Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy
Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's PhilosophyPREFACEFROM THE PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITIONBook ICHAPTER I.CHAPTER II.CHAPTER III.CHAPTER IV.CHAPTER V.CHAPTER VI.CHAPTER VII.CHAPTER VIII.CHAPTER IX.CHAPTER X.CHAPTER XI.CHAPTER XII.CHAPTER XIII.CHAPTER XIV.BOOK IICHAPTER XV.CHAPTER XVI.CHAPTER XVII.CHAPTER XVIII.CHAPTER XIX.CHAPTER XX.CHAPTER XXI.CHAPTER XXII.CHAPTER XXIII.CHAPTER XXIV.CHAPTER XXV.BOOK IIICHAPTER XXVI.CHAPTER XXVII.CHAPTER XXVIII.CHAPTER XXIX.CHAPTER XXX.CHAPTER XXXI.CHAPTER XXXII.Copyright
Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy
Hegel, Wallace
PREFACE
The present volume of Prolegomena completes the second
edition of my LOGIC OF HEGEL which originally appeared in 1874. The
translation, which was issued as a separate volume in the autumn of
1892, had been subjected to revision throughout: such faults as I
could detect had been amended, and many changes made in the form of
expression with the hope of rendering the interpretation clearer
and more adequate. But, with a subject so abstruse and complicated
as Hegel's Logic, and a style so abrupt and condensed as that
adopted in hisEncyclopaedia, a
satisfactory translation can hardly fall within the range of
possibilities. Only the enthusiasm of youth could have thrown
itself upon such an enterprise; and later years have but to do what
they may to fulfil the obligations of a task whose difficulties
have come to seem nearly insuperable. The translation volume was
introduced by a sketch of the growth of theEncyclopaediathrough the three
editions published in its author's lifetime: and an appendix of
notes supplied some literary and historical elucidations of the
text, with quotations bearing on the philosophical development
between Kant and Hegel.The Prolegomena, which have grown to more than twice their
original extent, are two-thirds of them new matter. The lapse of
twenty years could not but involve a change in the writer's
attitude, at least in details, towards both facts and problems. The
general purpose of the work, however, still remains the same, to
supply an introduction to the study of Hegel, especially hisLogic,and to philosophy in general.
But, in the work of altering and inserting, I can hardly imagine
that I have succeeded in adjusting the additions to the older work
with that artful juncture which would simulate the continuity of
organic growth. To perform that feat would require a master who
surveyed from an imperial outlook the whole system of Hegelianism
in its history and meaning; and I at least do not profess such a
mastery. Probably therefore a critical review will discern
inequalities in the ground, and even discrepancies in the
statement, of the several chapters. To remove these strains of
inconsistency would in any case have been a work of time and
trouble: and, after all, mere differences in depth or breadth of
view may have their uses. The writer cannot always compel the
reader to understand him, as he himself has not always the same
faculty to penetrate and comprehend the problems he deals with. In
these arduous paths of research it may well happen that the
clearest and truest perceptions are not always those which
communicate themselves with fullest persuasion and gift of insight.
Schopenhauer has somewhere compared the structure of his
philosophical work to the hundred-gated Thebes: so many, he says,
are the points of access it offers for the pilgrims after truth to
reach its central dogma. So—if one may parallel little things with
his adventurous quest—even the less speculative chapters, and the
less consecutive discourse, of these Prolegomena may prove helpful
to some individual mood or phase of mind. If—as I suspect—the
Second Book should elicit the complaint that the reader has been
kept wandering too long and too deviously in thePorches of Philosophy, I will hope
that sometimes in the course of these rovings he may come across a
wicket-gate where he can enter, and—which is the main thing—gather
truth fresh and fruitful for himself.Fourteen chapters, viz. II, XXIV, and the group from VII to
XVIII inclusive, are in this edition almost entirely new. Three
chapters of the first edition, numbered XIX, XXII, XXIII, have been
dropped. For the rest, Chaps. III-VI in the present correspond to
Chaps. II-V in the first edition: Chap. XIX to parts of VII, VIII:
Chaps. XX-XXIII to Chaps. IX-XII: Chaps. XXV-XXX to Chaps.
XIII-XVIII: and Chaps. XXXI, XXXII to Chaps. XX, XXI. But some of
those nominally retained have been largely rewritten.The new chapters present, amongst other things, a synopsis of
the progress of thought in Germany during the half-century which is
bisected by the year 1800, with some indication of the general
conditions of the intellectual world, and with some reference to
the interconnexion of speculation and actuality. Jacobi and Herder,
Kant, Fichte, and Schelling have been especially brought under
succinct review. In the first edition I did Kant less than justice.
I have now, so far as my limits allowed, tried to rectify the
impression; and even more perhaps, by a clear palinode, to tender
my apology for the meagre and somewhat inappreciative notice I gave
to the great names of Fichte and Schelling. For like reasons, and
from a growing perception how much post-Kantian thought owed to the
pre-Kantian thinkers, Spinoza and Leibniz have been partly brought
within my range. If, furthermore, I may seem to have transgressed
the due amount of allusions and comparisons drawn from Plato and
Aristotle, Bacon and Mill, the excuse must be sought in that
fixture of philosophical horizon which can hardly but creep on
after a quarter of a century spent in teaching philosophy under the
customs and ordinances of the Oxford School of Classical
Philology.It would be to mistake the scope of this survey to seek in it
a history of the philosophers of the period I have named. They have
been presented, not in and for themselves, but asmomentaor constituent! factors in
producing Hegel's conception of the aim and method of philosophy.
