49.] (γ) The third object of the Reason is God (§36): He also must be known and defined in terms of thought. But in comparison with an unalloyed identity, every defining term as such seems to the understanding to be only a limit and a negation: every reality accordingly must be taken as limitless,i.e.undefined. Accordingly God, when He is defined to be the sum of all realities, the most real of beings, turns into amere abstract.And the only term under which that most real of real, things can be defined is that of Being—itself the height of abstraction. These are the two elements, abstractidentity, on one hand, which is spoken of in this place as the notion; and Being on the other,—which Reason seeks to unify. And their union is theIdealof Reason.
50.] To carry out this unification two ways or two forms are admissible. Either we may begin with Being and proceed to theabstractionof Thought: or the movement may begin with the abstraction and end in Being.
We shall, in the first place, start from Being. But Being, in its natural aspect, presents itself to view as a Being of infinite variety, a World in all its plenitude. And this world may be regarded in two ways: first, as a collection of innumerable unconnected facts; and second, as a collection of innumerable facts in mutual relation, giving evidence of design. The first aspect is emphasised in the Cosmological proof: the latter in the proofs of Natural Theology. Suppose now that this fulness of being passes under the agency of thought. Then it is stripped of its isolation and unconnectedness, and viewed as a universal and absolutely necessary being which determines itself and acts by general purposes or laws. And this necessary and self-determined being, different from the being at the commencement, is God.
The main force of Kant's criticism on this process attacks it for being a syllogising,i.e.a transition. Perceptions, and that aggregate of perceptions we call the world, exhibit as they stand no traces of that universality which they afterwards receive from the purifying act of thought. The empirical conception of the world therefore gives no warrant for the idea of universality. And so any attempt on the part of thought to ascend from the empirical conception of the world to God is checked by the argument of Hume (as in the paralogisms, § 47), according to which we have no right tothink sensations, that is, to elicit universality and necessity from them.
Man is essentially a thinker: and therefore sound Common Sense, as well as Philosophy, will not yield up their right of rising to God from and out of the empirical view of the world. The only basis on which this rise is possible is the thinking study of the world, not the bare sensuous, animal, attuition of it. Thought and thought alone has eyes for the essence, substance, universal power, and ultimate design of the world. And what men call the proofs of God's existence are, rightly understood, ways of describing and analysing the native course of the mind, the course ofthoughtthinking thedataof the senses. The rise of thought beyond the world of sense, its passage from the finite to the infinite, the leap into the super-sensible which it takes when it snaps asunder the chain of sense, all this transition is thought and nothing but thought. Say there is no such passage, and you say there is to be no thinking. And in sooth, animals make no such transition. They never get further than sensation and the perception of the senses, and in consequence they have no religion.
Both on general grounds, and in the particular case, there are two remarks to be made upon the criticism of this exaltation in thought. The first remark deals with the question of form. When the exaltation is exhibited in a syllogistic process, in the shape of what we callproofsof the being of God, these reasonings cannot but start from some sort of theory of the world, which makes it an aggregate either of contingent facts or of final causes and relations involving design. The merely syllogistic thinker may deem this starting-point a solid basis and suppose that it remains throughout in the same empirical light, left at last as it was at the first. Inthis case, the bearing of the beginning upon the conclusion to which it leads has a purely affirmative aspect, as if we were only reasoning from one thing whichisand continues tobe,to another thing which in like manner is. But the great error is to restrict our notions of the nature of thought to its form in understanding alone. To think think the phenomenal world rather, means to re-cast its form, and transmute it into a universal. And thus the action-of-thought, has also,negativeeffect upon its basis: and the matter of sensation, when it receives the stamp of universality, at once loses its first and phenomenal shape. By the removal and negation of the shell, the kernel within the sense; v percept is brought to the light (§§ 13 and 23). And it is because they do not, with sufficient prominence, express the negative features implied in the exaltation of the mind from the world to God, that the metaphysical proofs of the being of a God are defective interpretations and descriptions of the process. If the world is only a sum of incidents, it follows that it is also deciduous and phenomenal, inesseandpossenull. That upward spring of the mind signifies, that the being which the world has is only a semblance, no real being, no absolute truth; it signifies that, beyond and above that appearance, truth abides in God, so that true being is another name for God. The process of exaltation might thus appear to be transition and to involve a means, but it is not a whit less true, that every trace of transition and means is absorbed; since the world, which might have seemed to be the means of reaching God, is explained to be a nullity. Unless the being of the world is nullified, thepoint d'appuifor the exaltation is lost. In this way the apparent means vanishes, and the process of derivation is cancelled in the very act by which it proceeds. It is the affirmative aspect of thisrelation, as supposed to subsist between two things, either of whichisas much as the other, which Jacobi mainly has in his eye when he attacks the demonstrations of the understanding. Justly censuring them for seeking conditions (i.e.the world) for the unconditioned, he remarks that the Infinite or God must on such a method be presented as dependent and derivative. But that elevation, as it takes place in the mind, serves to correct this semblance: in fact, it has no other meaning than to correct that semblance. Jacobi, however, failed to recognise the genuine nature of essential thought—by which it cancels the mediation in the very act of mediating; and consequently, his objection, though it tells against the merely 'reflective' understanding, is false when applied to thought as a whole, and in particular to reasonable thought.
To explain what we mean by the neglect of the negative factor in thought, we may refer by way of illustration to the charges of Pantheism and Atheism brought against the doctrines of Spinoza. The absolute Substance of Spinoza certainly falls short of absolute spirit, and it is a right and proper requirement that God should be defined as absolute spirit. But when the definition in Spinoza is said to identify the world with God, and to confound God with nature and the finite world, it is implied that the finite world possesses a genuine actuality and affirmative reality. If this assumption be admitted, of course a union of God with the world renders God completely finite, and degrades Him to the bare finite and adventitious congeries of existence. But there are two objections to be noted. In the first place Spinoza does not define God as the unity of God with the world, but as the union of thought with extension, that is, with the material world. And secondly, even if we accept this awkward popular statementas to this unity, it would still be true that the system of Spinoza was not Atheism but Acosmism, defining the world to be an appearance lacking in true reality. A philosophy, which affirms that God and God-alone is, should not be stigmatised as atheistic, when even those nations which worship the ape, the cow, or images of stone and brass, are credited with some religion. But as things stand the imagination of ordinary men feels a vehement reluctance to surrender its dearest conviction, that this aggregate of finitude, which it calls a world, has actual reality; and to hold that there is no world is a way of thinking they are fain to believe impossible, or at least much less possible than to entertain the idea that there is no God. Human nature, not much to its credit, is more ready to believe that a system denies God, than that it denies the world. A denial of God seems so much more intelligible than a denial of the world.
