Chapter 12

[1]See vol. ii. p. 190, (Logic, § 102).

[2]See Max Müller in Mind, vol. i. 345.

[3]Pure number is ἀριθμὸς μοναδικός: applied number is αριθμὸς φυσικὸς or σωματικός. Aristotle,Metaph. N. 5, speaks of αριθμὸς πύρινος ἤ γήϊνος. But this is only Greek idiom: as we say 'Greek history' instead of 'History of Greece:' or vice versa, when we translatePopulus Romanusby 'people of Rome.' Aristotle is speaking of 'proportions' or 'amounts' of fire or earth in the compounds of these elements.

[4]See L. Geiger,Ursprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen Sprache und Vernunft(vol. i. p. 380). And Gabelenz 'Die melanesischen Sprachen' in theAbhandlungen der Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften(VIII), 1861, pp. 89-91.

[5]Mémoire sur le Systeme grammatical, &c. p. 155.

[6]Cf.nousandnous autres. The same distinction is found in some American languages. There is a dual in the language of the Greenlanders; but it is not, however, used when a natural duality seems to call for it, but in cases when, though there might have been several things, only two are actually found.

[7]W. von Humboldt,Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues, p. 423 (ed. 1841); Misteli,Typen des Sprachbaues(1893).

[8]Capt. Grey,Vocabulary of the dialects of S. W. Australia, pp. xxi and 104 (1840).

[9]The sharp distinction between the first and second personal pronouns and the third: the want of any apparent connexion in the Indo-Germanic languages between the first and second persons singular and the plural form seems to point in the same direction.

[10]Cf. vol. ii.Notes and Illustrations, p. 400.

[11]Die Sprachwissenschaft, p. 168.

[12]'Vorstellung,' as distinguished from 'Begriff.'

[13]Thus in Malay, there are about twenty words for strike, according as it is done with thick or thin wood, downwards, horizontally, or upwards, with the hand, with the fist, with the flat hand, with a club, with the sharp edge, with a hammer, &c. (See Misteli,Typen des Sprachbaues, p. 265.)

The compensating dialectic whereby reason, under the guise of imagination, overthrows the narrowness of popular estimates, makes itself observed even in the popular use of the terms abstract and concrete. Terms like state, mind, wealth, may from one point of view be called abstract, from another concrete. At a certain pitch these abstractions cease to be abstract, and become even to popular sense very concrete realities. In the tendency to personification in language we see the same change from abstract to concrete: as when Virtue is called a goddess, or Fashion surnamed the despot of womankind. In such instances, imagination, more or less in the service of art and religion, upsets the narrow vulgar estimates of reality. But it upsets them, so to speak, by giving to the abstraction (through its creative power) that sensuous concreteness which the mere abstract lacks and which the ordinary mind alone recognises as real. It 'stoops to conquer.' Such a representation is, as Hegel says[1], 'the synthetic combination of the Universal and Individual': 'synthetic,' because not their free, spontaneous, and essential unity, but the supreme product of the artistic will and hand, which, rather than let the universal perish by neglect,build for it, the eternal and omnipresent, 'a temple made with hands.' In mythology we can see the same process: by which, as it is phrased, an abstract term becomes concrete: by which, as we may more correctly say, a thought is transformed into, or rather stops short at, a representative picture. The many gods of polytheism are the fixed and solidified shapes in which the several degrees of religious growth have taken 'a local habitation and a name': or they bear witness to the failure of the greater part of the world to grasp the idea of Deity in its unity and totality apart from certain local and temporary conditions. So, too, terms like force, law, matter,—the abstractions of the mere popular mind—are by certain periods reduced to the level of sensuous things, and spoken of as real entities, somewhere and somehow existent, apart from the thinking medium to which they belong. Such terms, again, as property, wealth, truth, are popularly identified with the objects in which they are for the time and place manifested or embodied.