To do this it was necessary to lay stress on their inner purport
and implications: to treat the individual thinker in subordination
to the general movement of ideas: to give, as far as was possible,
a constructive conception of them rather than an analysis and
chronicle. Yet as the picture had to be done, so to say, with a few
vigorous touches, and made characteristic rather than descriptive,
it cannot have that fairness and completeness which only patient
study of every feature and untiring experiment in reconstruction
can enable even the artist to produce. I may have seemed to confine
the environment too exclusively to continental thinkers: but this
is not, I think, due to any anti-patriotic bias. English (by which
term, I may explain to my countrymen, I mean English-writing)
thought, if it has its own intrinsic value, has after all been only
an occasional influence, of suggestion and modification, in
Germany. It is not therefore an integral portion of my theme. Even
in Kant's case, too much may be made of the stimulus he received
from Hume.Even twenty years ago, my translation could hardly be
described literally as a voice crying in the wilderness. But since
that time there has been a considerable out-put of history,
translation, and criticism referring to the great age of German
philosophy, and a comparatively numerous group of writers, more or
less familiar with the aims and principles of that period, have
treated various parts of philosophy with notable independence and
originality. To these writers it has sometimes been found
convenient to give the title of Neo-Kantians, or Neo-Hegelians. The
prefix suggests that they do not in all points reproduce the ideal
or the caricature which vulgar tradition fancied, and perhaps still
fancies, to be implied in German 'transcendentalism.' And that for
the good reason that the springs of the movement lie in the natural
and national revulsion of English habits of mind. Slowly, but at
length, the storms of the great European revolution found their way
to our intellectual world, and shook church and state, society and
literature. The homeless spirit of the age had to reconsider the
task of rebuilding its house of life. It may have been that some of
the seekers, in the fervour of a first impression, spoke
unadvisedly, as if salvation could and would come to English
philosophy only by Kant and Hegel. Yet, there was a real foundation
for the belief that the insularity—however necessary in its season,
and however admirable in some of its results—which had secluded and
narrowed the British mind since the middle of the eighteenth
century, needed something deeper and stronger than French
'ideology' to bring it abreast of the requirements of the age.
Whatever may be the drawbacks of transcendentalism, they are
virtues when set beside the vulgar ideals of enlightenment by
superficialisation. Mill has well pointed out how the spirit of
Coleridge was for the higher intellectual life a needful complement
to the spirit of Bentham. Yet the spirit of Coleridge had but
caught some of the side-lights and romantic illuminations: it had
not dared to face the central sun either in literature or
philosophy. The scholar who has given us excellent versions of
Fichte's lighter works, those who have translated and expounded
Kant, and the great author who opened German literature to the
British public, have brought us nearer the higher teaching of
Germany. In Germany itself it has always been the possession only
of the few. Even at the height of the classical period there were
litterateurs who vended thousands of their books for Goethe's
hundreds, and the great philosophers had ten opponents to one
follower even amongst the teachers of their day. Yet Goethe and not
Kotzebue gave the permanent law to literature; Hegel, and not Krug
or Fries, has influenced philosophy. To have had the resolution to
learn in this school is the merit of 'Neo-Hegelianism.' It has
probably not found Kant free from puzzles and contradictions, or
Hegel always intelligible. But the example of the Germans has
served to widen and deepen our ideas of philosophy: to make us
think more highly of its function, and to realise that it is
essentially science, and the science of supreme reality. And it has
at least familiarised many with the heresy that dilettantism and
occasional fits of speculativeness are worth as little in
philosophy as elsewhere. To have striven for dignity in its scope,
and scientific security in its method, is something. If the
Neo-Hegelian has not given philosophy a settled language, it may be
urged that a philosophical language cannot be created by the easy
device of inventing a few Hellenistic-seeming
vocables.I could have wished to make these volumes a worthier
contribution to the work whereby these and other writers have
recently enriched our island philosophy. Not least because of the
honoured name I have ventured to write on the dedication-page. If,
as Epicurus said, we should above all be grateful to the past, the
first meed is from the scholar due to the teachers of earlier
years, and not least those who have now entered into their rest. I
do not forget what I, and others, owed to T. H. Green, my
predecessor in the Chair of Moral Philosophy; that example of
high-souled devotion to truth, and of earnest and intrepid thinking
on the deep things of eternity. But at this season the memory of my
Oxford tutor and friend is naturally most prominent. The late
Master of Balliol College was more than a mere scholar or a mere
philosopher. He seemed so idealist and yet so practical: so realist
and yet so full of high ideals: so delicately kind and yet so
severely reasonable. You felt he saw life more steadily and saw it
more whole than others: as one reality in which religion and
philosophy, art and business, the sciences and theology, were
severally but elements and aspects. To the amateurs of novelty, to
the slaves of specialisation, to the devotees of any narrow way,
such largeness might, with the impatience natural to limited minds,
have seemed indifference. So must appear those who on higher planes
hear all the parts in the harmony of humanity, and with the justice
of a wise love maintain an intellectualSôprosyné. On his pupils this secret
power of an other-world serenity laid an irresistible spell, and
bore in upon them the conviction that beyond scholarship and logic
there was the fuller truth of life and the all-embracing duty of
doing their best to fulfil the amplest requirements of their
place.In earlier days Jowett had been keenly interested in German
philosophy, and had made a version (most of which was still extant
in 1868) of the Logic I have translated. But Greek literature, and
above all Plato, drew him to more congenial fields. It was on his
suggestion,—or shall I say injunction—at that date, that the work I
had casually begun was some years later prosecuted to completion.
It was his words, again, two years ago, that bade me spare no
labour in the work of revision.
FROM THE PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
The 'Logic of Hegel' is a name which may be given to two
separate books. One of these is the 'Science of Logic'
(Wissenschaft der Logik), first published in three volumes
(1812-1816), while its author was schoolmaster at Nüremberg. A
second edition was on its way, when Hegel was suddenly cut off,
after revising the first volume only. In the 'Secret of Hegel,' the
earlier part of this Logic has been translated by Dr. Hutchison
Stirling, with whose name German philosophy is chiefly associated
in this country.The other Logic, of which the present work is a translation,
forms the First Part in the 'Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical
Sciences.' The first edition of the Encyclopaedia appeared at
Heidelberg in 1817; the second in 1827; and the third in 1830. It
is well to bear in mind that these dates take us back forty or
fifty years, to a time when modern science and Inductive Logic had
yet to win their laurels, and when the world was in many ways
different from what it is now. The earliest edition of the
Encyclopaedia contained the pith of the system. The subsequent
editions brought some new materials, mainly intended to smooth over
and explain the transitions between the various sections, and to
answer the objections of critics. The work contained a synopsis of
philosophy in the form of paragraphs, and was to be supplemented by
theviva voceremarks of the
lecturer.The present volume is translated from the edition of 1843,
forming the Sixth Volume in Hegel's Collected Works. It consists of
two nearly equal portions. One halt here printed in more open type,
contains Hegel's Encyclopaedia, with all the author's own
additions. The first paragraph under each number marks the earliest
and simplest statement of the first edition. The other half, here
printed in closer type, is made up of the notes taken in lecture by
the editor (Henning) and by Professors Hotho and Michelet. These
notes for the most part connect the several sections, rather than
explain their statements. Their genuineness is vouched for by their
being almost verbally the same with other parts of Hegel's own
writings.The translation has tried to keep as closely as possible to
the meaning, without always adhering very rigorously to the words
of the original. It is, however, much more literal in the later and
systematic part, than in the earlier chapters.The Prolegomena which precede the translation have not been
given in the hope or with the intention of expounding the Hegelian
system. They merely seek to remove certain obstacles, and to render
Hegel less tantalizingly hard to those who approach him for the
first time. How far they will accomplish this, remains to be
seen.
