes, of another order. Fictions or postulates of
-the understanding take the place of the figments of imagination. The
-ordinary scientific man labours especially under the 'metaphysical'
-fallacy: he realises abstractions in their abstractness. As against
-this it is the business of the logician to show how such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_386" id="Page_386">[Pg 386]</a></span> terms are to
-be interpreted as steps in a process of interpretation&mdash;containing so
-much that others of simpler structure have handed on, and themselves
-presupposing by implication a great deal they fail properly to
-explicate. Thus, the logician evinces at one blow the relativity of
-each term in its mereness, abstractness, or false absoluteness, and the
-ideal absoluteness which always carries it beyond itself, and makes it
-mean more than it says.</p>
-
-<p>The natural mind always hastens to substantiate the terms it employs.
-It makes them a fixed, solid foundation, an hypostasis, on which
-further building may be raised. If such pseudo-absolutising of concepts
-is to be called metaphysics, then logic has to free us from the
-illusions of metaphysics, to de-absolutise them, to disabuse us of a
-false Absolute. The false Absolute is what Hegel calls the Abstract:
-it is the part which, because it succeeded in losing sight of its
-dependence, had believed itself to be a whole. Logic shows&mdash;in the
-phrase of Hegel&mdash;that each such term or concept is only an attempt
-to express, explicate, or define the Absolute<a name="FNanchor_3_195" id="FNanchor_3_195"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_195" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>: a predicate of the
-Absolute, but falling short of its subject, or only uttering part of
-the whole truth of reality. But while Logic shows it only to be an
-attempt, and therefore in an aspect relative, it equally shows its
-ingrained tendency to complete itself, to carry out to realisation
-its ideal implication,&mdash;shows, in short, that e. g. force is more
-than <i>mere</i> force, that thing-in-itself is not properly even a thing;
-that a veritable notion (<i>Begriff</i>) or grasp of a thing is more than
-a <i>mere</i> (subjective) notion, &amp;c. Thus the true Absolute is not the
-emptiest and most meagre of abstractions,&mdash;what is left as a residual
-after the relative in all its breadth and length has been cut out
-of it;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_387" id="Page_387">[Pg 387]</a></span> it is the concretest of all being, the whole which includes
-without destroying all partial aspects. Yet as it includes them, it
-shows itself their master and more than master: making each lose and
-win in the other, till all are satisfied in unity, and no shade of
-individuality is utterly lost in the totality of the Universal.</p>
-
-<p>Accordingly, Metaphysics and Logic tend to form one body. For the
-distant and transcendent Absolute, which was the object of older
-Metaphysics, was substituted an Absolute, self-revealing in the terms
-of thought. Being is deposed from its absoluteness, and made the
-first postulate of thought. Former Metaphysics had dashed itself in
-vain against the reefs that girdle the island of the supersensible
-and noümenal, the supposed world of true Being: and the struggle at
-last grew so disastrous that Kant gave the signal to retreat, and to
-leave the world of true Being, the impregnable Thing-in-itself, to its
-repose. His advice to metaphysicians<a name="FNanchor_4_196" id="FNanchor_4_196"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_196" class="fnanchor">[4]</a> was that, while scientific
-research continued to concentrate the attack of analysis upon single
-experiences conforming to certain conditions, they should investigate
-these' conditions of possible experience or foundations of objectivity.
-In other words, he turned observation to what he called Transcendental
-Logic. It was by means of this suggestion, understood in the widest
-sense, that Hegel was led to treat Logic as the science of ultimate
-reality. He had to show how these conditions when carried out in
-full gave the Unconditioned. He attacked the Absolute, if we may say
-so, in detail. The Absolute, as the totality, universe or system of
-Relativity,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_388" id="Page_388">[Pg 388]</a></span> lays itself open to observation by deposing itself to a
-Relative. It possesses the differentiating power of separating itself
-as an object in passivity, from itself as a subject in action,&mdash;of
-deposing itself to appearance, of being <i>for</i> itself, and also <i>in</i>
-and <i>for</i> itself. And thus Thought is the active universal,&mdash;which
-actualises itself more and more out of abstraction into concreteness.</p>
-
-<p>Hegel, then, solved the problem of Metaphysics by turning it into
-Logic. The same principle, Thought, appeared in both: in the former
-as a fixed and passive result, showing no traces of spontaneity,&mdash;in
-the latter as an activity, with a mere power of passing from object
-to object, discovering and establishing connexions and relations. The
-two sciences were fragments, unintelligible and untenable, when taken
-in abstract isolation. This is the justification, if justification
-be required, for Hegel's unification of Logic and Metaphysics. The
-Hegelian Logic falls into three parts: the theory of Transitory Being:
-the theory of Relative Being: and the theory of the Notion. The first
-and second of these in his Science of Logic are called Objective Logic;
-they also might be described as Metaphysics. The third part is more
-strictly on Logical ground. Or perhaps it is best to describe the whole
-as the Metaphysics of Logic.</p>
-
-<p>The Logic of Hegel is the Science of Thought as an organic system of
-its characteristic forms, which in their entirety constitute the Idea.
-These forms or types of thought, the moulds in which the Idea confines
-itself in its evolution, are not unlike what have been otherwise called
-the Categories. (Of course the foreign word 'Categories' does not
-commend itself to Hegel).<a name="FNanchor_5_197" id="FNanchor_5_197"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_197" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> They<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_389" id="Page_389">[Pg 389]</a></span> are the modifications or definite
-forms, the articulated and distinct shapes, in which the process of
-Thought ever and anon culminates in the course of its movement. The
-Infinite and Absolute at these points conditions itself, and as so
-conditioned or differentiated is apprehended and stamped with a name.
-They specify the unspecified, and give utterance to the ineffable.
-They are the names by which reason grasps the totality of things,&mdash;the
-names by which the truth (or God) reveals itself, however inadequately.
-From one point of view they constitute a series, each evolved from
-the other, a more completely detailed term or utterance of thought
-resulting by innate contradiction from a less detailed. From another
-point of view the total remains perpetually the same; and the change
-seems only on the surface. The one aspect of the movement conceals the
-Absolute: the other puts the Relative into the background.</p>
-
-<p>What then are the Categories? We may answer: They are the ways in
-which expression is given to the unifying influence of thought: and we
-have to consider them as points or stations in the progress of this
-unification, and in the light of this influence. These Categories are
-the typical structures marking the definite grades in the growth of
-thought,&mdash;the moulds or forms which thought assumes and places itself
-in,&mdash;those instants when the process of thought takes a determinate
-form, and admits of being grasped. The growth of thought, like
-other growths, is often imperceptible and impalpable.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_390" id="Page_390">[Pg 390]</a></span> And then,
-unexpectedly, a condensation takes place, a form is precipitated out of
-the transparent medium. A new concept, a new grasp of reality, emerges
-from the solution of elements: and a name is created to realise the
-new shade of the Idea. These thought-terms are the world of Platonic
-forms, if we consider his 'form of Good' as corresponding to the 'Idea'
-of Hegel. For if we look carefully into this mystic word 'Good' which
-plays so brilliant a part in ancient philosophy, we shall see that it
-only expresses in a more concrete and less analytic form, as ancient
-thought often does, the same thing as so many moderns love to speak
-of as Relativity, and which is also implied in Aristotle's conception
-of an End. To see things <i>sub specie boni</i>&mdash;which Plato describes
-as the supreme quality of the truth-seeker who is to guide men into
-uprightness, or into conformity with the true nature of things,&mdash;is
-to see them elevated above their partial self-subsistence into the
-harmony and totality of that which is always and unvaryingly its real
-self. The Good is the sun-light in which things lose their earlier
-character (which they had in the days of our bondage and ignorance) of
-mysterious and perplexing spectres of the night. In the light of the
-Good, things are shorn of their false pretence of self-subsistence and
-substantiality, deposed by comparison with the perfect and unspotted,
-and as it were stung into seeking a higher form of being by struggle.
-And this is the abstract moral way of looking. But to see them in the
-form of Good means also that they are seen to be more and better than
-we thought, that they are not condemned to inadequacy, but bear in them
-the witness and revelation of infinity and absoluteness. And this is
-rather the faith of religion and the vision of art. And the 'form of
-Good' is only a brief and undeveloped<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_391" id="Page_391">[Pg 391]</a></span> vision of an Absolute, which is
-the 'form of Relativity,'&mdash;Relativity elevated into an Absolute.</p>
-
-<p>A Category is often spoken of as if it were the highest extreme of
-generalisation, the most abstract and most widely applicable term
-possible. If we climb sufficiently far and high up the Porphyry's tree
-of thought, we may expect, thought the old logicians, to reach the
-'<i>summa genera</i>' or highest species of human thought. Nor have modern
-logicians always refrained from this byway. But these quantitative
-distinctions of greater and less, in which the Formal Logic revels,
-are not very suitable to any of the terms or processes of thought,
-and they certainly give an imperfect description of the Categories.
-The essential function which the Categories perform in the fabric
-of thought and language is, in the first place, to combine, affirm,
-demonstrate, relate, and unify,&mdash;and <i>not</i> to generalise.<a name="FNanchor_6_198" id="FNanchor_6_198"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_198" class="fnanchor">[6]</a> Their
-action may be better compared to that fulfilled by those symbols in
-an algebraical expression, which like <i>plus</i> and <i>minus</i> denote an
-operation to be performed in the way of combining or relating, than
-to the office of the symbols which in these expressions denote the
-magnitudes themselves.</p>
-
-<p>To the student of language the Categories sometimes present themselves
-as pronominal, or formal roots,&mdash;those roots which, as it is said, do
-not denote things, but relations between things. He meets them in the
-inflections of nouns and verbs; in the signs of number, gender, case,
-and person: but, as thus presented, their influence is subordinate to
-the things of which they are, as it were, the accidents. He meets them
-in a more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_392" id="Page_392">[Pg 392]</a></span> independent and tangible shape in the articles, pronouns,
-prepositions, conjunctions, and numerals, and in what are called the
-auxiliary verbs. In these apparently trifling, and in some languages
-almost non-existent words or parts of words, we have the symbols of
-relations,&mdash;the means of connexion between single words,&mdash;the cement
-which binds significant speech together. There are languages, such as
-the older and classical forms of Chinese, where these categorising
-terms are, as it were, in the air: where they are only felt in accent
-and position, and have no separate existence of their own. But in
-the languages of the Indo-European family they gradually appear, at
-first in combination, perhaps, with the more material roots, and only
-in the course of time asserting an independent form. Originally they
-appear to denote the relations of space and time,&mdash;the generalised or
-typical links between the parts of our sense-perceptions: but from
-there they are afterwards, and in a little while, transferred into
-the service of intellect. These little words are the very life-blood
-of a language,&mdash;its spirit and force. It is in these categories,
-as they show themselves in the different linguistic families, that
-a nation betrays its mode and tone of thought. The language of the
-Altaic races, e. g., expresses activity only as a piece of property,
-an appropriation of a substance, and knows no true distinction of noun
-and verb: the Semitic Tongues in their tense-system perhaps betray the
-intense inwardness of the race: whereas the immense inflectionalism of
-the Indo-European seems not unconnected with his greater versatility
-and energy. Complete mastery in the manipulation of these particles
-and forms is what makes an idiomatic knowledge of a language, as
-distinct from a mere remembrance of the vocabulary. And philosophy
-is the recognition of their import and significance.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_393" id="Page_393">[Pg 393]</a></span> Thus in Greek
-philosophy the central questions turn upon such words as Being and
-not-Being: Becoming: that out of which: that for the sake of which: the
-what-was-being: the what is: the other: the one: the great and small:
-that which is upon the whole: what is according to each: this somewhat:
-&amp;c.<a name="FNanchor_7_199" id="FNanchor_7_199"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_199" class="fnanchor">[7]</a> And again in Modern Philosophy, how often has the battle raged
-about the meaning of such words as I: will: can: must: because: same
-and different: self: &amp;c.!</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_193" id="Footnote_1_193"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_193"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Cf. Herbart's maxim, 'Wie viel Schein, so viel Hindeutung
-auf Sein.' (<i>Hauptpunkte der Metaphysik.</i>)</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_194" id="Footnote_2_194"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_194"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> <i>Die Natur</i> (1780): 'Sie lebt in lauter Kindern: und die
-Mutter, wo ist sie?.... Sie ist ganz und doch immer unvollendet.... Sie
-verbirgt sich in tausend Namen und Termen, und ist immer dieselbe.'</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_195" id="Footnote_3_195"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_195"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> <i>Logic (Encyclop.)</i> §§ 85, 87, 112, 194, &amp;c.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_196" id="Footnote_4_196"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_196"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Metaphysic is, in Kant's usage, ambiguous. It means (<i>a</i>)
-a supposed science of the supersensible or unconditioned reality;
-(<i>b</i>) a study of the conditions or presuppositions&mdash;the Kantian <i>a
-priori</i>&mdash;of some aspect of Experience, e. g. a Metaphysic of Moral
-rules.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_197" id="Footnote_5_197"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_197"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> His usual term is <i>Denkbestimmungen,</i> the several
-expressions or specific forms of the unification which thought is.
-The term Categories has been identified by Kant with his list of
-<i>Stammbegriffe.</i> and by Mill with his classes of nameable things,&mdash;with
-some critical remarks on Aristotle's use of the word. That use&mdash;to
-denote the elements of predicable reality, what Grote called <i>ens</i>&mdash;is
-probably not so 'rhapsodical' as Kant, with his new-born zeal for the
-contrast of sensibility and intellect, was inclined to suppose. A real
-history of the Category-theory would be almost a history of philosophy.
-Perhaps the name might be more sparingly used.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_198" id="Footnote_6_198"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_198"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> Generalisation is only one small aspect of thought, with
-specialisation as its, at least as important, pendant. To read certain
-logics, one might think the all-comprehensive virtue of truths were to
-be general,&mdash;not to be true.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_199" id="Footnote_7_199"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_199"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> ὅν and μὴ ὅν: τὸ γιγνόμενον: τὸ ἐξ οὗ: τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα: τὸ τί
-ἦν εἶναι: τὸ τί ἐστι: θάτερον: ἕν: τὸ μέγα καὶ τὸ μικρόν: τὸ καθ' ὅλου:
-τὸ καθ' ἔκαστον: τόδε τί.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_394" id="Page_394">[Pg 394]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XXVIII.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>THE THREE PARTS OF LOGIC.</h4>
-
-
-<p>Logic, as it is understood in these pages, is the critical history
-of the terms of thought by which reality, the sum of experience, the
-world, is described or expressed. It is the philosophical criticism
-of the concepts, or elements of conception, by which we define or
-develop the Totality, the Absolute. It describes the constitution
-of the intellectual realm, by and in which we give body, coherence,
-unity, and system to reality. It is the self-developing organisation
-of the thoughts by which we think things, and by which things are
-what they are. It is the ripe fruit of the experience of the ages of
-humanity, and it therefore bears in itself a principle of growth. But
-if it be a fruit, it is a fruit which can watch its own growth, which
-reflects upon its own life. Its three parts show the main stages of its
-development, beginning with the least adequate and most abstract or
-general description of reality.</p>
-
-<p>The first part of Logic, the theory of Being<a name="FNanchor_1_200" id="FNanchor_1_200"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_200" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>, may be<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_395" id="Page_395">[Pg 395]</a></span> called the
-theory of unsupported and freely-floating Being. We do not mean
-something which <i>is,</i> but the mere 'is,' the bare fact of Being,
-without any substratum. The degree of condensation or development,
-where substantive and attribute, or noun and verb, co-exist, has not
-yet come. The terms or forms of Being float as it were freely in the
-air, and we go from one to another, or&mdash;to put it more correctly&mdash;one
-passes into another. The terms in question are Is and Not: Become:
-There is: Some and Other: Each: One: Many: and so on through the
-terms of number to degree and numerical specificality. This Being is
-immediate: i.e. it contains no reference binding it with anything
-beyond itself, but stands forward baldly and nakedly, as if alone;
-and, if hard pressed, it turns over into something else. It includes
-the three stages of Quality, Quantity, and Measure. The ether of
-'Is' presumes no substratum, or further connexion with anything: and
-we only meet a series of points as we travel along the surface of
-thought. To <i>name,</i> to <i>number</i>, to <i>measure</i>, are the three grades
-of our ordinary and natural thought: so simple, that one is scarcely
-disposed to look upon them as grades of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_396" id="Page_396">[Pg 396]</a></span> thought at all. And yet if
-thought is self-specification, what more obvious forms of specifying
-it are there than to name (so pointing it out, or qualifying it), to
-number (so quantifying it, or stating its dimensions), and to measure
-it? These are the three primary specificates by which we think,&mdash;the
-three primary dimensions of thought. Thought, in so determining,
-plays upon the surface, and has no sense of the interdependence of
-its terms. And if we could imagine a natural state of consciousness
-in which sensations had not yet hardened into permanent things, and
-into connexions between things, we should have something like the
-range of Immediate Being. Colours and sounds, a series of floating
-qualities, pass before the eye and the ear: these colours and sounds
-are in course of time counted: and then, by applying the numbers to
-these qualities, we get the proportions or limits ascertained. When
-this process in actual life,&mdash;the advance from the vague feelings
-which tell us of sweet, cold, &amp;c., by means of a definite enumeration
-of their phenomena, to the rules guiding their operation,&mdash;is reduced
-to its most abstract terms, we have the process of Being. It would
-be the period when a distinction between things and their actions
-or properties has not arisen. The demonstrative pronouns and the
-numerals are among the linguistic expressions of Being in its several
-stages. Perhaps too we may illustrate it by the so-called 'impersonal'
-verb&mdash;which has hardly reached the stage of verb proper, having no
-subject: or by the name which still fluctuates between the stage of
-substantive or adjective.</p>
-
-<p>The first sphere was that of Being directly confronting us, and using
-the demonstrative pronouns first of all. The second is Relative or
-Reflective Being: and in this we have to deal with the relative
-pronouns. The<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_397" id="Page_397">[Pg 397]</a></span> surface of Being is now seen to exhibit a secondary
-formation, to involve a sort of permanent standard in itself, and to
-be essentially relative. The mere quality, when reduced to number, is
-seen to be subjected to a certain measure, rule, sort, or standard:
-and this reflex of itself always haunts it, modifying and determining
-it. Thus instead of qualities, we begin to speak of the properties of
-a thing: we have, as it were, two levels of Being, in intimate and
-necessary connexion, where there was only one before. At first it was
-but a mere surface-picture, one thing here and another there: a this
-and a that; one, <i>now,</i> and another, <i>then. This,</i> it might be, was
-round, and <i>that</i> square: <i>now,</i> it was bright, and <i>then,</i> it was
-dull: <i>here</i> was a head, and <i>there</i> was a limb. But the comparison of
-quality with quantity, measuring one by the other, gave rise to the
-conception of something permanent, a true nucleus amid the changes. The
-fact, previously single, is now become double: the mere event is now a
-phenomenon, a temporary and outward manifestation of something inner.
