Chapter 3

'So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,This Duke would fain know he was without being it.'

To that period of incipient and darkling energy Hegel stands in very much the same position as Luther did to the pre-Reformation mystics, to Meister Eckhart, and the unknown author of the 'German Theology.' It was from this side, from the school of Genius and Romance in philosophy, that Hegel was proximately driven, not into sheer re-action, but into system, development, and science.

To elevate philosophy from a love of wisdom into the possession of real wisdom, into a system and a science, is the aim which he distinctly set before himself from the beginning. In almost every work, and every course of lectures, whatever be their subject, he cannot let slip the chance of an attack upon the mode of philosophising which substituted the strength of belief or conviction for the intervention of reasoning and argument. There may have been a strong sympathy in him with the end which these German contemporaries and, in some ways, analogues to Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron had in view. No one who reads his criticism of Kant can miss perceiving his bent towards the Infinite. But he utterly rejects the vision of feeling, whether as longing faith or devout enjoyment, as an adequate exposition of the means to this end. Whereas these fantastic seers and sentimentalists either disparage science as a limitation to the spirit, in the calm trust of their life in God, or yearn throughout life for a peace which they never quite reach, Hegel is bent upon showing men that the Infinite is not unknowable, as Kant would have it, and yet that man can not, asJacobi would have it, naturally and without an effort enjoy the things of God[14]. He will prove that the way of Truth is open, and prove it by describing in detail every step of the road. Philosophy for him must be reasoned truth. She does not visit favoured ones in visions of the night, but comes to all who win her by patient study.

'For those,' he says, 'who ask for a royal road to science, no more convenient directions can be given than to trust to their own sound common sense, and, if they wish to keep up with the age and with philosophy, to read the reviews criticising philosophical works, and perhaps even the prefaces and the first paragraphs in these works themselves. The introductory remarks state the general and fundamental principles; and the reviews, besides their historical information, contain a critical estimate, which, from the very fact that it is such, is beyond and above what it criticises. This is the road of ordinary men: and it may be traversed in a dressing-gown. The other way is the way of intuition. It requires you to don the vestments of the high-priest. Along that road stalks the ennobling sentiment of the Eternal, the True, the Infinite. But it is wrong to call "this a road. These grand sentiments find themselves, naturally and without taking a single step, centred in the very sanctuary of truth. So mighty is genius, with its deep original ideas and its high flashes of wit. But a depth like this is not enough to lay bare the sources of true being, and these rockets are not the empyrean. True thoughts and scientific insights are only to be gained by the labour which comprehends and grasps its object. And that thorough grasp alone can produce the universality of science. Contrasted with the vulgar vagueness and scantiness of common sense, that universalityis a fully-formed and rounded intellect; and, contrasted with the un-vulgar generality of the natural gift of reason when it has been spoilt by the laziness and self-conceit of genius, it is truth put in possession of its native form, and thus rendered the possible property of every self-conscious reason[15].'

These words which were taken to heart (unnecessarily, perhaps) by the patron of theIntellectual Intuitionrung the knell to the friendship of Hegel with his great contemporary Schelling. Yet this hard saying is also the keynote to the subsequent work of the philosopher. In Hegel we need expect no brilliantapergusof genius, no intellectual legerdemain, but only the patient unraveling of the clue of thought through all knots and intricacies: a deliberate tracing and working-out of the contradictions and mysteries in thought, until the contradiction and the mystery disappear. Perseverance is the secret of Hegel.

This characteristic of patient work is seen, for example, in the incessant prosecution of hints and glimpses, until they grew into systematic and rounded outline. Instead of vague anticipations and guesses at truth, fragments of insight, his years of philosophic study are occupied with writing and re-writing, in theVendeavour to clear up and arrange the masses of his ideas. Essay after essay, and sketch after sketch of a system, succeed each other amongst his papers. His first great work was not published before his 37th year, after six years spent in university work at Jena, following as many spent in preliminary lucubration. The notes which he used to dictate some years afterwards to the boys in the Gymnasium at Nürnberg bear evidence of constant remodelling, and the same is true of his professorial lectures.

Such insistance in tracing every suggestion of truth to its place in the universe of thought is the peculiar character and difficulty of Hegelian argument. Other observers have now and again noticed, accentuated, and, it may be, popularised some one point or some one law in the evolution of reason. Here and there, as we reflect, we are forced to recognise what Hegel termed the dialectical nature in thought,—the tendency, by which a principle, when made to be all that it implied, when, as the phrase is, it is carried to extremes, recoils and leaves us confronted by its antithesis. We cannot, for example, study the history of ancient thought without noting this phenomenon. Thus, the persistence with which Plato and Aristotle taught and enforced the doctrine that the community was the guide and safeguard of the several citizens, very soon issued in the schools of Zeno and Epicurus, teaching the rights of self-seeking and of the independent self-realisation of the individual. But the passing glimpse of an indwelling discord in the terms, by which we argue, is soon forgotten, and is set aside under the head of accidents, instead of being referred to a general law. Most of us take only a single step to avoid what has turned out wrong, and when we have overcome the seeming absoluteness of one idea, we are content and even eager to throw ourselves under the yoke of another, not less one-sided than its predecessor. Sometimes one feels tempted to say that the course of human thought as a whole, as well as that branch of it termed science, exhibits nothing but a succession of illusions, which enclose us in the belief that some idea is all-embracing as the universe,—illusions, from which the mind is time after time liberated, only in a little while to sink under the sway of some partial correction, as if it and it only were the complete truth.

Or, again, the Positive Philosophy exhibits as one of its features an emphatic and popular statement of a fallacy much discussed in Hegel. One of the best deeds of that school has been to protest against a delusive belief in certain words and notions; particularly by pointing out the insufficiency of what it calls metaphysical terms, i. e. those abstract entities formed by reflective thought, which are little else than a double of the phenomenon they are intended to explain. To account for the existence of insanity by an assumed basis for it in the 'insane neurosis,' or to attribute the sleep which follows a dose of opium to the soporific virtues of the drug, are some exaggerated examples of the metaphysical intellect which is so rampant in much of our popular, and even of our esoteric science. Positivism by its logical precepts ought at least to have instilled general distrust of abstract talk about essences, laws, forces and causes, whenever they claim an inherent and independent value, or profess to be more than a reflex of sensation. But all this is only a desultory perception, the reflection of an intelligent observer. When we come to Hegel, the Comtian perception of the danger lying in the terms of metaphysics is replaced by the Second Part of Logic, the Theory of Essential Being, where substances, causes, forces, essences, matters, are confronted with what Mr. Bain has called their 'suppressed correlative[16].'