The second remark bears on the criticism of the material propositions to which that elevation in thought in the first instance leads. If these propositions have for their predicate such terms as substance of the world, its necessary essence, cause which regulates and directs it according to design, they are certainly inadequate to express what is or ought to be understood by God. Yet apart from the trick of adopting a preliminary popular conception of God, and criticising a result by this assumed standard, it is certain that these characteristics have great value, and are necessary factors in the idea of God. But if we wish in this way to bring before thought the genuine idea of God, and give its true value and expression to the central truth, we must be careful not to start from a subordinate level of facts. To speak of the 'merely contingent' things of the world is a very inadequate description of the premisses. Theorganic structures, and the evidence they afford of mutual adaptation, belong to a higher province, the province of animated nature. But even without taking into consideration the possible blemish which the study of animated nature and of the other teleological aspects of existing things may contract from the pettiness of the final causes, and from puerile instances of them and their bearings, merely animated nature is, at the best, incapable of supplying the material for a truthful expression to the idea of God. God is more than life: He is Spirit. And therefore if the thought of the Absolute takes a starting-point for its rise, and desires to take the nearest, the most true and adequate starting-point will be found in the nature of spirit alone.
51.] The other way of unification by which to realise the Ideal of Reason is to set out from theabstractumof Thought and seek to characterise it: for which purpose Being is the only available term. This is the method of the Ontological proof. The opposition, here presented from a merely subjective point of view, lies between Thought and Being; whereas in the first way of junction, being is common to the two sides of the antithesis, and the contrast lies only between its individualisation and universality. Understanding meets this second way with what is implicitly the same objection, as it made to the first. It denied that the empirical involves the universal: so it denies that the universal involves the specialisation, which specialisation in this instance is being. In other words it says: Being cannot be deduced from the notion by any analysis.
The uniformly favourable reception and acceptance which attended Kant's criticism of the Ontological proof was undoubtedly due to the illustration which he made use of. To explain the difference between thought and being, he took the instance of a hundredsovereigns, which, for anything it matters to the notion, are the same hundred whether they are real or only possible, though the difference of the two cases is very perceptible in their effect on a man's purse. Nothing can be more obvious than that anything we only think or conceive is not on that account actual: that mental representation, and even notional comprehension, always falls short of being. Still it may not unfairly be styled a barbarism in language, when the name of notion is given to things like a hundred sovereigns. And, putting that mistake aside, those who perpetually urge against the philosophic Idea the difference between Being and Thought, might have admitted that philosophers were not wholly ignorant of the fact. Can there be any proposition more trite than this? But after all, it is well to remember, when we speak of God, that we have an object of another kind than any hundred sovereigns, and unlike any one particular notion, representation, or however else it may be styled. It is in fact this and this alone which marks everything finite:—its being in time and space is discrepant from its notion. God, on the contrary, expressly has to be what can only be 'thought as existing'; His notion involves being. It is this unity of the notion and being that constitutes the notion of God.
If this were all, we should have only a formal expression of the divine nature which would not really go beyond a statement of the nature of the notion itself. And that the notion, in its most abstract terms, involves being is plain. For the notion, whatever other determination it may receive, is at least reference back on itself, which results by abolishing the intermediation, and thus is immediate. And what is that reference to self, but being? Certainly it would be strange if the notion, the very inmost of mind, if even the 'Ego,' orabove all, the concrete totality we call God, were not rich enough to include so poor a category as being, the very poorest and most abstract of all. For, if we look at the thought it holds, nothing can be more insignificant than being. And yet there may be something still more insignificant than being,—that which at first sight is perhaps supposed tobe,an external and sensible existence, like that of the paper lying before me. However, in this matter, nobody proposes to speak of the sensible existence of a limited and perishable thing. Besides, the petty stricture of theKritikthat 'thought and being are different' can at most molest the path of the human mind from the thought of God to the certainty that Heis: it cannot take it away. It is this process of transition, depending on the absolute inseparability of thethoughtof God from His being, for which its proper authority has been re-vindicated in the theory of faith or immediate knowledge,—whereof hereafter.
52.] In this way thought, at its highest pitch, has to go outside for any determinateness: and although it is continually termed Reason, is out-and-out abstract thinking. And the result of all is that Reason supplies nothing beyond the formal unity required to simplify and systematise experiences; it is acanon,not anorganonof truth, and can furnish only acriticismof knowledge, not adoctrineof the infinite. In its final analysis this criticism is summed up in the assertion that in strictness thought is only the indeterminate unity and the action of this indeterminate unity.
Kant undoubtedly held reason to be the faculty of the unconditioned; but if reason be reduced to abstract identity only, it by implication renounces its unconditionality and is in reality no better than empty understanding. For reason is unconditioned, only in so far as its character and quality are not due to an extraneous and foreign content, only in sofar as it is self-characterising, and thus, in point of content, is its own master. Kant, however, expressly explains that the action of reason consists solely in applying the categories to systematise the matter given by perception,e.to place it in an outside order, under the guidance of the principle of non-contradiction.
53.] (b) ThePractical Reasonis understood by Kant to mean athinkingWill,i.e.a Will that determines itself on universal principles. Its office is to give objective, imperative laws of freedom,—laws, that is, which state what ought to happen. The warrant for thus assuming thought to be an activity which makes itself felt objectively, that is, to be really a Reason, is the alleged possibility of proving practical freedom by experience, that is, of showing it in the phenomenon of self-consciousness. This experience in consciousness is at once met by all that the Necessitarian produces from contrary experience, particularly by the sceptical induction (employed amongst others by Hume) from the endless diversity of what men regard as right and duty,—i.e.from the diversity apparent in those professedly objective laws of freedom.
54.] What, then, is to serve as the law which the Practical Reason embraces and obeys, and as the criterion in its act of self-determination? There is no rule at hand but the same abstract identity of understanding as before: There must be no contradiction in the act of self-determination. Hence the Practical Reason never shakes off the formalism which is represented as the climax of the Theoretical Reason.
But this Practical Reason does not confine the universal principle of the Good to its own inward regulation: it first becomespractical,in the true sense of the word, when it insists on the Good being manifested in the world with an outward objectivity, and requires thatthe thought shall be objective throughout, and not merely subjective. We shall speak of this postulate of the Practical Reason afterwards.
The free self-determination which Kant denied to the speculative, he has expressly vindicated for the practical reason. To many minds this particular aspect of the Kantian philosophy made it welcome; and that for good reasons. To estimate rightly what we owe to Kant in the matter, we ought to set before our minds the form of practical philosophy and in particular of 'moral philosophy,' which prevailed in his time. It may be generally described as a system of Eudaemonism, which, when asked what man's chief end ought to be, replied Happiness. And by happiness Eudaemonism understood the satisfaction of the private appetites, wishes and wants of the man: thus raising the contingent and particular into a principle for the will and its actualisation. To this Eudaemonism, which was destitute of stability and consistency, and which left the 'door and gate' wide open for every whim and caprice, Kant opposed the practical reason, and thus emphasised the need for a principle of will which should be universal and lay the same obligation on all. The theoretical reason, as has been made evident in the preceding paragraphs, is identified by Kant with the negative faculty of the infinite; and as it has no positive content of its own, it is restricted to the function of detecting the finitude of experiential knowledge. To the practical reason, on the contrary, he has expressly allowed a positive infinity, by ascribing to the will the power of modifying itself in universal modes,i.e.by thought. Such a power the will undoubtedly has: and it is well to remember that man is free only in so far as he possesses it and avails himself of it in his conduct. But a recognition of the existence of this power is not enough and does not avail to tell us what are the contents of the will or practical reason. Hence to say, that a man must make the Good the content of his will, raises the question, what that content is, and what are the means of ascertaining what good is. Nor does one get over the difficulty by the principle that thewill must be consistent with itself, or by the precept to do duty for the sake of duty.