-We now see each that <i>is,</i> in the halo of what it <i>has been,</i> or will
-be: the passing modification in the light of the permanent type. But as
-yet the permanent and the passing are separate, and only throw light
-on each other: A explaining itself by B and B by A. We have apparently
-two facts; neither of which can however stand by itself and therefore
-refers us to the other. But to get a real rest in this incessant round
-of mutual reference of one to another we must take a higher stand-point.</p>
-
-<p>In this sphere of Relativity the terms expressive of things come in
-pairs: such as Same and Different, Like and Unlike: True Being and Show
-or Semblance: Cause and Effect: Substance and Accident: Matter and
-Form: and the like. If we compare mere Being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_398" id="Page_398">[Pg 398]</a></span> to the cell in its simple
-state, we may say that in the second sphere of Logic a nucleus has been
-formed,&mdash;that a distinction has sprung up between two elements, which
-are still in closest interconnexion. We have penetrated behind the
-seeming simplicity of the surface: and in fact discovered it to be mere
-seeming in the light of the substratum, cause, or essence, upon which
-it is now reflected. In immediate Being one category, or specificate,
-or dimension of thought passes over into another, and then disappears:
-but in mediated Being one category has a meaning only by its relation
-to another,&mdash;only by its reflection on another,&mdash;only by the light
-which another casts upon it. Thus a cause has no meaning except in
-connexion with its effect: a force implies or postulates an exertion
-of that force: an essence is constituted by the existence which issues
-from it. Instead of 'is,' therefore, which denotes resting-upon-self,
-or connexion-with-self, the verb of the second sphere is 'has,'
-denoting reference, or connexion-with-something-else: e.g. the cause
-<i>has</i> an effect: the thing <i>has</i> properties. Instead of numerals,
-come the prepositions and pronouns of relation, such as which, same,
-like, as, by, because. The only conjunction in the first stage or
-Being was 'And,'&mdash;mere juxtaposition; and even that conjunction was
-perhaps premature, and due to reflective thought, going beyond what was
-immediately before it, and tracing out connexions with other things.
-The first stage, as we have seen, treated of the terms of natural
-thought present in the action of the senses: the second stage&mdash;that of
-Essential Being&mdash;deals with scientific, reflective, or mediate thought.
-What, why, are the questions: comparison and connexion the methods: the
-establishment of relations of similarity, causation, and co-existence,
-the purpose in this range of logical method. Its categories are those
-most familiar<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_399" id="Page_399">[Pg 399]</a></span> to science in its reflective and comparative stage. It
-is the peculiar home of what are known as Metaphysical subtleties. The
-natural but delusive tendency of reasoning is to throw the emphasis
-on one side of the relation, and to regard the other as accessary and
-secondary. Contrasts between <i>essentia</i> and <i>existentia: substantia</i>
-and <i>modi</i>: cause and effect: real and apparent: constantly occur.</p>
-
-<p>If the first branch of Logic was the sphere of simple Being in a point
-or series of points, the second is that of difference and discordant
-Being, broken up in itself. The progress in this second sphere&mdash;of
-<i>Essentia</i> or Relative being&mdash;consists in gradually overcoming the
-antithesis and discrepancy between the two sides in it&mdash;the Permanent
-and the Phenomenal. At first the stress rests upon the Permanent
-and true Being which lies behind the seeming&mdash;upon the essence or
-substratum in the background, on which the show of immediate Being has
-been proved by the process in the first sphere really to rest. Then,
-secondly, Existence comes to the front, and Appearances or Phenomena
-are regarded as the only realities with which science can deal. And
-yet even in this case we cannot but distinguish between matter and
-form, between the phenomena and their laws, between force and its
-exercises: and thus repeat the relativity, though both terms in it are
-now on the whole transferred into the range of the Phenomenal world.
-The third range of Essential Being is known as Actuality, where the
-two elements in relation rise to the level of independent existences,
-essences in phenomenal guise&mdash;bound together, and deriving their very
-characteristics from that close union. Relativity or correlation is
-now clearly apparent in actual form, and comprises the three heads of
-Substantial Relation, Causal Relation,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_400" id="Page_400">[Pg 400]</a></span> and Reciprocal Relation. In
-this case while the two members of the relation are now indissolubly
-linked together, they are no more submitted to each other than they
-are independent. According to Reciprocity everything actual is at once
-cause and effect: it is the meeting-point of relations: a whole with
-independent elements in mutual interconnexion. Such a total is the
-Notion.</p>
-
-<p>This brings us to the third branch of Logic,&mdash;the theory of the
-Notion, or Grasp of Thought.<a name="FNanchor_2_201" id="FNanchor_2_201"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_201" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> The theory of Causality, with which
-the second branch closed, continued to let the thought fall asunder
-into two unequal halves&mdash;always however in relation or connexion with
-each other. But in the present part of the Logic the two halves are
-re-united, or in their difference their identity is also recognised.
-Instead of a cause of a thing (which is separate from it in order), we
-have a concept which is its principle of unity, its universal in which
-it is individualised. Instead of incessant and endless Relativity,
-we have Development. By development is meant self-specification, or
-self-actualisation: the thing is what it becomes, or while it changes
-it remains identical with itself. The Category or Development is the
-category or method of philosophic or speculative science: just as
-Being corresponded to natural thought, and Relativity or Reflection to
-metaphysical and realistic science. According to the law of Development
-diversity and unity both receive their due. Mere unity or Being
-reappears now as Universality or Generality. Mere<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_401" id="Page_401">[Pg 401]</a></span> diversity, or the
-relativity of essence, re-appears as Particularity, or the speciality
-of details. And the union of the two is seen in the Individualised
-notion or real object. In other words, the true thought which really
-grasps and gets all round its object, which is a real whole, is a
-Triplicity: it is first seen all as the ground or self-same, the
-possibility&mdash;secondly, all as the existence in details, and difference,
-the actuality or contingency&mdash;and thirdly, all as the self-same in
-difference, and the possible in actuality. Every object in its full
-reality is an innate movement; and to grasp it wholly we must apprehend
-it as such a self-evolving and self-involving unity of elements, in
-each of which however it is whole and entire. Thus the Notion embraces
-the three elements or factors of universal, particular and individual.
-These three elements first rise to independence and get their full
-significance or explication in the syllogism, with its three terms
-and judgments, exhibiting the various ways in which any two of these
-elements in thought are brought into unity by means of the third. This
-adequate form is a system or organic unity which contains in itself the
-premisses of its conclusion or the means to its realisation,&mdash;which is
-a process within itself, and when complete and self-supporting perforce
-gives itself reality.</p>
-
-<p>The Notion or <i>Begriff</i> is where Hegel makes his special mark on
-Logic. Schelling, even, following on Kant, had (like Schopenhauer
-after him) lauded the merit of the Intuition at the expense of the
-mere notion<a name="FNanchor_3_202" id="FNanchor_3_202"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_202" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> and expressed himself surprised at Hegel's use of the
-word. But what Hegel wants first to insist upon is that the Intuition
-or Perception (<i>Anschauung</i>) is built upon the Notion&mdash;that it is
-only because there is a universal principle in its details that the
-individual reality<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_402" id="Page_402">[Pg 402]</a></span> of the percept is assured. That we can elicit a
-notion from a perception is only possible because it is implicitly
-dominated by a universal. Secondly, Hegel wishes to note (as elsewhere)
-that the full adequate notion, the notion as self-explaining and
-self-constituting, is all that is meant by the object. Thus the Notion
-or Subject<i>&mdash;Causa Sui</i>&mdash;when it is fully realised in the plenitude
-of its elements or differences,&mdash;when each element has scope of its
-own, is the Object&mdash;the actual and individualised total of thought, or
-syllogism in reality. This objective world or Object appears in three
-forms. An Object is either a mechanical, a chemical, or a teleological
-object. The terms mechanical and chemical are not to be understood in
-the narrow sense of a machine or chemical compound. They are to be
-taken in an analogical sense, just as J. S. Mill speaks of a chemical
-or geometrical method of treating social problems. The object or
-realised notion is mechanical, when the unification of the members in
-the totality comes or seems to come from without, so that the whole
-or universal they form is external and almost indifferent to the
-particulars, and only arranges them. An object is chemical, when the
-connexion or genesis of the compound from its factors is not evident:
-when the elements are as it were lost, and only give rise to a fresh
-particular. An object is teleological, when the universal is, though
-not distinctly conceived as realised, still always as tending to be
-realised by the particulars. And in each of these grades the object
-comes more and more to be seen to be a self-enacting, self-legislating
-being; more and more a due pendant to the subject-notion. Modern
-science is a vehement opponent of teleology: and with justice, so
-far as in teleology, means and end fall apart. But it is mistaken in
-supposing itself to return to the mechanical<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_403" id="Page_403">[Pg 403]</a></span> point of view. On the
-contrary its success is most generally secured by rising to the point
-of view given by the Idea of Life, and by looking upon the objective
-world as an Organism, that is, as the notion in objectivity, soul
-indissolubly united with body. But even the Idea of Life, in which we
-enter the third stage of the notion, is defective as a representation
-of the truth of Objectivity: for body and soul must part. The
-conception of an Organism or living being is too crude. Reality is no
-doubt well described as alive: the Absolute well defined as Life. But
-here again Life is taken in a higher than its sense of <i>mere</i> Life:
-it is life as intelligent and volitional energy. If the universe&mdash;the
-Absolute&mdash;can be said to be living, it must be said also that it is
-more than Living. Such a life&mdash;such existence&mdash;is what Aristotle has
-called <i>θεωρία</i> and ἐνέργεια of the highest in man. It is mental and
-spiritual life. In its consummation it is the Idea&mdash;the absolute
-Idea&mdash;the totality which is and is aware of itself,&mdash;the developed
-unity of the Notion with Objectivity. This unity thus presented is
-what lies implicit to our perception in Nature: and thus the Idea,
-as developed in Logic, forms the prologue and presupposition to the
-Philosophy of Nature.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_200" id="Footnote_1_200"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_200"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Being (<i>das Seyn</i>) probably conveys much more to an
-English reader than is here meant or wanted. It is Being, where the
-distinction between essence and appearance has not yet emerged or been
-thought of. If being = τὸ ὄν, then essence (<i>Wesen</i>) = <i>τὸ ὄντως</i> ὄν,
-the being which underlies and yet includes appearance. <i>Wesen</i> has more
-right to the substantival vocable of Being: <i>Seyn</i> is little better
-than an 'Is' or 'Be.'
-</p>
-<p>
-In writers of Locke's time, 'Being seems to mean a reality, an actually
-existing object, e.g. Clarke: 'There has existed from eternity some one
-unchangeable and independent Being.' 'What the substance or <i>essence</i>
-of that Being is, we have no idea.' 'Essence,' says Locke, 'may be
-taken for the very being of anything, whereby it is what it is.' Of
-course Aristotle long ago noted Being as one of the terms with variety
-of implication; and his own fluctuation about <i>οὐσία</i> is an obvious
-illustration of this.
-</p>
-<p>
-In the translation of the <i>Logic</i>, <i>Wesen</i> is occasionally rendered by
-Being (e. g. Supreme Being); <i>Seyn,</i> by existence. <i>Seyn</i> here means
-so little that one can hardly find any word of sufficiently minimal
-content for it.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_201" id="Footnote_2_201"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_201"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> No doubt, as Dr. W. T. Harris remarks, <i>Notion</i> (used
-by Dr. Stirling) is a quite insignificant rendering of Hegel's
-<i>Begriff</i>:&mdash;for which he proposes Self-activity. But, as he admits,
-that is just Hegel's way: he coins brand-new the old terms, and forces
-us, if we will follow him, to think full meaning into them.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_202" id="Footnote_3_202"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_202"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> See vol. ii, Notes and Illustrations, p. 408.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_404" id="Page_404">[Pg 404]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XXIX.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>THE SEARCH FOR A FIRST PRINCIPLE.</h4>
-
-
-<p>If there be one thing which, more than another, distinguishes Modern
-Philosophers from the Ancient Philosophy of Athens, it is the desire
-to discover a First Principle of certainty, a handle by which they
-may get hold of and set in due order the perplexed mass of reality.
-They find themselves born to an inheritance of tradition, a mass of
-belief and lore which overwhelms where it does not support. The long
-watches of the Middle Ages had been a time of preparation&mdash;even if
-the 'cerebration' had been somewhat unconscious. The mind had been
-by discipline trained to freedom. As it worked amid the material and
-tried to order it and defend it, the intellect grew to recognise its
-lordship over the load of authority. Overt revolts indeed against
-coercion by decrees and by canons of dogma had never been wanting even
-in the quietest of the so-called 'ages of faith.' But it is not in the
-loudest outcry or the most rampant dissent that progress shows its most
-effective course. The 'catholic' and 'orthodox' tradition equally bears
-witness to a movement to emancipation, to self-centred intelligence.
-Such an emancipation however cannot be complete and self-realised
-without a sharp and painful wrench at the moment of mental birth.
-The great<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_405" id="Page_405">[Pg 405]</a></span> word of disruption, of self-assertion, of defiance to the
-past and to the dominant, must be said: and, as human beings are
-constituted, it will be said in a tone of acerbity for which neither
-the revolutionist nor the reactionary are severally alone responsible.</p>
-
-<p>Thus to hear the brave words and the bold defiance hurled out by
-the thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one might
-fancy they, like Archimedes, sought a supernal vantage-ground from
-which they could move the world. Yet, unlike the material earth,
-the intellectual globe is a burden we each carry with us,&mdash;which we
-find upon us when&mdash;if ever&mdash;we begin to shake ourselves out of the
-slothful unconsciousness of our merely vegetative life. For though
-we all carry it, we do not all feel its weight. In some individuals
-and in some ages there is so accurate a proportion between the inner
-power and the outer pressure that the load of belief and custom is
-but a well-fitting garb, almost a second nature. To others there
-is a felt disproportion, a sense of superincumbent clothes and
-uncongenial, unnatural trappings. Out of such struggles to be free,
-grow, occasionally, philosophers, and reformers. To the former the
-burden is the burden of the unintelligible: to the latter the burden of
-the unbearable and intolerable. To the philosopher the removal of the
-burden consists in such a re-adjustment of the intellectual world that
-it shall be no longer a foreign thing, but bone of his bone and flesh
-of his flesh. But, to re-adjust and to re-organise, one must stand
-back from the objective: one must cast it forth, and look about for a
-clue to an exit from the maze of confusion. The given and subsistent
-is put on probation: not rejected, but for the moment declined: not
-denied, but asked to present its credentials.<a name="FNanchor_1_203" id="FNanchor_1_203"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_203" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> This<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_406" id="Page_406">[Pg 406]</a></span> is the ἐποχή
-of the sceptical schools of later Greece; the invitation to doubt
-addressed by Descartes to his own soul. It is the protest against that
-vulgar precipitancy which in primitive and modern credulity is ready to
-give itself away to any doctrine which has the voice and the garb of
-outward authority. Or is it the assertion! of the royal and inalienable
-sovereignty of the Subjectivity to be <i>certain</i> of whatever claims to
-be objective and <i>true</i>: the assertion that what is true must be seen
-and experienced to be true. Or it is, in another way, the principle of
-Socrates: that the beginning of knowledge, the first step in the way
-of wisdom, is to know that you know nothing&mdash;to realise the absolute
-supremacy of self-consciousness.</p>
-
-<p>It is in short the same demand as Augustine's. There is indeed a wide
-gulf of temperament and circumstances dividing the bishop of Hippo from
-the mathematician Descartes and the rationalist Spinoza. But in the cry
-for the knowledge of 'God and my Soul' as the first, the indispensable,
-the sole knowledge: as the <i>one</i> knowledge which binds the finite and
-the infinite together,&mdash;the knowledge on which turns the truth of
-science, and the reality of experience, the great thinkers of these
-diverse ages are at one.<a name="FNanchor_2_204" id="FNanchor_2_204"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_204" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> They turn their backs upon the external
-that they may find rest in the truly internal, on the inner certainty,
-which is not a mere subjective but a very objective also: not a mere
-<i>anima mea,</i> but in close unity therewith <i>Deus meus.</i> This is perhaps
-more explicit in Spinoza, in some points, than in Descartes, and in
-many respects more decisively put by Augustine than by either. But this
-is what is really meant by the initial concentration of suspense: this
-is what is sought when a Principle is sought.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_407" id="Page_407">[Pg 407]</a></span> Nothing short of this
-unity of subjective and objective in an Absolute&mdash;we may say&mdash;Ego, is a
-principle.</p>
-
-<p>But 'principles' like other terms are sometimes lightly taken; and can
-be in the plural&mdash;just as in lower levels of religion and society there
-can be gods many and lords many. Nor in a way wrongly. For, as has been
-before pointed out, a principle is the unity of beginning and end: it
-is only caught hold of by approaching from different directions: it
-loses its life and power when cut off from the many organs by which it
-distributes itself so as to grasp reality. If it be essentially one,
-it is not a bare unit: it cannot, without injury, be reduced to utter
-simplicity, and accepted in the shape of a single term. And yet this is
-what almost inevitably happens to every so-called principle.</p>
-
-<p>Like a <i>deus ex machina</i>, or a trick of the trade, it is applied to
-unloose every knot, and to clear any difficulties that arise. But a
-principle of this stamp possesses no intimate connexion or organic
-solidarity with the theory which it helps to prop. It is always at
-hand as a ready-made schema or heading, and can be attached to the
-most incongruous orders of fact. Thus in the works of Aristotle, the
-principle of 'End' or 'Activity' has sometimes seemed to be applied
-to whatever subject comes forward, and like a hereditary official
-vestment to suit all its wearers equally well or equally ill. What is
-true 'on the whole' is not always true 'of each': the <i>καθόλον</i> never
-quite equals the <i>καθ' ἔκαστον.</i> The modern principle of Utility is
-equally flexible in its application to the problems of moral and social
-life. It costs no trouble to pronounce the magic word, and even 'such
-as are of weaker capacity' may make something out of such a formula.
-But an abstract formula, which is equally applicable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_408" id="Page_408">[Pg 408]</a></span> to everything,
-is not particularly applicable to anything. While it seems to save
-trouble, and is so plain as to be almost tautological (as when the
-worth of a thing or act is explained to mean its utility), it really
-suggests fresh questions in every case, and multiplies the difficulty.
-Having an outward adaptability to every kind of fact, the principle
-has no true sympathy with any: it becomes a mere form, which we use as
-we do a measuring-rod, moving it along from one thing to another. We
-are always reverting to first principles as our last principles also.
-Even Aristotle, when he remarked that an object had to be criticised
-from its own principles and not from general formulae, saw through the
-fallacy of this style of argument.</p>
-
-<p>This is like asking for bread and getting a stone. The philosopher,
-who ought to take us through the shut chambers of the world, merely
-hands us a key at the gate, telling us that it will unlock every door,
-and then the insides will speak for themselves. But we would have our
-philosopher do a little more than this. Not being ourselves omniscient,
-we should be glad of a guide-book at the least, and perhaps even of
-the services of an interpreter to explain some peculiarities, some
-startling phenomena, and sights even more unpleasant than those which
-appalled the spouse of the notorious Bluebeard. Or, dropping metaphor,
-we wish the formula to be applied systematically and thoroughly.