In these ways the abstract, in the ordinary meaning, becomes in the ordinary meaning concrete. The distinction between abstract and concrete is turned into a distinction between understanding and sense, instead of, as Hegel makes it, a distinction in the adequacy and completeness of thought itself. Thought (the Idea), as has been more than once pointed out, is the principle of unification or unification itself: it is organisation plus the consciousness of organisation: it is the unifier, the unity, and the unified,—subject as well as object, and eternal copula of both. An attempt is at first made in two degrees to represent the thought in terms of the senses as a sort of superior or higher-class sensible. When the impossibility of that attempt is seen, common sense ends by denying what it has learned to call thesuper-sensible altogether. These three plans may be called respectively the mythological, the metaphysical, and the positive or nominalist fallacies of thought. In the mythological, or strictly anthropomorphic fallacy, thought is conceived under the bodily shape and the physical qualities of humanity, as a separate unifying, controlling, synthetic agent, through whose interference the several things, otherwise dead and motionless, acquire a semblance of life and action, though in reality but puppets or marionettes: that is to say, it is identified with a subject of like passions with ourselves, a repetition of the particular human personality, with its narrowness and weakness. The action of the Idea is here replaced by the agency of supposed living beings, invested with superhuman powers. In the metaphysical or realist fallacy we have a feeble ghostly reproduction of the mythological. The living personal deity is replaced by a faint scare-crow of abstract deity. The cause of the changes that go on in nature is now attributed to indwelling sympathies and animosities, to the abhorrence of a vacuum, to selection, affinity, and the like: to essences and laws conceived of as somehow existent in a mystic space and time. In the positive or nominalist fallacy, the failure of these two theories begins to be felt: and the mind, which had only heard of unifying reason under these two phases and is meanwhile sure of its sense-perceptions, treats the objective synthesis as a dream and a delusion. Or, at best, it regards the synthesis as essentially subjective—as a complementary idealising activity of ours which ekes out the defects of reality, and brings continuity into the discontinuous. Our thought—(it is onlyourthought)—is but an instrument, distinct from us and from the reality: yet acting as a bridge to connect these two opposing shores—a bridge however which does not really reachthe other side, but only an artificial image, which simulates to us, and will for ever simulate, the inaccessible reality. This last view is the utterance of the popular matter-of-fact reason, when in weariness and tedium it turns from the attempt to grasp thought pure and simple, and instead of reducing the metaphysical antitheses to the transparent unity of comprehension, relapses into mere acceptance of a given reality.

In some of these cases the full step into pure thought is never made. The creations of mythology, for example, display an unfinished and baffled attempt to rise from the separation of sense to the unity and organisation of thought. The gods of heathenism are only individuals—and individuals onlymeant to be,and by the act of faith and devotion set forth as reality before the worshipper: but they are individuals in which imagination embodies a unified and centralised system of forces or principles. Theymeanthe powers of nature and of mind, but the sceptre in their hands is only a sign of power attributed by the believer; and far away, encompassing alike them and him, is the great relentless necessity. In other cases there is a relapse: when the higher stage of thought has been attained, it is instantaneously lost. Terms which are really thoughts are again reduced to the level of the things of sense, individualised in some object, which, though it is only a representation or sign, is allowed to usurp the place of the thought which it but partially and by extraneous institution embodies. The intuition of the sensuous imagination at every step throws its spells on the products of thought, and turns them into a representative picture, which in popular use and wont occupies the place of the notion. Instead of being retained in their native timelessness, the terms of the Idea are brought under the laws of Sense-perception, under the conditions of space and time.

The term 'representation,' which Hegel employs to name these picture-thoughts or figurate conceptions, corresponds to the facts of their nature. A 'representation' is one of two things: either a particular thing sent out accredited with general functions, or a universal narrowed down into a particular thing. Thus, as it has been seen, a general name implies or connotes a universal relation or attribute, but confines it to denote a particular object or class. 'Swift,' for example, was an epithet tied down to express the horse. In the first instance we may suppose the name to be a sort of metaphor: differing only by its simplicity and frequency of suggestion from those endless epithets, which in Norse or Arabic poetry veil and adorn the object which they are meant to designate. That is, we conceive the object as an embodiment or representation of the quality, as an eagle is the emblem of strength: only in the latter case we distinguish between the object and its metaphorical signification. In the second place, however, the object of experience is allowed completely to coincide with the aspect discriminated by the selective epithet, and we can no longer in ordinary thought separate the imaging object from the general relation which it images forth. This is the level of thought to which Hegel appropriates the term 'representation.' It includes under it the three fallacies of thought already noted and saves the trouble of comprehending the reality. In the Hegelian sense, a representation is abstract; because it solidifies, hardens, and isolates the term of thought, makes it a particular, and never rises above the single case to the general notion embodied in it.