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

[2]Hegel'sBriefe, ii. 377.

[3]Phenomenologie des Geistes,p. 9.

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

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

[6]Ibid., i. 178.

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

[8]Jacobi'sWerke, iv. i, p. xxi.

[9]Jacobi'sBriefwechsel,i. 330.

[10]Jacobi'sWerke, iii. 53.

[11]Jacobi'sBriefwechsel, ii. 468.

[12]Hegel'sWerke,i. 15.

[13]Hegel'sVermischte Schriften,i. 50.

[14]Compare pages 121-142 of theLogic.

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

[16]Practical Essays,p. 43.

By asserting the rights of philosophy against the dogmatism of self-inspired 'unphilosophy,' and by maintaining that we must not feel the truth, with our eyes as it were closed, but must open them full upon it, Hegel does not reduce philosophy to the level of one of the finite sciences. The name 'finite,' like the name 'empirical,' is not a title of which the sciences have any cause to be ashamed. They are called empirical, because it is their glory and their strength to found upon experience. They are called finite, because they have a fixed object, which they must expect and cannot alter; because they have an end and a beginning,—presupposing something where they begin, and leaving something for the sciences which come after. Botany rests upon the researches of chemistry: and astronomy hands over the record of cosmical movements to geology. Science is interlinked with science; and each of them is a fragment. Nor can these fragments ever, in the strict sense of the word, make up a whole or total. They have broken off, sometimes by accident, and sometimes for convenience, from one another. The sciences have budded forth here and there upon the tree of popular knowledge and ordinary consciousness, as the interest and needs of the time drew attentioncloser to various points and objects in the world surrounding us.

Prosecute the popular knowledge about any point far enough, substituting completeness and accuracy for vagueness, and especially giving numerical definiteness in weight, size, and figure, until the little drop of fact has grown into an ocean, and the mere germ has expanded into a structure with complex interconnexion,—and you will have a science. By its point of origin this luminous body of facts is united to the great circle of human knowledge and ignorance. Each special science is a part, which presupposes a total of much lower organisation, but much wider range than itself: each branch of scientific knowledge grows out of the already existent tree of acquaintance with things. But the part very soon assumes an independence of its own, and adopts a hostile or negative attitude towards the general level of unscientific opinion. This process of what we may, from the vulgar point of view, call abnormal development, is repeated irregularly at various points along the surface of ordinary consciousness. At one time it is the celestial movements calling for the science of astronomy: at another the problem of dividing the soil calling for the geometrician. Each of these outgrowths naturally re-acts and modifies the whole range of human knowledge, or what we may call popular science; and thus, while keeping up its own life, it quickens the parent stock with an infusion of new vigour, and raises the general intelligence to a higher level and into a higher element.

The order of the outcome of the sciences in time, therefore, and their connexions with one another, cannot be explained or understood, if we look only to the sciences themselves. We must first of all descend into the depths of natural thought, or of general culture,and trace the lines which unite science with science in that general medium. The systematic interdependence of the sciences must be chiefly sought for in the workings of thought as a whole in its popular phases, and in the action and reaction of thatgeneralhuman thought with the sciences, those definite organisations of knowledge which form sporadically round thenucleihere and there presented in what would superficially be described as the inorganic mass and medium of popular knowledge. Thus, by means of the sciences in their aggregate action, the material of common consciousness is expanded and developed, at least in certain parts, though the expansion may be neither consistent nor systematic. But so long as this work is incomplete, so long, that is to say, as every point in the line of popular knowledge has not received its due elaboration and equal study, the sciences merely succeed each other in a certain imperfect sequence, or exist in juxtaposition: they do not form a total. The whole of scientific knowledge will only be formed, when science shall be as completely rounded and unified, as in its lower sphere and more inadequate element the ordinary consciousness of the world is now.

Up to a certain point the method of science is but the method of ordinary consciousness pursued knowingly and steadily. But ere long the method acquires a distinctive character of its own. It shakes off the pressure of that immediate subservience in which ordinary knowledge stands to man's needs, wishes and interests. Knowledge is pursued—within a wide range—for its own sake, and by a class more or less definitely set apart by humanity for its scientific service,—which is thus performed more systematically and continuously. But the great step which carries ordinary knowledge into its higher region is the discovery, due to reflectionand comparison, that there is a double grade of reality-a permanent, essential, uniform, substantial being, which is contrasted with an evanescent, apparent, varying and accidental. To know a thing is in all cases torelate itto something else: to know it in the higher sense—vere scire—is to relate it to its essence, its substantial or universal form, its permanent self. Ordinary knowledge, e. g., fixes a thing by referring to its antecedents: scientific knowledge refers it to its 'invariable, 'unconditional' or 'essential' antecedent,—to something which contains it implicitly, and necessarily, and is not merely by accident or juxtaposition associated with it. To discover this permanent, underlying substance or reality comes to be the problem of science—a problem which may be taken in the widest generality, or restricted to some one group of existences. What is asked for, e.g., may be the uniformity and essence in the appearance of the diurnal journey of the sun, or it may be the underlying, invisible, nature which displays itself in all the variety of minerals, and in animal and plant life. The one-and-the-same in a diversity of many; the type-form in individuals: the cause which is the key to understanding an effect that always and unconditionally follows it; the force which finds different expression in actions—are what Science seeks.