Book I
OUTLOOKS AND APPROACHES TO
HEGEL
CHAPTER I.
WHY HEGEL IS HARD TO
UNDERSTAND.'The condemnation,' says Hegel, 'which a great man lays upon
the world, is to force it to explain him[1].' The greatness of Hegel, if it be measured by this
standard, must be something far above common. Interpreters of his
system have contradicted each other, almost as variously as the
several commentators on the Bible. He is claimed as their head by
widely different schools of thought, all of which appeal to him as
the original source of their line of argument. The Right wing, and
the Left, as well as the Centre, profess to be the genuine
descendants of the prophet, and to inherit the mantle of his
inspiration. If we believe one side, Hegel is only to be rightly
appreciated when we divest his teaching of every shred of religion
and orthodoxy which it retains. If we believe another class of
expositors, he was the champion of Christianity.These contradictory views may be safely left to abolish each
other. But diversity of opinion on such topics is neither
unnatural, nor unusual. The meaning and the bearings of a great
event, or a great character, or a great work of reasoned thought,
will be estimated and explained in different ways, according to the
effect they produce on different minds and different levels of life
and society. Those effects, perhaps, will not present themselves in
their true character, until long after the original excitement has
passed away. To some minds, the chief value of the Hegelian system
will lie in its vindication of the truths of natural and revealed
religion, and in the agreement of the elaborate reasonings of the
philosopher with the simple aspirations of mankind towards higher
things. To others that system will have most interest as a
philosophical history of thought,—an exposition of that organic
development of reason, which underlies and constitutes all the
varied and complex movement of the world. To a third class, again,
it may seem at best an instrument or method of investigation,
stating the true law by which knowledge proceeds in its endeavour
to comprehend and assimilate existing nature.While these various meanings may be given to the Hegelian
scheme of thought, the majority of the world either pronounce Hegel
to be altogether unintelligible, or banish him to the limbo
ofa priorithinkers,—that
bourne from which no philosopher returns. To argue with those who
start from the latter conviction would be an ungrateful, and
probably a superfluous task. Wisdom is justified, we may be sure,
of all her children. But it may be possible to admit the existence
of difficulties, and agree to some extent with those who complain
that Hegel is impenetrable and hard as adamant. There can be no
doubt of the forbidding aspect of the most prominent features in
his system. He is hard in himself, and his readers find him hard.
His style is not of the best, and to foreign eyes seems unequal. At
times he is eloquent, stirring, and striking: again his turns are
harsh, and his clauses tiresome to disentangle: and we are always
coming upon that childlikeness of literary manner, which English
taste fancies it can detect in some of the greatest works of German
genius; There are faults in Hegel, which obscure his meaning: but
more obstacles are due to the nature of the work, and the
pre-occupations of our minds. There is something in him which
fascinates the thinker, and which inspires a sympathetic student
with the vigour and the hopefulness of the
spring-time.Perhaps the main hindrance in the way of a clear vision is
the contrast which Hegelian philosophy offers to our ordinary
habits of mind. Generally speaking, we rest contented if we can get
tolerably near our object, and form a general picture of it to set
before ourselves. It might almost be said that we have never
thought of such a thing as being in earnest either with our words
or with our thoughts. We get into a way of speaking with an
uncertain latitude of meaning, and leave a good deal to the
fellow-feeling of our hearers, who are expected to mend what is
defective in our utterances. For most of us the place of exact
thought is supplied by metaphors and pictures, by mental images,
and figures generalised from the senses. And thus it happens that,
when we come upon a single precise and definite statement, neither
exceeding nor falling short in its meaning, we are thrown out of
our reckoning. Our fancy and memory have nothing left for them to
do: and, as fancy and memory make up the greater part of what we
loosely call thinking, our powers of thought seem to be brought to
a standstill. Those who crave for fluent reading, or prefer easy
writing, something within the pale of our usual mental lines, are
more likely to find what they seek in the ten partially correct and
approximate ways commonly used to give expression to a truth, than
in the one simple and accurate statement of the thought. We prefer
a familiar name, and an accustomed image, on which our faculties
may work. But in the atmosphere of Hegelian thought, we feel very
much as if we had been lifted into a vacuum, where we cannot
breathe, and which is a fit habitation for unrecognisable ghosts
only.Nor is this all. The traveller, as his train climbs the
heights of Alps or Apennines, occasionally, after circling in grand
curve upon the mountain-side, and perhaps after having been dragged
mysterious distances through the gloom of a tunnel, finds himself
as it would seem back at the same place as he looked forth from
some minutes before; and it is only after a brief comparison that
he realises he now commands a wider view from a point some hundreds
of feet higher. So the student of Hegel—(and it might be the case
with Fichte also) as the machinery of the dialectical method, with
its thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, carries him round and round
from term to term of thought—like theLogosand the Spirit, which blow us
whithersoever they list—begins to suffer from dizziness at the
apprehension that he has been the victim of phantasmagoria and has
not really moved at all. It is only later—if ever—that he
recognises that the scene, though similar, is yet not altogether
the same. It is only later—if ever—that he understands that the
path of philosophy is no wandering from land to land more remote in
search of a lost Absolute, a vanished God; no setting forth of new
and strange facts, of new Gods, but the revelation in fuller and
fuller truth of the immanent reality in whom we live, and move, and
have our being,—the manifestation in more closely-knit unity and
more amply-detailed significance of that Infinite and Eternal,
which was always present among us, though we saw but few, perhaps
even no, traces of its power and glory.To read Hegel often reminds us of the process we have to go
through in trying to answer a riddle. The terms of the problem to
be solved are all given to us: the features of the object are, it