-When that is done the formula loses its abstractness; it gains those
-necessary amplifications and qualifications, as we call them, without
-which no theory explains much or gives much information. And thus,
-instead of fancying that our initial formula contains the truth in a
-nutshell, we shall find that it is only one step to be taken on the
-way to truth, and that its narrow statement sinks more and more<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_409" id="Page_409">[Pg 409]</a></span> into
-insignificance, as its amplified theory gains in significance.</p>
-
-<p>But an adequate principle must have other qualities.<a name="FNanchor_3_205" id="FNanchor_3_205"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_205" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> What has been
-said up to this point, only amounts to a condition, that our principle
-must cease to be abstract and formal, and must become concrete and
-real. What we want, it may be said, is a Beginning. But a beginning is
-not exactly the same thing as a principle: a beginning is to a large
-extent a matter of choice and convenience,&mdash;a matter depending on the
-state and prospects of the beginner; and the main point is not where we
-should begin, but that we should be thorough in our treatment. It is
-otherwise, however, in the present case. For the skill of the expositor
-simply lies in the exactitude with which he reproduces the spontaneous
-movement of growth in his object. His art is <i>celare artem:</i> to
-retire, as it were, into the background, and seem to leave the object
-to expound itself. In a dramatic work it is no doubt the hand of the
-dramatist that seems to set the whole of the characters in motion, that
-weaves destinies and snips the thread of life. And yet in a perfect
-work of dramatic art everything must seem to flow on by a necessity of
-character, a consecution of inner fate. The true artist dare not act or
-allow the <i>deus ex machina.</i> So every genuine work of science&mdash;which
-is more than a compilation, a school-book, a bundle of notes, and
-contributions toward a subject&mdash;must be a self-determined unity&mdash;a
-self-justifying scheme in which the personality of the worker enters
-into and is absorbed in the system of his work.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_410" id="Page_410">[Pg 410]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>If this is generally true, it is above all a canon to rule the
-logician. He at least must follow the Logos and the Logos alone. His
-theme must be a law unto itself: all its movements must be freely
-and nobly objective. For his subject-matter is at least an organism,
-and develops according to an inward law. But it is even more than an
-organism: it must not merely develop, as organisms do,&mdash;not merely
-live and grow&mdash;but <i>know</i> that it develops and as it were <i>will</i> its
-own development&mdash;and in that harmony of being, willing, and knowing,
-be essentially one. In Hegelian language it must not merely be
-implicit<i>&mdash;an sich</i> or <i>für uns</i>&mdash;the subject of a change which it
-undergoes and feels, but without definitely realising,&mdash;the subject
-of a change which we (the historians) perceive. It must also be <i>für
-sich</i>: aware of its modifications, an agent in bringing them about:
-and yet withal in so looking forth and willing, be self-possessed, and
-self-enjoying.</p>
-
-<p>The principle of Hegelianism is the principle of Development, the
-principle of the Notion&mdash;but a Notion which is objective as well as
-subjective&mdash;the Idea. That principle then determines the beginning
-of Logic. We must know the whole course of growth and history before
-we can say where is the true commencement. It must be that out of
-which the end can obviously and spontaneously issue. In a sense, it
-must implicitly contain the end. It must show us the very beginning
-of thought, before it has yet come to the full consciousness of
-itself,&mdash;when the truth of what it is still lurks in the background and
-has to be developed. We must see thought in its first and fundamental
-calling. As the biologist, when he describes the structure of a plant,
-rests upon the assumption of a previous development of parts, in an
-existing plant, which has resulted in a seed,&mdash;but begins with the seed
-from which the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_411" id="Page_411">[Pg 411]</a></span> plant is derived: so the logician must begin with a
-point which in a way presupposes the system to which it leads. But in
-its beginning this presupposition is not apparent: and in fact, the
-presupposition will only appear when the development of the system
-is complete. The first step in a process, just because it is a step,
-may be said to presuppose the completed process. Thus the beginning
-of Logic presumes the fullest realisation of Mind, as the beginning
-of botany can only be told by one who knows the whole story of the
-plant. It is from this circumstance that Hegel describes philosophy as
-a circle rounded in itself, where the end meets with the beginning, or
-says that philosophy has to grasp its original grasp or conceive its
-concept. In other words, it is not till we reach the conclusion that
-we see, in the light thus shed upon the beginning, what that beginning
-really was. From the general analogy of the sciences we should not
-expect that the beginning of thought would be full-grown thought, or
-indeed seem to the undiscerning eye to be thought at all. In many
-cases, the embryonic organism shows but little similarity to the adult,
-and occasionally a violent abruptness seems, on cursory glance, to
-mark off one stage of a creation's growth from the next. Who that knew
-not the result could in the seed prefigure to himself the tree? The
-beginning is not usually identifiable with the final issue, except by
-some effort to trace the process of connexion. The object of science
-only appears in its truth when the science has done its work.</p>
-
-<p>The beginning of philosophy must hold a germ of development, however
-dead and motionless it may seem. But it must also to some extent
-be a result,&mdash;the result of the development or concentration of
-consciousness;&mdash;of the other forms of which it is the hypothetical
-foundation, or, of which it is (otherwise viewed) the first<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_412" id="Page_412">[Pg 412]</a></span>
-appearance. The variety of imaginative conception, and the chaos
-of sense, must vanish in a point, by an act of abstraction, which
-leaves out all the variety and the chaos,&mdash;or rather by an act
-of distillation, which draws out of them their real essence and
-concentrated virtue. This variety, when thoroughly examined and tested,
-shrivels up into a point:&mdash;it only <i>is.</i> Everything definite as we call
-it, the endless repetitions of existence, have disappeared, and have
-left only the energy of concentration, the unitary point of Being.</p>
-
-<p>We may describe the process in two ways. We may say that we have left
-out of sight all existing differences,&mdash;that we have stripped off
-every vestige of empirical conceptions, and left a residue of pure
-thought. The thought is pure, perhaps, but it is not entire. In this
-way of describing it, pure thought is the most abstract thought,&mdash;the
-last outcome of those operations which have divested our conceptions
-of everything real and concrete about them. But thus to speak of the
-process as Abstraction would be to express half of the truth only:
-and would really leave us a mere zero, or gulf of vacuity. In the
-beginning there would then be nothing&mdash;the mere annihilation of all
-possible and actual existence. And it is certainly true that in the
-beginning there can be nothing.&mdash;On the other hand, and secondly, there
-is affirmation as well as negation involved in the ultimate action
-by which sense and imagination pass into thought. They are not left
-behind, and the emptiness only retained: they are carried into their
-primary consequence, or into their proximate truth. They are reduced
-to their simplest equivalent or their lowest term in the vocabulary
-of thought: which is Being. The process which creates the initial
-point of pure thought is at once an abstraction from everything, and a
-concentration upon itself in a point:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_413" id="Page_413">[Pg 413]</a></span>&mdash;which point, accordingly, is
-a unity or inter-penetration of positive and negative. This absolute
-self-concentration into a point is the primary step by which Mind
-comes to know itself,&mdash;the first step in the Absolute's process of
-self-cognition&mdash;that process which it is the purpose of Logic to trace,
-so far as it is conducted in the range of mere thought.</p>
-
-<p>The bare point of Being and nothing more is the beginning in the
-process of the Absolute's self-cognition: it is, in other words, our
-first and rudimentary apprehension of reality,&mdash;the narrow edge by
-which we come in contact with the universe of Reason. For these are two
-aspects of the same. The process of the self-cognition or manifestation
-of the Absolute Idea is the very process by which philosophers (not
-philosophers only) have built up the edifice of thought. What the
-one statement views from the universal side or the totality, the
-other views in connexion with the several achievements of individual
-thinkers. Of course the evolution of the system of thought, as it
-is brought about by individuals, leaves plenty of room for the play
-of what is known as Chance. The Natural History of Thought or the
-History of Philosophers has to regard the action of national character
-upon individual minds, and the reciprocal action of these minds upon
-one another. The History of Organic Nature similarly presents the
-dependence of the species upon their surroundings, and of one species
-upon another in the medium of its conditions. Gradually Physical
-Science reduces these conditions to their universal forms, and may
-try to exhibit the evolution of the animal through its species in all
-grades of development. So in the Science of the development of this
-Idea the accidents, as we may call them, disappear: and the temporary
-and local questions, which once engrossed the deepest attention,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_414" id="Page_414">[Pg 414]</a></span> fade
-away into generalised forms of universal application. Philosophy, as
-it historically presents itself in the world, is not an accidental
-production, or dependent on the arbitrary choice of men. The accident,
-if such there be, is that these particular men should have been the
-philosophers, and not that such should have been their philosophy.
-They were, according to their several capacity for utterance, only
-the mouth-pieces of the Spirit of the Times,&mdash;of the absolute mind
-under the superficial limitations of their period. They saw the
-Idea of their world more clearly and distinctly than other men; and
-therein lies their title to fame: but really their words were only
-a reflex,&mdash;an almost involuntary and necessary movement, due to the
-pressure of the cosmical reason. The great philosophers are, like all
-men in all estates, and according to their measure, the ministers of
-the Truth,&mdash;apostles charged to bring about that consummation of the
-times in which reality is more fully apprehended and more adequately
-estimated. Necessity is laid upon them to consecrate themselves to the
-service of the Idea, and to devote their lives to the noble but austere
-work of speculation&mdash;the work which seeks <i>sine ira et studio</i> to
-reconstruct that city of God which is the permanent, if it often be the
-hidden, foundation of human life.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_203" id="Footnote_1_203"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_203"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> Cf. p. 90.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_204" id="Footnote_2_204"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_204"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Augustin. <i>Soliloq.</i> i. 7. 'Deum et animam scire cupio.
-Nihilne plus? Nihil omnino.'</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_205" id="Footnote_3_205"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_205"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> 'A Principle,' says Herbart (<i>Psychologie als
-Wissenschaft,</i> Einl.) 'should have the double property of having
-originally a certainty of its own, and of generating other certainty.
-The way and manner in which the second comes about is the Method.'</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_415" id="Page_415">[Pg 415]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5><a name="CHAPTER_XXX" id="CHAPTER_XXX">CHAPTER XXX.</a></h5>
-
-
-<h4>THE LOGIC OF DESCRIPTION: NATURAL REALISM: BEING.</h4>
-
-
-<p>The antithesis between thought and being, between idea and actuality,
-between notion and object, is almost a commonplace of criticism.
-Between the ideas of the subject and objectivity a great gulf seems
-to yawn fixed and impassable. Thinkers, like Anselm and Descartes,
-have (it is asserted) attempted by a trick which cheated themselves
-to get from the notion to the object. But&mdash;as Kant is supposed to
-have for ever shown&mdash;these <i>decepti deceptores</i> are now universally
-discredited.<a name="FNanchor_1_206" id="FNanchor_1_206"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_206" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> Yet the same Kant had shown that the 'things' of
-ordinary experience are only ideas or appearances in consciousness.
-These latter ideas, however, were verified by the necessity of
-interdependence in which they stood, as given by sense. From the
-notions which Anselm and Descartes proposed to invest with objectivity,
-there was absent the feature of sense-perception. They were not limited
-and real ideas, but synthetic laws, general and abstract aspects of
-reality, modes of conception. They were not definite and individualised
-things, but terms or conditions for all concepts and realities. They
-were forms,&mdash;forms essential to the explication of reality&mdash;and never
-mere parts of reality.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_416" id="Page_416">[Pg 416]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>With such 'forms' or 'thought-terms,' such abstractions, Logic (<i>à
-la mode de Hegel</i>) has to deal. And in dealing with them it has to
-counteract this popular distinction (which Kant inclines toward) which
-sets up an insuperable division between thought and being, between
-reality and syllogism, between is and is known. Certain of these
-denominators which thinking employs to describe reality the popular
-mind wholly identifies with reality. That being is a thought, that
-force and thing are only modes of conception, sounds to the untrained
-intellect only a verbal quibble. Things, beings, are there<i>&mdash;out
-there</i>, it says: force is 'ultimate reality.' It is perhaps ready
-to allow that <i>substances</i> are only mental figments: but it is more
-doubtful about causes, and inclines to assume them to be in outside
-nature, and to generate a real necessity in things. On the other hand,
-it has little doubt that concepts and syllogism are only our ways of
-looking at reality,&mdash;the reality of substances and phenomena, with
-quality and quantity: that 'final cause' is a mere subjective principle
-of explanation: and that ideas and knowledge are altogether additions
-superinduced on a real world.</p>
-
-<p>Now what the Logic shows is that, on one hand, all these terms are
-ideal and regulative; and on the other that they are real, because
-constitutive of reality. Showing&mdash;or shall we say, reminding us&mdash;that
-being is after all a form of thought, it shows us that knowledge, at
-the other end, contains or implies reality. It is the business of logic
-as a fundamental philosophy to dispel the illusion that sensations are
-fixed reality: that causes and effects are an absolutely real order;
-whereas concepts and sciences and still more aesthetic and moral
-principles are not. Its doctrine is that all Our thought-terms, the
-most vulgar and the most delicate, are, as we may put it, symbolical of
-reality:<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_417" id="Page_417">[Pg 417]</a></span> explications and manifestations of it. Absolutely real&mdash;if
-that means utterly unideal&mdash;none of them are. On the other hand,
-absolutely ideal,&mdash;if that means utterly unreal&mdash;none of them are
-either. If you call them real, their reality is that of thought. If you
-call them ideal, it is an ideality of a real. Being is not a fixed and
-solid substratum, a hard rock of reality, on which we may build our
-relations and further determinations. It also is a thought: it also
-lives in relation, and becomes more real by further determination.<a name="FNanchor_2_207" id="FNanchor_2_207"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_207" class="fnanchor">[2]</a>
-But the habit comes natural to the majority to attribute essential
-and independent reality (total reality) to the thought-modes it is
-familiar with in practice: whereas the modes familiar to more advanced
-intelligence are put aside as merely ideal.</p>
-
-<p>Thus in proportion as Logic insists on the reality of idea, it insists
-also on the ideality of being. Being is after all a thought: when
-separate from the relations of experience, a very poor thought. A
-'supreme being' even is a thought. And the question of questions for
-Logic is what degree of reality, what amount of truth does each result
-of unification express. Is it self-consistent and complete, or does it
-imply further elements, and if so, in what direction does it suggest
-and receive completion? But at the best the reality of a logical
-term is an abstract or formal reality, and consists in its power to
-interpret, to expound, to define the Absolute. Its more concrete and
-material reality it has in Nature and in Mind. There however Philosophy
-has in a further measure to repeat its earlier lesson and show that
-Nature is not without its ideal aspect, and that Mind is founded on
-physical reality.</p>
-
-<p>All science tends to carry us over the hard lines of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_418" id="Page_418">[Pg 418]</a></span> separation which
-practical interests treat as if ultimate disruptions. The sciences of
-Nature, for instance, in their completed circle must carry us from
-the inorganic to the organic: must in some way make a path from the
-lifeless to the alive. The science of thought has a corresponding task.
-It has to show that the incommensurability between thought and being,
-or between the idea and actuality, disappears on closer examination.
-When we trace the development of thought sufficiently far, we see that
-Being is an imperfect or inadequate thought,&mdash;certainly not adequate
-to the Idea, but not for that reason generically differing from it.
-The fixity of Being as more than, and superior to, mere Thought is a
-habit of mind, due to the same worldly-minded immobility as leads us
-all to believe (and, within the limited practical range, to believe
-rightly) that the earth is solidly at rest, notwithstanding all the
-demonstrations of the Copernicans. But Thought has not deposited all
-its burden, or uttered all its meaning in Being. Being is the veriest
-abstraction,&mdash;the very rudiment of thought&mdash;meagre as meagre can be.
-It is on one side the bare position or affirmation of thought: on the
-other hand it is the very negation of thought,&mdash;if thought be only
-possible under difference. For a mere 'Is' is a mere indescribable
-without-difference. There is no such thing as mere Being: or mere Being
-is mere nothing: <i>mere</i> Being is not.</p>
-
-<p>The first category of Ontology is that of Being. It is the merest
-simplicity and meagreness, with nothing definite in it at all: and
-for that very reason constantly liable to be confused with categories
-of more concrete burden. It denotes all things, and connotes next
-to nothing. It does not however mean something which has being; it
-does not mean definite being: still less<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_419" id="Page_419">[Pg 419]</a></span> does it mean permanent and
-substantial being. Ordinary language certainly uses being in all these
-senses. But if we are to be logical, we must not mix up categories with
-one another: we must take terms at their precise value. Mere Being then
-is the mere 'Is,' which can give no explanation or analysis of itself:
-which indescribable in itself: which is an 'Is' and nothing more. The
-simplest answer to those who invest Being with so much signification,
-is to ask them to consider the logical <i>copula</i>. 'Every school-boy
-knows' that the 'Is' of the copula disappears in several languages:
-that it is far from indispensable in Latin: that in Greek e. g. the
-demonstrative article serves the same purpose. In Hebrew too the
-pronouns officiate for the so-called substantive verb: and the same
-verb probably does not exist in the Polynesian family of languages,
-where its place is supplied by what we call the demonstrative
-pronoun.<a name="FNanchor_3_208" id="FNanchor_3_208"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_208" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> In the copula, which according to M. Laromiguiere, as
-quoted by Mr. Mill, expresses only '<i>un rapport spécial entre le sujet
-et l'attribut</i>,' we encounter the mere undeveloped and unexplained
-unifying of thought, the very abstraction of relativity<a name="FNanchor_4_209" id="FNanchor_4_209"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_209" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_420" id="Page_420">[Pg 420]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>In the beginning, then, there is nothing and yet that nothing is. Such
-is the fundamental antithesis of thought: or the discrepancy which
-makes itself felt between each several term of thought and the whole
-Idea of which they are the expression. Being is the term emphasised
-as absolute by understanding: then the dialectical power, or the
-consciousness of the whole, steps in to counteract the one-sided
-element. In other words, thought, the total thought, asks what is
-Being, mere and simple; and answers mere nothing.<a name="FNanchor_5_210" id="FNanchor_5_210"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_210" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> The one aspect
-of the point is as justifiable as the other. In other words the two
-aspects are indissoluble: they are in one. The term 'Unity,' applied to
-the relation of Being and Not, may perhaps mislead: and it is therefore
-better to say that the two points of view are (as Mr. Spencer puts
-it) at once 'antithetical and inseparable,' An unrelated being, an
-'absolute' (i. e. separate and transcendent) reality is an Unknowable,
-i. e. an ineffable, an unspeakable of which we can legitimately
-predicate a not-    , leaving imagination to fill up the blank after the
-hyphen. A mere Not, with no substratum which it negatives, is mere
-Being: and a mere Being, which has no substratum, is a mere Not. The
-movement upward and the movement downward are here illustrated: and
-it is evident that they are the same movement<a name="FNanchor_6_211" id="FNanchor_6_211"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_211" class="fnanchor">[6]</a>,&mdash;the same<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_421" id="Page_421">[Pg 421]</a></span> unrest,
-only differentiated as up and down by some <i>termini</i> not yet explicitly
-brought into view. Each&mdash;Is and Not&mdash;as it seeks to differentiate
-itself, to make itself clear, passes into the other. In fact, the very
-vocation, calling, or notion of Being and Nothing, is not Being and
-Nothing, but the tendency of each to pass into the other. Their truth,
-in short, is not in themselves, but in their process,&mdash;and that process
-by which the one passes into the other is 'To become.' Try to get at
-mere Being and you are left with Nought: of mere Nought you can only
-say it is. The two abstractions have no truth except in the passage
-into one another: and this passage or transition is 'To become.' Take
-reality apart from what it leads on to, and from what it has come from,
-apart from its end or purpose and from its cause, take it as mere
-being: then this being in its supposed singleness and self-subsistence
-is really annihilated: <i>stat magni nominis umbra</i>: but it is the name
-of nothing. True being is always on the way to or from being: to stop
-is fatal.</p>
-
-<p>This unity or inseparability of opposite elements in a truth or
-real notion is the stumbling-block to the incipient Hegelian. The
-respectable citizens of Germany were amazed, says Heine, at the
-shamelessness of J. G. Fichte, when he proclaimed that the Ego produced
-the world, as if that had cast doubts on their reality; and the ladies
-were curious to know whether Madame Fichte was included in the general
-denial of substantial existence<a name="FNanchor_7_212" id="FNanchor_7_212"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_212" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>. If easy-going critics treated
-Fichte in this way, they had even better source for amusement in Hegel.