The world of representative thought is a world of independent points in juxtaposition, which we arrange as seems best to us. It lies in an undefinable borderlandbetween us and things. It is a would-be, but not an actual, reality. It is not like a true Idea—the unity of subjective and objective: but only a make-believe. We have put it there, and yet we credit it with an effective existence. When our mind moves amongst these picture-thoughts, it can only institute external relations between the terms. A judgment, in that case, is interpreted to mean the conjunction of two terms, which at once step into the rank of subject and predicate by means of the copula. A sentence is an arrangement of wordsab extrain conscious or unconscious conformity with the rules of grammar. The world of knowledge, or the Idea, as a whole is turned into a plane surface with its typical terms,—the members of the organism of reason,—like dots put in co-ordination and juxtaposition, not spontaneously affected towards each other. Even if they are not embodied and reduced to a sensuous level of existence, they are held to be originally separate and unconnected. How they all came into being, and whether they do not all by gradations and differentiation-proceed from one root, are questions neither asked nor answered.

The level of representative thinking—thinking i. e. which is not the grasp (Begriff) of the reality, but only the apprehension of something which stands for and represents it—is the level on which we all come, more or less, to stand in our non-philosophic moments. It is, in essentials, the realm of what Plato calledδόξα,—the level of consciousness which fails to rise to see the unity of essence in the many single goods and beauties, which holds its knowledge (such at is) at the mercy of accidents, not bound by the conclusions of reasoning,—the realm which is not without reality, but an immature and uncertain reality. It is, in essentials, the same as what, as opposed tointellectus, Spinoza styledimaginatio.Imagination, to Spinoza, is an understanding under the bondage of particular passions and temporary interests, which loses sight of the great bond of being orSubstantia, and fixes its glance on the parts in subordinate and infra-essential relationships: which is always finite, i. e. never really comprehensive and self-sustaining in its view, but always limited by a tacit reference to something outside itself. The 'Representation' is the idea, in the loose and inexact use of that word, which goes with the phrasemere idea,—i. e. a mere mental image, which is not the reality, though it is believed to do duty for and to represent it[2]. Yet it is not a mere thought: rather its whole aim and meaning is to refer to reality, to suggest it, to bring it nearer us. Its fault is that it is an imperfect, partial, one-sided, or even one-pointed idea. It is really an instance and phase of theignava ratio, to which a date or name serves as a ποῦ στῶ of explanation.

'At Kilne there was no weathercock,And that's the reason why.'

Such 'representation,' according to Hegel, is, e. g., the mode of intelligence accessible to those who cling to the mere, or abstractly, religious mood, and who cannot or will not rise to the comprehension of their creed. Its facts or dogmas present themselves to such a restricted conception as the parts of a picture or the stages of a history, in visible or imaginatively-construable space, and in a succession of times. The essence of religion, of course, for Hegel as for other exponents of its inmost nature, is a feeling of certitude or faith which transcends the gulfs and separations of the secular consciousness, which sees with the believing soul theinner peace, the absolute harmony of the true reality.Pectus facit theologum.The sense of utter dependence on God, in complete identity with the sense of absolute independence in God—that strength of faith is the very life of religion. But when religion seeks to give an intelligent expression of her faith, when she tries to give a reason acceptable to the outside world, she is apt, unless specially trained in the high things of the spirit, to base her creed not on the rock of ages, but on the signs and miracles of the times. She has tried to theorise the faith: but, although her faith may be sound and true, the religious spirit, unless it be also the spirit of wisdom and reasoned truth, runs a risk of falling into the fallacy ofPost hoc,ergo propter hoc.She descends therefore to the region of representation: she uses the language of sense and analogy; she presents the spiritual under the guise of the natural. Yet in her heart of hearts these things are only a parable,—they are but

'Flesh and bloodTo which she links a truth divine.'

Hegel—in the introduction to his lectures on the Philosophy of Religion—is reported to have given the following characteristics of 'representation,' (a) It is still trammeled by the senses. Thought and sensation strive for the mastery in it. Thought is bound fast to an illustration: and of this illustration it cannot as representative thought divest itself:—the eternally living idea is chained to the transient and perishable form of sense. It is metaphorical and material thinking, which is helpless without the metaphor and the matter. (b) Representative thought envisages what is timeless and infinite under the conditions of time and space. It loses sight of the moral and spirit of historical development under the semblance of the names, incidents, and forms in which it is displayed. The historical andphilosophical sense is lost under the antiquarian. Representative thought keeps the shell, and throws away the kernel. (c) The terms by which such a materialised thought describes its objects are not internally connected: each is independent of the other; and we only bring them together for the occasion by an act of subjective arrangement[3].