In that search two points emerge as regards the method. The first is the importance of quantitative statements or numerical appreciations, and the general law that variations in the qualitative are in some ratio concomitant with variations in the quantitative. Mathematics, in a word, is found to be an invaluable instrument for recording with accuracy the minutest as well as the most immense differences of quality. First, it is seen that qualitative differences within a given range, e.g. various colours or various musical notes, can beaccurately expressed by a numerical ratio. But, secondly, it soon appears that even greater divergences of quality, e.g. those of colour and of chemical quality, may possibly be reduced to stages on one quantitative scale. It is not unnatural that such experiences should give rise to a hope—and in sanguine minds, an assurance—that all the phenomena of nature are ultimately phases of some common nature—some elementary being—which runs through an infinite gamut of numerically defined adjustments.

But the numerical prepossession—as we may call it—creates another assumption. Every number consists of units: every cube can be regarded as an aggregation of smaller cubes, and in measurement is (implicitly at least) so regarded. Transferring this to the physical world, every object is regarded as a composite—a Large, made up by the addition and juxtaposition of many (relatively) Littles. The essentials of the composite are here the elements that compose it: these, by a natural tendency, we proceed to conceive as remaining always unchanged, and giving rise by their peculiar juxtaposition to certain perceptions in the human being. You whirl rapidly a blazing piece of wood, and instead of a discontinuous series of flashes you see one orbit of luminous matter: or, let falling rain-drops take up a particular position in reference to your eyes and the sun, and a rainbow is visible. In both cases there is what may be called an illusion—the illusion, above all, of unity and continuity. Now what is in these cases obviously and demonstrably seen, is, as Leibniz in particular has reminded us, the general law of all matter as such. In the extended and material world there is nowhere a real unity discoverable. The small is made up of the smallerad infinitum[1]. But the conclusion(which Leibniz drew)—that unity belongs only to v,' Monads and never by any possibility to a material substance, was not that commonly reached or accepted. There are—or there must be,—said the prevalent creed, ultimates, indivisibles, indecomposables, simples, atoms. These are the final bricks of reality, out of which the apparent universe is built: each with a maximum,—ane plus ultra—of resistibility, hardness, fullness, and unsqueezable bulk.

Into further details of these ultimate irreducibles we need not enter. It is sufficient to denote the general purport of the conception, and the tendency it implies.

In these ultimates supreme reality is understood to lie; and on them at last, and indeed always, rests whatever reality truly exists in any object. All else is secondary—and, comparatively speaking, illusory,—unreal. Any phenomena that may be noted only affect the surface or show of these reals: the inner reality continues one and unchanged. Outside them, around them, is the void—emptiness, non-entity. Yet null and void as it may be, we may, in passing, reply,—this circumambient is the source of all that gives these masses of atoms any distinctive reality—any character of true being. Space may be empty enough,—a mere spectre-shell; and yet it is their differences in spatial circumstance that bring out and actualise what they implicitly are. These 'individua' these units of reality, these atoms, are real and knowable only in their relations. So too Time may be contemptuously treated as a passive receptacle: yet it is only by its connexions in the past and the future that the present moment has any actuality it may claim. And time and space are potent agencies—inpopular mode of utterance—whatever the mechanical philosophy may say.

But all of these relations are in the realm of unreality. The atoms aloneare: and yet the void, which oughtnottobe,in an unmistakable wayisalso. To this mysterious vacuum which lies outside (and yet not outside) reality, to this not-being whichis,there can only be given a half-negative and baffling name. Let it be called Chance—or let it be called Necessity; let it be called inexplicable Law of co-existence and sequence,—the Force which is the beginning of motion. It is the ultimate key to the mystery—but it is at least a key which no human hand can use, or even lay hold of. It is enough for science if, leaving this ultimate inexplicability untouched, it trace in each separate instance the exact equation between the sum of the constituents and the total which they compose,—if it prove that the several items when put together exactly give the sum proposed. Identification—the establishment of quantitative equations—is the work of science. Identity is its canon, working on the presumption or axiom that there can be nothing in the result which was not in the antecedents or conditions.Ex nihilo nihil fit.The quantity of energy must always be the same, though its phases may vary, or temporarily avoid detection. Matter, i.e. the ultimate reality, is indestructible. In short, the method of analysis and synthesis, as that of addition and subtraction, is a calculus which takes the form of an equation.

So far the inorganic, inanimate world has been mainly in view. If we now turn to the organisms, we find the popular creed expressed in the adageOmne vivum e vivo.No eye has ever seen—though fanatical observers have sometimes so deluded themselves as to think they saw—a living being directly emerge frominorganic stuff. The saner student of physiology contents himself with leaving for the while the crux of the genesis of Life, and examining only the building up of the living creature out of its constituents. Here the atom is called the cell: every organism is a synthesis of cells, and in the cell we have the primary element of organic reality:Omnis cellula e cellula,In the atom we have the ultimate element; in the cell a relative element,—the absolute beginning of a new order of things,—which we may, if we like, choose to treat (though only for logical simplicity's sake) as a gradual development from the other and more primitive, but which, so far as experience and history teach, is equally ultimate in its kind. But be the final constituent (physical) atom, or (physiological) cell, the relation of these constituents is at first conceived by science only as composition, or mechanical synthesis. It is only gradually that science begins to have doubts as to the inviolability and unalterableness of the elements. When the idea—not altogether new—of a 'latent meta-schematism' and latent process within the constituents is entertained and carried out in earnest, science has passed on to a new stage: from mechanical atomism to a dynamic and organic theory of existence. And the governing ideas of scientific logic have then ceased to be co-existence, and sequence, correlation and composition: the new category is intus-susception, development, adaptation not only external but internal.

Divide et imperais the motto of Science. To isolate one thing or one group of facts from its context,—to penetrate beneath the apparent simplicity, which time and custom have taught ordinary eyes to see in the concrete object, to the multitude of underlying simple elements,—to leave everything extraneous out of sight,—to abolish the teleology which imposes upon Naturea permanent tribute (direct or indirect) towards the supply of human wants,—and to take, as it were, one thing at a time and study it for itself disinterestedly; that is the problem of the sciences. And to accomplish that end they do not hesitate to break the charmed links which in common vision hold the world together,—to disregard the spiritual harmony which the sense of beauty finds in the scene,—to strip off the relations of means and end, which reflection has thrown from thing to thing, and the sensuous atmosphere of so-called 'secondary' qualities in which human sense has enveloped each; and finally to sever its connexion by which

'the whole round world is every wayBound by gold chains about the feet of God.'