55.] (c)The Reflective Power of Judgmentis invested by Kant with the function of an Intuitive Understanding. That is to say, whereas the particulars had hitherto appeared, so far as the universal or abstract identity was concerned, adventitious and incapable of being deduced from it, theIntuitiveUnderstanding apprehends the particulars as moulded and formed by the universal itself. Experience presents such universalised particulars in the products of Art and oforganicnature.
The capital feature in Kant's Criticism of the Judgment is, that in it he gave a representation and a name, if not even an intellectual expression, to the Idea. Such a representation, as an Intuitive Understanding, or an inner adaptation, suggests a universal which is at the same time apprehended as essentially a concrete unity, It is in these aperçus alone that the Kantian philosophy rises to the speculative height. Schiller, and others, have found in the idea of artistic beauty, where thought and sensuous conception have grown together into one, a way of escape from the abstract and separatist understanding. Others have found the same relief in the perception and consciousness of life and of living things, whether that life be natural or intellectual.—The work of Art, as well as the living individual, is, it must be owned, of limited content. But in the postulated harmony of nature (or necessity) and free purpose,—in the final purpose of the world conceived as realised, Kant has put before us the Idea, comprehensive even in its content. Yet what may be called the laziness of thought, when dealing with this supreme Idea, finds a too easy mode of evasion in the 'ought to be': instead of the actual realisation of the ultimate end, it clingshard to the disjunction of the notion from reality. Yet if thought will notthinkthe ideal realised, the senses and the intuition can at any rateseeit in the present reality of living organisms and of the beautiful in Art. And consequently Kant's remarks on these objects were well adapted to lead the mind on to grasp and think the concrete Idea.
56.] We are thus led to conceive a different relation between the universal of understanding and the particular of perception, than that on which the theory of the Theoretical and Practical Reason is founded. But while this is so, it is not supplemented by a recognition that the former is the genuine relation and the very truth. Instead of that, the unity (of universal with particular) is accepted only as it exists in finite phenomena, and is adduced only as a fact of experience. Such experience, at first only personal, may come from two sources. It may spring from Genius, the faculty which produces 'aesthetic ideas'; meaning by aesthetic ideas, the picture-thoughts of the free imagination which subserve an idea and suggest thoughts, although their content is not expressed in a notional form, and even admits of no such expression. It may also be due to Taste, the feeling of congruity between the free play of intuition or imagination and the uniformity of understanding.
57.] The principle by which the Reflective faculty of Judgment regulates and arranges the products of animated nature is described as the End or final cause,—the notion in action, the universal at once determining and determinate in itself. At the same time Kant is careful to discard the conception of external or finite adaptation, in which the End is only an adventitious form for the means and material in which it is realised. In the living organism, on the contrary, the final cause is a moulding principle and an energy immanent in the matter,and every member is in its turn a means as well as an end.
58.] Such an Idea evidently radically transforms the relation which the understanding institutes between means and ends, between subjectivity and objectivity. And yet in the face of this unification, the End or design is subsequently explained to be a cause which exists and acts subjectively,i.e.as our idea only: and teleology is accordingly explained to be only a principle of criticism, purely personal toourunderstanding.
After the Critical philosophy had settled that Reason can know phenomena only, there would still have been an option for animated nature between two equally subjective modes of thought. Even according to Kant's own exposition, there would have been an obligation to admit, in the case of natural productions, a knowledge not confined to the categories of quality, cause and effect, composition, constituents, and so on. The principle of inward adaptation or design, had it been kept to and carried out in scientific application, would have led to a different and a higher method of observing nature.
59.] If we adopt this principle, the Idea, when all limitations were removed from it, would appear as follows. The universality moulded by Reason, and described as the absolute and final end or the Good, would be realised in the world, and realised moreover by means of a third thing, the power which proposes this End as well as realises it,—that is, God. Thus in Him, who is the absolute truth, those oppositions of universal and individual, subjective and objective, are solved and explained to be neither self-subsistent nor true.
60.] But Good,—which is thus put forward as the final cause of the world,—has been already described as onlyourgood, the moral law ofourPractical Reason. Thisbeing so, the unity in question goes no further than make the state of the world and the course of its events harmonise with our moral standards.[1]Besides, even with this limitation, the final cause, or Good, is a vague abstraction, and the same vagueness attaches to what is to be Duty. But, further, this harmony is met by the revival and re-assertion of the antithesis, which it by its own principle had nullified. The harmony is then described as merely subjective, something which merely ought to be, and which at the same time is not real,—a mere article of faith, possessing a subjective certainty, but without truth, or that objectivity which is proper to the Idea. This contradiction may seem to be disguised by adjourning the realisation of the Idea to a future, to atimewhen the Idea will also be. But a sensuous condition like time is the reverse of a reconciliation of the discrepancy; and an infinite progression—which is the corresponding image adopted by the understanding—on the very face of it only repeats and re-enacts the contradiction.
A general remark may still be offered on the result to which the Critical philosophy led as to the nature of knowledge; a result which has grown one of the current 'idols' or axiomatic beliefs of the day. In every dualistic system, and especially in that of Kant, the fundamental defect makes itself visible in theinconsistency of unifying at one moment, what a moment before had been explained to be independent and therefore incapable of unification. And then, at the very moment after unification has been alleged to be the truth, we suddenly come upon the doctrine that the two elements, which, in their true status of unification, had been refused all independent subsistence, are only true and actual in their state of separation. Philosophising of this kind wants the little penetration needed to discover, that this shuffling only evidences how unsatisfactory each one of the two terms is. And it fails simply because it is incapable of bringing two thoughts together. (And in point of form there are never more than two.) It argues an utter want of consistency to say, on the one hand, that the understanding only knows phenomena, and, on the other, assert the absolute character of this knowledge, by such statements as 'Cognition can go no further'; 'Here is thenaturaland absolute limit of human knowledge.' But 'natural' is the wrong word here. The things of nature are limited and are natural things only to such extent as they are not aware of their universal limit, or to such extent as their mode or quality is a limit from our point of view, and not from their own. No one knows, or even feels, that anything is a limit or defect, until he is at the same time above and beyond it. Living beings, for example, possess the privilege of pain which is denied to the inanimate: even with living beings, a single mode or quality passes into the feeling of a negative. For living beings as such possess within them a universal vitality, which overpasses and includes the single mode; and thus, as they maintain themselves in the negative of themselves, they feel the contradiction toexistwithin them. But the contradiction is within them, only in so far as one and the same subject includes both the universality of their sense oflife, and the individual mode which is in negation with it. This illustration will show how a limit or imperfection in knowledge comes to be termed a limit or imperfection, only when it is compared with the actually-present Idea of the universal, of a total and perfect. A very little consideration might show, that to call a thing finite or limited proves by implication the very presence of the infinite and unlimited, and that our knowledge of a limit can only be when the unlimited ison this sidein consciousness.
