Chapter 10

[1]The legal use of the distinction between 'real' and 'personal' is only partly 'logical,' and largely retains traces of the larger logic of life and history. Yet, roughly speaking, personal property is what we can, so to speak, carry on our backs or in our pockets.

[2]See Spinoza,Cogitata Metaph., Pars II. cap. 8: 'Nec fugit nos vocabulum (Personalitatisscilicet) quod theologi passim usurpant ad rem explicandam: verum quamvis vocabulum non ignoremus eius tamen significationem ignoramus: quamvis constanter credamus, in visione Dei beatissima Deum hoc suis revelaturum.' For Hegel, it may be noted, Person, so far as he uses the term at all, bears its restricted legal and juridical sense. A person is a free intelligence, which realises that independence by appropriating an external thing as its sign and property. It probably belongs therefore to a world in which people count rather by what theyhavethan by what theyare; the world of law where rights and duties tend to oppose each other. This is not the highest kind of world for human beings.

[3]This one may call the Platonic ideal of the State, where Equity rules supreme in the incarnate spirit of wisdom,—a guide adapting its measures to circumstances, not tied down to the inflexible letter of one law in an incoherent and imperfect code. See thePoliticus, p. 294;Phaedrus,p. 275; and compare Aristotle's Wise man whose conduct is not κατὰ λόγον but μετὰ λόγου.

[4]See e. g.Encyclopaedia, § 475.

[5]See his 'Dreams of a Spirit-seer, illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics.' (Werke,ed. Ros. und Schub. Bd. VII. p. 38 sqq.)

[6]It is perilous and misleading (said the ancient Graiae, who dwell on the way to the Hesperides of philosophy) to interpret an old system by the language of modern (and especially German) idealism. It is much worse, replied Perseus, not to interpret it at all, but to repeat its magicipsissima verba,—carefully Latinised, as if they belonged to a cabinet of fossils.

[7]Encyclopaedia, §§ 387, 389.

[8]The above is an attempt to give a very condensed synopsis of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (Encyclopaedia).

[9]See especially in theTheodicee,part I. § 43 seqq. Cf. Nouv. Ess. II. § 9,incline sans necessiter:I. § 13,La nécessité ne doit pas être confondue avec la détermination.

[10]Microcosmus, Book IX. chap. 4.

[11]See the well-known passage inWilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,Book II. chap. a.

Aristotle, who saw into the nature of abstract entities, remarked that the mind was nothing before it exercised itself[1]. The mind,—and the same will turn out true of many things else where it is at first unsurmised,—is not a fixed thing, a sort of exceedingly refined substance, which we can lay hold of without further trouble. It is what it has become, or what it makes itself to be. This point, that 'To be' = 'To have become,' or rather to have made itself, is an axiom never to be lost sight of in dealing with the mind. It is easy to talk of and about conscience and freewill, as if these were existing things in a sort of mental space, as hard to miss or mistake as a stone and an orange, or as if they were palpable organs of mind, as separately observable as the eye or ear. One asks if the will is free or not, as glibly as one might ask whether an orange is sweet; and the answer can be given with equal ease, affirmatively or negatively, in both cases. Everything in these cases depends on whether the will has made itself free or not, whether indeed we are speaking of the will at all, and on what we mean by freedom. To ask the question in an abstract way, taking no account of circumstances, is one of thosetemptations which lead the intellect astray and produce only confusion and wordy war—as a good deal of so-called popular metaphysics has done. The mind and its phenomena, as they are called, cannot be dissected with the same calmness of analysis as other substances which adapt themselves to the scalpel: nor is dissection after all more than a part of the scientific process, subject to the control of the synthesis in physiology.

The ordinary metaphysician makes his own task easy and his thoughtful reader's a burden, by plunging too lightlyin medias res.He wants patience—often, perhaps, because he thinks too much of his reader's impatience at analysis—to unravel the tangled mass which human experience, when first looked at, presents. He is apt to catch at any end which promises to effect a temporary clearance. True philosophy, on the contrary, must show that it has got hold of what it means to discuss: it has to construct its subject-matter: and it constructs it by tracing every step and movement in its construction shown in actual history. The mind is what it has been made and has made itself; and to see what it is we must consider it not as an Alpha and Omega of research, as popular conception and language tend to represent it, but in the stages constituting its process, in the fluidity of its development, in the elements out of which it results. We must penetrate the apparent fixity and simplicity under which it comes forward, and see through it into the process which bears it into being. For, otherwise, the object of our investigation is taken, as if it were the most unmistakable thing of sense and fancy,—as if everybody were agreed that this and no other were the point in question.