In those days when reflection had not set in,—when humanity had not yet found itself a stranger in the house of Nature, and had not yet dared to regard her as a mere automatic slave, men had no doubts as to the meaning of things. They lived sympathetically her life.

'Man, once descried, imprints for everHis presence on all lifeless things: the windsAre henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,A querulous mutter, or a quick gay laugh.'

To the extent of his abilities and his culture, indeed man has in all ages read himself into the phenomena external to him. Such readings, in times when he feared and loved his kinsfolk of Nature, were fetichism and anthropomorphism. Gradually, however, forgetting his community, he claimed to be the measure and master of all things: to decree their use and function. But in course of time, when the sciences had emancipated themselves from the yoke of philosophy, they refused to borrow any such help in reading the riddle of the universe, and resolved to begin,ab ovo,from the atom or cell, and leave the elements to work out their own explanation. Modern science in so doing practises the lessons learned from Spinoza and Hume. The former teaches that all conception of order, i. e. of adaptation and harmony in nature, and indeed all the methods by which nature is popularly explained, are only modes of our emotional imagination, betraying how imperfect has been in most of us the emancipation of human intellect from the servitude to the affections[2]. The latter points out that all connexions between things are solely mental associations, ingrained habits of expectation, the work of time and custom, accredited only by experience[3]. There must be no pre-suppositions allowed in the studies of science, no help derived prematurely from the later terms in the process to elucidate the earlier. Let man, it is said, be explained by those laws, and by the action of those primary elements which build up every other part of nature: let molecules by mechanical union construct the thinking organism, and then construct society. The elements which we find by analysis must be all that is required to make the synthesis. Thus in modern times science carries out, fully and with the details of actual knowledge in several branches, the principles of the atom and the void, which Democritus suggested.

The scientific spirit, however, the spirit of analysis and abstraction (or of 'Mediation' and 'Reflection'), is not confined in its operations to the physical world. The criticism of ordinary beliefs and conventions has been applied—and applied at an earlier period—to what has been called the Spiritual world, to Art, Religion, Morality, and the institutions of human Society. Under these names the agency of ages, acting by their individual minds, has created organic systems, unities which have claimed to be permanent, inviolable, and divine. Such unities or organic structures are the Family, the State, the works of Art, the forms, doctrines, and systems of Religion, existing and recognised in ordinary consciousness. But in these cases, as in Nature, the reflective principle may come forward and ask what right these unities have to exist. This is the question which the 'Encyclopaedic,' the 'Aufklärung,' the 'Rationalist' and 'Freethinking' theories, raise and have raised in the last century and the present. What is the Family, it is said, but a fiction or convention, which is used to give a decent, but somewhat transparent covering to a certain animal appetite, and its probable consequences? What is the State, and what is Society, but a fiction or compact, by which the weak try to make themselves seem strong, and the unjust seek to shelter themselves from the consequences of their own injustice? What is Religion, it is said, but a delusion springing from the fears and weakness of the crowd, and the cunning of the few, which men have fostered until it has wrapped humanity in its snaky coils? And Poetry, we are assured, like its sister Arts, will perish and its illusions fade away, when Science, now in the cradle, has become the full-grown Hercules. As for Morality and Law, and the like, the same condemnation has been prepared from of old.All of them, it is said, are but the inventions of power and craft, or the phantoms of human imagination, which the strength of positive science and bare facts is destined in no long time to dispel.

When they insisted upon a severance of the elements in the vulgarly-accepted unities of the world, Science and Freethinking, like Epicurus in an older day, have believed that they were liberating the world from its various superstitions, from the bonds which instinct and custom had fastened upon things so as to combine them into systems more or less arbitrary. They denied the supremacy and reality of those ideas which insist on the essential unity and self-sameness in things that visibly and tangibly have a separate existence of their own, and branded these ideas comprehensively as mysticism and metaphysics. They sought to disabuse us of spirits, vital forces, divine right of governments, final causes,et hoc genus omne.They were exceedingly jealous for the independence of the individual, and for his right to demand satisfaction for the questioning, ground-seeking faculty of his nature. But while they did so they hardly realised how entirely the spectator is the part, the product of what he surveys, and while surveying treats as if it were but a spot or mark on the circumference of the circle that lies—some way off—around him. 'Phenomenalism,' as this mode of looking at things has been called, is false to life, and would cut away the ground from philosophy.[4]

To some extent philosophy returns to the position of the wider consciousness, to the general belief in harmony and symmetry. It reverts to the unity or connexion, which the natural presumptions of mankind find in the picture of the world. Thenolo philosophariof the intuitivist, in reaction from the supposed excessesof the sciences, simply reverted to the bare re-statement of the popular creed. If science, e. g., had shown that the perception of an external world pre-supposed for its accomplishment an unsuspected series of intermediate steps, the mere intuitivist simply denied the intermediation by appealing to Common Sense, or to the natural instincts and primary beliefs of mankind. Conviction and natural instinct were declared to counterbalance the abstractions of science. But philosophy which seeks to comprehend existence cannot take the same ground as the intuitional school, or neglect the testimony of science. If the spiritual unity of the world has been denied and lost to sight, mere assertion that we feel and own its pervading power will not do much good. It is necessary to reconcile the contrast between the wholeness of the natural vision, and the fragmentary, but in its fragments elaborated, result of science.

The sciences break up the rough generalisations or vulgar concepts of everyday use, and make their fixed distinctions yield to analysis. They thus render continuous things which were looked at as only separate. But they tend again to substitute the results of their analysis as a new and permanent distinction and principle of things. They are like revolutionists who upset and perturb an old order, and set up a new and minuter tyranny in its place. Gradually, the general culture, the average educated intelligence gathers up the fruit of scientific research into the total development of humanity: and uses the work of science to fill up thelacunae,the gaps, which make popular consciousness so irregular and disconnected. A sort of popular philosophy comes to sum up and estimate what science has accomplished: and therein is as it were the spirit of the world taking into his own hand the acquisitions won by the more audacious and self-willed of his sons,and investing them in the common store. They are set aside and preserved there, at first in an abstract and technical form, but destined soon to pass into the possession of all, and form that mass of belief and instinctive or implanted knowledge whence a new generation will draw its mental supplies. Each great scientific discovery is in its turn reduced to a part of the common stock. It leaves the technical field, and spreads into the common life of men, becoming embodied in their daily beliefs,—a seed of thought, from which, by the agency of intelligent experience, new increments of science will one day spring.