The result however of Kant's view of cognition suggests a second remark. The philosophy of Kant could have no influence on the method of the sciences. It leaves the categories and method of ordinary knowledge quite unmolested. Occasionally, it may be, in the first sections of a scientific work of that period, we find propositions borrowed from the Kantian philosophy: but the course of the treatise renders it apparent that these propositions were superfluous decoration, and that the few first pages might have been omitted without producing the least change in the empirical contents.[2]
We may next institute a comparison of Kant with the metaphysics of the empirical school. Natural plain Empiricism, though it unquestionably insists most upon sensuous perception, still allows a super-sensible world or spiritual reality, whatever may be its structure and constitution, and whether derived from intellect, or from imagination, &c. So far as form goes, the facts of this super-sensible world rest on the authority of mind, inthe same way as the other facts, embraced in empirical knowledge, rest on the authority of external perception. But when Empiricism becomes reflective and logically consistent, it turns its arms against this dualism in the ultimate and highest species of fact; it denies the independence of the thinking principle and of a spiritual world which developes itself in thought. Materialism or Naturalism, therefore, is the consistent and thorough-going system of Empiricism. In direct opposition to such an Empiricism, Kant asserts the principle of thought and freedom, and attaches himself to the first-mentioned form of empirical doctrine, the general principles of which he never departed from. There is a dualism in his philosophy also. On one side stands the world of sensation, and of the understanding which reflects upon it. This world, it is true, he alleges to be a world of appearances. But that is only a title or formal description; for the source, the facts, and the modes of observation continue quite the same as in Empiricism. On the other side and independent stands a self-apprehending thought, the principle of freedom, which Kant has in common with ordinary and bygone metaphysic, but emptied of all that it held, and without his being able to infuse into it anything new. For, in the Critical doctrine, thought, or, as it is there called, Reason, is divested of every specific form, and thus bereft of all authority. The main effect of the Kantian philosophy has been to revive the consciousness of Reason, or the absolute inwardness of thought. Its abstractness indeed prevented that inwardness from developing into anything, or from originating any special forms, whether cognitive principles or moral laws; but nevertheless it absolutely refused to accept or indulge anything possessing the character of an externality. Henceforth the principle of the independence of Reason,or of its absolute self-subsistence, is made a general principle of philosophy, as well as a foregone conclusion of the time.
(1) The Critical philosophy has one great negative merit. It has brought home the conviction that the categories of understanding are finite in their range, and that any cognitive process confined within their pale falls short of the truth. But Kant had only a sight of half the truth. He explained the finite nature of the categories to mean that they were subjective only, valid only for our thought, from which the thing-in-itself was divided by an impassable gulf. In fact, however, it is not because they are subjective, that the categories are finite: they are finite by their very nature, and it is on their own selves that it is requisite to exhibit their finitude. Kant however holds that what we think is false, because it is we who think it. A further deficiency in the system is that it gives only an historical description of thought, and a mere enumeration of the factors of consciousness. The enumeration is in the main correct: but not a word touches upon the necessity of what is thus empirically colligated. The observations, made on the various stages of consciousness, culminate in the summary statement, that the content of all we are acquainted with is only an appearance. And as it is true at least that all finite thinking is concerned with appearances, so far the conclusion is justified. This stage of 'appearance' however—the phenomenal world—is not the terminus of thought: there is another and a higher region. But that region was to the Kantian philosophy an inaccessible 'other world.'
(2) After all it was only formally, that the Kantian system established the principle that thought is spontaneous and self-determining. Into details of the manner and the extent of this self-determination of thought, Kant never went. It was Fichte who first noticed the omission; and who, after he had called attention to the want of a deduction for the categories, endeavoured really to supply something of the kind. With Fichte, the 'Ego' is the starting-point in the philosophical development: and the outcome of its action is supposed to be visible in the categories. But inFichte the 'Ego' is not really presented as a free, spontaneous energy; it is supposed to receive its first excitation by a shock or impulse from without. Against this shock the 'Ego' will, it is assumed, react, and only through this reaction does it first become conscious of itself. Meanwhile, the nature of the impulse remains a stranger beyond our pale: and the 'Ego,' with something else always confronting it, is weighted with a condition. Fichte, in consequence, never advanced beyond Kant's conclusion, that the finite only is knowable, while the infinite transcends the range of thought. What Kant calls the thing-by-itself, Fichte calls the impulse from without—that abstraction of something else than 'I,' not otherwise describable or definable than as the negative or non-Ego in general. The 'I' is thus looked at as standing in essential relation with the not-I, through which its act of self-determination is first awakened. And in this manner the 'I' is but the continuous act of self-liberation from this impulse, never gaining a real freedom, because with the surcease of the impulse the 'I,' whose being is its action, would also cease to be. Nor is the content produced by the action of the 'I' at all different from the ordinary content of experience, except by the supplementary remark, that this content is mere appearance.
[1]Even Hermann's 'Handbook of Prosody' begins with paragraphs of Kantian philosophy. In § 8 it is argued that a law of rhythm must be (1) objective, (a) formal, and (3) determinedà priori.With these requirements and with the principles of Causality and Reciprocity which follow later, it were well to compare the treatment of the various measures, upon which those formal principles do not exercise the slightest influence.
[1]Even Hermann's 'Handbook of Prosody' begins with paragraphs of Kantian philosophy. In § 8 it is argued that a law of rhythm must be (1) objective, (a) formal, and (3) determinedà priori.With these requirements and with the principles of Causality and Reciprocity which follow later, it were well to compare the treatment of the various measures, upon which those formal principles do not exercise the slightest influence.
[2]In Kant's own words (Criticism of the Power of Judgment, p. 427): 'Final Cause is merely a notion of our practical reason. It cannot be deduced from any data of experience as a theoretical criterion of nature, nor can it be applied to know nature. No employment of this notion is possible except solely for the practical reason, by moral laws. The final purpose of the Creation is that constitution of the world which harmonises with that to which alone we can give definite expression on universal principles, viz. the final purpose of our pure practical reason, and with that in so far as it means to be practical.'