But in this matter of stability and the reverse, thereis a broad distinction between the natural and the spiritual world. In Nature every step in the organisation, by which the Cosmos is developed, has an independent existence of its own: and the lowest formation confronts the highest, each standing by itself beside the other. Matter and motion, for example, are not merely found as subordinate elements entering into the making of a plant or an animal. They have a free existence of their own: and the free existence of matter in motion is seen in the shape of the planetary system. So, too, chemical or electrical phenomena can be observed by themselves, operating in spheres where they are untrammeled by the influence of biological conditions. It seems, at least at first sight, to be different in the case of mind. There the specific types or several stages in the integrating process of mental development seem to have no substantive existence in the earlier part of the range, and to appear only as states or factors entering into, and merged in, the higher grades of development. This causes a peculiar difficulty in the study of mind. We cannot seize a formation in an independent shape of its own: we must trace it in the growth of the whole. Mental fusion and coalescence of elements is peculiarly close, and hardly leaves any traces of its constituent factors[2].Sensation, for instance, in its purity, as mere sensation, is apparently something which we can never study in isolation. All the sensation which we can, in the strictly psychological (as opposed to the physiological) mode of study, examine, i. e. which we can reproduce in ourselves, is more than mere sensation: it includes elements of thought, and probably of desire and will. This, of course, makes the difficulties of so-called introspection: difficulties so great and real that they have provoked in natural reaction a set against introspection altogether, and the adoption of the external observation (physiological or so-called psycho-physical) employed in the 'objective' sciences. And hence when we accept the name, such as intellect, conscience, will, &c., as if it expressed something specially existent in a detached shape of its own, we make an assumption which it is impossible to justify. We are reckoning with paper-money which belongs to no recognised currency, and may be stamped as the dealer wills. The consequence is that the thing with which we begin our examination is an opaque point,—a mereterminus a quo, from which we start on our journey of explication, leaving theterminusitself behind us unexplained.

The constituents of mind do not lie side by side tranquilly co-existent, like the sheep beside the herbage on which it browses. Their existence is maintained in an inward movement, by which, while they differentiate themselves, they still keep up an identity. In our investigations we cannot begin with what is to be defined. The botanist, if he is to give us a science of the plant, must begin with something whose indwelling aim it is to be itself and to realise its own possibility.He must begin with what is not the plant, and end with what is; begin, let us say, with the germ which has the tendency to pass into the plant. The speculative science of biology begins with a cell, and builds these cells up into the tissues and structures out of which vegetables and animals are constituted. The object of the science appears as the result of the scientific process: or,a science is the ideal construction of its object. As in these cases, so in the case of thought. We must see it grow up from its simplest element, from the bare point of being, the mere speck of being which, if actually no better than nothing, is yet a germ which in the air of thought will grow and spread; and see it appear as a result due to the ingrowing and outgrowing union of many elements, none of which satisfies by itself, but leads onward from abstractions to the meeting of abstractions in what is more and more concrete. The will and conscience, understanding and reason, of man are not matter-of-fact units to be picked up and examined. You must, first of all, make sure what you have in hand: and to be sure of that is to see that the mind is the necessary outcome of a course of development. The mind is not an immediatedatum,with nothing behind it, coming upon the field of mental vision with a divinely-bestowed array of faculties; but a mediated unity, i. e. a unity which has grown up through a complex interaction of forces, and which lives in differences through comprehending and reconciling antagonisms.

If the mind be not thus exhibited in its process, in the sum and context of its relations, we may mean what we like with each mental object that comes under our observation: but with as much right another observer may mean something else. We may, of course, define as we please: we may build up successive definitions into a consistent total: but such asuccessful arrangement is not a real science. Unless we show how this special form of mind is constituted, we are dealing with abstractions, with names which we may analyse, but which remain as they were whenouranalysis is over, and which seem like unsubstantial ghosts defying our coarse engines of dissection. They are not destroyed: like immaterial and aery beings they elude the sword which smites them, and part but to re-unite. The name, and the conception bodied forth in it, is indeed stagnant, and will to all appearance become the ready prey of analysis: but there is something behind this materialised and solidified conception, this worn-out counter or sign, which mere analysis cannot even reach. And that underlying nature is a process or movement, a meeting of elements, which it is the business of philosophy to unfold. The analyst in this case has dealt with ideas as if they were a finer sort of material product, a fixed and assailable point: and this is perhaps the character of the generalised images, which take the place of thoughts in our customary habits of mind. But ideas, when they have real force and life, are not hard and solid, but, as it were, fluid and transparent, and can easily escape the divisions and lines which the analytical intellect would impose. Perhaps some may think that it is unwise to fight with ghosts like these, and that the best plan would be to disregard this war of words altogether. But, on the other hand, it may be urged that such unsubstantial forms have a decided reality in life: that men will talk of them and conjure by their means, with or without intelligence; and that the best course is to understand them. It will then be seen that it is our proper work as philosophers to watch the process, by which the spiritual unity divides and yet retains its divided members in unity.Even in the first steps we take to get a real hold of an object we see this. To understand it, we must deprive it of its seeming independence. Every individual object is declared by the logician to be the meeting of two currents, the coincidence of two movements. It concentrates into an undecompounded unit,—at least such it appears to representative or material thought,—two elements, each of which it is in turn identifiable with. The one of these elements has been called the self-same (or identity), the universal, the genus, the whole: while the second is called the difference, the particular, the part. And by these two points of reference it is fixed,—by two points which are for the moment accepted as stationary. What has thus been stated in the technical language of Logic is often repeated in the scientific parlance of the day, but with more materialised conceptions and in more concrete cases. The dynamic theory of matter represents it as a unity of attraction and repulsion. A distinguished Darwinian remarks that 'all the various forms of organisms are the necessary products of the unconscious action and reaction between the two properties of adaptability and heredity, reducible as these are to the functions of nutrition and reproduction[3]. The terms 'action and reaction' are hardly sufficient, it may be, to express the sort of unity which is called for: but the statement at least shows the reduction of an actual fact to the interaction of two forces, the meeting of two currents. The one of these is the power of the kind, or universal, which tends to keep things always the same: the other the power of localised circumstances and particular conditions, which tends to render things more and more diversified. The one may be called a centripetal, the other a centrifugal force. If the onebe synthetic, the other is analytic. But such names are of little value, save for temporary distinction, and must never be treated as permanent differences which explain themselves. The centre is relative, and so is the totality.