Philosophy properly so called is also the unification of science, but in a new sphere, a higher medium not recognised by the sciences themselves. The reconciliation which the philosopher believes himself to accomplish between ordinary consciousness and science is identified by either side with a phase of its antagonist error. Science will term philosophy a modified form of the old religious superstition. The popular consciousness of truth, and especially religion, will see in philosophy only a repetition or an aggravation of the evils of science. The attempt at unity will not approve itself to either, until they enter upon the ground which philosophy occupies, and move in that element. And that elevation into the philosophic ether calls for a tension of thought which is the sternest labour imposed upon man: so that the continuous action of philosophising has been often styled superhuman. If anywhere, it is in pure philosophy that proof becomes impossible, unless for those who are willing to think for themselves[5]. The philosophic lesson cannot be handed on to a mere recipient: the result, when cut off fromthe process which produced it, vanishes like the palace in the fairy tale.

'The whole of philosophy is nothing but the study of the specific forms or types of unity.[6]There are many species and grades of this unity. They are not merely to be enumerated and asserted in a vague way, as they here and there force themselves upon the notice of the popular mind. Philosophy sees in that unity neither an ultimate and unanalysable fact, nor a deception, but a growth (which is also a struggle), a revealing or unfolding, which issues in an organism or system, constructing itself more and more completely by a force of its own. This system formed by these types of the fundamental unity is called the 'Idea,' of which the highest law is development. Philosophy essays to do for this connective and unifying nature, i. e. for the thought in things, something like what the sciences have done or would like to do for the facts of sense and matter,—to do for the spiritual binding-element in its integrity, what is being done for the several facts which are more or less combined. It retraces the universe of thought from its germinal form, where it seems, as it were, an indecomposable point, to the fully matured system or organism, and shows not merely that one phase of pure thought passes into another, but how it does so, and yet is not lost, but subsists suspended and deprived of its narrowness in the maturer phase.

[1]Leibniz, ed. Gerhardt, iii. 507: 'Les atomes sont l'effet de la foiblesse de nostre imagination, qui aime à se reposer et à se hater à venir à une fin dans les sous-divisions et analyses: il n'en est pas ainsi dans la nature qui vient de l'infini et va à l'infini.'

[2]Spinoza,Ethica,i. 36, App. 'Quoniam ea nobis prae ceteris grata sunt quae facile imaginari possumus, ideo homines ordinem confusioni praeferunt; quasi ordo aliquid in natura praeter respectum ad nostram imaginationem esset... Videmus itaque omnes rationes quibus vulgus solet naturam explicare modos esse tantummodo imaginandi.' Cf.Eth.iv. praef.: Epist. xxxii.

[3]'This transition of thought from the Cause to the Effect proceeds not from Reason. It derives its origin altogether from Custom and Experience.' Hume, Essay V. (Enquiry concerning Human Understanding.) 'All inferences from Experience therefore are effects of Custom.' (Ibid.)

[4]J. Grote,Exploratio Philosophica.

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

[6]Philosophie der Religion,i. p. 97: 'Die ganze Philosophie ist nichts Anderes als das Studium der Bestimmungen der Einheit.' See especiallyEncycl.§ 573 (Philosophy of Mind, pp. 192 seqq.).

The psychology of the Greeks has to all appearance given the mere intellect an undue pre-eminence, if it has not even treated it as man's essential self. Whether the appearance is altogether sound might be a profitable inquiry for those who most criticise it. At any rate, a later psychology has taught us to regard man as at once a cognitive, an emotional, and a volitional being. It has arrived at this conclusion as it looked at the division that parted off the systems of science from the sphere of conduct and social life, and both from the inner life of sentiment, of love, admiration and reverence. And the inference was justifiable, in the same way as Plato's when, as he surveyed the triple sphere into which the outward world of his contemporary society was divided, he concluded a triplicity of the soul. If it was justifiable, it was also, as in his case, somewhat misleading. In the outward manifestation, where the letters are posted up on a gigantic scale, one tends to forget that they only spell one word. Their difference and distance seem increased, and we fail to note that, though there are three aspects, yet there is only one power or soul, which exhibits itself under one or other of the three tones or modes. In the actual human being, cognition is always of some emotionalinterest and always leads up to some practical result. From different points of view one or other is occasionally declared to be primary and original; the others derivative and secondary. At any rate we may say that in the ordinary human being who is still in the garden of preparation and has not yet stepped forth on one of the separate routes of life, his knowledge, his emotional and his active life are in a tolerable harmony, and that each in its little development is constantly followed by the other.

But with the outward differentiation an inward went hand in hand. In some cases the intellectual or scientific, in others the emotional, in others the active faculties became predominant. Human nature in order to attain all its completeness had first of all, as it were, to lose its life in order to gain it. The individual had to sacrifice part of his all-sided development in order that he might gain it again, and in a larger measure, through the medium of society. This process is the process of civilisation: the long and, as it often seems, weary road by which man can only realise himself by self-sacrifice: can only reach unity through the way of diversity, and must die to live. It is a process in which it is but too easy to notice only one stage and speak of it as if it were the whole. It is possible sometimes to identify civilisation with the material increase in the means of producing enjoyment, or with the progress of scientific teaching as to the laws of those material phenomena on which material civilisation is largely dependent. It is possible sometimes to take as its test the stores of artistic works, and the extension of a lively and delicate love of all that is beautiful and tasteful. One may identify it with a high-toned moral life, and with an orderly social system. Or one may maintain that the real civilisation of a country presupposesa lofty conception and reverent attitude to the supreme source of all that is good, and true, and beautiful.