may be, fully described: and yet somehow we cannot at once tell
what it is all about, or add up the sum of which we have the
several items. We are waiting to learn the subject of the
proposition, of which all these statements may be regarded as the
predicates. Something, we feel, has undoubtedly been said: but we
are at a loss to see what it has been said about. Our mind wanders
round from one familiar object to another, and tries them in
succession to see whether any one satisfies the several points in
the statement and includes them all. We grope here and there for
something we are acquainted with, in which the bits of the
description may cohere, and get a unity which they cannot give
themselves. When once we have hit upon the right object, our
troubles are at an end: and the empty medium is now peopled with a
creature of our imagination. We have reached a fixed point in the
range of our conception, around which the given features may
cluster.All this trouble caused by the Hegelian theory of what
philosophy involves—viz. really beginning at the beginning, is
saved by a device well known to the several branches of Science. It
is the way with them to assume that the student has a rough general
image of the objects which they examine; and under the guidance, or
with the help of this generalised image, they go on to explain and
describe its outlines more completely. They start with an
approximate conception, such as anybody may be supposed to have;
and this they seek to render more definite. The geologist, for
example, could scarcely teach geology', unless he could pre-suppose
or produce some acquaintance on the part of his pupils with what
Hume would have called an 'impression' or an 'idea' of the rocks
and formations of which he has to treat. The geometer gives a
short, and, as it were, popular explanation of the sense in which
angles, circles, triangles, &c. are to be understood: and then
by the aid of these provisional definitions we come to a more
scientific notion of the same terms. The third book of Euclid, for
example, brings before us a clearer notion of what a circle is,
than the nominal explanation in the list of definitions. By means
of these temporary aids, or, as we may call them, leading-strings
for the intellect, the progress of the ordinary scientific student
is made tolerably easy. But v in philosophy, as it is found in
Hegel, there is quite another way of working. The helps in question
are absent: and until it be seen that they are not even needed, the
Hegelian theory will remain a sealed mystery. For that which the
first glance seemed to show as an enigma, is only the plain and
unambiguous statement of thought. Instead of casting around for
images and accustomed names, we have only to accept the several
terms and articles in the development of thought as they present
themselves. These terms merely require to be apprehended. They
stand in no immediate need of illustration from our experience.
What we have to bring to the work, is patience, self-restraint, the
sacrifice of our cherished habits of mind, the surrender of the
natural wish to see at once what it all comes to, what it is good
for, how it squares with other convictions. As Bacon reminded his
age, Into the kingdom of philosophy, as into the kingdom of heaven,
none can enter,nisi sub persona
infantis: i. e. unless he at least steadfastly
resolve to renounce that world which lieth in the
Evil.Ordinary knowledge consists in referring a new object to a
class of objects, that is to say, to a generalised image with which
we are already acquainted. It is not so much cognition as
re-cognition. '"What is the truth?"' asked Lady Chettam of Mrs.
Cadwallader inMiddle-march.
"The truth? he is as bad as the wrong physic—nasty to take, and
sure to disagree." "There could not be anything worse than that,"
said Lady Chettam, with so vivid a conception of the physic that
she seemed to have learned something exact about Mr. Casaubon's
'disadvantages.' Once we have referred the new individual to a
familiar category or a convenient metaphor, once we have given it a
name, and introduced it into the society of our mental
drawing-room, we are satisfied. We have put a fresh object in its
appropriate drawer in the cabinet of our ideas: and hence, with the
pride of a collector, we can calmly call it our own. But such
acquaintance, proceeding from a mingling of memory and naming, is
not the same thing as knowledge in the strict sense of the
term.[2]'What is he?' 'Do you know him?' These are our questions: and
we are satisfied when we learn his name and his calling. We may
never have penetrated into the inner nature of those objects, with
whosetout ensemble,or rough
outlines, we are so much at home, that we fancy ourselves
thoroughly cognisant of them. Classifications are only the first
steps in science: and we do not understand a thought because we can
view it under the guise of some of its illustrations.In the case of the English reader of Hegel some peculiar
hindrances spring from the foreign language. In strong contrast to
most of the well-known German philosophers, he may be said to write
in the popular and national dialect of his country. Of course there
are tones and shades of meaning given to his words by the general
context of his system. But upon the whole he did what he promised
to J. H. Voss—the translator of Homer, and the poet of theLuise,in a letter written from Jena in
1805. He there says of his projects: 'Luther has made the Bible,
and you have made Homer speak German. No greater gift than this
could be given to the nation. So long as a nation is not acquainted
with a noble work in its own language, it is still barbarian, and
does not regard the work as its own. Forget these two examples, and
I may describe my own efforts as an attempt to teach philosophy to
speak in German.[3]Yet, in this matter of nationalising or Germanising
philosophy, he only carried a step further what Wolff and even Kant
had begun; just as, on the other hand, he falls a long way short of
what K. C. F. Krause, his contemporary, attempted in the same
direction. Such an attempt, by its very nature, could never command
a popular success. It runs directly counter to that tendency
already noted, to escape the requirement to think and think for
ourselves, by taking refuge under the shadow of a familiar term,
which conceals in its apparent simplicity a great complex of
ill-apprehended elements. The ordinary mind—and the more readily
perhaps the more vulgar it is—flees for ease and safety to a
cosmopolitan term, to the denationalised vocable of learned origin,
to the language of general European culture. To such an ordinary
mind—and up at least to a certain extent we all at times come under
that heading—the effort to remain in the pellucid air of our
unadulterated mother-tongue is too embarrassing to be long
continued. Nor, after all, is it more than partially practicable.