Thus it is that the so-called Evolutionist explains the origin of natural kinds. They are what they severally are by reason of a process, a struggle, by alliances and divisions, by re-unions and selections. They are not independent of the inorganic world around them: it has entered into their blood and structure, and made them what they are. To understand them we must learn all we can of the simpler and earlier forms, which have left traces in their structure: traces which, without the existence of such more primitive forms, we might have misunderstood, or have passed by unperceived. And, again, we learn that our hard and fast distinctions are barely justified by Nature. There, kind in its extreme examples seems to run into kind, and we do not find the logically-exact type accurately embodied anywhere. Our classifications into genera and species turn out to be in the first instance prompted by a practical need to embrace the variety in a simple shape. But though perfectly valid, so far as we use them for such ends, they tend to lead us false, if we press them too far.

And when we have seen so much, we may learn the further lesson that the variety of organisation, animal and vegetable, is only the exhibition in an endless detail by single pictures, more or less complementary, more or less inclusive of each other, of that one vital organisation in principle and construction which we could not otherwise have had presented to us. In a million lessons from the vast ranges of contemporary and of extinct life there is impressed upon the biological observer the idea of that system of life-function and life-structurewhich is the goal of biological science. The interest in the mere variety whether of modern or of primeval forms of life is as such merely historical; its truer use is to enable the scientific imagination to rise above local or temporary limitations. And thus in the end the records and guesses of evolution in time and place serve to build up a theory of the timeless universal nature of life and organisation.

And what is true of Nature is equally true of the Mind. For these two, as we have already seen, are not isolable from each other. Neither the mind nor the so-called external world are either of them self-subsistent existences, issuing at once and ready-made out of nothing. The mind does not come forth, either equipped or un-equipped, to conquer the world: the world is not a prey prepared for the spider, waiting for the mind to comprehend and appropriate it. The mind and the world, the so-called 'subject' and so-called 'object,' are equally the results of a process: and it is only when we isolate the terminal aspects of that process, and in the practical business of life forget the higher theoretical point of view, that we lose sight of their origin, and have two worlds facing each other. As the one side or aspect of the process gathers feature and form, so does the other. As the depth and intensity of the intellect increases, the limits of the external world extend also. For the psychical life is just the power which maintains a continuing correlation between the body and its environment, and between the various elements in that environment. It is the unity in which that correlation lives and is aware of itself. It is the subject-object, which sets one element against another, and gives it quasi-independence. The mind of the savage is exactly measured by the world he has around him. The dull, almost animal, sensation andfeeling, which is what we may call his mental action, is just the obverse of the narrow circumference that girdles his external world. The beauty and interest of the grander phenomena of terrestrial nature, and of the celestial movements, are ideally non-existent for a being, whose whole soul is swallowed up in the craving for food, the fear of attack, and the lower enjoyments of sense. In the course of history we can see the intellect growing deeper and broader, and the limits of the world recede simultaneously with the advance of the mind. This process or movement of culture takes place in the sequence of generations, and in the variety of races and civilisations spread over the face of the world. But here too, the higher science, not resting in the merely historical inquiry, takes no interest in the medium of time, and merely uses it to supply material for the rational sequence of ideas[4].

The objective world of knowledge is really at one with the subjective world: they spring from a common source, what Kant called the 'original synthetic unity of apperception.' The distinction between them flows from abstraction, from failure to keep in view the whole round of life and experience. The subjective world—the mind of man—is really constituted by the same force as the objective world of nature: the latter has been translated from the world of extension, with its externality of parts in time and space, into an inner world of thought where unity, the fusion or coalescence of all types and forms, is the leading feature. The difficulty of passing from the world of being to the world of thoughts, from notion to thing, from subject to object, from Ego to Non-ego, is a difficulty which men have unduly allowed to grow upon them. It grows by talking of and analysingmerebeing,merethought,merenotion, ormerething. And it will be dispelled when it is seen that there is nomerebeing, and nomerethought: that these two halves of the unity of experience—the unity we divide and the division we unify in every judgment we make—are continually leaning out of themselves, each towards the other. But men, beginning as they must from themselves, and failing to revise and correct their stand-point till it became anἀρχὴ ἀνυπόθετος,argued from a belief that the individual mind was a fixed and absolute centre, from which the universe had to be evaluated. In Hegel's words, they made man and not God the object of their philosophy[5]. So that Kant really showed the outcome of a system which acted on the hypothesis that man in his individual capacity was all in all. Hegel, on his own showing, came to prove that the real scope of philosophy was God;—that the Absolute is the 'original synthetic unity' from which the external world and the Ego have issued by differentiation, and in which they return to unity.