-That Being and Nothing is the same was a perpetual fund for jokes,
-too tempting to be missed.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_422" id="Page_422">[Pg 422]</a></span> Now, in the baldness, and occasionally
-paradoxical style, of Hegel's statements, there is some excuse for such
-exaggerations. Being and Nothing are not merely the same: they are also
-different: they at least tend to pass into each other. In the technical
-language of logicians, the question is not what being denotes, but what
-it connotes. The word 'is' had, it may be, originally a 'demonstrative'
-meaning, a 'pronominal' force, which in course of time passed from
-a local or sensuous meaning to express a thought. No doubt 'is' and
-'is not' are wide enough apart in our application of them as copula
-of a proposition: but if we subtract the two terms and leave only
-the copula standing, the difference of the two becomes inexpressible
-and unanalysable. In both there is the same statement of immediacy
-or face-to-faceness: that two things are brought to confront each
-other,&mdash;united, as it were, without producing any real or specific sort
-of union. If Thought be unifying, Being is the minimum of unification:
-if Thought be relating, Being is the most abstract of relations. So
-abstract, indeed, that its relativity is completely lost sight of: so
-utterly one, that it vanishes in a point. And just because it <i>is</i>
-(as it seems) out of relations, it must be nothing. No doubt, between
-the two terms Being and not-Being a difference is meant; when they
-are employed, a difference is thrown into them; and then they are not
-the same: but if we keep out of sight what is meant, and stick to the
-ultimate point which is said, we shall find that mere being and mere
-nothing are alike inapprehensible by themselves, and that to institute
-a difference we must go out of and beyond them. Perhaps some approach
-to the right point of comprehension may be made, if we note that when
-two people quarrel and can give no reason or further development to
-their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_423" id="Page_423">[Pg 423]</a></span> opposite assertions, the one person's 'is' is exactly equal
-(apart from subsequent explanations) to the other's 'is not.' The mere
-'Is' and 'Is not' have precisely the same amount of content: a mere
-affirmation or assertion, which is mere nothing,&mdash;because connecting,
-where there is nothing to connect.</p>
-
-<p>The truth of 'is' then turns out 'become': nothing <i>is</i>: all things are
-coming to be and passing out of being. This illustrates the meaning of
-the word 'truth' in Hegel. It is partly synonymous with 'concrete,'
-partly with the 'notion.' With concrete: because to get at the truth,
-we must take into account a new element, kept out of sight in the mere
-affirmation of being. With notion: because if we wish to comprehend
-being, we must grasp it as 'becoming.' For truth lies in transcending
-the first or merely given. We have to go forward, and to go backward,
-as it were: forward from being, backward to being: we look before and
-after. The attempt to isolate the mere point of being is impossible
-in thought: it would only lead to the 'representation' of being,&mdash;i.
-e. the notion of being would be arrested in its development, and
-identified probably with a sensible thing, i. e. with <i>something</i>, and
-some concrete thing said to be.</p>
-
-<p>If being, however, is truly apprehended as a passage from the unknown
-to the known, or as emergence from bare vacuity, then it implies a
-definiteness, which we missed before. Somewhat has become: or the
-indeterminate being has been invested with definiteness and distinct
-character. Mere being (mere <i>Is)</i> is nothing: to be something is
-must be not something else. The second step in the process to
-self-realisation therefore is reached: Being has become Somewhat; which
-is more, because it professes less. The fluid unity or movement from
-'is' to 'is not,' and <i>vice versa</i>,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_424" id="Page_424">[Pg 424]</a></span> has crystallised: and 'There is'
-is the still imperfectly unified result precipitated. By this term we
-imply the <i>finitude</i> of being,&mdash;imply that a portion has been cut off
-from the vague, and contrasted with something else. In the ordinary
-application of the word, Being is especially employed to denote this
-stage of definite being<a name="FNanchor_8_213" id="FNanchor_8_213"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_213" class="fnanchor">[8]</a>. Thus we speak of bringing something into
-being: by which we mean, not mere being, but a definite being, or,
-in short, reality. Reality is determinateness, as opposite to mere
-vagueness. To be real, it is necessary to be somewhat,&mdash;to limit and
-define. Whatever is anything or is real, is <i>eo facto</i> finite. Even an
-infinite therefore to be real must submit to self-limitation. This is
-the necessity of finitude: in order to be anything more and higher,
-there must come, first of all, a determinate being and reality. But
-reality, as we have seen, implies negation: it implies limiting,
-distinction, and dependence. Everything finite, every 'somewhat,' has
-somewhat else to counteract, narrow, and thwart it. To be somewhat
-<i>(esse aliquid)</i> is an object of ambition, as Juvenal implies: but it
-is only an unsatisfactory goal after all. For somewhat always implies
-something else, by which it is limited: whereas mere being, just
-because it is nothing, is free from the check of an other.</p>
-
-<p>This, then, is the price to be paid for rising into reality, and coming
-to be somewhat: there is always somewhat else to be minded. The very
-point which makes a 'somewhat,' as above a mere 'nothing,' is its
-determinateness: and determinateness, as at first determinateness from
-outside, a given and passive determinateness, is also a negation and
-limit. Now the limit of a thing is that point where it begins to be
-somewhat else: where it passes out of itself and yields<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_425" id="Page_425">[Pg 425]</a></span> to another.
-Accordingly in the very act of being determined, somewhat is passing
-over into another: it is altering, and becoming somewhat else. Thus a
-some-thing' implies for its being the being of somewhat else: its being
-is as it were only to be beside something else,&mdash;it is finite, and
-alterable, a <i>this</i> with a <i>that</i> always in the neighbourhood. Such is
-the character of determinate being. It leads to an endless series from
-some to an other, and so on <i>ad infinitum:</i> everything as a somewhat,
-as a determinate being, in reality, presupposes a something else, and
-that again has some third thing; and so the chain is extended with
-its everlasting <i>And,</i> And, And, (as in the children's way of telling
-a story). Somewhat-ness is always vexed by the fact that it is not
-somewhat else: and for that very reason, ceasing to be the primary
-object, it becomes somewhat else itself; and the other term becomes the
-somewhat. And so the same story is repeated in endless progression,
-till one gets wearied with the repetition of finitude which is held out
-as infinite.</p>
-
-<p>Thus in determinate being as in mere being we see the apparent fixity
-resolved into a double movement&mdash;the alteration from some to somewhat
-else, and <i>vice versa.</i> But a movement like this implies after all
-that there is a something which alters: which is alterable, but which
-alters into somewhat. This somewhat which alters into somewhat, and
-thus retains itself, is a being which has risen above alteration, which
-is independent of it because including it: which is <i>for itself,</i> and
-not for somewhat else. Thus in order to advance a step further from
-determinate and alterable being, we have only to keep a firm grasp
-on both sides of the process, and not suffer the one to slip away
-from the other. We must not merely <i>say,</i> but energise the unity of
-the two 'antithetical yet inseparable' elements we are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_426" id="Page_426">[Pg 426]</a></span> naturally
-disposed to take and leave only as One <i>and</i> an Other. Something
-becomes something else: in short, the one side passes on to the other
-side of the antithesis, and the limitation is absorbed. The new result
-is something <i>in</i> something else: the limit is taken up within: and
-this being which results is its own limit, i. e. no restrictive limit
-at all, but self-imposed characteristic and definiteness. It is
-Being-for-self:&mdash;the third step in the process of thought under the
-general category of Being. The range of Being which began in a vague
-nebula, and passed into a series of points, is now reduced to a single
-point, self-complete and whole.</p>
-
-<p>This Being-for-self is a kind of true infinite, which results by
-absorption of the finite. The false infinite, which has already come
-before us, is the endless range of finitude, passing from one finite
-to another, from somewhat to somewhat else, until <i>satiety</i> sets in
-with weariness. The true infinite is <i>satisfaction</i>,&mdash;the inclusion
-of the other being into self, so that it is no longer a limit, but a
-constituent part in the being. Such inclusion in the unity of an idea,
-of elements which are realistically separate, is termed 'ideality.' The
-antithesis is reduced to become an organic and dependent part. It still
-exists, but as no longer outside and independent. Thus in determinate
-being the determinateness is found in somewhat else: in being-for-self
-the determinateness is self-realisation. Being-for-self may be shortly
-expressed by 'one' or 'each': as determinate being a, or an, or by
-'some': and Being simple has no nominal equivalent. As 'some' is always
-fractional or partial, 'each' is always a whole or unit. Mere Being has
-not the consistency of any noun or pronoun: it is the bare (impersonal)
-verb.</p>
-
-<p>But 'each for self' expresses the sentiment of an armed neutrality
-with implicit leanings to universal<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_427" id="Page_427">[Pg 427]</a></span> war,&mdash;the <i>bellum omnium contra
-omnes.</i> Each is self-centred, independent, resting upon self, and not
-minding anything else,&mdash;which is now thrown out as indifferent into the
-background. Each is centripetal; anything else is for it a matter of no
-moment. If determinate being was something to be explained by something
-other, this is or professed to be self-explanatory, and rests upon
-itself. It seems purely affirmative, and promises to give a definite
-unity. But we cannot free thought from negation in this sphere, any
-more than in the earlier. We may, if we like, assert the absolute
-self-sufficingness, primariness, and unalterability of each; but a
-very little reflection shows the opposite to be true. The very notion
-of each is exclusiveness towards the rest: a negative and, as it were,
-polemical attitude towards others is the very basis of Being-for-self.
-One after one, they each rise to confront each, each excluding each,
-until their self-importance is reduced to be a mere point in a
-series of points, one amongst many. When that is clearly seen, their
-qualitative character has disappeared: and there is left only their
-quantity.<a name="FNanchor_9_214" id="FNanchor_9_214"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_214" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> The negative attitude of each to each forms a sort of
-bond connecting them. If to the reference which connects we give the
-name of attraction, then we may say that the repulsion of each against
-each is exactly equal to their mutual attraction. And thus, in the
-language of Hobbes, the universal quarrel is only the other side of the
-general union in the great Leviathan: repulsion, in the shape of mutual
-fear, is the principle of attraction. Thus each for self is repeated
-endlessly: instead of the atom or unit we have a multitude, utterly
-indifferent to what each is for itself. The mere fact that it is,
-entitles it to count, and so constitutes quantity.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_428" id="Page_428">[Pg 428]</a></span> Here we may shortly
-recapitulate the categories of Quality or Being Proper. It forms three
-steps or grades: those of indeterminate being: determinate being:
-self-determined being: or if we speak of them as processes, we have
-becoming: alteration: attraction and repulsion<a name="FNanchor_10_215" id="FNanchor_10_215"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_215" class="fnanchor">[10]</a>. From the extreme of
-abstraction and concentration thought, under the form of Being, passes
-on to greater determinateness and development. The fixity of mere
-Being is seen to imply a distinction of elements, and a dependence of
-one upon the other: where the 'is' and 'is not' part from each other
-sufficiently to let us distinguish them. This is the stage of finitude:
-when we say that there is somewhat, but there are others, and imply
-that any one has an end, a limit, a negation in its nature. These
-words describe the finite scene,&mdash;a fragmentary being which makes an
-advance upon indeterminateness, but loses its wholeness and is always
-and necessarily leading on to something else. It is the revulsion
-from the vague and yet unspecified universal to definite and limited
-particulars. In the third stage the limit is uplifted and included in
-the particular, which now contains its negation in itself,&mdash;is (by
-accepting its dependence) independent, is its own ground, and may be
-called an individual. But an individual, again, implies an aggregate
-of ones, or a multitude. This being-for-self is an individual or atom:
-it is the basis of those higher developments known as subjectivity and
-personality. These are, as it were, higher multiples of it.</p>
-
-<p>This first sphere of thought, apparently so abstruse and unreal in its
-abstractions, had to be thus narrowly discussed because it presents
-all the difficulties and peculiarities of Hegel in their elementary
-form. They<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_429" id="Page_429">[Pg 429]</a></span> are clearly the fundamental problems of ancient Greek
-philosophy&mdash;of that first or fundamental philosophy which discusses
-Being and its intrinsic attributes or accidents. Modern superficiality
-has sometimes reproached these old thinkers (who, forsooth, 'knew no
-language but their own') for their tiresome insistence on this problem
-of Is and Is not. Compared, indeed, with what are called topics of
-interest, e. g. the Soul and the Hereafter, or the origins of the
-Cosmic process, tiresome such inquiry is. But it is the bitter lesson
-of experience that till such fundamentals are at least critically
-surveyed, the interesting topics will still (and in more than one
-sense) belong to the Unknowable. Herbart not less than Hegel sees it is
-the prime business of philosophical criticism (i. e. of philosophy) to
-examine thoroughly those primary notions on which the whole structure
-of thought rests. It is on the comprehension of the radical limitations
-latent in the seemingly simplest terms of thought, that the profoundest
-problems of human interest ultimately turn.</p>
-
-<p>Thus, in the first place, the process of Being, as seen in the light
-of the whole system of Logic, shows that reality is truly known only
-as a trinity,&mdash;or perhaps rather as a duality in unity. This is the
-'Notion' or 'Grasp' of Being. First, reality seems an unspecialised
-and self-centred being,&mdash;and that by itself is mere nothing: a mere
-<i>universal.</i> Second, it appears a specialised and differentiated being
-of some and other: a mere <i>particular</i>, limited by other particulars,
-and so finite. Third, as a combination of the two earlier stages:
-as wholeness with determinateness, as unity; and so an <i>individual</i>
-which is the <i>true</i> or complete and authentic character of all being.
-In the <i>metaphysics</i> of Being these three elements follow, one after
-another: but in the <i>logic</i> of the notion they interpenetrate,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_430" id="Page_430">[Pg 430]</a></span> and
-each of them is the others and the total. The truth or the notion of
-being takes it in Being-for-self as a universalised particular or
-as an individual.&mdash;In the second place: the sphere of mere Being is
-that of <i>mere</i> identity: that of determinate being is the sphere of
-otherness, difference: that of self-determined being is the sphere of
-well-grounded existence.&mdash;Thirdly: the first sphere may be illustrated
-by the freedom of indeterminateness, expressed by the word 'may': the
-second by necessity or determinateness, expressed by the word 'must':
-and the third, by the freedom which even in its determinateness
-is self-determining, expressed by the word 'will.'&mdash;Fourthly:
-these steps illustrate the meaning of the Hegelian technical terms
-<i>setzen</i>: <i>aufheben: an sich</i>: <i>für sich</i>: <i>Idealität: Realität.</i>
-Thus Determinate Being or somewhat is <i>an sich</i> or implicitly (by
-implication) somewhat else: and the process of determinate being
-is to lay it down or express (<i>setzen</i>) it as such. When this
-explicitly-stated 'other' or limit is included in the Being, and
-reduced into a unity with somewhat in each Being-for-self, it is said
-to be '<i>aufgehoben</i>'&mdash;uplifted, as it were, so that it is no longer a
-separate existent, but is still an efficient element. As being partly
-<i>this,</i> and partly <i>that,</i> now <i>one,</i> and now an <i>other,</i> which limits
-and is limited, determinate being is <i>Realität.</i> The characteristic
-of reality is externality of its parts, which are thus left side by
-side quasi-independent: that of ideality is unity and solidarity of
-function. When the mutual dependence of elements is tightened till
-it becomes equivalent to unity and totality, these elements are seen
-in their Ideality (<i>Idealität</i>). Such a total has the others in it
-as elements (<i>Momente</i>); they are there ideally (<i>ideëller Weise,</i>)
-as it were (in the loose analogical use of that term) organically:
-that is, they are denied the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_431" id="Page_431">[Pg 431]</a></span> privilege, which their total has, of
-being-for-themselves. They do not enjoy the benefit of their own being,
-though their presence is felt.&mdash;Fifthly: Being-for-self is absolute
-negativity; i.e. the negation of negation. Determinate being was a
-negation of Being mere and simple: Being-for-self is the negation of
-this, and so a return to true affirmation, as including the element of
-negation.</p>
-
-<p>Being seemed to describe a complete reality. But its latent limitation
-has become explicit. It only retains itself by a self-assertion which
-leaves it a mere abstract unit, or atom,&mdash;a unit with nothing in it
-to be united,-and where it matters not whether it be somewhat or
-other. The quality of Being, in which all qualitative attributes are
-lost and sunk, is Quantity: the characteristic of which is to be a
-matter of no importance to Being, as it originally presents itself.
-In other words, whilst Quality is identical with Being,&mdash;while Being
-means qualitativeness, and the Being of a thing means its quality, or
-constitution; Quantity is external to Being, and a thing is, while its
-quantity undergoes all sorts of variation. At least this is true within
-certain limits: for quantity is not an ultimate category any more than
-quality. But for the present the truth of quality is quantity; or, in
-other words, if a thing is to be anything definite it must ultimately
-rest on a solid atom: must be a unit and amenable to measurement. First
-come qualities, such as sweet, green, and the like: these seem to be
-truth and reality to the senses and the natural mind: and in their
-universality are represented by the abstract terms of qualitative
-being. The first step in the progress of knowledge consists in seeing
-that quality presupposes quantity. Number, in short, is the proximate
-truth to which the vague qualitative distinction of <i>a, some,</i> and
-<i>each</i> is to be reduced. The qualitative<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_432" id="Page_432">[Pg 432]</a></span> differences of sounds are
-reduced to relations or ratios of number: and so are the other data of
-sensation. We see this truth recognised in the Atomic School, which
-may be taken to represent the summing-up of that period of thought
-which begins with the 'Being' of Parmenides, and the 'Becoming' of
-Heraclitus. When Democritus says that, although bitter and sweet are
-conventional distinctions, yet in reality there is only atoms and
-void<a name="FNanchor_11_216" id="FNanchor_11_216"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_216" class="fnanchor">[11]</a>, he is introducing a distinction between real and apparent.