The well of German undefiled is apt to run dry. Hegel himself never
shrinks when it is needful to appropriate non-Teutonic words, and
is in the habit of employing the synonymous terms of native and of
classical origin with a systematic difference of meaning[4]Hegel is unquestionablypar
excellencethe philosopher of Germany,—German
through and through. For philosophy, though the common birthright
of full-grown reason in all ages and countries, must like other
universal and cosmopolitan interests, such as the State, the Arts,
or the Church, submit to the limits and peculiarities imposed upon
it by the natural divisions of race and language. The
subtlernuances, as well as the
coarser differences of national speech, make themselves vividly
felt in the systems of philosophy, and defy translation. If Greek
philosophy cannot, no more can German philosophy be turned into a
body of English thought by a stroke of the translator's pen. There
is a difference in this matter, a difference at least in degree,
between the special sciences and philosophy. The several sciences
have a de-nationalised and cosmopolitan character, like the trades
and industries of various nations; they are pretty much the same in
one country and another, especially when we consider the details,
and neglect the general subdivisions. But in the political body, in
the works of high art, and in the systems of philosophy, the whole
of the character and temperament of the several peoples finds its
expression, and stands distinctly marked, in a shape of its own. If
the form of German polity be not transferable to this side of the
Channel, no more will German philosophy. Direct utilisation for
English purposes is out of the question: the circumstances are too
different. But the study of the great works of foreign thought is
not on that account useless, any more than the study of the great
works of foreign statesmanship.Hegel did good service, at least, by freeing philosophy from
that aspect of an imported luxury, which it usually had,—as if it
were an exotic plant removed from the bright air of Greece into the
melancholy mists of Western Europe. 'We have still,' he says, 'to
break down the partition between the language of philosophy, and
that of ordinary consciousness: we have to overcome the reluctance
against thinking what we are familiar with[5].' Philosophy must be brought face to face with ordinary
life, so as to draw its strength from the actual and living
present, and not from the memories or traditions of the past. It
has to become the organised and completed thinking of what is
contained blindly and vaguely in the various levels of popular
intelligence, as these are more or less educated and ordered. It
must grow naturally, as in ancient Greece, from the necessities of
the social situation, and not be a product of artificial
introduction and nurture: the revelation by the mind's own energy
of an implicit truth, not the communication of a mystery
sacramentally received. To suppose that a mere change of words can
give this grace, would be absurd. Yet where the national life
pulses strong, as that of Germany in those days did at first in
letters and then in social reform, the dominant note will make
itself felt even in the neutral regions of speculation. It was a
step on the right road to banish a pompous and aristocratic dialect
from philosophy, and to lead it back to those words and forms of
speech, which are at least in silent harmony with the national
feeling.[1]Hegel'sLeben(Rosenkranz), p.
555.[2]'Das Bekannte
überhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt.'Phenomenologie des Geistes,p.
24.[3]Vermischte
Schriften,vol. ii. p. 474.[4]e. g.DaseinandExistenz:
WirklichkeitandRealität:WesenandSubstanz.It is the same habit of
curiously pondering over the tones and shades of language which
leads him to something very like playing on words, and to
etymologising, as one may call it, on unetymological principles: e.
g. the play onMeinandMeinung(vol. ii. 32: cf.Werke, ii. 75): the literal rendering
ofErinnerung(Encycl.§§ 234 and 450); and the abrupt
transitions, as it would seem, from literal to figurative use of
such a term asGrund.At the
same time it is well not to be prosaically certain that a free play
of thought does not follow the apparently fortuitous assonance of
words.[5]Hegel'sLeben(Rosenkranz), p.
553.
CHAPTER II.
WHY TRANSLATE HEGEL?
'But,' it is urged, 'though it be well to let the stream of
foreign thought irrigate some of our philosophical pastures, though
we should not for ever entrench ourselves in our insularity—why try
to introduce Hegel, of all philosophers confessedly the most
obscure? Why not be content with the study and the "exploitation"
of Kant, whom Germans themselves still think so important as to
expound him with endless comment and criticism, and who has at
length found, after some skirmishes, a recognised place in the
English philosophical curriculum? Why seek for more Teutonic
thinking that can be found in Schopenhauer, and found there in a
clear and noble style, luminous in the highest degree, and touching
with no merely academic abstruseness the problems of life and
death? Or—as that song is sweetest to men which is the newest to
ring in their ears—why not render accessible to English readers the
numerous and suggestive works of Eduard von Hartmann, and of
Friedrich Nietzsche—not to mention Robert Hamerling[1]? Or, finally, why
not give us more and ever more translations of the works in logic,
ethics, psychology, or metaphysics, of those many admirable
teachers in the German universities, whom it would be invidious to
try to single out by name? As for Hegel, his system, in the native
land of the philosopher, is utterly discredited; its influence is
extinct; it is dead as a door-nail. It is a pity to waste labour
and distract attention, and that in English lands, where there are
plenty of problems of our own to solve, by an attempt, which must
perforce be futile, to resuscitate these defunctitudes?'
That Hegelianism has been utterly discredited, in certain
quarters, is no discovery reserved for these later days. But on
this matter perhaps we may borrow an analogy. If the reader will be
at the trouble to take up two English newspapers of opposite
partisanship and compare the reports from their foreign
correspondents on some question of home politics, he may, if a
novice, be surprised to learn that according to one, the opinion e.
g. of Vienna is wholly adverse to the measure, while, according to
the other, that opinion entirely approves.
It is no new thing to find Hegelianism in general obloquy.
Even in 1830 the Catholic philosopher and theologian Günther[2]—an admirer, but by
no means a follower of Hegel—wrote that, 'for some years it had
been the fashion in learned Germany to look upon philosophy, and
above all Hegelian philosophy, as a door-mat on which everybody
cleaned his muddy boots before entering the sanctuary of politics
and religion.' What is true as regards the alleged surcease of
Hegelianism is that in the reaction which from various causes
turned itself against philosophy in the two decennia after 1848,
that system, as the most deeply committed part of the
'metaphysical' host, suffered most severely. History and science
seemed to triumph along the whole line. But it may be perhaps
permissible to remark that Hegelianism had predicted for itself the
fate that it proved had fallen on all other philosophies. After the
age of Idealism comes the turn of Realism. The Idea had to die—had
to sink as a germ in the fields of nature and history before it
could bear its fruit. Above all it is not to be expected that such
a system, so ambitious in aim and concentrated in expression, could
find immediate response and at once disclose all its meaning. His
first disciples are not the—truest interpreters of any great
teacher. What he saw in the one comprehensive glance of genius, his
successors must often be content to gather by the slow accumulation
of years, and perhaps centuries, of experience. It is not to
Theophrastus that we go for the truest and fullest conception of
Aristotelianism; nor is Plato to be measured by what his immediate
successors in the Academy managed to make out of him. It is now
more than a century since Kant gave his lesson to the public, and
we are still trying to get him focussed in a single view: it may be
even longer till Hegel comes fully within the range of our
historians of thought. Aristotelianism too had to wait centuries
till it fully entered the consciousness even of the thinking
world.