The thing—the so-calledsubjectof the properties, of which it is really no more than thesubstratum—affords no sufficient ground for the unity of the properties attached to it. The substratum or subject of the proposition is given, and we then look around to see what other properties accompany the primary characteristic for which the name was applied. But the term of popular language is not a real unity capable of supporting differences; it is only one aspect of a thing, a single point fixed and isolated in the process of language by the action of natural selection. And so, to ask how the properties are related to the thing, is to ask how one aspect, taken out of its setting, is related to another isolated aspect: which is evidently an unanswerable question. Science is right in rejecting the 'thing' of popular conception. Ifaisa,and nothing more, as the law of Identity informs us, then it is for ever impossible to get on tob, c, d, and the rest. The union between the thing divided or defined, and its divided or defining members, is what is termed extra-logical; in other words, it is not evident from what is given or stated in the popular conception. That union must be sought elsewhere, and deeper.

And whenwestep in to overcome the repugnance which the point of conception, or what is supposed the subject, shows against admitting a diversity of predicates,—whenweforce it into union with these properties: orwhen we try to remove the separation which leaves the cause and effect as two independent things to fall apart; our action, by which we effect a unification of differences, may, from another and a universal point of view, be said to be the notion, or grasp of thought, coming to the consciousness of itself. Thought, as it were, recognises itself and its image in those objects of representative conception, which seem to be given and imposed upon the intellect. The two worlds, which the understanding accepts as each solid and independent,—the world of external objects or conceptions, and the world of self,—meet and coincide in the free agency of thought, developing itself under a double aspect. It is the 'original synthetical unity of apperception' (to quote Kant's words), from which the Ego or thinking subject, and the 'manifold' or body and world, are simultaneously differentiated. Thus, on the one hand, we ourselves no longer remain a rigid unity, existing in antithesis to the objects presupposed or referred to by representative thought: and on the other hand the so-called thing loses its hardness and fragmentary independence, as distinguished from our apprehension of it.Ouraction, as we incline to call it, which mends the inadequacies of terms, is from a philosophic point of view, the notion itself coming to the front and claiming recognition. The process of thought is then seen to be a totality, of which our faculties, on the one hand, and the existing thing, on the other, are isolated abstractions, supposed habitually to exist on their own account. To view either of these systems, the mental, on the one hand, and the objective world, on the other, as self-subsistent, has been the error in much of our metaphysics, and in the popular conceptions of what constitutes reality. The idealism of metaphysicians has been often as narrow and insufficient as the realism of common sense. Anadequate philosophy, on the contrary, recognises the presence of both elements, in a subordinate and formative position. Representations may be compared to the little pools left here and there by the sea amongst the rocks and sand: the notion, or grasp of thought, is the tidal wave, which left them there to stagnate, but comes back again to restore their continuity with the great sea. In our thinking we are only the ministers and interpreters of the Idea,—of the organic and self-developing system of thought.

The difference between a representative conception and a thought proper may be illustrated by the case of the term 'Money.' Money may be either a materialised thought, i. e. a Representative Conception, or a Notion Proper. In the former case, money is identified with a piece of money. It is probably, in the first instance, embodied in coins of gold, silver, and bronze. In the second place, a wide gulf is placed between it and the other articles for which it is given in exchange. If other things are regarded as money, they are generally treated on the assumption that they can in case of need be reduced to coinage. The conception of money by the unscientific vulgar considers it separately from other commodities: and the laws which forbade its exportation gave a vigorous expression to the belief that it was somethingsui generis, and subject to conditions of its own. The scientific notion of money modifies this belief in the peculiarity and fixity of money. Science does so historically, when it can point to a time and a race where money in our sense of the word does not exist, and where barter takes the place of buying and selling. Science does so philosophically, when it expounds what may be called theprocessof money,—the inter-action or meeting of conditions to which the existence of money is due. The notion ofmoney, as given in theEthicsof Aristotle, says that it is the common measure of utility or demand. When we leave out of sight the specific quality of an object, and consider only its capacity of satisfying human wants, we have what is called its worth or value. This value of the thing,—the psychological fact which is left, when all the qualities marking the objective thing are reduced to their social efficiency—is the notion, of which the currency is the representation, reducing thought to the level of the senses, and embodying the 'ideality' of value in a tangible and visible object. So long as this 'idea' of value is kept in view, the currency is comprehended: but when the perception of the notion disappears, money is left a mere piece of currency, the general notion being narrowed down to the coinage. Thus the notion of money, like other notions in their ideal truth, is not in us, nor in the things merely: it is what from a minor point of view, when we and the things are regarded under the head of want or need, may be called thetruthof both, the unity of the two sides. Thus considered, money falls into its proper place in the order of things.

