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. [3]

WHY HEGEL IS HARD TO UNDERSTAND

CHAPTER II. [14]

WHY TRANSLATE HEGEL?

CHAPTER III. [21]

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY AND HEGEL

CHAPTER IV. [30]

HEGEL AND THEOLOGY

CHAPTER V. [37]

PSEUDO-IDEALISM: JACOBI

CHAPTER VI. [57]

THE SCIENCES AND PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER VII. [72]

ANTICIPATORY SKETCH OF THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER VIII. [88]

THE SCEPTICAL DOUBT: HUME

CHAPTER IX. [98]

THE ATTEMPT AT A CRITICAL SOLUTION: KANT

CHAPTER X. [112]

THE CRITICAL SOLUTION (continued): KANT

CHAPTER XI. [124]

SYNTHESIS AND RECONSTRUCTION: FICHTE

CHAPTER XII. [136]

THE BEGINNINGS OF SCHELLING

CHAPTER XIII. [147]

THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND IDEALISM

CHAPTER XIV. [163]

TRANSITION TO HEGEL

BOOK II.

IN THE PORCHES OF PHILOSOPHY.

CHAPTER XV.[175]

THE TWO AGES OF REASON

CHAPTER XVI. [189]

THE NEW IDEALISM

CHAPTER XVII. [202]

METHODS, ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL

CHAPTER XVIII. [230]

THE RANGE OF PERSONALITY

CHAPTER XIX. [261]

GENESIS IN MENTAL LIFE

CHAPTER XX. [277]

GENERAL LAW OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

CHAPTER XXI. [292]

ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE: AND THE ORDINARY LOGIC

CHAPTER XXII. [307]

FROM SENSE TO THOUGHT

CHAPTER XXIII. [323]

FIGURATE OR REPRESENTATIVE THOUGHT

CHAPTER XXIV. [335]

FROM SUBSTANCE TO SUBJECT

CHAPTER XXV. [348]

REASON AND THE DIALECTIC OF UNDERSTANDING

BOOK III.

LOGICAL OUTLINES.

CHAPTER XXVI. [365]

THOUGHT PURE AND ENTIRE

CHAPTER XXVII. [383]

ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE: OR THE CATEGORIES

CHAPTER XXVIII. [394]

THE THREE PARTS OF LOGIC

CHAPTER XXIX. [404]

THE SEARCH FOR A FIRST PRINCIPLE

CHAPTER XXX. [415]

THE LOGIC OF DESCRIPTION: NATURAL REALISM: BEING

CHAPTER XXXI. [440]

THE LOGIC OF EXPLANATION AND REALISTIC METAPHYSICS:

ESSENCE

CHAPTER XXXII. [459]

THE LOGIC OF COMPREHENSION AND IDEALISM: THE NOTION

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.

[1] Hegel's Leben (Rosenkranz), p. 555.

[2] 'Das Bekannte überhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt.' Phenomenologie des Geistes, p. 24.

[3] Vermischte Schriften, vol. ii. p. 474.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[2] Hegel's Briefe, ii. 349.

[3] J. Volkelt, Vorträge zur Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart (München 1892): F. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (Berlin 1892).

[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].'

[1] Vermischte Schriften, vol. ii. p. 87.

[2] De Augm. Scient. iii. 5.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.).

[3] Werke, x. I, p. 131.

[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].'

[1] Aus Schellings Leben (Plitt.), ii. 161.

[2] Hegel's Briefe, ii. 377.

[3] Phenomenologie des Geistes, p. 9.

[4] Cf. Notes and Illustrations in vol. ii. 396, and chapter iii. of the Logic.

[5] Jacobi's Werke, v. 79, III, 115, 417.

[6] Ibid., i. 178.

[7] Jacobi's Werke, iv. i. Abth. p. 55 seqq.

[8] Jacobi's Werke, iv. i, p. xxi.

[9] Jacobi's Briefwechsel, i. 330.

[10] Jacobi's Werke, iii. 53.

[11] Jacobi's Briefwechsel, ii. 468.

[12] Hegel's Werke, i. 15.

[13] Hegel's Vermischte Schriften, i. 50.

[14] Compare pages 121-142 of the Logic.

[15] Phenomenologie des Geistes, p. 54 (Werke, ii).

[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.

[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.'

[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.

[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.)

[4] J. Grote, Exploratio Philosophica.

[5] Cf. vol. ii. p. 4.

[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.