[2]In Kant's own words (Criticism of the Power of Judgment, p. 427): 'Final Cause is merely a notion of our practical reason. It cannot be deduced from any data of experience as a theoretical criterion of nature, nor can it be applied to know nature. No employment of this notion is possible except solely for the practical reason, by moral laws. The final purpose of the Creation is that constitution of the world which harmonises with that to which alone we can give definite expression on universal principles, viz. the final purpose of our pure practical reason, and with that in so far as it means to be practical.'
61.] If we are to believe the Critical philosophy, thought is subjective, and its ultimate and invincible mode isabstract universalityor formal identity. Thought is thus set in opposition to Truth, which is no abstraction, but concrete universality. In this highest mode of thought, which is entitled Reason, the Categories are left out of account.—The extreme theory on the opposite side holds thought to be an act of theparticularonly, and on that ground declares it incapable of apprehending the Truth. This is the Intuitional theory.
62.] According to this theory, thinking, a private and particular operation, has its whole scope and product in the Categories. But, these Categories, as arrested by the understanding, are limited vehicles of thought, forms of the conditioned, of the dependent and derivative. A thought limited to these modes has no sense of the Infinite and the True, and cannot bridge over the gulf that separates it from them. (This stricture refers to the proofs of God's existence.) These inadequate modes or categories are also spoken of asnotions: and to get a notion of an object therefore can only mean, in this language, to grasp it under the form of being conditioned and derivative. Consequently, if the object in question be the True, the Infinite, the Unconditioned, we changeit by our notions into a finite and conditioned; whereby, instead of apprehending the truth by thought, we have perverted it into untruth.
Such is the one simple line of argument advanced for the thesis that the knowledge of God and of truth must be immediate, or intuitive. At an earlier period all sort of anthropomorphic conceptions, as they are termed, were banished from God, as being finite and therefore unworthy of the infinite; and in this way God had been reduced to a tolerably blank being. But in those days the thought-forms were in general not supposed to come under the head of anthropomorphism. Thought was believed rather to strip finitude from the conceptions of the Absolute,—in agreement with the above-mentioned conviction of all ages, that reflection is the only road to truth. But now, at length, even the thought-forms are pronounced anthropomorphic, and thought itself is described as a mere faculty of finitisation.
Jacobi has stated this charge most distinctly in the seventh supplement to his Letters on Spinoza,—borrowing his line of argument from the works of Spinoza himself, and applying it as a weapon against knowledge in general. In his attack knowledge is taken to mean knowledge of the finite only, a process of thought from one condition in a series to another, each of which is at once conditioning and conditioned. According to such a view, to explain and to get the notion of anything, is the same as to show it to be derived from something else. Whatever such knowledge embraces, consequently, is partial, dependent and finite, while the infinite or true,i.e.God, lies outside of the mechanical inter-connexion to which knowledge is said to be confined.—It is important to observe that, while Kant makes the finite nature of the Categories consist mainly in the formal circumstance that they are subjective,Jacobi discusses the Categories in their own proper character, and pronounces them to be in their very import finite. What Jacobi chiefly had before his eyes, when he thus described science, was the brilliant successes of the physical or 'exact' sciences in ascertaining natural forces and laws. It is certainly not on the finite ground occupied by these sciences that we can expect to meet the in-dwelling presence of the infinite. Lalande was right when he said he had swept the whole heaven with his glass, and seen no God. (See note to § 60.) In the field of physical science, the universal, which is the final result of analysis, is only the indeterminate aggregate,—of the external finite,—in one word, Matter: and Jacobi well perceived that there was no other issue obtainable in the way of a mere advance from one explanatory clause or law to another.
63.] All the while the doctrine that truth exists for the mind was so strongly maintained by Jacobi, that Reason alone is declared to be that by which man lives. This Reason is the knowledge of God. But, seeing that derivative knowledge is restricted to the compass of finite facts, Reason is knowledge underivative, or Faith.
Knowledge, Faith, Thought, Intuition are the categories that we meet with on this line of reflection. These terms, as presumably familiar to every one, are only too frequently subjected to an arbitrary use, under no better guidance than the conceptions and distinctions of psychology, without any investigation into their nature and notion, which is the main question after all. Thus, we often find knowledge contrasted with faith, and faith at the same time explained to be an underivative or intuitive knowledge:—so that it must be at least some sort of knowledge. And, besides, it is unquestionably a fact of experience, firstly, that what we believe isin our consciousness,—-which implies that weknow about it;and secondly, that this belief is a certainty in our consciousness,—which implies that weknow it.Again, and especially, we find thought opposed to immediate knowledge and faith, and, in particular, to intuition. But if this intuition be qualified as intellectual, we must really mean intuition which thinks, unless, in a question about the nature of God, we are willing to interpret intellect to mean images and representations of imagination. The word faith or belief, in the dialect of this system, comes to be employed even with reference to common objects that are present to the senses. We believe, says Jacobi, that we have a body,—we believe in the existence of the things of sense. But if we are speaking of faith in the True and Eternal, and saying that God is given and revealed to us in immediate knowledge or intuition, we are concerned not with the things of sense, but with objects special to our thinking mind, with truths of inherently universal significance. And when the individual 'I,' or in other words personality, is under discussion—not the 'I' of experience, or a single private person—above all, when the personality of God is before us, we are speaking of personality unalloyed,—of a personality in its own nature universal. Such personality is a thought, and falls within the province of thought only. More than this. Pure and simple intuition is completely the same as pure and simple thought. Intuition and belief, in the first instance, denote the definite conceptions we attach to these words in our ordinary employment of them: and to this extent they differ from thought in certain points which nearly every one can understand. But here they are taken in a higher sense, and must be interpreted to mean a belief in God, or an intellectual intuition of God; in short, we must put aside all that especially distinguishes thoughton the one side from belief and intuition on the other. How belief and intuition, when transferred to these higher regions, differ from thought, it is impossible for any one to say. And yet, such are the barren distinctions of words, with which men fancy that they assert an important truth: even while the formulae they maintain are identical with those which they impugn.
The termFaithbrings with it the special advantage of suggesting the faith of the Christian religion; it seems to include Christian faith, or perhaps even to coincide with it; and thus the Philosophy of Faith has a thoroughly orthodox and Christian look, on the strength of which it takes the liberty of uttering its arbitrary dicta with greater pretension and authority. But we must not let ourselves be deceived by the semblance surreptitiously secured by a merely verbal similarity. The two things are radically distinct. Firstly, the Christian faith comprises in it an authority of the Church: but the faith of Jacobi's philosophy has no other authority than that of a personal revelation. And, secondly, the Christian faith is a copious body of objective truth, a system of knowledge and doctrine: while the scope of the philosophic faith is so utterly indefinite, that, while it has room for the faith of the Christian, it equally admits a belief in the divinity of the Dalai-lama, the ox, or the monkey,—thus, so far as it goes, narrowing Deity down to its simplest terms, a 'Supreme Being.' Faith itself, taken in this professedly philosophical sense, is nothing but the sapless abstract of immediate knowledge,—a purely formal category applicable to very different facts; and it ought never to be confused or identified with the spiritual fulness of Christian faith, whether we look at that faith in the heart of the believer and the in-dwelling of the Holy Spirit, or in the system of theological doctrine.