It is to be said too that without Hegel it would be difficult
to imagine what even teachers, like Lotze, who were very unlike
him, would have had to say. It does not need a very wide soul, nor
need one be a mere dilettantist eclectic, to find much of
Schopenhauer's work far from incompatible with his great, and as
some have said, complementary opposite. It is not indeed prudent as
yet for a writer in Germany who wishes to catch the general ear to
affix too openly a profession of Hegelian principles, and he will
do well to ward off suspicion by some disparaging remarks on the
fantastic methods, the overfondness for system, the contempt for
common sense and scientific results which, as he declares, vitiate
all the speculations of the period from 1794 to 1830. But under the
names of Spinoza and of Leibniz the leaven of Hegelian principles
has been at work: and if the Philistines solve the riddle of the
intellectual Samson, it is because they have ploughed with his
heifer,—because his ideas are part of the modern stock of
thought,—not from what they literally read in the great thinkers at
the close of the seventeenth century. Last year saw appear in
Germany two excellent treatises describable as popular
introductions to philosophy[3], one by a thinker
who has never disguised his obligations to Hegel, the other by a
teacher in the University of Berlin who may in many ways be
considered as essentially kindred with our general English style of
thought. But both treatises are more allied in character to the
spirit of the Hegelian attempts to comprehend man and God than to
the formalistic and philological disquisitions which have for some
years formed the staple of German professorial activity. And,
lastly, the vigorous thinker, who a quarter of a century ago
startled the reading public by the portent of a new metaphysic
which should be the synthesis of Schelling and Schopenhauer, has
lately informed us[4]that his affinity to Hegel is, taken all in all, greater than
his affinity to any other philosopher'; and that that affinity
extends to all that in Hegel has essential and permanent
value.
But it is not on Eduard von Hartmann's commendation that we
need rest our estimate of Hegelianism. We shall rather say that,
till more of Hegel has been assimilated, he must still block the
way. Things have altered greatly in the last twenty years, it is
true; and ideas of more or less Hegelian origin have taken their
place in the common stock of philosophic commodities. But it will
probably be admitted by those best qualified to speak on the
subject, that the shower has not as yet penetrated very deeply into
the case-hardened soil, still less saturated it in the measure most
likely to cause fruitful shoots to grow forth. We have to go back
to Hegel in the same spirit as we go to Kant, and, for that matter,
to Plato or Descartes: or, as the moderns may go back—to borrow
from another sphere—to Dante or Shakespeare. We do not want the
modern poet to resuscitate the style and matter ofKing Learor of theInferno.Yet as the Greek tragedian steeped his soul in the language
and the legend of Homeric epic, as Dante nurtured his spirit on the
noble melodies of Mantua's poet; so philosophy, if it is to go
forth strong and effective, must mould into its own substance the
living thought of former times. It would be as absurd, and as
impossible to be literally and simply a Hegelian,—if that means one
for whom Hegel sums up all philosophy and all truth—as it is to be
at the present day in the literal sense a Platonist or an
Aristotelian. The world may be slow, the world of opinion and
thought may linger:e pur si muove.We
too have our own problems—the same, no doubt, in a sense, from age
to age, and yet infinitely varying and never in two ages alike. New
stars have appeared on the spiritual sky; and whether they have in
them the eternal light or only the flash and glare of a passing
meteor, they alter the aspects of the night in which we are still
waiting for the dawn.
A new language, born of new relations of ideas, or of new
ideas, is perforce for our generation the vehicle of all
utterances, and we cannot again speak the dialect, however imposing
or however quaint, of a vanished day.
And for that reason there must always be a new philosophy,
couched in the language of the age, sympathetic with its hopes and
fears, conscious of its beliefs, more or less sensible of its
problems—as indeed we may be confident there always will be. But,
perhaps, the warrior in that battle against illusion and prejudice,
against the sloth which takes things as they are and the poorness
of spirit which is satisfied with first appearances, will not do
wisely to disdain the past. He will not indeed equip himself with
rusty swords and clumsy artillery from the old arsenals. But he
will not disdain the lessons of the past,—its methods and
principles of tactics and strategy. Recognising perhaps some
defects and inequalities in the methods and aims of thought most
familiar to him and current in his vicinity, he may go abroad for
other samples, even though they be not in all respects worth his
adoption. And so without taking Hegel as omniscient, or pledging
himself to every word of the master, he may think from his own
experience that there is much in the system that will be helpful,
when duly estimated and assimilated, to others. There is—and few
can be so bigoted or so positive-minded as to regret it—there is
unquestionably a growing interest in English-speaking countries in
what may be roughly called philosophy—the attempt, unprejudiced by
political, scientific, or ecclesiastical dogma, to solve the
questions as to what the world really is, and what man's place and
function is. 'The burthen of the mystery, the heavy and the weary
weight of all this unintelligible world' is felt—felt widely and
sometimes felt deeply. To the direct lightening of that burthen and
that mystery it is the privilege of our profoundest thinkers and
our far-seeing poets and artists to contribute. To the translator
of Hegel there falls the humbler task of making accessible, if it
may be, something of one of the later attempts at a solution of the
enigma of life and existence,—an attempt which for a time dazzled
some of the keenest intellects of its age, and which has at least
impressed many others with the conviction, born of momentary
flashes from it of vast illuminant power, that—si sic
omnia—there was here concealed a key to many puzzles,
and a guard against many illusions likely to beset the inquirer
after truth.
[1]A book by V. Knauer published last year
(Hauptprobleme der Philosophie), a
series of popular lectures, gives one-sixth of its space to the
'Atomistic of Will' by the Austrian poet Hamerling.
[2]Hegel'sBriefe,
ii. 349.
[3]J. Volkelt,Vorträge zur
Einführung in die Philosophie der Gegenwart(München
1892): F. Paulsen,Einleitung in die
Philosophie(Berlin 1892).
[4]E. v. Hartmann,Kritische
Wanderungen, p. 74.
CHAPTER III.
ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY AND HEGEL.
Although we need not take too seriously Hegel's remark (vol.
ii. p. 13) on the English conception of philosophy, it may be
admitted that, by the dominant school of English thought,
philosophy, taken in the wide sense it has predominantly born
abroad, was, not so very long ago, all but entirely ignored. Causes
of various kinds had turned the energy of the English mind into
other directions, not less essential to the common welfare.
Practical needs and an established social system helped—to bind
down studies to definite and particular objects, and to exclude
what seemed vague and general investigations with no immediate
bearing on the business of life. Hence philosophy in England could
hardly exist except when it was reduced to the level of a special
branch of science, or when it could be used as a receptacle for the
principles and methods common to all the sciences. The general term
was often used to denote the wisdom of this world, or the practical
exhibition of self-control in life and action. For those
researches, which are directed to the objects once considered
proper to philosophy, the more definite and characteristic term
came to be Mental and Moral Science.