The question is important as bearing on the relation of philosophy to the special sciences. Philosophy is sometimes identified with the sum of sciences: sometimes with their complete unification. Philosophy, says a modern, is knowledge completely unified. It is of course to some extent a question of words in what sense a term is to be defined. And no one will dispute that the scientific element is in point of form the most conspicuous aspect of philosophy. Yet if we look at the historical use of the term, one or two considerations suggest themselves. Philosophy, said an ancient, is the knowledge of things human and divine. Again and again, it has claimed for its task to be a guide and chart of human life—to reveal the form of good and of beauty. But to do this, it must be more than a mere science, or than a mere system of the sciences. Again, it has been urged by modern critics that Kant at last discovered for philosophy her true province—the study of the conditions and principles of human knowledge. But though epistemology is all-important, the science of knowledge is not identical with philosophy: nor did Kant himself think it was. Rather his view is on the whole in accord with what he has called the 'world's (as opposed to the scholar's) conception of philosophy[1],' as the science of the bearing of all ascertainable truths on the essential aims of human reason—teleologia humanae rationis,—in accord, too, with the world's conception of the philosopher as no mere logician, but the legislator of human reason.

This, it need hardly be added, is the conception of philosophy which is implicitly the basis of Hegel's use. Let us hear Schelling. 'A philosophy which in itsprinciple is not already religion is no true philosophy[2].'

Or again, as to the place of Ethics: 'Morality is Godlike disposition, an uplifting above the influence of the concrete into the realm of the utterly universal. Philosophy is a like elevation, and for that reason intimately one with morality, not through subordination, but through essential and inner likeness[3].' But, again, it has more than once been felt that philosophy is kindred with Art. It has been said—not as a compliment—that philosophy is only a form of gratifying the aesthetic instincts. Schopenhauer has suggested—as a novelty—that the true way to philosophy was not by science, but through Art. And Schelling before him had—while asserting the inner identity of the two—even gone so far as to assert[4]that 'Art is the sole, true and eternal organon as well as the ostensible evidence of philosophy.'

Philosophy, therefore, is one of a triad in which the human spirit has tried to raise itself above its limitations and to become god-like. And philosophy is the climax; Art the lowest; Religion in the mean. But this does not mean that Religion supersedes Art, and that Philosophy supersedes religion; or, if we retain the term 'supersede,' we must add that the superseded is not left behind and passed aside: it is rather an integral constituent of what takes its place. Philosophy is true and adequate only as it has given expression to all that religion had or aimed at. So, too, Religion is not the destruction of Art: though here the attitude may often seem to be more obviously negative. A religion which has no place for art is, again, no true religion. And thus again, Philosophy becomes a reconciler of Art and Religion: of the visible ideal and the invisible God.Art, on the other hand, is a foretaste and a prophecy of religion and philosophy.

But Art, Religion, and Philosophy, again, rest upon, grow out of, and are the fulfilment of an ethical society-a state of human life where an ordered commonwealth in outward visibility is animated and sustained by the spirit of freedom and self-realisation. And that public objective existence of social humanity in its turn reposes on the will and intelligence of human beings, of souls which in various relations of discipline and interaction with their environment have become free-agents, and have risen to be more than portions of the physical world, sympathetic with its changes, and become awake to themselves and their surroundings. Such is the mental or spiritual life as it rises to full sense of its power, recognises its kindred with the general life, carries out that kindred in its social organisation, and at length through the strength social union gives floats boldly in the empyrean of spiritual life, in art, religion, and philosophy.

But, what about the special relationship of philosophy to the sciences? Undoubtedly the philosophers of the early years of the century have used lordly language in reference to the sciences. They have asserted—from Fichte downwards—that the philosophical construction, of the universe must justify itself to itself—must be consistent, continuous, and coherent—and that it had not to wait for experience to give it confirmation. Even the cautious Kant[5]had gone so far as to assert that the 'understanding gives us nature'—i. e. as he explains,natura formaliter spectata, viz., the order and regularity in the phenomena—that it is the source of the laws of nature and of its formal unity. The so-called proofs of natural laws are only instances andexemplifications, which no moreprovethem, than we prove that 6 x 4 = 24, because 6 yards of cloth at 4s. must be paid for by 24 shillings. To assert that this instance is no proof, is not to reject experience—still less to refuse respect to the new discoveries of science. But it is unquestionably to assert that there is something prior to the sciences—prior, i. e. in the sense that Kant speaks of thea priori,something which is fundamental to them, and constitutes them what they are—something which is assumed as real if their syntheses (and every scientific truth is a synthesis) are to be possible. The analysis and exhibition in its organic completeness of this Kantiana prioriis the theme of the Hegelian Logic.

The Philosophy of Nature stands in the Hegelian system between Logic and Mental or Spiritual Philosophy. Man—intelligent, moral, religious and artistic man—rests upon the basis of natural existence: he is the child of the earth, the offspring of natural organisation. But Nature itself—such is the hypothesis of the system—is only intelligible as the reflex of thata prioriwhich has been exhibited in Logic. The whole scheme by which the natural world is scientifically held together, apprehended by ordinary consciousness and elaborated by mathematical analysis, presupposes the organism of the categories—these fundamental habits of thought or form of conception which are the framework of the existence we know. Yet Nature never shows this intelligible world—the Idea—in its purity and entirety. In the half-literal, half-figurative phrases of Hegel, Nature shows the Idea beside itself, out of its mind, alienated,non compos mentis.'It is a mad world, my masters,' 'The impotence of nature—Ohnmacht der Natur[6]—is a frequent phrase, by which he indicates thea-logical, if not illogical, character of the physical world. Here we come across the negation of mind: chance plays its part: contingency is everywhere. If you expect that the physical universe willdisplayunquestioning obedience to the laws of reason and of the higher logic, you will be disappointed. What youseeis fragmentary, chaotic, irregular. To the bodily sense—even when that sense has been rendered more penetrating by all the many material and methodical aids of advanced civilisation—the Idea is in the natural world presented only in traces, indications, portions, which it requires a well-prepared mind to descry, still more to unite. Yet at the same time the indications of that unity are everywhere, and the hypothesis of the logical scheme or organisation of the Idea is the only theory which seems fully to correspond with the data. Nature[7], says Hegel, is the Idea as it shows itself in sense-perception, not as it shows itself in thought. In thought a clear all-comprehending total; in sense a baffling fragment. The Idea—the unity of life and knowledge—is everywhere in nature, but nowhere clearly, or whole, or otherwise than a glimpse; not a logical scheme or compact theory. Nature is the sensible in which the intelligible is bound—the reality which is the vehicle of the ideal. But the ideal treasure is held in rough and fragile receptacles which half disclose and half conceal the light within. Nature in short contains, but disguised, the idea, in fainter and clearer evidences: it is the function of man, by his scientific intelligence and ethical work, building up a social organisation, to provide the ground on which the ultimate significance and true foundation of the world may be deciphered, guessed, or believed, or imaginatively presented. The verification of the guess or deciphering,of course, lies in its adequacy to explain and colligate the facts. The true method and true conception is that which needs no subsequent adjustments—no epicycles to make it work—which is no mere hypothesis useful for subjective arrangement, but issues with uncontrollable force and self-evidence from the facts.