If this be so, then there is behind the external world and behind the mind an organism of pure types or forms of thought,—an organism which presents itself, in a long array of fragments, to the senses in the world of nature, where all things lie outside of one another, and which then is, as it were, reflected back into itself so as to constitute the mind, or spiritual world, where all parts tend to coalesce in a more than organic unity. The deepest craving of thought, and the fundamental problem of philosophy, will accordingly be to discover the nature and law of that totality or primeval unity,—the totality which we see appearing in the double aspect of nature and mind, and which we first become acquainted with as it is manifested in this state ofdis-union. To satisfy this want is what the Logic of Hegel seeks. It lays bare the kingdom of those potent shades,—the phases of the Idea—which embodies itself more concretely in the external world of body, and the inward world of mind. The psychological or individualist conditions, which even in the Kantian criticism sometimes seem to set up mind as an entity parallel to the objects of nature, and antithetic to nature as a whole, have fallen away. Reason has to be taken in the whole of its actualisation as a world of reason, not in its bare possibility, not in the narrow ground of an individual's level of development, but in the realised formations of reasonable knowledge and action, as shown in Art and Life, Science and Religion. In this way we come to a reason which might be in us or in the world, but which, being to a certain extent different from either, was the focus of two orders of manifestations.

To ascertain that ultimate basis of the world and mind was the chief thing philosophy had to see to. But in order to do this, a good deal of preliminary work was necessary. The work of Logic, as understood by Hegel, involves a stand-point which is not that of every-day life or reflection on experience. It presupposes the whole process from the provisional starting-point which seems at first sight simplest and universally acceptable, upwards to the unhypothetical principle which—though at a long distance—it involves and leads up to, or presupposes. We all know Aristotle's dictum ᾽Εν τοῐς αὶσθητοῐς τὰ νοητά ἐστιν:Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu.The fact of sense and feelingisthe fact of experience: or rather the fact and reality of experience is the underlying truth which the expression of it in terms of sense and perception inadequately interprets. Even in the principles of sensation there is judgment, thought, reasoning: but it needs eliciting, re-statement,opening up, and explanation. The Phenomenology of Mind is, as Hegel himself has said, his voyage of discovery. It traces the path, and justifies the work of traversing it, from the ill-founded and imperfect certainties of sense and common-sense, up through various scientific, moral, and religious modes of interpreting experience and expressing its net sum of reality, till it culminates in the stand-point of 'pure thought,' of supreme or 'absolute' consciousness. It is certainly not a history of the individual mind: and equally little is it a history of the process of the intellectual development of the race. In a way it mixes up both. For its main interest is not on the purely historical side. It indulges in bold transitions, in sudden changes of scene from ancient Greece and Rome to modern Germany, from public facts and phases of national life to works of fiction (compare its use of Goethe'sFaustand his version ofRameau's Nephew).It lingers—for historical accuracy and proportion unduly—over the period of Kant and Fichte, and reads Seneca by the light of theSorrows of Werther.For its aim is to gather from the inspection of all ways in which men have attempted to reach reality the indication of their several content of truth, and of the several defects from it, so as to show the one necessary path on which even all their errors converge and which they serve to set out in clearer light.

Hegel's philosophy is undoubtedly the outcome of a vast amount of historical experience, particularly in the ancient world, and implies a somewhat exhaustive study of the products of art, science, politics, and religion. By experience he was led to his philosophy, not by what is calleda priorireasoning. It is curious indeed to observe the prevalent delusion that German philosophy is the 'highprioriroad,'—to hear its profundity admired, but its audacity and neglect of obviousfacts deplored. The fact is that without experience neither Hegel nor anybody else will come to anything. But, on the other hand, experience is in one sense only the yet undeciphered mass of feeling and reality, the yet unexpounded psychical content of his life; or, taken in another acceptation, it is only a form which in one man's case means a certain power of vision, and in another a different degree. One man sees the idea which explains and unifies experience as actuality: to the other man it is only a subjective notion. And even when it is seen, there are differences in the subsequent development. One man sees it, asserts it on all hands, and then closes. Another sees it, and asks if this is all, or if it is only part of a system. An appeal to 'my experience' is very much like an appeal to 'my sentiments' or 'my feelings': it may prove as much or as little as can be imagined: in other words, it can prove nothing. The same is true of the appeal to consciousness, that oracle on whose dicta it has sometimes been proposed to found a system of philosophy. By that name seems meant the deliverances of some primal and unerring nucleus of mind, some real and central self, whose voice can be clearly distinguished from the mere divergent cries of self-interest and casual opinion. That such discernment is possible no philosophy will seek to deny: but it is a discernment which involves comparison, examination, and reasoning. And in that case the appeal to consciousness is the exhortation to clear and deliberate thinking. While, on another side, it hints that philosophy does not—in the end—deal with mere abstractions, but with the real concrete life of mind. And if an appeal to other people's experience is meant, that is only an argument from authority. What other people experience is their business, not mine. Experiencemeansa great deal for which it isnot the right name: and to give an explanation of what it is, and what it does, would render a great service to English methodologists.