[1]Werke,ii. 529, 555.

[2]Hegel'sWerke, ii. 431: 'Wobei das Selbst nur repräsentirtund vorgestellt ist, da ist es nicht wirklich: we es vertreten ist, ist es nicht.' Cf.ib.416.

[3]Philosophie der Religion,i. p. 137 seqq.

'It is, in my view, all important,' says Hegel[1], 'to apprehend and express the True not asSubstance,but equally much asSubject.' Substance, as Spinoza defines it, is that which is in itself and which is conceived through itself, something which does not need the conception of something else by which its concept may be formed[2]. Substance, in other words, is something which serves to explain itself, which iscausa sui.The mind, looking out on the wide world of mutable and manifold objects, finds its rest in the great calm of a something at their base, the eternal nature which, itself unmoved, is the one foundation, complete and sufficient, of all things,—ares aeterna et infinita,which can feed the mind with joy alone[3]. These words suggest only an object—a transcendent object—the basis of an objective order. They seem to leave little for the contemplating subject to do save to discern it and, so discerning, to rest in it and to love. They seem to leave substance a mere datum, a far-off all-embracing end in which the variety of human effort can find a central object and a final close. Yet, in the end it appears[4]that thisRes aeternaloves himself with an intellectuallove, and this love is identified with the love of man to God, so far at least as man's mind, consideredsub specie aeternitatis, can be said to 'explicate' Deity. From this conclusion it might be said that Spinoza rises above the mere category of substance: God is no longer the mere foundation of things—the absolute object of all objects. He rises in human spirit (regarded in its eternal significance) to the rank of a true subject. He is not merely known as the True; but He himself, living and moving in the essential spirit of man, knows himself and acquiesces in his infinite beatitude. But if this be the legitimate inference to be drawn from the closing sections of theEthics, it is not the view ordinarily suggested by the mention of Spinoza's doctrine. That doctrine, on the contrary, seems, as it first confronts us, and as it has taken its place in history, to omit the subjectivity which had found so decided a recognition in the commencement of Cartesianism. In thecogito ergo sumso much at least is clearly stated: true being—the true—is not merely known, but itself knows; not a mere object, but a subject: a subject-object, or, an Idea. It is to be admitted, indeed, that Descartes hardly remains at this altitude, but he touches it for a moment. Even when he finds in the conception of God a security for truth and reality, and thus seems to base these on a one-sidedly objective standard, he regards God as, on the other hand, the truth and reality postulated and presupposed by the structural system of our ideas. God—such seems the tendency of his so-called 'proof'—is the inevitable prius and presupposition of our thought and being: He makes us know, as much as He is ultimately the object known: He is the unity and the creator of subject and object.

But it is hardly possible to get in philosophy the full recognition of the antithesis between subject andsubstance and the inclusion of both in the fuller Idea, till after the time of Kant. Kant himself is, in essentials, the antithesis of Spinoza, but it is not till Fichte that the full force of that antithesis is expressly recognised. With Hegel, the two opposite points of view are equally insisted on: the immanence and the transcendence of the True, the Real, the Absolute: or, in other words, the unity in it of subject and object, or of thought and existence. Or, in the words of the religious spirit, though heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him, He dwells in the spirit of the righteous, and is not far from any one of us. The truth is not the correspondence or agreement of an idea with a further reality which it represents. Such an idea or 'representation' is a projection which has escaped from our hands, which has slipped from our grip, and which, while owning its mere vicarious character, at the same time beckons us on to seek a reality we can never find. The 'representation' is in a way objective—it is set over against us: but yet it is not truly objective, not self-subsistent and self-possessed. Its objectivity is the objectivity of a name: a quasi-objectivity, which requires to be dipped in the living waters of intelligence before it can really exist and act. It seems, to the untrained observer, to point only outwards to the real object which it copies or designates: to a deeper reflection, it is seen to point equally inward to the mind which informed it and projected it. Thus the knowing subject, and the known object, with the representation which acts as a perpetual mediator to connect and yet not unify the one of these terms with the other,—all at last take their place, reduced and transfigured, in the unity of the Idea.