-But again the irregular and sporadic appearances of species of quality
-are replaced by a gradual and regular series of quantities. With mere
-Being you have a conception quite unfit for describing the manifold
-reality. But by breaking up the whole Being into a countless number of
-atoms of being, you get the means of establishing an equation between
-a given sensible and some multiple of the atomic unit. Thus Atomism,
-with its many bits of being and its interfluent non-being in which they
-can unite, replaces the total and complete universe of being and its
-attendant shadow of unreality, the world of opinion. Still the <i>Is not</i>
-clings to the <i>Is</i>: if each atom seems complete, they are subject to a
-necessity which forces them by negation, i. e. by the void (as Atomism
-figuratively calls the repulsion of the atoms) to meet each other and
-form apparent unities. Before a step could be made to higher problems,
-it was necessary to see that the proximate truth of the qualitative
-world,&mdash;or world of sense proper (ἰδία αἴσθησις) is in its simplest
-terms a quantitative world, or world of common sensibles (κοινὰ
-αἴσθητα), universalised sensibles, number and quantity.</p>
-
-<p>The sphere of quantity need only be briefly sketched.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_433" id="Page_433">[Pg 433]</a></span> It has its three
-heads: (1) quantity in general,&mdash;the universal and vague notion of
-quantitativeness, the mere conception of reality as the Great and the
-Little, or the More and Less<a name="FNanchor_12_217" id="FNanchor_12_217"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_217" class="fnanchor">[12]</a>: (2) Quantum, or defined quantity,
-expressed in the shape of a number: and (3) the quantitative ratio
-or degree, which is the individualisation or self-determination of
-numbers, or their application to one another,&mdash;which gives the real
-meaning and value of numbers. The fundamental antithesis, which
-we found in quality, comes before us here more definitely as the
-opposition of many ones in one number. In every quantity there are the
-two elements: the 'one,' unity or solidarity, which renders a total
-number possible, and the 'many' or multiplicity, which gives it real
-body and character. By this quantitative law, reality must always be
-both Continuous and Discrete. Thus when I regard a line as consisting
-of a number of points I treat it as a discrete quantity: as many in
-one. When, on the other hand, I regard the line as the unity of these
-points, it becomes a continuous quantity. These distinctions are not
-so trivial as they may appear: they lie at the bases of paradoxes like
-those by which Zeno disproved the ordinary representations of motion,
-and when a M.P. informs the House of Commons that it is impossible
-to divide 73l. 1s. 6d. by 1l. 2s. 6d., he is, like Zeno, and perhaps
-more unconsciously, forgetting that these quantities are not merely
-continuous but discrete.</p>
-
-<p>The Pythagoreans, according to the tradition of antiquity,
-philosophised number. In it they found the reality, or the principle
-of things,&mdash;the characteristic feature which dominated existence, and
-by which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_434" id="Page_434">[Pg 434]</a></span> the world in all its multiplicity could be made coherent
-and intelligible. They saw it composed of two elements: a limit or
-limiting, and an unlimited: the latter as it were a dark ground,
-measureless and endless, on which definiteness was gradually marked
-out. Such a limiting principle would be e. g. the unit of number. But
-the full definiteness of number only comes out when a numerical scale
-is fixed on, in which each number bears a definite ratio to what goes
-before and what comes after. Each number in such a scale is really a
-multiple of its unit: a product of its unity into its multeity, of the
-monad into the indefinite duad. It is this view of each number, as the
-product of its prime unit with the ratio, which comes explicitly to
-the fore in Degree, or quantitative ratio. Each so-called quantitative
-statement is thus a ratio between a given quantity in the object and an
-assumed standard or unit of number.</p>
-
-<p>These implications latent in quantitative order or determination come
-out in mensuration. If quantitative or numerical precision is to have
-a real basis, it presupposes the existence of a qualitative atom or
-unit which shall be the Measure. Measure is therefore the truth and the
-unity of quantity and quality: each refers forward and backward to the
-other, and both lead up to or imply a modulus, or standard unit. Such
-a standard unit may seem, at first sight, to be a matter of arbitrary
-choice and imposition. There seems to be no ultimate reason for taking
-the foot or the cubit as unit of measurement: and if the original foot
-or cubit be the king's limb, it is easy to say that the whole thing is
-conventional and artificial. But it is evident on further reflection,
-first that the foot or the pace is the natural and primitive measurer
-of lengths of space for the human being, and secondly that the
-particular foot which is imposed as the measure is taken as being<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_435" id="Page_435">[Pg 435]</a></span>
-normal and typical. So too it is partly arbitrary choice which fixes
-upon the starting-point for the scale of temperatures: but here also
-the range from freezing-point to boiling-point of the commonest of
-liquids affords a sufficient standard from which naturally to carry on
-the scale above or below it.</p>
-
-<p>What happens is therefore that what is the rule, the standard,&mdash;we
-may also say, the test of being, is the natural mean or average. The
-measure presents itself as the permanent and regular proportion of
-quantity and quality. It is the amount or quantity at which things
-settle down in equilibrium and produce the quality or characteristic
-feature of the object. To say that Measure is the supreme category
-or the truth of being&mdash;of that superficial being which merely is&mdash;of
-the mere fact of perception&mdash;is to say that the prime or governing
-feature of reality, its obviously dominant characteristic in this
-sphere, is a self-imposing harmony and proportion. It naturally
-arranges itself&mdash;defines and describes itself in rhythmic series, in
-regular scales, in symmetrical schemes. All things are in geometrical
-proportion, self-defined and uniformly graded. Such a conception and
-category of reality may be said to be peculiarly Greek. The doctrine
-of the Mean is well known as a principle of their popular Ethics. But
-the Mean is an average which is regarded as a Normal,&mdash;a regular and
-permanent mode of being which is equivalent to a standard. The rule is
-given by the logic of facts and of nature. There is in it an apparent
-optimism&mdash;a belief that what is predominant and fundamental is right:
-a doctrine of immanent symmetry and order. The mere habitual custom
-is as such held to be the right and good. It is true, no doubt, that
-Protagoras came to point out that this Measure was not inherent in
-things, but came from Man, the measure of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_436" id="Page_436">[Pg 436]</a></span> all things: and that the
-later philosophy had to show how the conception of reality should
-be re-construed, if the objectivity of Measure and symmetry in the
-universe were still to be maintained. Still even with this correction
-the belief remained down to the Stoic School that being is essentially
-self-ordering: that Nature is immanent proportion.</p>
-
-<p>The Measure thus emerging as the Mean, which stands out as the
-permanent background or recurrent same amidst varying extremes, is
-set against these divergencies and used to measure them. It has to
-serve as a denominator for all of these: or each of these differences
-has a definite ratio to it. For that purpose it must be so graded or
-present such a scale that the smallest difference from it that exists
-may be measured, estimated and defined in terms of it. It is here out
-of place to consider how this can be accomplished,&mdash;how mensuration in
-any case is solved as a problem of scientific determination. What is
-more important is to note the fact that appearances everywhere start up
-to testify to the incompatibility of the two elements in measure,&mdash;to
-their tendency to fly away from each other. It is only within certain
-ranges that quantity and quality change proportionately to each other.
-The colour spectrum, the scale of musical notes, the series of chemical
-combination, the order of the planets, all are found in experience up
-to some point to follow a symmetrical order, and exhibit a measure.
-But after that point is reached, a sudden change or transition occurs.
-There is a break in the continuity of being: without warning, a new
-series of physical manifestation, having a new rule or measure, emerges
-by a sort of catastrophe. So also, it is only to a certain portion of
-the process of physical order in the human body that psychical changes
-are found to correspond.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_437" id="Page_437">[Pg 437]</a></span> Everywhere the correspondence or harmony or
-proportion of immediate fact has its breaks,&mdash;its sudden emergencies
-into a new range of being.</p>
-
-<p>It is on the repeated evidence of this fact&mdash;the discontinuity of
-immediate being, the inexplicable gulfs which separate its ordered
-provinces from one another, that we rise to the distinction of two
-orders or grades of being: a double aspect of reality. The primitive
-consciousness is, we may suppose, confined to one level of being, one
-world. And so long as the facts remain within limits there is no need
-to go further. The measure is the rule. But the uniformity breaks
-down abruptly<a name="FNanchor_13_218" id="FNanchor_13_218"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_218" class="fnanchor">[13]</a>: the rule has its inevitable exceptions: it is no
-law or principle, but only the factual majority within a fixed range.
-Thus the measure, to fulfil all that is expected of it, and be a full
-expression or definition of reality, must go beyond a mere measure:
-must become the essence, or rather give place to the essence. In order
-to explain the irregularity and want of measure which turns up if we
-exceed the narrow provinces of being, we are forced on the conception
-of a being, one permanent and the same, set in relation, antithetical
-but inseparable, to an other being, manifold, changing, and different.
-The undying rhythm, the ceaseless symmetry retreat into the further
-region&mdash;the world beyond: while the older surface-being, as set against
-it, comes to be a mere phenomenon or appearance, a derivative and
-dependent something, which has its roots of being in the underlying
-law and essential reality. But the two planes are still in intimate
-connexion, in a correlation which becomes more and more palpable as its
-implications are disclosed and realised.</p>
-
-<p>This change from Measure to Essential Being is one<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_438" id="Page_438">[Pg 438]</a></span> which Greek
-philosophy seems to exhibit in the step from Pythagoreanism to
-Platonism. Plato himself has noted the passage from what have been
-called the mathematical to the metaphysical categories, and insisted
-on the essential and higher truth to which mathematics only point.
-Mathematical terms give the supreme definiteness to the world of being;
-they show it as in its several compartments a world immanently ordered
-and measured. As in Greek Art, all seems to be fully brought to the
-surface: as the image suggests no further and deeper meaning, but
-affords an absolute identity of aspect and purport; so the natural and
-semi-popular philosophy of Greece was satisfied for its ethics with the
-proportionate, the becoming, the beautiful. Plato however passes beyond
-the surface, and reflects the apparent fact on a deeper permanent
-reality behind. That reality is still, in name, only the 'form' or
-'shape'&mdash; only the regular and permanent type&mdash;only the measure. But
-it is called the really real, the <i>ὄντως ὄν</i>,&mdash;the being of being. In
-it the truth is clear, transparent, one and systematic, which in the
-sensible or immediate world is obscure, confused, multiple. It is the
-key to explain the difficulties and irregularities of the first and
-visible scene. Yet even Plato never for a moment forgets the essential
-correspondence of the two realms, however he may insist upon their
-separation, and however hard he may find it to explain how being can be
-duplicated, how the one can be many and yet not cease to be one, how
-appearance has part in reality.</p>
-
-<p>This indeed is not a difficulty confined to Plato. It is, after all,
-the same antithesis as we found in the beginning: the Is which lapses
-into the Is not. It now becomes the play of positive and negative&mdash;of
-perpetual relativity: of a known dependent on an unknown, and an
-unknown interpreted by a known: an essence<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_439" id="Page_439">[Pg 439]</a></span> guaranteed by its show
-or seeming and a <i>Schein</i> which supposes permanent <i>Sein.</i> How can a
-thing be, and yet not be true? How can pleasures seem and not be real?
-Aristotle, taking up the Platonic antithesis of true and apparent
-being, carries it on into greater detail. Matter and form: possibility
-and actuality: are amongst his cardinal pairs of correlatives. But
-he is anxious to maintain their essential relativity: to show that
-reality only is and maintains itself as the unity of the two poles of
-universal and particular, reason and sense, or as a syllogism and a
-development. So far as he succeeds in doing this, Aristotle rises above
-the correlational view of reality into the comprehension of it as a
-unity, which carries itself through difference into self-realisation.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_206" id="Footnote_1_206"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_206"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> What he did show was that these Ideas were not objects in
-the vulgar sense of reality, or things.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_207" id="Footnote_2_207"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_207"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Cf. the controversy between Schiller and Goethe as to idea
-and observation, quoted by Whewell, <i>Scientific Ideas</i>, i. 36.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_208" id="Footnote_3_208"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_208"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> The use of the substantival form <i>Being</i> for the verbal
-(participle, infinitive, or indicative) suggests an idea of permanence
-and substance, or essence. So potentiality seems much more real than
-<i>may</i> or <i>can.</i> And yet the phrase He knows δυνάμει is only equivalent
-to He can or may know (δύναται or ἐνδέχεται).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_209" id="Footnote_4_209"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_209"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> When it is said that: 'It is strange that so profound a
-thinker as Hegel should not have seen that the conception of definite
-objects, such as a <i>dog</i> and <i>cat</i>, is prior no less in nature than in
-knowledge to the conception of abstract relations, such as <i>is</i> and <i>is
-not,'</i> it is difficult to say what the writer meant. Had he ever heard
-of geometry? Both in nature and in knowledge (i. e. in the natural
-process from sense to thought) chairs and tables are prior to lines
-and surface. The mathematical point and line are abstractions, i. e.
-thoughts, and no image of sensuous reality. It is also true that the
-ordinary conception of the sun's movements was 'prior no less in nature
-than in knowledge' to the theory of the earth's rotation. And no doubt
-Hegel, sedate though his boyhood was, had made the acquaintance of dog
-and cat in his pre-logical days: as of balls and windows before he was
-turned upon Euclid. See Mansel's <i>Letters</i>, <i>Lectures</i>, &amp;c., p. 209.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_210" id="Footnote_5_210"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_210"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> As <i>Being</i> to ordinary unthinkingness seems to mean a
-great deal it cannot expound, so the mind full of the mystic depths of
-time and space is disgusted to find them turn so empty and shallow when
-it would set forth its wealth. See Augustin. <i>Confess.</i> xi. 14.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_6_211" id="Footnote_6_211"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_211"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> This may be illustrated by saying that to <i>affirm</i> is the
-same energy of thought as to <i>deny,</i> and that the difference lies in
-the terms related by the judgment. <i>In themselves,</i> the one act is as
-empty or meaningless as the other.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_7_212" id="Footnote_7_212"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_212"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> Heine, <i>Ueber Deutschland (Werke),</i> v. 213.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_8_213" id="Footnote_8_213"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_213"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> πᾱσα οὐσία δοκεῑ τόδε τι σημαίνειν (Ar. <i>Cat.</i> 5).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_9_214" id="Footnote_9_214"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_214"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> Hence the disparaging sense in which the term 'individual'
-may be used.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_10_215" id="Footnote_10_215"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_215"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> These latter terms being used in a metaphorical sense.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_11_216" id="Footnote_11_216"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_216"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> νόμῳ γλυκὺ καὶ νόμῳ πικρόν ἐτεῇ δὲ ἃτομα καὶ κενόν.
-Democritus ap. Sext. <i>Empir. adv. Math.</i> vii. 135.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_12_217" id="Footnote_12_217"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_217"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> Aristotle's μᾱλλον καὶ ἦττον: see <i>Metaph.</i> i. 6 τὺ μέγα
-κaὶ τὸ μικρον.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_13_218" id="Footnote_13_218"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_218"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> Thus, the sharp break at death suggests the reference of
-vital phenomena to a substantial soul.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_440" id="Page_440">[Pg 440]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XXXI.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>THE LOGIC OF EXPLANATION AND REALISTIC METAPHYSICS: ESSENCE.</h4>
-
-
-<p>The coherence and consistency of being was, it appeared in the last
-chapter, only to be maintained by assuming it to fall into two planes,
-or orders, always however relative to each other. The need of a measure
-forced itself upon even the superficial student. In the ordinary
-business of economical life one commodity of common use or of general
-acceptability steps into the place of a common measure. At first it is
-no more than one amongst many, a more suitable and convenient means of
-discharging the task of mensuration. But gradually it draws away into
-a world of its own, and acquires in common estimation a unique and
-peculiar dignity. It becomes a commodity of a higher order than the
-common, and is even treated as if it had intrinsic and inherent worth,
-apart from all relations of exchange. In a further stage it rises to
-rank as an invariable and almost supersensible standard, which amid all
-the fluctuations of currency tends to remain unchanged. One loses sight
-of the movement out of which it grew and in which it exists&mdash;the social
-give and take, the interaction of individual needs and general opinion.</p>
-
-<p>The characteristic feature of this sphere of thought is the perpetual
-antithesis of terms. And its tragedy is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_441" id="Page_441">[Pg 441]</a></span> the result of the tendency to
-separate the terms, and treat them as independently real. It matters
-not how often this error may be detected. Each side of the antithesis
-no doubt reflects itself upon the other. But we as constantly fail to
-note that reflection. Even the philosopher who most loudly preaches
-relativity falls into the common trap, and speaks of relatives as
-ultimate and absolute. He talks of an Unknowable, as if it could be
-without a Known (or Knowable): whereas no such term fully manifests
-itself. Each term owes its distinct existence to its correlative:
-each gives itself over to the other, and invests it with meaning
-and authority. Accordingly when even the ordinary mind, which takes
-these categories as they are given, is asked what each means, it can
-only reply by referring to the other. A cause is <i>that</i> which has an
-effect. The dialectic in the nature of thought,&mdash;its self-revising
-self-conscious nature&mdash;which was concealed in the First Part of Logic,
-where one term, when carried to its extreme, passed over into another,
-is made obvious in the Second Part, where each term postulates and even
-points to its correlative, and, however it may be contra-distinguished,
-cannot be thought without it. Thus, force is a meaningless abstraction
-without the correlative expression or utterance of force: and matter
-means nothing except in its distinction from, and yet reflection on,
-form. These, it may be said, are simple and tautological statements.
-They are principles, however, which every day sees disregarded. Have
-they, for example, been remembered by those theorists who tell us
-that everything is ultimately reducible to matter, or who propose to
-improve upon that theory by explaining that matter is after all only
-another name for force? Forgetting how this reduction is made, they are
-dealing with abstractions or mental figments, and losing their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_442" id="Page_442">[Pg 442]</a></span> way in
-an endless maze of metaphysics. Do those who speak so confidently of
-laws of nature as something real and effective ever reflect that the
-two terms are more or less relative to each other, and that there is
-some latent metaphor in the phrase? Or if they prefer to speak of laws
-of phenomena, on which word is the accent to be laid? Those who thus
-speak of matter and force, really speak of a matter which is formed and
-form-possessed, capable of determining its own form, and of a force
-which can rule its own exertions: and for such conceptions the words in
-question are scarcely adequate representatives. They use the language
-of the Second, to express notions which properly belong to the Third
-branch of Logic.</p>
-
-<p>The whole range of Essence or Relativity exhibits a sort of see-saw:
-while one term goes up in importance, the other term goes down. The
-several antitheses, too, have their day of fashion, and give place to
-others. Those inquirers who speak of the phenomena of nature shrug
-their shoulders at the very mention of essences: and the practical
-man, whose field is actuality, acquires a very pronounced contempt
-for both abstractions. One class of investigators glories in the
-perpetual discovery of differences, and stigmatises the seekers after
-identity and similarity as dreamers: while the latter retort, and
-name the specialisers empiricists. One intellect considers an action
-almost solely by its grounds or motives: another almost solely by
-its consequences. Some console themselves for their degradation by
-piquing themselves on what they might have been: others despise these
-'would-be' minds for what they practically are. What a wealth there
-lies in each of us, which our nearest friends know nothing of, and
-which has never been made outward! But in this mode of thought, it is
-the persistent<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_443" id="Page_443">[Pg 443]</a></span> delusion, misleading science no less than metaphysics
-and the reflective thinking of ordinary life, to suppose that either of
-two relative terms has an existence and value of its own. In Germany
-paper-money is sometimes known as 'Schein' or Show. That term marks its
-relativity to the gold or silver currency of the realm: and it would
-be as absurd to pay with Austrian paper-money in Persia, as to take
-one term of Essence apart from its correlative. The disputes about
-essences, about matters and forces, about substance, about freedom and
-necessity, or cause and effect, are generally aggravated by a forced
-abstraction of one term from another on which its meaning and existence
-depend.</p>
-
-<p>The essence may be roughly defined as that measure or standard which
-corresponds to the variation of immediate being, and yet remains
-identical in all variation. Or, if we like, we may say that this
-immediate being, which, as derivative, may now be called existence<a name="FNanchor_1_219" id="FNanchor_1_219"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_219" class="fnanchor">[1]</a>,
-has its ground in the essence. The essence is the ground of existence:
-and essence which exists is a 'thing,' Such an existing essence or
-thing subsists in its properties; and these properties are only found
-in the thing. Thus the essence, when it comes into existence as a
-thing, turns out to be a mere phenomenon or appearance.&mdash;Such briefly
-stated is the development of essence proper into appearance.</p>
-
-<p>With the idea of essential being&mdash;a permanent which yet changes, there
-emerge the problems connected with the double aspect of relation as
-identity and difference,&mdash;the favourite categories of reflection. These
-terms indeed the popular logician would fain avoid as savouring of
-pedantic accuracy, and prefers the psychological titles of similarity
-and contrast.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_444" id="Page_444">[Pg 444]</a></span> These, he tends to insinuate, are unique experiences,
-direct feelings, beyond which it is impossible to go in analysis.