There are, however, two modes in which these studies to discover the truth may appear. In the one case they are reproduced in all their fragmentary and patch-work character. They are supposed to possess a value of their own, and are enunciated with all the detail of historic incident. The common-place books of a man are, as it were, published to instruct the world and give some hint of the extent of his reading. But, in the other case, the scaffolding of incident and externality may be removed. The single facts, which gave the persuasion of the idea, are dismissed, as interesting only for the individual student on his way to truth: or, if the historical vehicle of truth be retained at all, it is translated into another and intellectual medium. Such a history, the quintessence of extensive and deep research, is presented in the Phenomenology. The names of persons and places have faded from the record, as if they had been written in evanescent inks,—dates are wanting,—individualities and their biographies yield up their place to universal and timeless principles. Such typical forms are the concentrated essence of endless histories. They remind one of the descriptions which Plato in his Republic gives of the several forms of temporal government. Or, to take a modern instance, the Hegelian panorama of thought which presents only the universal evolution of thought,—that evolution in which the whole mind of the world takes the place of all his children, whether they belong to the common level, or stand amongst representative heroes,—may be paralleled to English readers by Browning's poem ofSordello.There can be no question that such a method is exposed to criticism, and likely to excitemisconception. If it tend to give artistic completeness to the work, it also tantalises the outsider who has a desire to reach his familiar standing-ground. He wishes a background of time and space, where the forms of the abstract ideas may be embodied to his mind's eye. In most ages, and with good ground, the world has been sceptical, when it perceived no reference to authorities, no foot-notes, no details of experiments made: nor is it better disposed to accept provisorily, and find, as the process goes on, that it verifies itself to intelligence.

[1]De Anima,iii. 4.

[2]A philological parallel may make this clearer. 'The Indo-German,' says Misteli(Typen des Sprachbaues,p. 363), 'embraces or condenses several categories in a single idea in a way which though less logical is more fruitful; for in this way he procures graspable totals with which he can work further, and not patch-work which would crumble away in his hands. OurHeincludes four grammatical categories, which work not separately, but as a whole:—third person, masculine gender, singular, nominative; whereas the Magyaröis the vehicle only of one category, the third person, which is either determined as singular by the context, or as plural by the addition ofk: gender in these languages does not exist: and as subject againöis specially interpreted from the context. The unification of the four categories makesHean individual and a word; the generality and isolation of one category makesöan abstract and a stem.'

[3]Häckel,Natürliche Schöpfungs-Geschichte, p. 157.

[4]See above, pp.155,198.

[5]Hegel'sWerke,vol. i. p. 15.

'The order and concatenation of ideas,' says Spinoza, 'is the same as the order and concatenation of things[1].' The objective world at least of acts and institutions develops parallel with the growth and system of men's ideas. In the tangled skein which human life and reality present to the observer, the only promising clue is to be found in the process by which in history the past throws light on the present and gets light in return. There in the stream of time and in the expanses of space the condensed results, the hard knots, which present life offers for explanation, are broken up into a vast number of problems, each presenting a different aspect, and one helping towards a fairer and clearer appreciation of another.

The present medium of general intelligence and theory in which we live embraces in a way the results of all that has preceded it, of all the steps of culture through which the world has risen. But in this body of intellectual beliefs and ideas with which our single soul is clad,—in this common soil of thought,—the several contributions of the past have been half or even wholly obliterated, and are only the shadows of their old selves. What in a former day was a question of all-engrossing interest has left but a trace: the completeand detailed formations of ancient thought have lost their distinctness of outline, and have shrunk into mere shadings in the contour of our intellectual world. Questions, from which the ancient philosophers could never shake themselves loose, are now only a barely perceptiblenuancein the complex questions of the present day. Discussions about the bearings of the 'one' and the 'many,' puzzles like those of Zeno, and the casuistry of statesmanship such as is found in the Politics of Aristotle, have for most people little else than an antiquarian interest. We scarcely detect the faint traces they have left in the 'burning questions' of our own age. We are too ready to forget that the past is never altogether annihilated, and that every step, however slight it may seem, which has once been taken in the movement of intellect, must be traversed again in order to understand the constitution of our present intellectual world. To outward appearance the life and work of past generations have so completely lost their organic nature, with its unified and vital variety, that in their present phase they have turned into hard and opaque atoms of thought. The living forces of growth, as geologists tell us, which pulsed through the vegetables of one period are suspended and put in abeyance: and these vegetables turn into what we call the inorganic and inanimate strata of the earth. Similarly, when all vitality has been quenched or rendered torpid in the structures of thought, they sink into the material from which individuals draw their means of intellectual support. This inorganic material of thought stands to the mind, almost in the same way as the earth and its products stand to the body of a man. If the one is our material, the other is our spiritualsubstance. In the one our mind, as in the other our body, lives, moves, and has its being.

But in each case besides the practical need, which bids us consume the substance as dead matter, and apply it to use, there is the theoretical bent which seeks to reproduce ideally the past as a living and fully developed organism. 'This past,' says Hegel, 'is traversed by the individual, in the same way as one who begins to study a more advanced science repeats the preliminary lessons with which he had long been acquainted, in order to bring their information once more before his mind. He recalls them: but his interest and study are devoted to other things. In the same way the individual must go through all that is contained in the several stages in the growth of the universal mind: but all the while he feels that they are forms of which the mind has divested itself,—that they are steps on a road which has been long ago completed and levelled. Thus, points of learning, which in former times tasked the mature intellects of men, are now reduced to the level of exercises, lessons, and even games of boyhood: and in the progress of the schoolroom we may recognise the course of the education of the world, drawn, as it were, in shadowy outline[2].'