What Hegel has called the 'impotence of nature,' Schopenhauer has styled the irrational Will, and it is from that end, so to speak, that Schopenhauer's philosophy begins. Nature—the basis of all things—the fundamental prius—is an irresistible and irregular appetite or craving to be, to do, to live,—but anappetitusornisuswhich ascends from grade to grade—from mere mechanical forces acting in movement up to the highest form of animal activity. But as this 'Will' or blind lust of being and instinct of life gets above the inorganic world, and manifests itself in the animal organism, there emerges a new order of existence—the intellect, or the ideal world. Seen from the underside, indeed, all that has appeared now in the animal is a brain and a nerve-system—a new species of matter. But there is another side to the Mind which has thus awakened out of the sleep of natural forces. This intellect is unaware and can never be made aware that it is a child of nature: it acknowledges no superior, and no beginning or end in time. Its natal day is infinitely beyond the age when the cosmic process began its race; before stars gathered their masses of luminosity, and the earth received the first germs of life. As the genius of Art, it arrests the toiling struggle of existence to produce new forms and destroy old ones; it sets free in typical forms of eternal beauty the great ideas that nature vainly seeks to embody, and as moral and religious life its aim is toannihilate the craving and the lust for more and ever more being and to enter in passionless and calm union with the One-and-All.

Thus it is, if not absurd, at least misleading, to speak of Hegel's system as Panlogism. Strictly speaking, it is only of the Logic that this is the proper name: there, unquestionably, reason is all and in all. Yet to hold that reason is the very life and centre of things is for philosophy the cardinal article—the postulate which must inspire her first and last steps and guide her throughout. But the Logical Idea, if put at the beginning, is at first only put as a presupposition, which it is the task of human intelligence to work out and organise. If it be the key which is to explain nature and render it intelligible, it is a key which has only been gained in the process—the long process—by which man has risen from his natural origin—never however parting company with it—to survey and comprehend himself and his setting. The faculty of 'pure thinking,' which is the pre-condition of Logical study, is the result of a gradual development in which animal sense has grown, and metamorphosed, and worked itself up to be a free intelligence and a good will capable of discerning and fulfilling the universal and the eternal. Thus in the Logic the system constructs the pure Idea—the ideal timeless organisation of thoughts or λόγοι on which all knowledge of reality rests—the diamond net which suffers nothing to escape its meshes: in the Philosophy of Nature it tries to put together in unity and continuity the phases and partial aspects which the physical universe presents in graduated exemplification of the central truth: and in the Philosophy of Mind it traces the steps by which a merely natural being becomes the moral and aesthetic idealist in whom man approaches deity.

It is indeed Hegel's fundamental axiom that actuality is reasonable. But the actuality is not the appearance—the temporary phases—the succession of event: it is the appearance rooted in its essence—the succession concentrated (yet not lost) in its unity. There is room for much so-called irrationality within these ranges. For, when human beings pronounce something irrational, they only mean that their practical intelligence would have adopted other methods to arrive at certain conclusions. They judge, in fact, by their limited understandings and notex ordine universi.Hegel's doctrine is after all only another way of stating the maintenance of the fittest; and it is liable to the v same misconception by those who employ their personal aims as the standards of judgment.

So too there is reason—there is the Idea—in Nature. But it is there only for the artist, the religious man, and the philosopher; and they see it respectively by the eye of genius, by the power of faith, by the thought of reason. They see it from the standpoint of the absolute—sub specie quadam aeternitatis.It is therefore a recalcitrant matter in which Nature presents the Idea: or, if recalcitrant suggests a positive opposition, let us say rather a realm in which the Idea fails to come out whole and clear, where unity has to be forced upon and read into the facts. Science, says one writer, is an ideal construction: it implies an abstraction from irregularities and inequalities: it smoothes and sublimates the rough and imperfect material into a more rounded and perfect whole. Its object, which it terms a reality, is a non-sensible, imperceptible reality: what one might as well call an ideality, were it not that here again the popular imagination twists the word into a subjective sense to mean the private and personal ideas of the student.

But the obvious individual reality never quite in its obviousness equals the 'golden mediocrity' of the ideal. Its myriad grapes must be crushed to yield the wine of the spirit.

'It's a lifelong toil till our lump be leavened'

—till the ore be transformed into the fine gold. But the gold is there, and in the great laboratory ofnaturanaturansis the principle and agent of its own purification. 'Nature is made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean'—for nature is spirit in disguise.