-The logician, on the other hand, must insist on dealing with the
-more radical phase of the terms. And he must note their essential
-interdependence and their intrinsic contradictoriness. Abstract
-sameness, or sameness which does not presuppose a tinge of difference,
-is a fiction of weak thought, which wishes to simplify the subtlety
-of nature. Identity is a relative term, and for that very reason
-presupposes difference: and for the same reason difference presupposes
-identity and is meaningless without it. The whole dispute about
-'Personal Identity,' as it descends from one English psychologist to
-another, is enveloped in the obscurity which springs from failure to
-grasp the logical antinomy on which the question turns. When I feel
-that my friend whom I have not met for years is still the same, should
-I take the trouble to express myself in this manner, unless with
-reference to the difference betwixt Then and Now? If I remark that
-two men are different, would the remark be worth making or hearing
-unless there was some identity which made that difference all the
-more striking? The essence is, in short, the unity of sameness and
-difference: and when so apprehended, it is the ground by which we
-explain existence. The essence, ground, or possibility, is at once
-itself and not itself: if it is self-identical, it is for the same
-reason self-distinguishing. If it is to be itself, it can only be so
-by negativing what in it is other than itself. The affirmation of self
-implies the negation of the other of self,&mdash;the redintegration (though
-not the blank absorption) of the other in it. This is the <i>crux</i> which
-lies in <i>Ex nihilo nihil fit:</i> what exists must not be other than
-the essence (the effect not more than the cause),<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_445" id="Page_445">[Pg 445]</a></span> and yet unless it
-is other and different, there has been no passage from essence to
-existence.</p>
-
-<p>The tendency to identify, and the tendency to distinguish, alternate
-both in scientific thought and in general culture. But whichever
-prevail for the moment, it is only as a re-action and a protest against
-the one-sided predominance of the other. And thus both ultimately
-rest upon and presuppose a ground of existence which is neither mere
-sameness nor mere difference. It is only when the two tendencies meet
-and interpenetrate that science accomplishes its end, and discovers
-the ground of existence. In the first instance the world presents to
-incipient science the aspect of mere identity and of mere difference.
-Likeness is confounded with sameness, and unlikeness with diversity.
-The popular and the infant minds do not draw fine distinctions. Things
-to them are either the same or different: one point of sameness may
-in certain conditions obliterate whole breadths of difference; and
-tiny divergence may make as nothing all the many points of agreement,
-purely and simply, i. e. abstractly. But the process of comparison,
-setting things beside each other, teaches us to refine a little, and
-speak of things as Like or Unlike. One thing is like another when the
-element of identity preponderates: it is unlike, when the difference
-is uppermost. Thus while we distinguish things from one another, we
-connect them. From mere variety, and mere sameness, we have risen,
-secondly, to distinctions of like and unlike. But, thirdly, this
-distinction of same and different is in the thing itself. Everything
-includes an antithesis or contradiction in it: it is at once positive
-and negative. One can only be virtuous, so long as one is not utterly
-virtuous.<a name="FNanchor_2_220" id="FNanchor_2_220"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_220" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> To be a philosopher, implies that you are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_446" id="Page_446">[Pg 446]</a></span> not wholly or
-merely a philosopher. The rational animal is so, because of an inherent
-irrationality, and is so, only as rising upon and superseding it. Every
-epithet, so to speak, by which you describe any reality, presupposes in
-it the negative of the quality. Not only does every negation presuppose
-an attempted or surmised affirmation, but an affirmation is always,
-it may be said, a re-affirmation against an incipient doubt. Every
-stage of reality involves the presence of antithetical but inseparable
-elements: every light implies a shadow to set it forth. The epithet
-of each real is only <i>a potiori.</i> While it retains itself, it must
-lose itself. Its positivity is only secured by its self-negation and
-its identity is based upon its self-distinction. Every proposition
-which conveys real knowledge is a statement that self-sameness is
-combined with difference. Every such proposition is synthetical: it
-unites or identifies what is supposed to be implicitly different,
-or differentiates what seemed only identical. Here we have that
-<i>coincidentia oppositorum,</i> which is the truth of essence. Thus, e. g.
-the essence of the Self is the contradiction between its self-centred
-unity and its existence by self-differentiation into elements.</p>
-
-<p>Essence, thus comprehended as the unity of identity and difference,
-as that which is and is not the same, is the Ground, from which an
-Existence comes as the Consequent. Or, otherwise expressed, the ground
-is the source of the differences,&mdash;the point where they converge into
-unity, and whence they diverge into existence. Everything in existence
-has such a ground: or, as it is somewhat tautologically stated in the
-common formula, a sufficient ground. On that account, it is no great
-matter to give reasons or grounds for a thing, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_447" id="Page_447">[Pg 447]</a></span> no amount of them
-can render a thing either right or wrong, unless in reference to some
-given and supposedly fixed point. For the ground only states the same
-thing over again in a mediate or reflected form. It carries back the
-actual fact to its antecedent: and thus deprives it of its abruptness
-or inexplicability, by showing you it was there implicitly; and
-therefore as you accepted the ground you cannot complain of what but
-serves to continue it. To refer to the ground is to say there is really
-nothing new: and as you raised no objection before, you need raise none
-now.</p>
-
-<p>The Existent world&mdash;a world of existents, each conditioning and
-conditioned&mdash;is popularly described as a world of Things. These
-Things are the solid hinges on which turns our ordinary conception of
-change and action. They act, and exhibit properties. Being is partly
-substantive, partly adjective. The Thing itself is the ground of
-its properties: i. e. each thing is looked upon as a unity in which
-different relations converge, or an identity which subsists through its
-changing states. This is the side emphasised in ordinary life, when
-a thing is regarded as the permanent and enduring subject, which has
-certain properties. But a little science or a little reflection soon
-turns the tables upon the thing, and shows that the properties are
-independent matters, which, temporarily it may be, converge or combine
-into a factitious unity which we term a thing. But these very matters
-cannot be independent or whole, just because they interpenetrate each
-other in the thing. The thing, which from one point of view seemed
-permanent, and the properties, which from another point of view seemed
-self-subsistent matters, are neither of them more than appearance. For
-they must be at one, and at one they cannot be. And if we reduce the
-various matters to one, and speak<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_448" id="Page_448">[Pg 448]</a></span> of Matter in general, we have a mere
-abstraction&mdash;a something which only becomes real by being stamped with
-a special form. <i>Mere</i> Matter like <i>mere</i> Thing (thing in itself) is a
-knowable Unknowable.</p>
-
-<p>In this way we pass from the talk about essence, things, and matter
-into an other range of the sphere of relativity. We no longer have
-one order of being behind or in the depth, and another referring back
-to it. We now speak (as Mill does) of Phenomena:&mdash;not phenomena of
-an unknown, but, simply disregarding the background, we find all we
-want upon the surface. For neither is thing more real than property,
-nor essence than existence. Each is exactly equal in reality to the
-other, and that reality is its relation to the other. The thing and
-the essence with their claim to truth disappear. Nothing truly is:
-but only appears to be. The semblance (<i>Schein</i>) may refer to an
-essential. But the appearance (<i>Erscheinung</i>) only refers to another
-appearance, and so on. The phenomenal world is all on one level:&mdash;as
-was the world of immediate being. But, there, each term of being
-presented itself as independent: here, nothing is independent&mdash;nothing
-ever really <i>is,</i> but only represents something else, which is in its
-turn representative. Yet even here there is a pretence of hierarchy
-in existence. In the phenomenon a certain superiority is attributed
-to its Law. But the conception of Law is hard to keep in its proper
-place. Either it assumes a permanency&mdash;even were it but a permanent
-possibility&mdash;as contrasted with the coming and passing phenomenon:
-and then it is apt to be confounded with a real Essence. Or, on the
-other hand, it comes to be looked on as a mere way of colligating
-phenomena,&mdash;as a mere appearance in the variety of appearance (as it
-were an iris in the rain-drops)&mdash;a phenomenon of a phenomenon. Such<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_449" id="Page_449">[Pg 449]</a></span> a
-distinction between the phenomenon and its law; therefore, is and must
-be illusory, or itself only an appearance. As such it is described as
-the difference of Form and Content: two terms, which are incessantly
-opposed, but which more than most antitheses reveal when pressed the
-hollowness of their opposition. For true or developed Form is Content,
-and <i>vice versa.</i></p>
-
-<p>Instead however of this practical identification of the law of the
-phenomenon with the duly-formulated phenomenon itself, it is more
-natural to emphasise the discordance of the two aspects of reality,
-and yet to acknowledge their essential relativity. This essential
-relativity in the phenomenon has a threefold aspect: the relation of
-whole and parts; of force and the exertion of force; of inward and
-outward. The relation of whole and parts tends to explain by statical
-composition: the relation of force and its exertion, by dynamical
-construction. According to the former the parts are constituted by
-their dependence upon and in the whole, and yet the whole is composed
-by the addition of the several parts together. Each extreme is what
-it is only through the other. Only those parts can make up a whole,
-which somehow have the whole in them: and to become the whole, they
-must contrive to wholly obliterate their partitional character. A
-better exhibition of the inner unity and the difference between form
-and contents is seen in the relation of a force to its exertion. Here
-the contents appear under a double form: first, under the form of mere
-identity, as force,&mdash;secondly, under the form of mere distinction,
-as the manifestation of that force. Yet a force is only such in its
-utterance or manifestation, while in that utterance, if abstracted
-from the force it carries forth, all energy has been superseded.
-This separation of content and form, or of content as developed in
-two forms, appears<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_450" id="Page_450">[Pg 450]</a></span> still more clearly in the third relation: that
-of outward and inward. This is a popular distinction of very wide
-application in reference to phenomena. But neither outside nor inside
-is anything apart from its correlative. If the elements implied in the
-conception of phenomena are to have full justice done them, it must be
-expanded so as to give expression to these two phases, to include the
-outward and the inward. But at first only by reverting to something
-like the old distinction of essence and existence,&mdash;an essence however
-which is existent or phenomenal, and an existence which stands
-independent, though in correlation. Such being is Actuality&mdash;being, i.
-e. which is what it must be, and must be what it is.</p>
-
-<p>Actuality, though it comes under the general head of Essence, tends
-to pass away into another sphere. Here, as elsewhere, we see that
-the general rubric of a sphere is only partially applicable to some
-of its subordinate sections. In essence proper there were, or were
-assumed to be, two grades of being&mdash;a real or essential, and an
-unessential or seeming: or being was regarded (contradictorily) both
-as ideal (as one thing) and real (as having several properties). In
-Appearance or Manifestation the aspects of being are supposed to lie
-on a level; but they are always a pair of aspects, one side of which
-is entirely dependent for its explanation on a reflection from the
-other, e. g. whole and parts, the favourite category for explaining
-the larger unities. But in the category of actuality there is nothing
-so merely potential, so unessential as mere essence recognised: and
-each actual is something firm and self-supporting which does not,
-like a phenomenon, merely borrow its reality from its antithesis or
-correlative. Thus we have, in a way, got back to the characteristics
-of immediate being: only, as we find it,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_451" id="Page_451">[Pg 451]</a></span> we have this affirmation of
-the self-subsistence of reals contradictorily accompanied with the
-conviction of their necessary interdependence. It is a reflective (or
-correlated), not an immediate reality. There is no other world of being
-to have recourse to for explanation now: nor can we play back and
-forward from aspect to aspect of a reality which never comes forward
-itself, but only as a reflection on or from another. The world of
-reality is a self-contained world: its parts and phases are each hard
-realities: and for that reason they bear hard upon each other in the
-bond of necessity.</p>
-
-<p>The total actuality falls naturally in our conception into three
-elements. We separate first the central fact&mdash;the nucleus of the
-business, the concentrated reality in reality: the fact in its
-mere identity and inner abstractness: the ultimate drift or inner
-possibility of things. Then we turn to the rest of the concrete
-fact&mdash;all without which the fact would not be itself&mdash;the detail
-and particularity: this we treat as a sort of materials or passive
-conditions from which the real fact is to be produced, on which it
-is dependent and which precede it in time. Lastly, in order to get
-back the unity of the fact from these two unconnected elements, we
-refer to some agency which puts them together. The End&mdash;or thing to
-be realised&mdash;(so to speak) has to be brought out by a motive agency
-(efficient cause) which imposes the form (or general character) on
-the matter and makes these one. By this analysis, however, we have
-only put asunder what is one experience and introduced a mechanical
-(external) unifier needlessly. The name of <i>conditions</i> is given to the
-particulars or details, considered apart from the rest of the fact,
-and hypothetically invested with an existence anterior to it, with
-the implication, first, that they are self-subsistent, and secondly,
-that they to some extent involve the rest<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_452" id="Page_452">[Pg 452]</a></span> of it. Again, the general
-fact, the fact in its mere nominal or abstract generality or essence,
-its mere possibility, does not exist separately: every fact when in
-thought completed has its so-called conditions not outside it, but as
-constituent elements, aspects, or factors in it. Lastly, the so-called
-agency is the active element itself in the act, an aspect or factor
-in the totality: the aspect which keeps actuality together as a
-self-energising fact&mdash;a <i>Thathandlung</i> and not a mere <i>Thatsache</i> (to
-quote Fichte's phrase). Our practical and technical habits, where the
-agent is other than his materials and aims, lead us to draw the same
-distinctions in the realm of total Nature: they are aspects useful <i>in
-ordine ad hominem</i> which we, without due modification, apply <i>in ordine
-ad Universum.</i></p>
-
-<p>It is originally in our practical operations that the distinctions
-of necessary and possible emerge,&mdash;with a view to the accomplishment
-of our desires and purposes. That is necessary which is required and
-needed if some bare plan is projected and is to be actualised: it is
-the condition or conditions without which the end cannot be attained.
-It is an epithet of the means. Possible, on the contrary, is an
-epithet of the end or plan, and denotes that there are means for its
-attainment, without however always specifying that this is known of the
-present or given instance. It is clear that everything as regards the
-application of these terms will depend on the definiteness with which
-the plan is conceived, both in itself so to speak and in its relations
-with the rest of the circumstances. On the other hand, when a result
-emerges without being included in the purpose, and without any means
-having been employed for attaining it, it is said to be a chance,
-accident, or contingency.</p>
-
-<p>These terms are applied by analogy to the uses of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_453" id="Page_453">[Pg 453]</a></span> theoretical
-explanation. Just as in will you have a general aim to begin with,
-which becomes more and more determinate as it moves forward in the
-volitional process to execution; so in the attempt to understand the
-world you suppose it first of all the mere shadow or phantom of itself,
-a promise and potentiality of things to come: a next-to-nothing,
-which however you credit with a magic wealth of potential being. So
-much indeed may this possibility be emphasised that nothing more
-is needed: it is possible, and, without a thought of difficulties
-and counteractives, you could swear that it is actual<a name="FNanchor_3_221" id="FNanchor_3_221"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_221" class="fnanchor">[3]</a>. Being
-removed above this solid land of actuality, cut off from the ties
-and bonds of conditions, it fancies itself moving in its vacuum;
-and being free from all bonds of actuality fancies itself actually
-free, or self-disposing, whereas it can only claim this <i>liberum
-arbitrium indifferentiae,</i> so long as it remains bare and powerless
-possibility&mdash;a mere may-be, which, apart from all conditions, would
-exist only by a mere contingency, or freak of chance. This mere
-potentiality&mdash;being only an ante-dated, presupposed, and hypothetical
-actuality&mdash;being only a substance or substratum&mdash;must be raised out
-of its supposititious existence into reality by means of appropriate
-conditions. These conditions are necessary to its resuming its place
-or reaching a place in actuality. Thus each object becomes actual or
-real from a presupposed possibility by means of an external necessity.
-As in the former case the possibility was identified with power,
-and conditions were left out of sight as comparatively unimportant:
-so here the possibility&mdash;taken to lie at the root of the thing&mdash;is
-made a mere susceptibility, which would be nothing actual unless
-stimulated and necessitated from outside.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_454" id="Page_454">[Pg 454]</a></span> This necessity in the very
-heart of actuality (which is its characteristic to the reflectional
-mode of mind) thus arises from the separation and hypostatisation
-of its elements into independent powers which are so far in stress
-and opposition. This is the climax of metaphysics&mdash;if metaphysics
-be the investiture of the dynamic factors of the notion with the
-power and character of supposed agents or forces. It appears in
-three phases, with the three categories of substance, cause, and
-reciprocity. To the first, reality is regarded as dominated by its
-mere underlying potentiality: the reality of the mere superficial
-contingents is controlled by the necessity of its latent or substantial
-being. To explain event or incident, here, is merely to bind it
-to the generic nature or the intrinsic doom, which&mdash;unexplained
-and inexplicable&mdash;manifests itself in an extrinsically fluctuating
-appearance of facts: e. g. the single crime is explained as the product
-of social conditions. Under the conception of Causality, each thing is
-a mere might-be which owes all its actuality to a definite antecedent
-or cause,&mdash;an antecedent termed for the moment unconditional, but anon
-reduced to dependence on further conditions. The effect is as a fact:
-but would not have been so unless for an earlier fact&mdash;i. e. unless the
-effect in a supposed earlier stage of its growth had been helped on by
-certain conditions or circumstances to acquire actual and full being in
-the effect. And cause and conditions can change places, according to
-what we happen to regard as the central nucleus or inner possibility
-of the effect. Lastly, the conception of reciprocity recognises that
-causality is rather an arbitrary simplification of reality into strands
-of rectilinear event; it remembers that Substance emphasises the
-dependence of each non-independent element on the supposed totality
-which they grow from,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_455" id="Page_455">[Pg 455]</a></span> and doing so, it lays down the reversibility
-and essential elasticity of the causal relation. The cause in causing
-re-acts upon itself, and the effect is itself a cause of the effect,
-active as well as passive. The dependence in short is all-environing:
-nowhere is there any loop-hole to escape from necessity. Motives act
-on purpose, and purpose acts on motives: the stone hurls back the hand
-that hurled it.</p>
-
-<p>Explanation is thus baffled and thus forced to recognise its own
-limitations. The simplest fact is beyond all the powers of explanatory
-science to do full justice to: for to know fully the 'flower in the
-crannied wall' after this method of explanation would involve endless
-multiples of action and re-action. The antinomy between necessity
-and contingency arose by following out the antithesis, so natural to
-us, between selfsame and different, essence and existence, substance
-and accidents, till they were invested with a right to independent
-place and function. But the separation of the abstract receptacle
-of possibility, self-same and essential, from the equally abstract
-conditions which fill it up and make it actual, is only the great
-human instrumentality of comprehension, which however is not reached
-until each thing is realised and idealised as an individual, which
-has universality and has particularity, but never either alone.
-Its universality is possibility&mdash;its particularity the aspect of
-contingency: but these aspects are in submission to an inclusive unity.
-The real when ill known seems contingent; when somewhat better known
-it seems necessary by external (physical) compulsion; in its truth
-to intelligence, the real is a self-active, a <i>causa sui,</i> or it is
-necessary by that self-determination which is the freedom of autonomy.</p>
-
-<p>The view of the world under the category of actuality<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_456" id="Page_456">[Pg 456]</a></span> (Reality), and
-as dominated by the law of causality, is the culminating stand-point
-of scientific or reflective realism. It began with a mere descriptive
-science, naming and qualifying the successive aspects of being,&mdash;with
-description which passed through numeration into the definiteness
-of measurement. But all such determination was found to imply the
-existence of a permanent reality, or at least to involve the reference
-of one reality to another, outside of it, and yet not independent
-of relations to it, which had to make part of its nature. To the
-scientific realist the sum of fact presents itself independent of
-consciousness, as a complicated mass of real elements governed by
-laws and subject to necessities. Each thing or state of a thing is
-explained by reference to something outside it, which is its cause, and
-measured by something inside it which is its unit or atomic standard.