The old name was in certain circles restricted to denote the
vague and irregular speculations of those thinkers, who either
lived before the rise of exact science, or who acted in defiance of
its precepts and its example. One large and influential class of
English thinkers inclined to sweep philosophy altogether away, as
equivalent to metaphysics and obsolete forms of error; and upon the
empty site thus obtained they sought to construct a psychological
theory of mind, or they tried to arrange and codify those general
remarks upon the general procedure of the sciences which are known
under the name of Inductive Logic. A smaller, but not less
vigorous, school of philosophy looked upon their business as an
extension and rounding off of science into a complete unification
of knowledge. The first is illustrated by the names of J. S. Mill
and Mr. Bain: the second is the doctrine of Mr. Herbert
Spencer.
The encyclopaedic aggregate of biological, psychological,
ethical and social investigation which Mr. Spencer pursues, under
the general guidance of the formula of evolution by differentiation
and integration, still proceeds on its course: but though its
popularity—as such popularity goes—is vast and more than national,
it does not and probably cannot find many imitators. Very
differently stand matters with the movement in psychology and
logic. Here the initiative has led to divergent and unexpected
developments. Psychology, which at first was partly an ampler and a
more progressive logic, a theory of the origin and nature of
knowledge, partly a propaedeutic to the more technical logic and
ethics, and pursued in a loosely introspective way, has gravitated
more and more towards its experimental and physiological side, with
occasional velleities to assume the abstractly-mathematical
character of a psycho-physical science. Logic, on the other hand,
has also changed its scope. Not content to be a mere tool of the
sciences or a mere criterion for the estimation of evidence, it has
in one direction grown into a systematic effort to become an
epistemology—a system of the first principles of knowledge and
reality—a metaphysic of science; and in another it has sought to
realise the meaning of those old forms of inference which the
logicians of half a century ago were inclined to pooh-pooh as
obsolete. Most remarkable—and most novel of all—is the vast
increase of interest and research in the problems of ethics and v
of what is called the philosophy of religion—subjects which at that
date were literally burning questions, apt to scorch the fingers of
those who touched them. In all of this, but especially marked in
some leading thinkers, the ruling feature is the critical—the
sceptical, i. e. the eager, watchful, but self-restrained—attitude
towards its themes. Ever driving on to find a deeper unity than
shows on the surface, and to get at principles, the modern
thinker—and in this we see the permanent and almost overwhelming
influence of Kant upon him—recoils from the dogmatism of system, at
the very moment it seems to be within his grasp.
Thus the recent products of English thought have been, as Mr.
Spencer has taught us to say, partly in the line of
differentiation, partly of integration. At one moment it seems as
if the ancient queen of the sciences sat like Hecuba,exul, inops,while her younger daughters enjoyed
the freedom and progress of specialisation. The wood seems lost
behind the trees. And at another, again, the centripetal force
seems to preponderate: every department, logic, ethics, psychology,
sociology, rapidly carries its students on and up to fundamental
questions, if not to fundamental principles. Philosophy—the one and
undivided truth and quest of truths—emerges fresh, vigorous, and as
yet rather indeterminate, from the mass of detailed investigations.
That the position is now altered from what it was in times when
knowledge had fewer departments, is obvious. The task of the
'synoptic' mind—which Plato claims for the philosopher—grows
increasingly difficult: but that is hardly a reason for performing
it in a more perfunctory way. It seems rather as if in such a
crisis one of the great reconstructive systems of a preceding age
might be in some measure helpful.
If we consult history, it is at once clear that philosophy,
or the pursuit of ultimate reality and permanent truth, went hand
in hand with scientific researches into facts and their particular
explanations.
In their earlier stages the two tendencies of thought were
scarcely distinguishable. The philosophers of Ionia and Magna
Graecia were also the scientific pioneers of their time. Their
fragmentary remains remind us at times of the modern theories of
geology and biology,—at other times of the teachings of idealism.
The same thing is comparatively true of the earlier philosophers of
Modern Europe. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in spite
of Bacon and Newton, endeavoured to study the mental and moral life
by a method which was a strange mixture of empiricism and
metaphysics. In words, indeed, the thinkers from Descartes to Wolff
duly emphasise, perhaps over-emphasise, the antithesis between the
extended and the intellectual. But in practice their course is not
so clear. Their mental philosophy is often only a
preliminarymedicina mentisto set the
individual mind in good order for undertaking the various tasks
awaiting a special research. They are really eager to get on to
business, and only, as it were, with regret spend time in this
clearance of mental faculty. And when they do deal with objects,
the material and extended tends to become the dominant conception,
the basis of reality. The human mind, thatnobilissima
substantia, is treated only as an aggregate, or a
receptacle, of ideas, and themens,—with
them all nearly as with Spinoza,—is only anidea
corporis,and that phrase not taken so highly as
Spinoza's perhaps should be taken. In the works of these thinkers,
as of the pre-Socratics, there is one element which may be styled
philosophical, and another element which maybe styled
scientific,—if we use both words vaguely. But with Socrates in the
ancient, and with Kant in the modern epoch of philosophy, an
attempt was made to get the boundary between the two regions
definitively drawn. The distinction was in the first place
accompanied by something like turning the back upon science and
popular conceptions. Socrates withdrew thought from disquisitions
concerning the nature of all things, and fixed it upon man and the
state of man. Kant left the broad fields of actually-attained
knowledge, and inquired into the central principle on which the
acquisition of science, the laws of human life, and the ideals of
art and religion, were founded.
The change thus begun was not unlike that which Copernicus
effected in the theory of Astronomy. Human personality, either in
the actualised forms of the State, or in the abstract shape of the
Reason,—that intellectual liberty, which is a man's true
world,—was, at least by implication, made the pivot around which
the system of the sciences might turn. In the contest, which
according to Reid prevails between Common Sense and Philosophy, the
presumptions of the former have been distinctly reversed, and Kant,
like Socrates, has shown that it is not the several items of fact,
but the humanity, the moral law, the thought, which underlies these
doctrines, which give the real resting-point and true centre of
movement. But this negative attitude of philosophy to the sciences
is only the beginning, needed to secure a standing-ground. In the
ancient world Aristotle, and in the modern Hegel (as the inheritor
of the labours of Fichte and Schelling), exhibit the movement
outwards to reconquer the universe, proceeding from that principle
which Socrates and Kant had emphasised in its fundamental
worth.