The scope of historical investigation therefore is this. It shows how every shading in the present world of thought, which makes our spiritual environment, has been once living and actual with an independent being of its own. But it also reveals the presence of shades and elements in the present which if our eyes had looked on the present alone we should scarcely have suspected: and it thus enables us to interpolate stages in development of which the result preserves only rudimentary traces. And, when carried out in a philosophical spirit, it shows further, that in those formations, which are produced in each period of the structuraldevelopment of reason, the universe of thought, or the Idea, is always whole and complete, but characterised in some special mode which for that period seems absolute and final. Each form or 'dimension' of thought, in which the totality is grasped and unified, is therefore not so simple or elementary as it may seem to casual observers regarding only the simplicity of language: it is a total, embracing more or less of simpler elements, each of which was once an inferior total, though in this larger sphere they are reduced to unity. Thus each term or period in the process is really an individualised whole, with a complex interconnexion and contrast included in it: it isconcrete.No single word or phrase explains it: yet it is one totality,—a rounded life, from which its several spheres of life must be explained. But when that period is passing away, the form of its idea is separated, and retained, apart from the life and mass of the elements which constituted it a real totality; and then the mere shading or shell, with only part of its context of thought, is leftabstract.When that time has come, a special form, a whole act in the drama, of humanity has been transformed into an empty husk, and is only a name.

The sensuous reality of life, as it is limited in space and time, and made palpable in matter and motion, is however the earliest cradle of humanity. The environment of sense is prior in the order of time to the environment of thought. Who, it may be asked, first wrought their way out of that atmosphere of sense into an ether of pure thought? Who first saw that in sense there was yet present something more than sensation,—that the deliverances of sense-perception rest upon and involve relations, ties, distinctions, which contradict its self-confidence and carry us beyond its simple indications?. Who laid the first foundations of that worldof reason in which the civilised nations of the modern period live and move? The answer is, the Greek philosophers: and in the first place the philosophers of Elea. For Hegel the history of thought begins with Greece. All that preceded the beginnings of Greek speculation, and most that lies outside it, has only a secondary interest for the culture of the West.

But 'many heroes lived before the days of Agamemnon,' The records of culture no longer begin with Greece. Even in Hegel's own day, voices, like those of the poet Rückert (in his 'habilitation'-exercise), were heard declaring that the true fountain of European thought, the real philosophy, was to be sought in the remoter East. Since the time of Hegel, the study of primitive life, and of the rise of primitive ideas in morals and religion, has enabled us to some extent to trace the early gropings of barbarian fancy and reason. The comparative study of languages has, on the other hand, partly revealed the contrivances by which human reason has risen from one grade of consciousness to another. The sciences of language and of primitive culture have revealed new depths in the development of thought, where thought is still enveloped in nature and sense and symbols,—depths which were scarcely dreamed of in the earlier part of the present century. Here and there, investigators have even supposed that they had found the cradle of some elements in art, religion, and society, or, it may be, of humanity itself.

These researches have accomplished much, and they promise to accomplish more. They help us perhaps to take a juster view of the early Greek thinkers, and show how much they still laboured under conditions of thought and speech from which their struggles have partly freed us. But for the present, and with certainexplanations to be given later, it may still be said that the birthday of our modern world is the moment when the Greek sages began to construe the facts of the universe. Before their time the world lay, as it were, in a dream-life. Unconsciously in the womb of time the spirit of the world was growing,—its faculties forming in secresy and silence,—until the day of birth when the preparations were completed, and the young spirit drew its first breath in the air of thought. A new and to us all-important epoch in the history of thought begins with the Greeks: and the utterances of Parmenides mark the first hard, and still somewhat material, outlines of the spiritual world in which we live. Other nations of an older day had gathered the materials: in their languages, customs, religions, &c., there was an unconscious deposit of reason. It was reserved for the Greeks to recognise that reason: and thus in them reason became conscious.

For us, then, it was the Greek philosophers who distinctly drew the distinction between sense and thought, and who first translated the actual forms of our natural life into their abbreviated equivalents in terms of logic. The struggle to carry through this transition, this elevation into pure thought, is what gives the dramatic interest to the Dialogues of Plato and keeps the sympathy of his readers always fresh. Socrates, we are told, first taught men to seek a general definition: not to be content with having—like Pythagoreans—their meaning wrapped up inseparably in psychical images and quasi-material symbols. He taught them to refer word to fellow word, to elicit the underlying idea by the collision and comparison of instances, to get at the 'content' which was identical in all the multiplicity of forms. He taught them, in—brief, to think: and Plato carried out widely and deeplythe lesson. The endeavour to create an ideal world, which, at its very creation, seems often to be transformed into a refined and attenuated copy of the sense-world, meets us in almost every page of his Dialogues. In Aristotle this effort, with its concomitant tendency to give 'sensible' form to the ideal, is so far over and past; and some sort of intellectual world, perhaps narrow and inadequate, is reached,—the logical scheme in which immediate experience was expressed and codified. What these thinkers began, succeeding ages have inherited and promoted.