According to the Spinozist point of view, thought, it might seem by a sort of miracle, dispels the mists thatenvelop and bewilder it, sees through the multeity of modes, and the isolated pictures of imagination, to the true reality, one, infinite and eternal. Before that august vision of absolute wholeness the only attitude of a finite mind would seem to be resignation, worship, reverence,—deeply shading into the submission of absorption. For in it intellect and will are declared to have no place[5]. With such a statement, we get that first aspect of religion which has found its most imposing representative in the faith of Islam. In every religion there must, however, be more than this: or it would fail to do what all religion essentially does. Sheer dependence—Schlechthinnige Abhängigkeit(as Schleiermacher has named it)—can never be the whole burden of a religious teacher's message. Always—at least in the background—there is a contradictory element—in apparent discrepancy with the first—the deification of the worshipper. And as the Ethics of Spinoza—like every complete system of speculative truth—deals with a problem parallel to, if not even identical with, that of religion, its initial definitions and main programme must never let us forget the tacit presuppositions worked out to explicitness, as they are partly, in its conclusion. When Intellect and Will are denied to theDeus = Natura = Substantia,it is meant that the Absolute is and has more than intellect and will can well name, and that in Him (or Her, or It, for the pronominal distinctions of gender matter nothing here), the separation of will from intellect is a fallacy which can have no place. What Spinoza casts out are the lower passions, the affections of weakness; theseas such,i. e. as elements of weakness, can have no place in Him. But in God, as in the free man who most resembles God, and in whose love He loves himself,there is—but that also in terms we cannot fathom—abundance of joy—the joy of infinite self-realisation.

Partly by the complementary theory of Leibniz, partly by the antagonist theories of Kant, the way had been prepared for setting forth, and in fuller outline, the implications so tardily admitted by Spinoza. It was only by a misuse or mal-extension of a word that Herder's God—a God who is Force—and the Force of Forces—could be supposed an advance upon Spinoza. There is in Force an analogue of Life; but it is life in dependence, life not self-centred, always going forth, and when it goes forth dissipated. It is as it were pushed from behind, and is lost in what comes after it. If a Force of Forces means anything, it means something more than Force: it means a master of force, a force-controller and force-adjuster, a unity and principle of forces. And Substance, as Spinoza understood it, is more than this variability, this deification of instability. It is the unity in which the variety and disparity of existence, the multiplicity of vicissitude, is merged and lost, only again to issue from it, and yet not leave it behind, in the infinitely-various modes of its two great and conspicuous attributes of consciousness and extensionality. If Hegel then sought to go beyond Spinoza, he sought to find a formula which would lose nothing that Spinoza had reached, but would at the same time bring out what Spinoza had left an implication, or noted in a partial rectification. As in religion, besides the utter dependence on God (so that, God failing, I perish), there must be also an absolute union, complete reconciliation—complete as culminating in unity and identity (so that God shall not be God, unless I am I): so it is in philosophy. The Absolute cannot merelybe, and be far away—the last goal in which the variety of life is made one, andthe turmoil of the passionate existences laid to rest. The Soul which is (as some of the medieval Christians would say) stillin itinere, a wayfarer, is such because its glance is turned on outward circumstances: but country is no accident: the soul even here carries with it thatpatria, 'which is the heavenly,' in its longings, and has it, even while yet on pilgrimage, in that strong possession of all things by itself, which the theologian styles Faith. This goal determines the pilgrimage, fixes its direction, gives progress to its steps.

In the myth-loving language of Plato (and of Wordsworth in his Platonic ode) the Soul has in other spheres of being dwelt with the gods and seen the secret of the world: it is itself one of the immortals, and as it is here and now, is in a land of exile. At the morning of birth, the living sample of humanity has left his original glory behind; and a deep forgetfulness—only short of absolute—cuts it off from his every-day consciousness. In his present reality he finds himself in a land of darkness, fast bound in a hollow of the rock, looking out only on the ghostly images that flit across his prison wall, cast there by the objects that move between his back and the light of a mysterious fire behind him and them. Such is his natural estate, as it meets the bodily eye: the estate of the lowly savage, whom superstition and ignorance seem to hold as their captive for ever. But, though his high home and his glory of other days have left no conscious memory in the soul, asleep and imbruted in its fleshly house, they have not departed without leaving a trace behind. For forgetfulness is not blank non-existence. The sample of humanity inherits the birthright of his fathers—he has hopes and fears, duties and rights, which are his, if he can mature himself to take possession of them. Hesuffers from the pains of growth, from the sense of disparity between what he is and what he may and should be—from the noble uneasiness and dissatisfaction of a being who feels—if he does not know—his infinite potentialities. For these potentialities—otherwise they have no title even to that name—are also actualities, yet actualities which protest their own incompleteness, and crave imperiously for what they lack. What he has is his right, but his right only in so far as it is also his duty. It is as such, and only as such, that he still retains the soul in all its prerogatives: as the right, which is the duty, of knowledge. Such a pre-figured and promised, but yet to be realised, possession is what Plato has calledEros, or Love. But it is a Love whose wings are at first invisible, and who often seems rather to crawl among ignoble things than to soar in the free fresh air.