With what is here called faith or immediate knowledge must also be identified inspiration, the heart's revelations, the truths implanted in man by nature, and also in particular, healthy reason or Common Sense, as it is called. All these forms agree in adopting as their leading principle the immediacy, or self-evident way, in which a fact or body of truths is presented in consciousness.
84.] This immediate knowledge consists in knowing that the Infinite, the Eternal, the God which is in our idea, reallyis: or, it asserts that in our consciousness there is immediately and inseparably bound up with this idea the certainty of its actual being.
To seek to controvert these maxims of immediate knowledge is the last thing philosophers would think of. They may rather find occasion for self-gratulation when these ancient doctrines, expressing as they do the general tenor of philosophic teaching, have, even in this unphilosophical fashion, become to some extent universal convictions of the age. The true marvel rather is that any one could suppose that these principles were opposed to philosophy,—the maxims, viz., that whatever is held to be true is immanent in the mind, and that there is truth for the mind (§ 63). From a formal point of view, there is a peculiar interest in the maxim that the being of God is immediately and inseparably bound up with the thought of God, that objectivity is bound up with the subjectivity which the thought originally presents. Not content with that, the philosophy of immediate knowledge goes so far in its one-sided view, as to affirm that the attribute of existence, even in perception, is quite as inseparably connected with the conception we have of our own bodies and of external things, as it is with the thought of God. Now it is the endeavour of philosophy toprovesuch a unity, to show that it lies inthe very nature of thought and subjectivity, to be inseparable from being and objectivity. In these circumstances therefore, philosophy, whatever estimate may be formed of the character of these proofs, must in any case be glad to see it shown and maintained that its maxims are facts of consciousness, and thus in harmony with experience. The difference between philosophy and the asseverations of immediate knowledge rather centres in the exclusive attitude which immediate knowledge adopts, when it sets itself up against philosophy.
And yet it was as a self-evident or immediate truth that the 'Cogito, ergo sum,' of Descartes, the maxim on which may be said to hinge the whole interest of Modern Philosophy, was first stated by its author. The man who calls this a syllogism, must know little more about a syllogism than that the word 'Ergo' occurs in it. Where shall we look for the middle term? And a middle term is a much more essential point of a syllogism than the word 'Ergo.' If we try to justify the name, by calling the combination of ideas in Descartes an 'immediate' syllogism, this superfluous variety of syllogism is a mere name for an utterly unmediated synthesis of distinct terms of thought. That being so, the synthesis of being with our ideas, as stated in the maxim of immediate knowledge, has no more and no less claim to the title of syllogism than the axiom of Descartes has. From Hotho's 'Dissertation on the Cartesian Philosophy' (published 1826), I borrow the quotation in which Descartes himself distinctly declares that the maxim 'Cogito, ergo sum,' is no syllogism. The passages are Respons. ad II Object.: De Methodo IV: Ep. I. 118. From the first passage I quote the words more immediately to the point. Descartes says: 'That we are thinking beings is "prima quaedam notio quae ex nullo syllogismo concluditur"' (a certain primarynotion, which is deduced from no syllogism); and goes on:'neque cum quis dicit; Ego cogito, ergo sum sive existo, existentiam ex cogitatione per syllogismum deducit.'(Nor, when one says, I think, therefore I am or exist, does he deduce existence from thought by means of a syllogism.) Descartes knew what it implied in a syllogism, and so he adds that, in order to make the maxim admit of a deduction by syllogism, we should have to add the major premiss:'Illud omne quod cogitat, est sive existit.'(Everything which thinks, is or exists.) Of course, he remarks, this major premiss itself has to be deduced from the original statement.
The language of Descartes on the maxim that the 'I' whichthinksmust also at the same timebe,his saying that this connexion is given and implied in the simple perception of consciousness,—that this connexion is the absolute first, the principle, the most certain and evident of all things, so that no scepticism can be conceived so monstrous as not to admit it:—all this language is so vivid and distinct, that the modern statements of Jacobi and others on this immediate connexion can only pass for needless repetitions.
65.] The theory of which we are speaking is not satisfied when it has shown that mediate knowledge taken separately is an adequate vehicle of truth. Its distinctive doctrine is that immediate knowledge alone, to the total exclusion of mediation, can possess a content which is true. This exclusiveness is enough to show that the theory is a relapse into the metaphysical understanding, with its pass-words 'Either—or.' And thus it is really a relapse into the habit of external mediation, the gist of which consists in clinging to those narrow and one-sided categories of the finite, which it falsely imagined itself to have left for ever behind. This point, however, we shall not at present discuss indetail. An exclusively immediate knowledge is asserted as a fact only, and in the present Introduction we can only study it from this external point of view. The real significance of such knowledge will be explained, when we come to the logical question of the opposition between mediate and immediate. But it is characteristic of the view before us to decline to examine the nature of the fact, that is, the notion of it; for such an examination would itself be a step towards mediation and even towards knowledge. The genuine discussion on logical ground, therefore, must be deferred till we come to the proper province of Logic itself.
The whole of the second part of Logic, the Doctrine of Essential Being, is a discussion of the intrinsic and self-affirming unity of immediacy and mediation.
66.] Beyond this point then we need not go: immediate knowledge is to be accepted as afact.Under these circumstances examination is directed to the field of experience, to a psychological phenomenon. If that be so, we need only note, as the commonest of experiences, that truths, which we well know to be results of complicated and highly mediated trains of thought, present themselves immediately and without effort to the mind of any man who is familiar with the subject. The mathematician, like every one who has mastered a particular science, meets any problem with ready-made solutions which pre-suppose most complicated analyses: and every educated man has a number of general views and maxims which he can muster without trouble, but which can only have sprung from frequent reflection and long experience. The facility we attain in any sort of knowledge, art, or technical expertness, consists in having the particular knowledge or kind of action present to our mind in any case that occurs, even we may say, immediate in our very limbs, in an out-goingactivity. In all these instances, immediacy of knowledge is so far from excluding mediation, that the two things are linked together,—immediate knowledge being actually the product and result of mediated knowledge.
It is no less obvious that immediateexistenceis bound up with its mediation. The seed and the parents are immediate and initial existences in respect of the off-spring which they generate. But the seed and the parents, though they exist and are therefore immediate, are yet in their turn generated: and the child, without prejudice to the mediation of its existence, is immediate, because itis.The fact that I am in Berlin, my immediate presence here, is mediated by my having made the journey hither.