In the environment of reason, therefore, which encompasses the consciousness of our age, are contained under a generalised form and with elimination of all the particular circumstances, the results won in the development of mind and morals. These results now constitute the familiar joints and supports in the framework of ordinary thought: around and upon them cluster our beliefs and imaginations. During each epoch of history, the consciousness of the world, at first by the mouth of its great men, its illustrious statesmen, artists, and philosophers, has explicitly recognised, and translated into terms of thought,—into logical language,—that synthesis of the world which the period had practically secured by the action of its children. That activity went on, as is the way of natural activities, spontaneously, through the pressure of need, by an immanent adaptation of means to ends, not in conscious straining after a result. For the conscious or reflective effort of large bodies of men is often in a direction contrary to the Spirit of the Time. This Spirit of the Time, the absolute mind, which is neither religious nor irreligious, but infinite and absolute in its season, is the real motive principle of the world. But that Spirit of the Time is not alwaysthe voice that is most effective at the poll, or rings loudest in public rhetoric. It is often a still small voice, which only the wise, the self-restrained, the unselfish hear. And he who hears it and obeys it, not he who follows the blatant crowd, is the hero. It is only to a mistaken or an exaggerated hero-worship, therefore, that Hegel can be said to be a foe. Great men are great: but the Spirit of the Time is greater: their greatness lies in understanding it and bringing it to consciousness. The man, who would act independently of his time and in antagonism to it, is only the exponent of its latent tendencies. Nor need the synthesis be always formulated by a philosopher in order to leaven the minds of the next generation. The whole system of thought,—the theory of the time,—its world, in short, influences minds, although it is not explicitly formulated and stated: it becomes the nursery of future thought and speculation. Philosophy in its articulate utterances only gives expression to the silent and half-conscious grasp of reason over its objects. But when the adaptation is not merely reached but seen and felt, when the synthesis or world of that time is made an object of self-consciousness, the exposition has made an advance upon the period which preceded. For that period started in its growth from the last exposition, the preceding system of philosophy, after it had become the common property of the age, and taken its place in their mental equipment.

Each exposition or perception of the synthesis by the philosopher restores or re-affirms the unity which in the divided energies of the period, in its progressive, reforming, and reactionary aspects, in its differentiating time, had to a great extent been lost. By the reforming, progressive, and scientific movement of which each period is full, the unity or totality withwhich it began is shown to be defective. The value of the initial synthesis is impaired; its formula is found inadequate to comprehend the totality: and the differences which that unity involved, or which were implicitly in it, are now explicitly affirmed. But the bent towards unity is a natural law making itself felt even in the period of differentiation. And it makes itself felt in the pain of contradiction, of discord, of broken harmony. And that pain—which is the sign of an ever-present life that refuses to succumb to the encroaching elements—is the stimulus to re-construction. Only so far as pain ceases to be pain, as it benumbs, and deadens, does it involve stagnation: as pain proper, felt as resistance to an inner implicitly victorious principle, it stimulates and quickens to efforts to make life whole again. The integrating principle is present and active. There is then an effort, a re-action; the feeling has to do something to make itself outwardly felt: the implicit has to be actually put in its place, forced as it were into action and set forth[3]: and the existing contrasts and differences which the re-forming agency has called into vigorous life are lifted from their isolation, and show of independence, and kept, as it were, suspended in the unity[4]. The differences are not lost or annihilated: but they come back to a centre, they find themselves, as it were, at home: they lose their unfair prominence and self-assertion, and sink into their places as constituents in the embracing organism[5]. The unity which comes is not however the same as the unity which disappeared, however much it may seem so. The merenotion—the inner sense and inner unity—has put itself forward into the real world: it is no longer a mere subjective principle, but as moulded into actuality, into the objective world,it has become an Idea. (Begriffis nowIdee.) For the Idea is always more than a notion: it is a notion translated into objectivity, and yet in objectivity not sinking into a mere congeries of independent parts, but retaining them 'ideally'—united by links of thought and service—in its larger ideal-reality. It is all that the object ought to be (and which in a sense it must be, if it is at all), and all that the subject sought to be and looked forward to.

The mind of the world moves, as it were, in cycles, but with each new cycle a difference supervenes, a new tone is perceptible. History, which reflects the changing aspects of reality, does and does not repeat itself. The distinctions and the unity are neither of them the same after each step as they were before it: they have both suffered a change: it is a new scene that comes above the horizon, however like the last it may seem to the casual observer. Thus when the process of differentiation is repeated anew, it is repeated in higher terms, multiplied, and with a higher power or wider range of meaning[6]. Each unification however is a perfect world, a complete whole: it is the same sum of being; but in each successive level of advance it receives a fuller expression, and a more complexly-grouped type of features[7]. Such is the rhythmic movement,—the ebb and flow of the world, always recurring with the same burden but, as we cannot but hope, with richer variety of tones, and fuller sense of itself. The sum of actuality, the Absolute, is neither increased nor diminished. The world, the ultimatereality of experience and life, was as much a rounded total to the Hebrew Patriarchs as it is to us: without advancing, it has been, we may say, in its expression deepened, developed, and organised. In one part of the sway of thought, however, there is a harder, narrower, insistance (by practical and business minds) on the sufficiency of a definite principle to satisfy all wants and to make all mysteries plain, and a disposition to ignore all other elements of life: at another, there is a fuller recognition of the differences, gaps, and contradictions, involved in the last synthesis,—which recognition it is the tendency of scientific inquiry, of reforming efforts, of innovation, to produce: and in the last period of the sway, there is a stronger and more extended grasp taken by the unity pervading these differences,—which is the work appointed to philosophy gathering up the results of science and practical amendments.