-Alternately the reference, and the unit are designated arbitrary
-(contingent) and necessary (essential): i. e. they are sometimes
-considered as only a way of looking at reality<a name="FNanchor_4_222" id="FNanchor_4_222"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_222" class="fnanchor">[4]</a>&mdash;and sometimes as
-inevitable implications and conditions of reality.</p>
-
-<p>All this is Objective Logic: or, so far as it does not realise
-its implications, it is Metaphysics. Its terms of thought<a name="FNanchor_5_223" id="FNanchor_5_223"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_223" class="fnanchor">[5]</a> are
-in practice treated as elements of a reality which is what it is,
-apart from thought-conditions, apart from consciousness. As Hegel
-exhibits them in their interdependence, they hint their underlying
-thought-nature, which in their empirical applications is hardly
-apparent. For to the realistic stand-point mind and subjectivity are
-left out of account as only passive onlookers. The realist may no
-doubt speak of a Subject: but he means a real, a corporeal self,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_457" id="Page_457">[Pg 457]</a></span> an
-actual amongst other actuals. If he speaks of mind and will, such mind
-and will are parts and ingredients in a general scheme of causes and
-effects; they are points of transition through which passes the moving
-stream of event. They also are things and substances. They are agents
-and patients, always both, no doubt but the chief circumstance to note
-is that they are actuals, and that even knowledge and will are regarded
-as species of action and motion.</p>
-
-<p>When Protagoras laid down his maxim that <i>Man is the measure of all
-things</i>, he stated, apparently in an ambiguous manner, that the fact
-of measure (and all that mensuration implies), and (we may add)
-the existence of correlation in actuality, presupposed for their
-explanation the assumption of Mind and subjectivity. Mind thus became
-the basis of all actuality which claimed to be objective&mdash;claimed, in
-short, to be actual. The truth and objectivity of the objective lies in
-the subjective; Mind is its own measure, i. e. the absolute measure,
-and it is self-relation. So Kant had taught and Fichte enforced. The
-basis of objectivity is the subjective; but a subjective different
-from that so-called by the plain man or by the naive psychologist. By
-the subjective he does not, as the plain man, understand the compound
-of body and soul, the living and breathing organism amid outer
-objects&mdash;nor, as the psychological idealist does, a psychical process,
-a series or bundle of states of consciousness, always contrasted
-with a reality, <i>the</i> reality outside consciousness. It is true that
-his language resembles the language of psychology: as Herbart and
-others have said, that is to be expected, for he talks of mind and
-consciousness. But the consciousness he speaks of is a unity that
-includes all space and all time: it is one and all-embracing, infinite,
-because not as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_458" id="Page_458">[Pg 458]</a></span> individual (psychological) consciousness set in
-antithesis to reality, as the other half of the duality of existence.
-It is consciousness generalised<i>&mdash;Bewusstsein überhaupt&mdash;</i>an eternal,
-i. e. a timeless consciousness, an universal i. e. not a localised,
-mind:&mdash;a necessary Idea, but with an inward self-regulating necessity.
-Such a consciousness Fichte called the Absolute Ego: but as we saw
-before, the adjective transforms the substantive. Such a consciousness,
-which is absolute self-consciousness, is the Idea:&mdash;no psychical event,
-but the logical condition and explanation of reality whether physical
-or psychical. The Idea is the presupposition of epistemology, but
-of an epistemology which claims to occupy the place of old usurped
-by metaphysics. Metaphysics has no higher category than actuality:
-transcendental logic shows that actuality rests in the Idea,&mdash;reality
-conceived and conception realised.</p>
-
-<hr class="r5" />
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_219" id="Footnote_1_219"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_219"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>Existence,</i> as opposed to <i>Dasein</i>, should thus imply
-the emergence into efficient being from a state of quietude or passive
-latency (<i>Wesen</i>).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_2_220" id="Footnote_2_220"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_220"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> As Aristotle says, The brave man stands his ground, yet
-fearing: (cf. Tolstoi: <i>Siege of Sevastopol</i>). If he does not fear,
-brave is not the word for him.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_3_221" id="Footnote_3_221"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_221"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> Put into Greek, the mere ἐνδέχεται (<i>licet,</i> or
-<i>forsitan</i>) is taken as equivalent to δύναμαι (<i>possum</i>).</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_4_222" id="Footnote_4_222"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_222"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> Herbart's <i>Zufällige Ansicht</i>, or contingent aspect.</p></div>
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_5_223" id="Footnote_5_223"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_223"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> 'Denkbestimmungen.'</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_459" id="Page_459">[Pg 459]</a></span></p></div>
-
-
-
-
-<h5>CHAPTER XXXII.</h5>
-
-
-<h4>LOGIC OF COMPREHENSION AND IDEALISM: THE NOTION.</h4>
-
-
-<p>The distinction between the psychical or psychological idea and the
-logical concept has been more than once alluded to. The idea or
-representation is under psychical form exactly equivalent to the
-undigested and passively accepted thing to which we give the title of
-physical or external. It is the ideal, in the sense of the psychical,
-pendant to the real: and hangs up in the mental view in the same way as
-the real object to the physical perception. It is in brief the crude
-object, considered not as existing, but as a state of consciousness&mdash;it
-is a reduplication in inner space of the thing in outer space. If we
-cannot say it is altogether mythological, we must however note that
-it is simply a psychical reflex, which has an existence only through
-abstraction, and is neither more or less than the object apprehended
-without comprehension.</p>
-
-<p>The concept or notion is more than an image, and less than an image. An
-idea-image is symbolical of the unanalysed totality of the thing. But
-the notion is in the first instance due to an analysis, and secondly,
-a reconstruction of the thing. It takes up the thing in its relations:
-it thinks it, i. e. it abstracts and mutilates it, and artificially
-recombines. It implies analysis and synthesis. It produces a sort of
-manufactured thing: a mental construction. But<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_460" id="Page_460">[Pg 460]</a></span> the construction&mdash;as
-contrasted with the passivity that says first A and then B and a
-connexion of them&mdash;has the traces of subjective or mental violence
-about it: for violence there is in the act of comprehension. We have
-however got together in unity what actuality in the process of history
-let fall asunder, and could only, at the best, show as independent
-reals held against their will in ubiquitous relations of reciprocity.
-But the unity in which the individual sets the universal and the
-particular is an imported unity, which though it gives place and
-explanation to the elements of reality, seems to impose its synthesis
-upon reality. So far the concept is subjective only. It is an ample
-explanation including the facts, but not quite self-explanatory. <i>We</i>
-conceive, and judge, and reason: but all this is alien to the object.</p>
-
-<p>But there is a counterpart almost in antagonism to this. There is
-a concept, i. e. a grouping of existence into totals mediated by
-necessary links, which presents itself as embodied in things: and
-this embodied concept is the objective world. That world, apart from
-our interpretation and conception, offers itself as a synthesis of
-universal, particular and individual. It groups itself into systems,
-mechanical, chemical, and teleological. But in all of these there
-is lacking the evidence of the inward and subjective principle of
-unification. The unity is external, the members are held in a vice:
-their unity is given as a fact: it follows through certain laws and
-does not reveal itself. There is a want of perspicuity of connexion:
-logic&mdash;the need of inner explanation&mdash;in short, is not satisfied by
-this logic of facts. It is rather a realm of necessity than of freedom.
-It wants life; wants true self-activity. As in the subjective notion,
-the facts resented the hand of the logician (for here is the sphere
-of logic proper in the old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_461" id="Page_461">[Pg 461]</a></span> Aristotelian sense), and refused to show
-themselves in the simple and transparent transitions of his argument:
-so the objective synthesis of the members of a mechanical system, or
-of a kingdom of means and ends, lacks the freedom and lucidity of
-inner movement which logical insight demands. Objectivity&mdash;the logic
-of fact&mdash;is a syllogism of necessity, so hardened and fixed that the
-necessity of the conclusion is more obvious than the self-determination
-by the syllogism.</p>
-
-<p>The third stage of the Notion shows the union of the pellucidity and
-ideality of the syllogistic progress with the necessity and reality
-of the objective order. Here actuality and the concept are at one. At
-first as a mere fact&mdash;or more fact than idea. Life, organic life, is
-no doubt development: a totality which is in all its parts, and where
-parts have their being in the total. But life as such, the so-called
-vital principle, does not emancipate itself to a true universal: it is
-immersed in its particulars. Intellectual life, on the contrary,&mdash;the
-form of consciousness&mdash;rises independent and distinct from the
-totality of life. Psychology follows Biology. But as such&mdash;under the
-form of intellect and will&mdash;it has an antithesis no less fatal to its
-absoluteness than the opposite one-sidedness of life. There is&mdash;to
-put it in language more familiar to the present day&mdash;there is an
-analogue of life in all nature; and all reality, even the rock and the
-crystal, has its life-history. There is, properly speaking, no mere
-inorganic reality: organic life is universal. And then, going a step
-further, we attribute to all reality something analogous to a soul, or
-a consciousness. We talk, in rash moods, of mind-stuff and feelings,
-even in molecules. But as Spinoza has reminded us, terms like Will
-and Intellect have about them something finite, because they imply
-an antagonism to an object: they are predominantly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_462" id="Page_462">[Pg 462]</a></span> subjective. The
-reality in its final truth must be a subject-object: the adequacy of
-thought and being, the equation of real and ideal, the intellection
-which is life. And this is called Absolute Idea. It is natural to
-translate such an equation, when made a result, into a mere blank.
-And a blank it would be, if we suppose all that has gone before
-obliterated, and only the result left. Then, in the coincidence of
-opposites, we have only a zero of a gulf of negation. A life which <i>is</i>
-consciousness may seem to fade away like a vague ideal with no reality.
-A consciousness which <i>is</i> life can be no consciousness at all. The
-<i>is</i> and the <i>is known</i> dare not coincide or they perish both.</p>
-
-<p>A categorical proposition, says Hegel, can never express a speculative
-truth. That is to say: the subject over-rides the predicate, or the
-predicate makes you ignore the subject. The affirmation keeps out
-of sight the negation. To say that life <i>is</i> consciousness makes us
-forget that the very assertion would not and could not be made, unless
-also life were other than consciousness. In its full proportion of
-meaning, therefore, the proposition must imply a return to unity
-through difference, to identity through otherness. Affirmation,
-fully realised, is re-affirmation through negation. Cognition is but
-recognition deepened by contrast. This law which governs&mdash;or rather
-which is&mdash;logic; the principle of identity through contradiction&mdash;must
-not be lost sight of in the supreme struggle of thought. The Idea is
-the unity of life and consciousness: but it is a unity in which they
-are (<i>aufgehoben</i>)&mdash;not a zero in which they utterly collapse.</p>
-
-<p>We may illustrate in two ways. In the first we may compare the
-'Ενεργεια of Aristotle. That is his formula of reality. Nominally
-it only means activity and actuality: and sums up the metaphysical
-formula for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_463" id="Page_463">[Pg 463]</a></span> what really is,&mdash;the hard fact of being. But through it
-there glimmers the meaning of consciousness. It not merely is, but
-it means what it is. Energy of Soul is the end of life&mdash;the supreme
-fulfilling of desire, and consummation of tendency. As such it is, and
-feels that it is. It is the virtuous deed, which is its own reward. But
-Aristotle seems sometimes to fall from that identification of being and
-consciousness. The world of <i>praxis</i> parts from the world of <i>Theoria.</i>
-In that case the activity is a mere activity&mdash;the outward shell of
-action: and then, as a supplement or complement to the abstract result
-of the activity the consciousness of achievement gets a distinct
-position as Pleasure: and the activity, now no consummation, but only
-a means to an end, get its completion from this arbitrarily abstracted
-shadow of reality.[1]</p>
-
-<p>The second illustration may come from Mr. Spencer.</p>
-
-<p>'We can think of Matter only in terms of Mind. We can think of Mind
-only in terms of Matter. When we have pushed our explorations of the
-first to the uttermost limit we are referred to the second for a
-final answer: and when we have got the final answer of the second we
-are referred back to the first for an interpretation of it.' Beyond
-this see-saw indeed we cannot go, so as to leave it behind: but in
-reality we transcend it. The Mind that is in terms of Matter is partly
-the region of psychic event, partly the world of science, art and
-religion. And psychic event is always antithetical to physical reality.
-But the spiritual world already includes the antithesis of psychical
-and physical, and including it keeps it as a principle of life and
-consciousness. The supreme or absolute mind does not indeed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_464" id="Page_464">[Pg 464]</a></span> rise above
-Physis and Psyche so as to have no antagonism: but it is the unity of
-antitheses.</p>
-
-<p>What those who crave for something higher than this rest in unrest,
-this life in consciousness and consciousness in life, want, would
-destroy the very condition of reality. Still philosophising, they would
-be above philosophy. They want an objective reality in which they may
-still their beating hearts,&mdash;a 'repose which ever is the same' and
-yet is not annihilation:&mdash;to sink into the great sea of being, and
-leave consciousness with its radical division behind. Such a craving
-philosophy, in Hegers hands, has no power of satisfying. It cannot, in
-the sense in which Jacobi and Schelling used the words, reveal Being.
-It cannot get at the <i>That</i> except by means of the <i>What,</i> and is the
-eternal antithesis and correlation of these two. It will always be
-rational and logical&mdash;for it is its function to think being: and it
-will re-affirm that an unthought and a-logical being is a mere name,
-which in the language of humanity at least has no meaning, whatever
-it may stand for in the Volapük of imagined gods. To go beyond this
-correlation of Being and Thought is therefore no advance, but a relapse
-into the <i>Natura Naturans</i>, which, in its abstract completeness, <i>is,</i>
-but dare not be anything. Philosophy therefore in its supreme Idea is
-still the 'Ενεργεια of θεωρία, and not bare Οὐσία. For it mere Being
-is always Nothing. And to be actual it must live in antithesis and
-live victorious over antithesis. It follows the law of humanity <i>(Und
-das heisst ein Kämpfer sein</i>)&mdash;which can only exist in warfare as a
-church militant, but for continuous existence must also be a church
-triumphant. Like religion and art, it sometimes craves for utter union
-in the fullness of Being. Such a fullness is the unspeakable and the
-vain,&mdash;which we may picture as the apathy of Nirvana;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_465" id="Page_465">[Pg 465]</a></span> but which is the
-absorption of Art, Religion and Philosophy,&mdash;the cease of consciousness
-and an abyss. We may call it&mdash;it matters not&mdash;Being.</p>
-
-<p>These stages of the Notion must be examined in somewhat fuller detail.
-The subjective notion is the effort at the comprehension (at first
-subjective) of the two correlated elements into which actuality as
-such has been seen to fall&mdash;and to fall again and again without
-end. It brings out, or explicates (and with some opposition to the
-divisions of reality) the unity which was presupposed by the antagonist
-and inseparable reals. Hitherto we have had two things or aspects
-in relation and move from one to the other by an act of reflection.
-But to get two points in relation, they must belong to or exist in
-a unity. The divided reality of cause and effect must, if it is to
-be intelligible, submit to a unification of its elements. It is
-comparatively easy to get on if we are always allowed to have one foot
-on solid ground, and can move the other. Give us a standing-point, and
-explanation is simplified. But to get a notion of things is, it may
-seem, to transcend them, or get beneath them, and take a stand-point
-outside actuality which shall unify them. If we added to immediate
-being a further element to explain it, it may be said we now superadd
-a third to explain the two others. Over and above the different and
-related elements, there is assumed to be a unity. And at first it is
-certainly such a superimposed element, added to the facts, and regarded
-as our way of looking at them, as a subjective notion or grasp, holding
-together what is in itself reluctant to be unified.</p>
-
-<p>The three aspects or factors in a Concept are the Universal, the
-Particular, and the Individual. These are what Hegel calls the
-'moments' or 'vanishing factors' of the notion. They are 'vanishing,'
-because<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_466" id="Page_466">[Pg 466]</a></span> in their logical mobility they form a pellucid union: if they
-are distinct, yet they refuse to be independent of one another. Or, we
-may say, each in its truth is the meeting-ground and unification of
-the two others, thus forming a sort of cycle of perpetual movement.
-And in this way we may see that the addition of the third has really
-been a simplification: it has made two one. For the Unit which welds
-together is not a <i>tertium quid</i>, but simply the explicit statement
-and assertion of the truth implied in the antithesis, which was yet
-inseparability, of the two others. And for the same reason, neither
-mere universal nor mere particular nor mere individual are full
-reality, when taken apart. One can understand how Hegel could speak of
-the 'Bacchantelike intoxication' of the concept. It may be illustrated
-by the following utterances in which a modern psychologist labours
-to express the complex unity of mental fact. First we are told that
-a 'nervous shock,' e. g. the awakening caused by a sudden blow, or a
-simple sensation (so-called), is the ultimate unit of consciousness.
-And if this were all, it would correspond to the qualities of immediate
-being, which we can suppose measurable: we should get a science of
-purely empirical psychology based on psychical atoms. But, immediately
-after, it appears that the 'relational element' is never absent from
-the lowest stage of consciousness. Accordingly, besides feelings, there
-<i>must be</i> relations between feelings. And that means a good deal:
-especially if we also note the proposition that, in truth, 'neither a
-feeling nor a relation is an independent element of consciousness,'
-Evidently you cannot have either without both, and it seems difficult
-to have both when neither is independent. Nor does it mend matters to
-learn that 'a relation is a momentary feeling': for that only seems
-a way of implying that it is, and yet is not,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_467" id="Page_467">[Pg 467]</a></span> a feeling. Such are
-the difficulties that beset the sincere attempt to comprehend. The
-fixed points of explanation stagger under the burden of truth; and
-their unsteadiness shows that they lack the full foundation. Yet that
-foundation&mdash;it must be repeated&mdash;is not something extra: it is the
-underlying unity which gives life to the relativity of the separates.</p>
-
-<p>For the peculiarity of the Notional stand-point is that it insists on
-thorough comprehension. The usual explanation refers us from a later to
-an earlier, from a strange to a familiar, from a complex to a simple,
-from compound to elements. It keeps analysis and synthesis, induction
-and deduction apart. To comprehend is, on the other hand, to light up
-earlier by later and later by earlier, and carry both into their unity.
-It does not merely refer existence to its ground, phenomenon to law,
-or effect to cause; because beyond these it has still to reveal the
-unity of nature which carries on one of these into the other. Thus, the
-explanatory method in Social Science may either refer us to the simple
-elements or parts out of which the total is composed, or to an earlier
-stage in the same institution's life. The analytical sociologist
-does the former: the historical the latter. Neither really faces the
-problem. For if the whole is made up of parts, it is made up of parts
-which have been characterised by the whole. If the later has come
-from the earlier, that only shows that the nature of the earlier was
-inadequately ascertained. Development&mdash;which implies a permanent which
-changes, an identity which is also different,&mdash;is thus more than mere
-reference to an antecedent; because the antecedent must also figure as
-a simultaneous. <i>Cessante causa, cessat et effectus.</i> But here, in the
-concept (or λόγος) or syllogism, the permanent exists as the&mdash;may we
-call it&mdash;consciousness<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_468" id="Page_468">[Pg 468]</a></span> which binds together the elements of reality,
-as the life and the history, which is ideally continuous through real
-changes, and is a real unity through the distinctions of appearance.</p>
-
-<p>Such a comprehension e. g. of the State would show that though it
-must have a universal aspect, a particular, and an individual, yet
-these are not severally identifiable with the divisions of sovereign,
-executive, and people, but that in each of the latter the three
-moments of the notion must appear, and that e. g. the people is not
-mere people, but also executive and sovereign, just as the sovereign
-is no mere sovereign, but also executive and of the people. The same
-may be illustrated in the so-called individual. A man in his special
-department and sphere of action may very likely lose the sense of his
-wholeness and his integrity,&mdash;perhaps in more senses than one! He
-may reduce himself to the limits of his profession. But in so doing
-he becomes untrue, or, in Hegelian parlance, abstract: he fails to
-recognise the universality of his position. All work, however petty,
-which is done in the right spirit, is holy.</p>
-
-<p>
-'One place performs, like any other place,<br />
-The proper service every place on earth<br />
-Was framed to furnish man with: serves alike<br />
-To give him note, that through the place he sees<br />
-A place is signified he never saw.'<br />
-</p>
-
-<p>It is a false patriotism, for example, which is inconsistent with the
-spirit of universal brotherhood: and there is something radically wrong
-with the religion, on the other hand, which cannot be carried into act
-amid the pettiness of ordinary practical interests. The universal,
-again, is not a world beyond this world of sense and individuals: if it
-were so, it would itself be a mere particular. It is rather the world
-of sense<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_469" id="Page_469">[Pg 469]</a></span> unified, organised, and, if we may say so, spiritualised.