67.] One thing may be observed with reference to the immediate knowledge of God, of legal and ethical principles (including under the head of immediate knowledge, what is otherwise termed Instinct, Implanted or Innate Ideas, Common Sense, Natural Reason, or whatever form, in short, we give to the original spontaneity). It is a matter of general experience that education or development is required to bring out into consciousness what is therein contained. It was so even with the Platonic reminiscence; and the Christian rite of baptism, although a sacrament, involves the additional obligation of a Christian up-bringing. In short, religion and morals, however much they may be faith or immediate knowledge, are still on every side conditioned by the mediating process which is termed development, education, training.
The adherents, no less than the assailants, of the doctrine of Innate Ideas have been guilty throughout of the like exclusiveness and narrowness as is here noted. They have drawn a hard and fast line betweenthe essential and immediate union (as it may be described) of certain universal principles with the soul, and another union which has to be brought about in an external fashion, and through the channel ofgivenobjects and conceptions, There is one objection, borrowed from experience, which was raised against the doctrine of Innate ideas. All men, it was said, must have these ideas; they must have, for example, the maxim of contradiction, present in the mind,—they must be aware of it; for this maxim and others like it were included in the class of Innate ideas. The objection may be set down to misconception; for the principles in question, though innate, need not on that account have the form of ideas or conceptions of something we are aware of. Still, the objection completely meets and overthrows the crude theory of immediate knowledge, which expressly maintains its formulae in so far as they are in consciousness.—Another point calls for notice. We may suppose it admitted by the intuitive school, that the special case of religious faith involves supplementing by a Christian or religious education and development. In that case it is acting capriciously when it seeks to ignore this admission when speaking about faith, or it betrays a want of reflection not to know, that, if the necessity of education be once admitted, mediation is pronounced indispensable.
The reminiscence of ideas spoken of by Plato is equivalent to saying that ideas implicitly exist in man, instead of being, as the Sophists assert, a foreign importation into his mind. But to conceive knowledge as reminiscence does not interfere with, or set aside as useless, the development of what is implicitly in man;—which development is another word for mediation. The same holds good of the innate ideas that we find in Descartes and the Scotch philosophers. These ideas are only potential in the first instance, andshould be looked at as being a sort of mere capacity in man.
88.] In the case of these experiences the appeal turns upon something that shows itself bound up with immediate consciousness. Even if this combination be in the first instance taken as an external and empirical connexion, still, even for empirical observation, the fact of its being constant shows it to be essential and inseparable. But, again, if this immediate consciousness, as exhibited in experience, be taken separately, so far as it is a consciousness of God and the divine nature, the state of mind which it implies is generally described as an exaltation above the finite, above the senses, and above the instinctive desires and affections of the natural heart: which exaltation passes over into, and terminates in, faith in God and a divine order. It is apparent, therefore, that, though faith may be an immediate knowledge and certainty, it equally implies the interposition of this process as its antecedent and condition.
It has been already observed, that the so-called proofs of the being of God, which start from finite being, give an expression to this exaltation. In that light they are no inventions of an over-subtle reflection, but the necessary and native channel in which the movement of mind runs: though it may be that, in their ordinary form, these proofs have not their correct and adequate expression.
69.] It is the passage (§ 64) from the subjective Idea to being which forms the main concern of the doctrine of immediate knowledge. A primary and self-evident inter-connexion is declared to exist between our Idea and being. Yet precisely this central point of transition, utterly irrespective of any connexions which show in experience, clearly involves a mediation. And themediation is of no imperfect or unreal kind, where the mediation takes place with and through something external, but one comprehending both antecedent and conclusion.
70.] For, what this theory asserts is that truth lies neither in the Idea as a merely subjective thought, nor in mere being on its own account;—that mere beingper se,a being that is not of the Idea, is the sensible finite being of the world. Now all this only affirms, without demonstration, that the Idea has truth only by means of being, and being has truth only by means of the Idea. The maxim of immediate knowledge rejects an indefinite empty immediacy (and such is abstract being, or pure unity taken by itself), and affirms in its stead the unity of the Idea with being. And it acts rightly in so doing. But it is stupid not to see that the unity of distinct terms or modes is not merely a purely immediate unity,i.e.unity empty and indeterminate, but that—with equal emphasis—the one term is shown to have truth only as mediated through the other;—or, if the phrase be preferred, that either term is only mediated with truth through the other. That the quality of mediation is involved in the very immediacy of intuition is thus exhibited as a fact, against which understanding, conformably to the fundamental maxim of immediate knowledge that the evidence of consciousness is infallible, can have nothing to object. It is only ordinary abstract understanding which takes the terms of mediation and immediacy, each by itself absolutely, to represent an inflexible line of distinction, and thus draws upon its own head the hopeless task of reconciling them. The difficulty, as we have shown, has no existence in the fact, and it vanishes in the speculative notion.
71.] The one-sidedness of the intuitional school hascertain characteristics attending upon it, which we shall proceed to point out in their main features, now that we have discussed the fundamental principle. Thefirstof these corollaries is as follows. Since the criterion of truth is found, not in the nature of the content, but in the mere fact of consciousness, every alleged truth has no other basis than subjective certitude and the assertion that we discover a certain fact in our consciousness. What I discover in my consciousness is thus exaggerated into a fact of the consciousness of all, and even passed off for the very nature of consciousness.
Among the so-called proofs of the existence of God, there used to stand theconsensus gentium,to which appeal is made as early as Cicero. Theconsensus gentiumis a weighty authority, and the transition is easy and natural, from the circumstance that a certain fact is found in the consciousness of every one, to the conclusion that it is a necessary element in the very nature of consciousness. In this category of general agreement there was latent the deep-rooted perception, which does not escape even the least cultivated mind, that the consciousness of the individual is at the same time particular and accidental. Yet unless we examine the nature of this consciousness itself, stripping it of its particular and accidental elements and, by the toilsome operation of reflection, disclosing the universal in its entirety and purity, it is only aunanimousagreement upon a given point that can authorize a decent presumption that that point is part of the very nature of consciousness. Of course, if thought insists on seeing the necessity of what is presented as a fact of general occurrence, theconsensus gentiumis certainly not sufficient. Yet even granting the universality of the fact to be a satisfactory proof, it has been foundimpossible to establish the belief in God on such an argument, because experience shows that there are individuals and nations without any such faith.[1]But there can be nothing shorter and more convenient than to have the bare assertion to make, that we discover a fact in our consciousness, and are certain that it is true: and to declare that this certainty, instead of proceeding from our particular mental constitution only, belongs to the very nature of the mind.
72.] Asecondcorollary which results from holding immediacy of consciousness to be the criterion of truth is that all superstition or idolatry is allowed to be truth, and that an apology is prepared for any contents of the will, however wrong and immoral. It is because he believes in them, and not from the reasoning and syllogism of what is termed mediate knowledge, that the Hindoo finds God in the cow, the monkey, the Brahmin, or the Lama. But the natural desires and affections spontaneously carry and deposit their interests in consciousness, where also immoral aims make themselves naturally at home: the good or bad character would thus express thedefinite beingof the will, which would be known, and that most immediately, in the interests and aims.