To this rhythmical movement Hegel has appropriated the name of Dialectic. The name came in the first instance from Kant, but ultimately from Plato, where it denotes the process which brings the 'many' under the 'one,' and divides the 'one' into the 'many.' But how, it may be asked, does difference spring up, if we begin with unity, and how do the differences return into the unity? In other words, given a universal, how are we ever to get at particulars, and how will these particulars ever give rise to a real individual? Such is the problem, in the technical language of the Logic of the 'Notion.' And we may answer, that the unity or universal in question is either a true and adequate or an imperfect unity. In the latter case it is a mere unit, amid other units, bound to them and serving to recall them by relations of contrast, complement, similarity. It is one of many,—a subordinate member ina congeries, and notthe One. If, on the contrary, it be a true Unity, it is a concrete universal,—the parent of perpetual variety. The unity, if it be its genuine shape which is formulated by philosophers, is not mere monotony without differences. If it is a living and real Idea, containing a complex inter-action of principles: it is not a single line of action, but the organic confluence of several. No one single principle by itself is enough to state a life, a character, or a period. But as the unity comes before the eye of the single thinker, it is seldom or never grasped with all its fulness of life and difference. The whole synthesis, although it is implicitly present and underlies experience and life as its essential basis, is not consciously apprehended, but for the most part taken on one side only, one emphatic aspect into which it has concentrated itself. And even if the master could grasp the whole, could see the unity of actuality in all its differences, (and we may doubt whether any man or any philosopher can thus incarnate the prerogative of reason,) his followers and the popular mind would not imitate him. While his grasp of comprehension may possibly have been thorough, though he may have seen life whole through all its differences, inequalities, and schisms, and with all these reduced or idealised to their due proportions, into the unity beyond, the crowd who follow him are soon compelled to lay exclusive stress on some one side of his theory. Some of them see the totality from one aspect, some from another. It is indeed the whole which in a certain sense they see: but it is the whole narrowed down to a point. Whilehistheory was a comprehensive and concrete grasp, including and harmonising many things which seem otherwise wide apart, theirs is abstract and inadequate: it fixes on a single point, which is thus withdrawn fromits living and meaning-giving context, and left as an empty name. Now it is the very nature of popular reasoning to tend to abstractions, in this sense of the word. Popular thought wants the time and perseverance necessary to retain a whole truth, and so is contented with a partial image. It seeks for simple and sharp precision: it likes to have something distinctly before it, visible to the eye of imagination, and capable of being stated in a clear and unambiguous formula for the intellect. And popular thought—the dogmatic insistence on one-sided truth—is not confined to the so-called non-philosophic world: just as, on the other hand, the inclusive and comprehensive unity of life and reality is seen and felt and recognised by many—and felt by them first—who have no claim to the technical rank of philosophers. Popular thought is the thought which skims the surface of reality, which addresses itself to the level of opinion prevalent in all members of the mass as such, and does not go beyond that into the ultimate and complex depths of experience.

Thus it comes about that the concrete or adequate synthesis which should have appeared in the self-conscious thought of the period, when it reflected upon what it was, has been replaced by a narrow and one-sided formula, an abstract and formal universal, a universal which does not express all the particulars. One predominant side of the synthesis steals the place of the total: what should have been a comprehensive universal has lowered itself into a particular. Not indeed the same particular as existed before the union: because it has been influenced by the synthesis, so as to issue with a new colouring, as if it had been steeped in a fresh liquid. But still it is really a particular: and as such, it evokes a new particular in antagonism to it and exhibiting an element latent in the synthesis. If the firstside of the antithesis which claims unduly to be the total, or universal, be called Conservative, the second must be called Reforming or Progressive. If the first step is Dogmatic, the second is Sceptical. If the one side assumes to be the whole, the other practically refutes the assumption. If the one agency clings blindly to the unity,—as when pious men rally round the central idea of religion, the other as tenaciously and narrowly holds to the difference,—as when science displays the struggle for existence and the empire of chance among the myriads of aimless organisms. They are two warring abstractions, each in a different direction. But as they are the offspring of one parent,—as they have each in their own way narrowed the whole down to a point, it cannot but be that when they evolve or develop all that is in them, they will ultimately coincide, and complete each other. The contradiction will not disappear until it has been persistently worked out,—when each opposing member which was potentially a total has become what it was by its own nature destined to be. And this disappearance of the antithesis is the reappearance of the unity in all its strength, reinforced with all the wealth of new distinctions.

Thus on a large scale we have seen the law of growth, of development, of life. It may be called growth by antagonism. But the antagonism here is over-ruled, and subject to the guidance of an indwelling unity.Mereantagonism—if there be such a thing—would lead to nothing. A mere positive or affirmative point of being would lead to no antithesis, were it not, so to speak, a point floating in an ether of larger life and being, whence it draws an outside element which it overcomes, assimilates and absorbs. A bare national mind only grows to richer culture, because it lives ina universal human life, and can sayNihil humani a me alienum puto.So too the mere unit is always tainted with a dependence on outside: or it is always implicitly more than a mere unit: and what seems to come upon it from outside, is really an enemy from within, and it falls because there is treason within its walls. The revolution succeeds because the party of conservative order is not so hard and homogeneous as it appears. So, too, it is the immanent presence of the complete thought, of the Idea, which is the heart and moving spring that sets going the pulse of the universal movement of thought, and which reappears in every one of these categories to which the actualised thought of an age has been reduced. In every term of thought there are three stages or elements: the original narrow definiteness, claiming to be self-sufficient,—the antagonism and criticism to which this gives rise,—and the union which results when the two supplement and modify each other. In the full life and organic unity of every notion there is a definite kernel, with rigid outlines as if it were immovable: there is a revulsion against such exclusiveness, a questioning and critical attitude: and there is the complete notion, where the two first stages interpenetrate.

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