The process of experience has been by Plato called Anamnesis or Recollection. But Recollection is not always an easy, and never a merely passive, process; and sometimes the forgetfulness seems so deep that no extraneous stimulus can at all move it. We have seen already one of these stimuli which rouse the sleeping sense—the mystery of numbers: and there are many others. But, we have also learned, that in the psychical sphere items of memory are not, as reckless fancy puts it, stored up in compartments, sorted and arranged, ready to be pulled out. The process of recollection is a complicated affair: an affair of give and take, of comparison and selection and rejection, of construction and reconstruction. You cannot haul up ready-made memories from the mine. And this perhaps was sometimes forgotten by Plato; it certainly has been by more than one of his commentators. You may, no doubt, call up ideas from the vasty deep: but they come by lawsand principles of their own. Even when they come, which they sometimes do unexpectedly, they come as an echo of the calling mind. Recollection involves intellectual process: as Kant said, the synthesis of imagination reposes upon the synthesis in the concept. Yet—and this is the point which Plato's title ofAnamnesisaccentuates—unless 'the soul had been such as to be affected in this way' (the words are those of Aristotle), unless the soul had been implicitly intellectual in tone and faculty, it would not have grasped the presented universe under the categories which it uses. There is, says Aristotle, in the barest act of sensation a congenital power of judgment; there is, says Plato, an eye of the soul—a natural virtue of intelligence, which can never be put into it, and must always be presupposed in any theory of its processes.

There are, therefore, no innate ideas, says Cudworth in explanation of Plato, if these ideas mean formed and completed products of knowledge. All ideas in this sense begin and grow within the range of experience, and the history of their growth or development in literature and art can be at least approximately traced. We can trace, that is, the successions and connexions of the various types of beauty, or goodness: can show how the idea at one time dwelt in one of its aspects, at another in a different one. We can observe the variation, and it may be the progress, in men's conception of God. But it is another matter when we seek to explain these ideas themselves out of other elements, heterogeneous to them. When that question is asked, then with Plato we seem, in the absence of any theory of origins, obliged to own that it is by the Beautiful that beautiful things come to be beautiful. The μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένοs—the crossing of essential boundaries—which Aristotle forbids to science, stillraises its eternal barrier in the logical, if it cease to hold good (as has been suggested) in the physical sphere. In the totality which we call the world and experience of reality there are, so to say, ultimate and irreducible provinces. The utmost that philosophy, i. e. science, can do with these is to co-ordinate them,—to show their mutual filiations, adaptations, and harmonies,—to note their inadequacies and discrepancies. They are not all of equal rank, perhaps; they have to yield to each other, it may be in turn: but none of them can be arbitrarily expunged from the totality, and none of them shown to be a mere phase of others. To do that is to strip the universe of its variety and—it may be added—of its beauty and its interest. If it be a false philosophy that does it, there is a good deal of false philosophy abroad. There is a lust of explanation which is never content till it has found an equation for everything, till it has expressed everything in terms of the common-place, till it has emptied everything of all that made it individual and real, and turned it into an abstract, identical (as only abstracts can be) with some other abstract. Such abstractions are of course useful, and therefore need no excuse, when restricted to a special sphere. So long, that is, as we remember that it is an abstraction we are making, and that we are arbitrarily simplifying the real natural problem, no harm is done by these artificial constructions; and they are important steps in a larger process. But what is correct and useful within a range whose limits we can define, becomes dangerous when carried beyond all bounds. Its approximate truth then becomes misleading error.

It is these irreducible elements—these great provinces in human experience, in reality, in the system of reason—that correspond to the more important of whatare known as Platonic ideas. As ultimate constituents of the actual world they are in the narrower sense inexplicable. One does not amount to an exact sum of some others, nor is one got from another by the simple process of subtraction. But if they cannot be explained, by being reduced to multiples of some one basis, they can be comprehended in the respective implication and explication they exhibit with their co-realities. They can be correlated, reduced, and unified: we may even say, they can be identified; but if we use such a term, we must mean that there is some totality beyond and above them in which they all find a place and all are harmonious; in which all when brought to their Truth are really one and the same. This birthright of human nature in all ages and countries—this central essence of man's spirit—is the realm of Platonic ideas. They are the great elements, or constituent members, of humanity and of reality: the framework of his mind and of the world. How in each case they may be wrought out in detail, to what degree they may here be evolved, and there stunted, is a matter of historical research. And, in a sense, even it is not wrong to try to trace them one to another: to explain them, as the phrase is, one by another. For they are essentially connected: they are members of one system: they are unified and harmonised in a way for which even the word 'organism' is wholly insufficient. They are the poles and lines on which the tent of human life, of intelligent life, is stretched: but they are also the invisible ties which bind together the earth and heavens, and all that is therein.