73.]Thirdlyand lastly, the immediate consciousness of God goes no further than to tell usthatHe is: to tell uswhatHe is, would be an act of cognition, involving mediation. So that God as an object of religion is expressly narrowed down to the indeterminate supersensible, God in general: and the significance of religion is reduced to a minimum.
If it were really needful to win back and secure the bare belief that there is a God, or even to create it, we might well wonder at the poverty of the age which can see a gain in the merest pittance of religious consciousness, and which in its church has sunk so low as to worship at the altar that stood in Athens long ago, dedicated to the 'Unknown God.'
74.] We have still briefly to indicate the general nature of the form of immediacy. For it is the essential one-sidedness of the category, which makes whatever comes under it one sided and, for that reason, finite. And, first, it makes the universal no better than an abstraction external to the particulars, and God a beingwithout determinate quality. But God can only be called a spirit when He is known to be at once the beginning and end, as well as the mean, in the process of mediation. Without this unification of elements He is neither concrete, nor living, nor a spirit. Thus the knowledge of God as a spirit necessarily implies mediation. The form of immediacy, secondly, invests the particular with the character of independent or self-centred being. But such predicates contradict the very essence of the particular,—which is to be referred to something else outside. They thus invest the finite with the character of an absolute. But, besides, the form of immediacy is altogether abstract: it has no preference for one set of contents more than another, but is equally susceptible of all: it may as well sanction what is idolatrous and immoral as the reverse. Only when we discern that the content,—the particular, is not self-subsistent, but derivative from something else, are its finitude and untruth shown in their proper light. Such discernment, where the content we discern carries with it the ground of its dependent nature, is a knowledge which involves mediation. The only content which can be held to be the truth is one not mediated with something else, not limited by other things: or, otherwise expressed, it is one mediated by itself, where mediation and immediate reference-to-self coincide. The understanding that fancies it has got clear of finite knowledge, the identity of the analytical metaphysicians and the old 'rationalists,' abruptly takes again as principle and criterion of truth that immediacy which, as an abstract reference-to-self, is the same as abstract identity. Abstract thought (the scientific form used by 'reflective' metaphysic) and abstract intuition (the form used by immediate knowledge) are one and the same.
The stereotyped opposition between the form of immediacy and that of mediation gives to the former a halfness and inadequacy, that affects every content which is brought under it. Immediacy means, upon the whole, an abstract reference-to-self, that is, an abstract identity or abstract universality. Accordingly the essential and real universal, when taken merely in its immediacy, is a mere abstract universal; and from this point of view God is conceived as a being altogether without determinate quality. To call God spirit is in that case only a phrase: for the consciousness and self-consciousness, which spirit implies, are impossible without a distinguishing of it from itself and from something else,i.e.without mediation.
75.] It was impossible for us to criticise this, the third attitude, which thought has been made to take towards objective truth, in any other mode than what is naturally indicated and admitted in the doctrine itself. The theory asserts that immediate knowledge is a fact. It has been shown to be untrue in fact to say that there is an immediate knowledge, a knowledge without mediation either by means of something else or in itself. It has also been explained to be false in fact to say that thought advances through finite and conditioned categories only, which are always mediated by a something else, and to forget that in the very act of mediation the mediation itself vanishes. And to show that, in point of fact, there is a knowledge which advances neither by unmixed immediacy nor by unmixed mediation, we can point to the example of Logic and the whole of philosophy.
76.] If we view the maxims of immediate knowledge in connexion with the uncritical metaphysic of the past from which we started, we shall learn from the comparison the reactionary nature of the school of Jacobi. His doctrine is a return to the modern starting-point of this metaphysic in the Cartesian philosophy. BothJacobi and Descartes maintain the following three points:
(1) The simple inseparability of the thought and being of the thinker. 'Cogito, ergo sum' is the same doctrine as that the being, reality, and existence of the 'Ego' is immediately revealed to me in consciousness. (Descartes, in fact, is careful to state that by thought he means consciousness in general. Princip. Phil. I. 9.) This inseparability is the absolutely first and most certain knowledge, not mediated or demonstrated.
(2) The inseparability of existence from the conception of God: the former is necessarily implied in the latter, or the conception never can be without the attribute of existence, which is thus necessary and eternal.[2]
(3) The immediate consciousness of the existence of external things. By this nothing more is meant than sense-consciousness. To have such a thing is the slightest of all cognitions: and the only thing worth knowing about it is that such immediate knowledge of the being of things external is error and delusion, that the sensible world as such is altogether void of truth; that the being of these external things is accidental and passes away as a show; and that their very nature is to have only an existence which is separable from their essence and notion.
77.] There is however a distinction between the two points of view:
(1) The Cartesian philosophy, from these unproved postulates, which it assumes to be unprovable, proceeds to wider and wider details of knowledge, and thus gave rise to the sciences of modern times. The modern theory (of Jacobi), on the contrary, (§ 62) has come to what is intrinsically a most important conclusion that cognition, proceeding as it must by finite mediations, can know only the finite, and never embody the truth; and would fain have the consciousness of God go no further than the aforesaid very abstract belief that Godis.[3]
(2) The modern doctrine on the one hand makes no change in the Cartesian method of the usual scientific knowledge, and conducts on the same plan the experimental and finite sciences that have sprung from it. But, on the other hand, when it comes to the science which has infinity for its scope, it throws aside that method, and thus, as it knows no other, it rejects all methods. It abandons itself to wild vagaries of imagination and assertion, to a moral priggishness and sentimental arrogance, or to a reckless dogmatising and lust of argument, which is loudest against philosophy and philosophic doctrines. Philosophy of course tolerates no mere assertions or conceits, and checks the free play of argumentative see-saw.
78.] We must then reject the opposition between an independent immediacy in the contents or facts of consciousness and an equally independent mediation, supposed incompatible with the former. The incompatibility is a mere assumption, an arbitrary assertion. All other assumptions and postulates must in like manner be left behind at the entrance to philosophy, whether they are derived from the intellect or the imagination. For philosophy is the science, in which every such proposition must first be scrutinised and its meaning and oppositions be ascertained.
Scepticism, made a negative science and systematically applied to all forms of knowledge, might seem a suitable introduction, as pointing out the nullity of such assumptions. But a sceptical introduction would be not only an ungrateful but also a useless course; and that because Dialectic, as we shall soon make appear, is itself an essential element of affirmative science. Scepticism, besides, could only get hold of the finite forms as they were suggested by experience, taking them as given, instead of deducing them scientifically.To require such a scepticism accomplished is the same as to insist on science being preceded by universal doubt, or a total absence of presupposition. Strictly speaking, in the resolve thatwills pure thought,this requirement is accomplished by freedom which, abstracting from everything, grasps its pure abstraction, the simplicity of thought.