It is on this side that a certain analogy of Hegel's and Schelling's philosophy of nature with the Romantic school comes out. Nature is felt, as it were, to be spirit-haunted, to give glimpses of a solidarity, a design, a providentiality, which runs counter to that general outward indifference in which part seems to have settled beside part, each utterly indifferent to the other. Romance is the unexpected coincidence, the sudden jumping together of what seemed set worlds apart and utterly alien. It was the sense of this Romance which wove its wild legends of nymph and cobold, of faun and river-god, of imp and fairy, wielding the powers of the elements and guiding the life of even the so-called inanimate world. But it is no less the theme of the fairy tale of science. Even in the austere demonstrations of geometry, and the constructions of mechanics, the un-looked-for slips upon us with gipsy tread. Who has not—in his early studies of mathematics—been fain to marvel at the almost unexpected consilience of property with property in a figure, suddenly placing in almost 'eery' relief the conjunction of what was apparently poles asunder? It is not a mere form of words to speak of beautiful properties of a conic section or a curve. Custom perhaps has blunted oursense for the symmetries of celestial dynamics, but they are none the less admirable, because we are otherwise engrossed. To the first generation of our century the phenomena of chemistry, magnetism and electricity appealed—as they have never since done—with a tangible demonstration of thatappetitus ad invicem,that instinct of union Bacon speaks of; and this time in a higher form than in mere mechanism. Polarity—the bifurcation of reality into a pair of opposites which yet sought their complement in each other—eternally dividing only eternally to unite, and thus only to exist—became a process pressed into general service. Lastly, what more admirable than that adaptation of the individual to the environment—and of the environment to the individual—of the organs in him to his total, and of his total to his organs. One in all and All in one: one life in perpetual transformation, animals, plants, and earth and air; one organism, developing in absolute coherence. This was the vision which the genius of Schelling and his contemporaries saw—the same vision which, by accumulation of facts and pictorial history, Darwin and his disciples have impressed in some measure even on the dullest.

But there is a profound difference between the spirit of a Philosophy of Nature and the aggregate of the physical sciences. Each science takes the particular quarry which accident or providence has assigned to it, and does its best to 'put out' every piece of rock it contains. But it seldom goes, unless by constraint, and in these days of specialisation it does so less and less, to examine the neighbouring excavation, and see if there be any connexion between the strata. Even within its own domain it is ashamed to put forward too much parade of system. Its method is often like that of the showman in the travelling menagerie: 'Andnow, please pass to the next carriage.' It respects the compartmental arrangement into which it finds the world broken up, and often thinks it has deserved well if it has filled the compartment fuller than before, or succeeded in creating a few sub-compartments within the old bounds. Even the so-called mental and moral sciences when they lose their philosophical character tend to imitate these features. Yet in every science there is an outlook and an outlet, for whosoever has the will and the power, to emerge from his narrow domain on the open fields and free prospect into the first fountains and last great ocean of being. Always, and not least in our own day, the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist, the psychologist, the sociologist, and the economist, have made their special field a platform where they might discoursede omnibus rebus,and become for the nonce philosophers and metaphysicians. It would be a silly intolerance and a misconception of the situation to exclaimNe sutor ultra crepidam. In the organic system of things 'each "moment" even independent of the whole is the whole; and to see this is to penetrate to the heart of the thing.' We need hardly go to Hegel to be told that to know one thing thoroughly well is to know all things. The finite, which we inertly rest content with, would, if we were in full sympathy with it, open up its heart and show us the infinite. And yet if the specialist when he rises from his shoe-making, with a heart full of the faith that 'there is nothing like leather,' should proclaim his discovery of it in regions where it was hitherto unsurmised, one may smile incredulous and be no cynic.

Philosophy then keeps open eye and ear—as far as may be no doubt for the finer shades and delicate details—but essentially for the music of humanity and the music of the spheres—for the generalpurpose and drift of all sciences—from mathematics to sociology—as they help to make clear the life of nature and further the emancipation of man. It will seem occasionally to over-emphasise the continuity of science and to make light of its distinctions: it will seem occasionally more anxious as to the order than as to the contents of the sciences: it will remind the sciences of the hypothetical and formal character of much of their method and some of their principles: and sometimes will treat as unimportant, results on which the mere scholar or dogmatist of science lays great weight. From his habit of dealing with the limitations and mutual implication of principles and conceptions, the philosopher will often be able—and perhaps only too willing—to point out cases where the mere specialist has allowed himself to attribute reality to his abstraction. He will tell the analyst of the astronomical motions that he must not take the distinction of centrifugal and centripetal force, into which mechanics disintegrate the planetary orbit, as if it really meant that the planet was pulled inward by one force and sent on spinning forward by another[8]. And the scientist, proud of his mathematics, will resent and laugh at the philosopher who lets fall a word about the planets moving in grand independence like 'blessed gods.' The philosopher will hint to the chemist that his formulae of composition and decomposition of bodies are, as he uses them, somewhat mythological, picturing water as atom of oxygen locked up with atom of hydrogen; and the chemist will go away muttering something about a fool who does not believe in thewell-ascertained chemical truth that water is composed of these two gases. If the philosopher further hints that it is not the highest ideal of a chemical science to be content with enumerating fifty or sixty elements, and detecting their several properties and affinities[9]; that it would be well to find some principle of gradation, some unity or law which brought meaning into meaningless juxtaposition, the mere dogmatist, whose chemistry is his living and who shrinks from disendowment, will scent a propensity towards the heresy which sinks all elements in one. And yet, even among chemists, the instinct for law and unity begins to demand satisfaction.

A still richer store of amazing paradox and perplexing analogies awaits anyone who will turn over the volume in Hegel'sWerke(vii. i) and select the plums which lie thick in the lecture-notes. He will find a great deal—and probably more, the less he really knows of any of the subjects under discussion—that he cannot make head or tail of: language where he cannot guess whether it should be taken literally or figuratively. For Hegel seriously insists on the essential unity and identity of all the compartments of the physical universe; he will not keep time and space on one level, matter and motion on another, and senses, suns, plants, passions, all in their proper province. Going far beyond the theory which supposes that all the complex difference of organisation has grown up in endless, endless ages from a primitive indistinctness, so that the gap of time acts as a wall to keep early and late apart, Hegel insists upon their essential unity to-day. And that sounds hard—the herald of anarchy, of the collapse of the ordered polity of the scientific state. It is no doubt probable that Hegel, like other men, made mistakes; that he over-estimated the supposed discoveries of the day: that he indulged in false analogies, and that he was attracted by a daring paradox. All this has nothing to do with his main thesis: which is, that the natural realm is as it stands an a-logical realm where reason has gone beside itself, and yet containing an instrument—man, and that is mind—by which its rationality may be realised and restored. In that point at least he and Schopenhauer are at one.

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