-And an individual which is merely and simply individual is an utter
-abstraction, which is quite meaningless, and in the real world
-impossible. Or, if we prefer to express the same thing in connexion
-with the mind, sensation apart from thought is an inconceivable
-abstraction. Sensation is always alloyed with thought, and we can at
-the most <i>suppose</i> pure sensation to exist amongst the brutes. The mere
-individual opens out and expands: and in that expansion we see the
-universal: (sensation is thought in embryo). But, on the other hand,
-the developed universal concentrates itself into a point: (thought
-returns into the centre of feeling).</p>
-
-<p>The same process of particular, individual and universal, which thus
-goes on under the apparent point of the notion, is more distinctly
-and explicitly seen, with due emphasis on the several members, in
-the evolution of the notion into the Judgment and the Syllogism. The
-judgment is the statement of what each individual notion implicitly is,
-viz. a universal or inward nature in itself, or that it is a universal
-which individualises itself. The judgment may, therefore, in its
-simplest terms be formulated as: The Individual is the Universal. The
-connective link,&mdash;the copula 'is,' expresses however at first no more
-than a mere point-like contact of the two terms, not their complete
-identity. By a graduated series of judgments this identity between the
-two terms is drawn closer, until in the three terms and propositions of
-a syllogism the unity of the three factors of the notion finds its most
-adequate expression in (subjective) thought.</p>
-
-<p>It may be a question how far syllogisms as they are ordinarily found
-are calculated to impress this synthesis of the three elements upon the
-observer. The three elements there tend to bid each other good-bye, and
-are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_470" id="Page_470">[Pg 470]</a></span> only kept together by the awkward means of the middle term, and
-the conjunction 'therefore.' In these circumstances it becomes easy
-to show, that the major premiss is a superfluity, not adding anything
-to the cogency of the argument. But under the prominence of this
-criticism of form, we are apt to let slip the real question touching
-the nature of the syllogism. And that nature is to give their due place
-to the three elements in the notion: which in the syllogism have each
-a quasi-independence and difference as separate terms, while they are
-also reduced to unity. The syllogism expresses in definite outlines
-that everything which we think, or the comprehension which constitutes
-an object, is a particular which is individualised by means of its
-universal nature. As always, thought refers to reality; and a notion
-has to be carried out into objectivity. But as Aristotle complained,
-matter is recalcitrant to form. The objective appears at first only as
-an opposite, and instead of revealing, it rather obscures and condenses
-the features of subjectivity.</p>
-
-<p>Objectivity, or the thought which has forgotten its origin and stands
-out as a world, may be taken in three aspects: Mechanical, Chemical,
-and Teleological. That is to say, the mode in which groups or systems
-naturally present themselves in the objective world, is threefold. The
-contradiction which stands in the way of comprehending objectivity
-comes from the fact that it contains subjectivity absorbed in it. In
-other words, the object is at once active and passive; as thought and
-subjectivity it should be its own synthetiser, as objectivity it is
-necessitated to interdependence, and the subjectivity, at this stage,
-is in abeyance. Consequently, either the two attributes co-exist, or
-they cancel each other, or they are in mutual connexion.</p>
-
-<p>(1) In the first case the objects are independent, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_471" id="Page_471">[Pg 471]</a></span> yet are
-connected with one another. Such connexion is an external one, due
-to force, impulse, and outward authority. The principle of union is
-implied: but the objects are mutually determined from without. The
-more, for example, an object acts upon the imagination, the more
-vehement is the reaction of the mind towards it.&mdash;(2) But if the
-object is independent, as has been allowed, then the determination
-from without must really come from within. Thus desire is a turning or
-bent towards the object which draws it. The desiring soul leans out of
-itself. It gravitates towards a centre: and it is its own nature to be
-thus centripetal. The lesser objects of themselves draw closer around
-the more prominent object.&mdash;(3) But if this gravitation were absolute,
-the objects would lose their independence altogether, and sink into
-their centre. Accordingly if the independence of these objects is
-to remain, there must be, as it were, a double centre, the relative
-centre of each object, and the absolute centre of the system to which
-it belongs. In each of these three forms of mechanical combination,
-the objects continue external and independent. A mechanical theory of
-the state regards classes as independent, seeks to produce a balance
-between them, separates individuals and associations from the state,
-and, in short, conceives the state as one large centralising force with
-a number of minor spheres depending upon it, but with a greater or less
-amount of self-centred action in each of them.</p>
-
-<p>The fact is that an object cannot really be thought as thus
-independently subsistent. Its real nature is rather affinity,&mdash;a
-tendency to combine with another: it requires to receive its
-complement. Every object is naturally in a state of unstable
-equilibrium, with a tendency to quit its isolation and form a union.
-This<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_472" id="Page_472">[Pg 472]</a></span> theory, which is called the Chemical theory of an object,
-regards it as the reverse of indifferent: as in a permanent state
-of susceptibility. When objects thus open and eager for foreign
-influences combine, there results a new product, in which both the
-constituents are lost, so far as their qualities go. The qualities
-of the constituents are neutralised. A man's mind, for example,
-prepared by certain culture, meets a new stimulus in some strange
-doctrine, and the result is a new form of intellectual life. But at
-this point the process, which such a form of objectivity represents,
-is closed: all that remains is for the product to break up one day
-into its constituent factors. There is no provision made for carrying
-it on further. Hence if we are to have a self-regulating system of
-objectivity, we must rise above the Chemical theory of objects. And
-to do that, the first course is to look at the objective world as
-<i>regulated</i> (though not immanently constituted) by the Notion.</p>
-
-<p>The Notion as regulative of objectivity,&mdash;as independent and
-self-subsistent, but as in necessary connexion with Objectivity,&mdash;is
-the End, Aim, or Final Cause. According to this, the Teleological
-and practical theory of the Universe[2], the object is considered as
-bound to reproduce and carry out the notion, and the notion is looked
-upon as meant to execute itself in reality. The two sides, subjective
-and objective, are, in other words, in necessary connexion with each
-other, but not identical. This is the contrast of the End and the
-Means. By the 'Means' is meant an object <i>which is determined by an
-End</i>, and which operates upon other objects.&mdash;(1) The End is originally
-subjective: an instinct or desire after something<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_473" id="Page_473">[Pg 473]</a></span>&mdash;a feeling of
-want and the wish to remedy it. It is confronted by an objective
-mass, which is indifferent to these wishes: and manifests itself as a
-tendency outwards,&mdash;an appetite towards action. It seizes and uses up
-the objective world.&mdash;(2) But the End in the second place reduces this
-indifferent mass to be an instrument or Means: makes it the middle term
-between itself and the object.&mdash;(3) But the means is only valuable as
-a preparation to the End regarded as Realised, which thus counts as
-the truth of the thing. These are the three terms of the Syllogism of
-Teleology: the Subjective End, the Means, and the End Realised. It is
-the process of adaptation by which each thing is conceived as the means
-to some end, and which actively transforms the thing into something
-by which that end is realised. In the last resort it presents us with
-an objective world in which utility or design is the principle of
-systematisation: and in which therefore there is an endless series of
-ends which become means to other and higher ends. After all is done,
-the object remains foreign to the notion, and is only subsumed under
-it, and adapted to it. We want a notion which shall be identifiable
-with objectivity&mdash;which shall permeate it through and through, as soul
-does body. Such a unity of Subjective and Objective&mdash;the Motion in (and
-not merely in relation to) Objectivity&mdash;is what Hegel terms the Idea.</p>
-
-<p>The first form of the Idea is Life, taking that as a logical category,
-or as equivalent to self-organisation. The living, as organisms, are
-contrasted with mere mechanisms. The essential progress of modern
-science lies in its emphasis on this aspect of the Idea: which includes
-all that the teleological period taught about adaptation, and only sets
-aside the externality of means to ends there found. The savant of the
-last century<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_474" id="Page_474">[Pg 474]</a></span> and the beginning of the present dealt with the object
-of his inquiries as a mechanical, chemical, or teleological object.
-The modern theorist tends to see the world as one self-evolving Life.
-According to the naturalist of last century, kinds of animals and
-plants were viewed as convenient, and perhaps arbitrary arrangements:
-according to the moderns, these kinds represent the grades or steps in
-the life of the natural world.</p>
-
-<p>What, then, is the nature of the process which we call Life? Is it
-adequately or definitely defined as 'a continuous adjustment of
-internal to external relations'? Or is it a good deal more than
-anything the word 'correspondence' implies? According to Hegel it is
-nothing so simple, but a syllogism with three terms, and a syllogism
-moreover which permutates its terms and premisses. There is, in the
-first place, the term, which is also a process, of self-production. The
-living must articulate itself, create for itself limbs and members, and
-keep up a perpetual re-creation of morphological and structural system
-of parts. Secondly, there is the assimilation of what is external to
-the living individual. If there is to be life, spiritual or bodily,
-there must be a physiological intus-susception of foreign elements.
-Without this the first term or process is impossible. Thirdly, there
-must be a term or process of Reproduction or generation by which
-the living being passes itself on as a new unit. All life, mental
-or bodily, involves Reproduction.&mdash;These are the three terms of the
-process of vitality.</p>
-
-<p>But such a life, considered as merely organic, the life studied in
-Biology, is only a fragment. The truer life is in the genus, not in the
-individual: the consciousness, the sensation which inwardly unifies the
-diversity of organic processes. The universal has become the medium
-in which the Idea exists: it exists no longer in immediacy.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_475" id="Page_475">[Pg 475]</a></span> The mere
-natural life gives place to the life of the Spirit. The life of the
-Spirit has the double form of Cognition and Will:&mdash;the theoretical and
-the practical action of the Idea: or Truth and Goodness. In short, the
-Idea divides into two halves, which yet remain the same at bottom:
-Reason and the World: but yet there is reason in the world. The action
-of the Idea, or its process at this stage, is to bring these two terms
-into connexion, and show their ideal unity. Beginning with Reason, it
-goes on to discover reason in the World. Truth consists in the adequacy
-of object to notion. Such adequacy is the Idea: and an object which
-thus corresponds with its notion is an ideal object. The ideal man is
-the True Man. Truth is the revelation of rationality from the objective
-world: and Cognition is the name for that process. On the other hand,
-Goodness is the realisation of rationality in the objective world:
-and the Will is the name for that process. Truth proceeds from the
-Objectivity: Goodness from the Subjectivity. But truth can only proceed
-(analytically) from the objective world, in so far as it is produced
-(synthetically) by the subjectivity. And, on the other hand, when the
-good is realised in objectivity, it is submitted to the process of
-Cognition.</p>
-
-<p>With the unity of Life and Consciousness, the Absolute Idea, we reach
-the supreme effort of Logic. In Bacon's words, 'the truth of being and
-the truth of knowing is all one' (cf. p. 224). That is the absolute
-condition of comprehending reality: the principle of Absolute Idealism,
-so far apart from its psychological wraith, and yet compelled to
-employ the same language. But after all it is Logic, i. e., only the
-supreme logical condition of the reality of the physical and psychical
-world. And it gains reality at the cost of the disruption of its
-elements: it lets the Is slip from the Is known<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_476" id="Page_476">[Pg 476]</a></span>&mdash;the <i>est</i> from the
-<i>cogitatur</i>&mdash;Being from consciousness. Or, in less mysterious language,
-fundamental philosophy, or Logic, gives place to the concreter system
-of Philosophy&mdash;the Philosophy of the Outward and of the Inward
-actuality,&mdash;of Nature and Mind.</p>
-
-<p>The reader of the <i>Divina Commedia</i> may hardly need to be reminded
-that, at each of the grander changes of scene and grade in his
-pilgrimage, Dante suddenly finds himself without obvious means
-transported into a new region of experience. There are catastrophes
-in the process of development: not unprepared, but summing up, as in
-a flash of insight, the gradual and unperceived process of growth.
-There is birth and death in the spiritual world: and such are moments
-of sudden lapse, abrupt conversion, when the waters of Lethe close
-around, and thereafter all things are new. There are such moments of
-accumulated and abnormal intensity also in the Hegelian philosophy when
-a new cycle of idea suddenly appears. Such are the epochs of change at
-the great crises from Being to Essence, and from Essence to Notion.
-There is a revulsion, a sharp turn of the path which dialectic can
-enforce but cannot smooth away,&mdash;on that path which dialectic indeed,
-as opposed to the old logic of identity, shows not to be a mere smooth
-continuity. All development is by breaks, and yet makes for continuity.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_478" id="Page_478">[Pg 478]</a></span></p>
-
-<p>This is again exemplified in the passage from Logic to Physics. The
-reality which presents itself to the philosopher as Nature is a world
-of reason&mdash;but, as it stands, it only lives as some speechless work
-of art. It is, so to speak, the picture on the wall&mdash;the reflection
-that is cast by the fuller reality of experience. Reason here is
-in the garb of sense-perception. Nature is the silent image&mdash;the
-<i>tableau vivant</i>&mdash;which becomes intelligent, speaking, and real, in
-the observing and compre<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_477" id="Page_477">[Pg 477]</a></span>hending mind. It is the statue of Condillac,
-not yet invested with the minimum of sensibility and consciousness.
-Nature is or shows all that the Idea contained, but contained only
-in possibility, as a logical condition of reality. It shows it in
-reality&mdash;and that is a reality spread through endless times and spaces.
-Its unity, its meaning, its continuity are broken up into fragments.
-Yet as Nature, i. e. in its structural unity, and not in the dispersion
-of things and elements, it is all a unity of development and has a
-life-history written in its organism for intelligence to read and to
-reconstitute, on the assumption that all its accident and irregularity
-is but the inevitable imperfection of reality as given in parts and
-successions.</p>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's
-Philosophy, by William Wallace and G. W. F. Hegel
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROLEGOMENA--STUDY OF HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY ***
-
-***** This file should be named 54992-h.htm or 54992-h.zip *****
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
-        http://www.gutenberg.org/5/4/9/9/54992/
-
-Produced by Produced and Marc D'Hooghe at Free Literature
-(online soon in an extended version, also linking to free
-sources for education worldwide ... MOOC's, educational
-materials,...) Images generously made available by the
-Internet Archive.
-
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will
-be renamed.
-
-Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright
-law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works,
-so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United
-States without permission and without paying copyright
-royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part
-of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
-concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
-and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive
-specific permission. If you do not charge anything for copies of this
-eBook, complying with the rules is very easy. You may use this eBook
-for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports,
-performances and research. They may be modified and printed and given
-away--you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks
-not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the
-trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.
-
-START: FULL LICENSE
-
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
-
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
-Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
-Project Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
-www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-
-1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
-(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
-destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your
-possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
-Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound
-by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the
-person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph
-1.E.8.
-
-1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
-paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this
-agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
-
-1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the
-Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection
-of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual
-works in the collection are in the public domain in the United
-States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the
-United States and you are located in the United States, we do not
-claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing,
-displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as
-all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope
-that you will support the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting
-free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm
-works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the
-Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with the work. You can easily
-comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the
-same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg-tm License when
-you share it without charge with others.
-
-1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
-what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are
-in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States,
-check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this
-agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing,
-distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any
-other Project Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no
-representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any
-country outside the United States.
-
-1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
-
-1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other
-immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear
-prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work
-on which the phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the
-phrase "Project Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed,
-performed, viewed, copied or distributed:
-
-  This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-  most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
-  restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
-  under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
-  eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
-  United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you
-  are located before using this ebook.
-
-1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is
-derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not
-contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the
-copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in
-the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are
-redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase "Project
-Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply
-either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or
-obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg-tm
-trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any
-additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms
-will be linked to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works
-posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the
-beginning of this work.
-
-1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
-
-1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm License.
-
-1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including
-any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access
-to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format
-other than "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official
-version posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site
-(www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense
-to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means
-of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original "Plain
-Vanilla ASCII" or other form. Any alternate format must include the
-full Project Gutenberg-tm License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
-
-1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-provided that
-
-* You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
-  the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
-  you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed
-  to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he has
-  agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project
-  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid
-  within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are
-  legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty
-  payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project
-  Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in
-  Section 4, "Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg
-  Literary Archive Foundation."
-
-* You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
-  you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
-  does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-  License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all
-  copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue
-  all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg-tm
-  works.
-
-* You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of
-  any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
-  electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of
-  receipt of the work.
-
-* You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
-  distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work or group of works on different terms than
-are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing
-from both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and The
-Project Gutenberg Trademark LLC, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm
-trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
-
-1.F.
-
-1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
-works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project
-Gutenberg-tm collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may
-contain "Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate
-or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
-intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or
-other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or
-cannot be read by your equipment.
-
-1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
-of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
-fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
-DAMAGE.
-
-1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
-written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium
-with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you
-with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in
-lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person
-or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second
-opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If
-the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing
-without further opportunities to fix the problem.
-
-1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO
-OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
-LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
-
-1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of
-damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement
-violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the
-agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or
-limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or
-unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the
-remaining provisions.
-
-1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in
-accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the
-production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses,
-including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of
-the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this
-or any Project Gutenberg-tm work, (b) alteration, modification, or
-additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any
-Defect you cause.
-
-Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of
-computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It
-exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations
-from people in all walks of life.
-
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
-remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future
-generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see
-Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at
-www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-
-Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
-
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
-Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
-number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by
-U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
-
-The Foundation's principal office is in Fairbanks, Alaska, with the
-mailing address: PO Box 750175, Fairbanks, AK 99775, but its
-volunteers and employees are scattered throughout numerous
-locations. Its business office is located at 809 North 1500 West, Salt
-Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email contact links and up to
-date contact information can be found at the Foundation's web site and
-official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
-
-For additional contact information:
-
-    Dr. Gregory B. Newby
-    Chief Executive and Director
-    gbnewby@pglaf.org
-
-Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
-array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
-status with the IRS.
-
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
-States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
-with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND
-DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular
-state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
-approach us with offers to donate.
-
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
-outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
-
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
-methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To
-donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.
-
-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm concept of a library of electronic works that could be
-freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and
-distributed Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of
-volunteer support.
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
-editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in
-the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not
-necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper
-edition.
-
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search
-facility: www.gutenberg.org
-
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
-</body>
-</html>
diff --git a/old/54992-h/images/cover.jpg b/old/54992-h/images/cover.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 1926263..0000000
--- a/old/54992-h/images/cover.jpg
+++ /dev/null