These ideas therefore are immanent in man: for they are the basis of human nature. But to name, to disentangle them, to measure out their bounds and describe their connexions—that is no easy work. And that isthe work of Platonic recollection. That is the process of historical experience. But it is a small thing for Plato to say that these ideas are innate in man. What he is more concerned to make clear is that in the possession or vision of these eternal forms, the human soul is a partner of the gods, a citizen of the heavens. In less mythical language, man, as an intelligent, artistic, moral, and religious being, is not a mere accidental on-looker on the surface of things, but near their central and abiding truth. The forms of his mind, to speak after the manner of Kant, are the objective essences of the real world of experience. Degrees there may be in the reality which they possess—less or larger measures of truth to full experience—but true and real they are: never mere falsity or emptiness. To estimate the amounts of that reality is a problem Plato often tried. At one time it seems as if the Good were in his estimate the form of forms, the real of reals: but when we look closely, we see that it is a goodness which is synonymous with real reality or perfect being. At another time truth, i. e. reality, seems to be lord of all: at another, beauty: and again he seems to confess his inability to lay down the order of precedence in this hierarchy. Of one thing only he is perfectly clear: and that is the unreality, the non-entity of the sense-world as merely perceived, and the true being of the world of reason. But he has no doubts as to the central truth that in the good, the true, and the beautiful, there is a higher reality—a more far-reaching and deep-piercing influence than in all the mere variety of sensation, the mere multitude of sensible fact.

What Plato has sometimes called the act of reminiscence, what he has sometimes called the instinct of Love, is also known to him as the process of Dialectic. For reminiscence has to watch and wrestle with theinertia of oblivion, has to set the imagined beside the real, and to correct percepts by concepts, concepts by percepts, has to brace up its energies, and to advance not by mere pressing onward, but by tacking and zigzagging through contrary difficulties finally realise itself. And love too is a battle, where the craving for union has to measure its force with the instinct of independence, where selfishness and self-surrender seek a reconciliation, and where in the close, if the close be love, each is self-retained only as self-abandoned, and each rises to a higher union in which lower selfhoods are absorbed. Even so in the course of Dialectic. It is the art which divides and conjoins, which unifies and distinguishes: the art of asking and answering. To Plato it appears in the main as an action of the intelligent subject: but an action which, as he hints, is almost a natural instinct, which through discipline has become an art. In the hands of its typical artist, it proceeds, or seems to proceed, as if unconscious of its principle and end. Socrates has, as he professes, no overt conception of the result: he has no knowledge of the positive conclusion to be reached. It is the Logos—the logic of reality—which sustains the movement. Abandoning any subjective humour of carrying the argument to a preconceived end, one is swept on by the current of real logic—the reason in things. The dogma we have set up and seemed to see before us, will, if we are dispassionate, carry us on beyond itself, and suggest aspects calling for recognition and acceptance. If only we refrain from arresting the movement of criticism,—a course to which prudence, ease, custom, and every form of theignava ratiocounsel us,—truth will reveal itself in us, and by us. It is because other aims, personal and particular, are so ever-present with us, that speculative free inquiry seems so hard. It iswe who insist on closing up the door, not the truth that is reluctant to show itself.

Truth, then, is self-revelation or development. Not a result which is to be accepted, bowed to, and reverenced: but the result issuing (and only valuable as issuing) from a process in which we and objectivity are fellow-workers. The truth may no doubt be presented—as Spinoza does present it—in definitions, stating the net result as fundamental fact. Fundamental fact it is; but as so stated, as Substance, it comes as a stranger, almost as an enemy: the great vision, suddenly offered to untrained eyes, overwhelms and alarms the living sense of self, of personality. Hegel wishes to show it as a friend, as our very own,—as Subject (but not merely subject). It is for this that philosophy runs through its cycle and returns into itself. Man points to nature and nature to man: universal to individual: thought to things: the self to God, and God to the human soul.

Back to Index Next