Mr. Mill, in the closing chapter of his Logic, has briefly
sketched the ideal of a science to which he gives the name of
Teleology, corresponding in the ethical and practical sphere to
aPhilosophia Prima, or Metaphysics, in
the theoretical. This ideal and ultimate court of appeal is to be
valid in Morality, and also in Prudence, Policy and Taste. But the
conception, although a desirable one, falls short of the work which
Hegel assigns to philosophy. What he intended to accomplish with
detail and regular evolution was not a system of principles in
these departments of action only, but a theory which would give its
proper place in our total Idea of reality to Art, Science, and
Religion, to all the consciousness of ordinary life, and to the
evolution of the physical universe. Philosophy ranges over
the—whole field of actuality, or existing fact. Abstract principles
are all very well in their way; but they are not philosophy. If the
world in its historical and its present life develops into endless
detail in regular lines, philosophy must equally develop the
narrowness of its first principles into the plenitude of a
System,—into what Hegel calls, the Idea. His point of view may be
gathered from the following remarks in a review of Hamann, an
erratic friend and fellow-citizen of Kant's.
Hamann would not put himself to the trouble, which in an
higher sense God undertook. The ancient philosophers have described
God under the image of a round ball. But if that be His nature, God
has unfolded it; and in the actual world He has opened the closed
shell of truth into a system of Nature, into a State-system, a
system of Law and Morality, into the system of the world's History.
The shut fist has become an open hand, the fingers of which reach
out to lay hold of man's mind, and draw it to Himself. Nor is the
human mind a self-involved intelligence, blindly moving within its
own secret recesses. It is no mere feeling and groping about in a
vacuum, but an intelligent system of rational organisation. Of that
system Thought is the summit in point of form: and Thought maybe
described as the capability of going beyond the mere surface of
God's self-expansion,—or rather as the capability, by means of
reflection upon it, of entering into it, and then when the entrance
has been secured, of retracing in thought God's expansion of
Himself. To take this trouble is the express duty and end of ends
set before the thinking mind, ever since God laid aside His
rolled-up form, and revealed Himself[1].'
Enthusiastic admirers have often spoken as if the salvation
of the time could only come from the Hegelian philosophy. 'Grasp
the secret of Hegel,' they say, 'and you will find a cure for the
delusions of your own mind, and the remedy which will set right the
wrongs of the world.' These high claims to be a panacea were never
made by Hegel himself. According to him, as according to Aristotle,
philosophyas suchcan produce nothing
new. Practical statesmen, and theoretical reformers, may do their
best to correct the inequalities of their time. But the very terms
in which Bacon scornfully depreciated one great concept of
philosophy are to be accepted in their literal truth. Like a virgin
consecrated to God, she bears no fruit[2]. She represents the
spirit of the world, resting, as it were, when one step in the
progress has been accomplished, and surveying the advance which has
been made. Philosophy is not,' says Fichte, 'even a means toshapelife: for it lies in a totally different
world, and what is to have an influence upon life must itself have
sprung from life. Philosophy is only a means to theknowledgeof life.' Nor has it the vocation to
edify men, and take the place of religion on the higher levels of
intellect. 'The philosopher,' Fichte boldly continues, 'has no God
at all and can have no God: he has only a concept of the concept or
of the Idea of God. It is only in life that there is God and
religion: but the philosopher as such is not the whole complete
man, and it is impossible for any one to beonlya philosopher[3].' Philosophy does
not profess to bring into being what ought to be, but is not yet.
It sets up no mere ideals, which must wait for some future day in
order to be realised. Enough for it if it show what the
worldis,if it were what it professes to
be, and what in a way it must be, otherwise it could not be even
what it is. The subject-matter of philosophy is that which is
always realising and always realised—the world in its wholeness as
it is and has been. It seeks to put before us, and embody in
permanent outlines, the universal law of spiritual life and growth,
and not the local, temporary, and individual acts of human
will.
Those who ask philosophy to construe, or to deducea prioria single blade of grass, or a single
act of a man, must not be grieved if their request sounds absurd
and meets with no answer. The sphere of philosophy is the
Universal. We may say, if we like, that it is retrospective. It is
the spectator of all time and all existence: it is its duty to view
thingssub specie aeternitatis. To
comprehend the universe of thought in all its formations and all
its features, to reduce the solid structures, which mind has
created, to fluidity and transparency in the pure medium of
thought, to set free the fossilised intelligence which the great
magician who wields the destinies of the world has hidden under the
mask of Nature, of the Mind of man, of the works of Art, of the
institutions of the State and the orders of Society, and of
religious forms and creeds:—such is the complicated problem of
philosophy. Its special work is to comprehend the world, not try to
make it better. If it were the purpose of philosophy to reform and
improve the existing state of things, it comes a little too late
for such a task. 'As the thought of the world,' says Hegel, 'it
makes its first appearance at a time, when the actual fact has
consummated its process of formation, and is now fully matured.
This is the doctrine set forth by the notion of philosophy; but it
is also the teaching of history. It is only when the actual world
has reached its full fruition that the ideal rises to confront the
reality, and builds up, in the shape of an intellectual realm, that
same world grasped in its substantial being. When philosophy paints
its grey in grey, some one shape of life has meanwhile grown old:
and grey in grey, though it brings it into knowledge, cannot make
it young again. The owl of Minerva does not start upon its flight,
until the evening twilight has begun to fall[4].'
[1]Vermischte Schriften, vol. ii.
p. 87.
[2]De Augm. Scient.iii. 5.
[3]The passages occur in some notes (written
down by F. in reference to the charge of Atheism) published in
hisWerke,v. pp. 342, 348.
[4]Philosophie des Rechts, p. 20
(Werke,viii).
CHAPTER IV.
HEGEL AND THEOLOGY.
Even an incidental glance into Hegel's Logic cannot fail to
discover the frequent recurrence of the name of God, and the
discussion of matters not generally touched upon, unless in works
bearing upon religion. There were two questions which seem to have
had a certain fascination for Hegel. One of them, a rather
unpromising problem, referred to the distances between the several
planets in the solar system, and the law regulating these
intervals[1].
The other and more intimate problem turned upon the value of the
proofs usually offered in support of the being of God. That God is
the supreme certitude of the mind, the basis of all reality and
knowledge, is what Hegel no more put in question, than did
Descartes, Spinoza, or Locke. What he often repeated was that
thematterin these proofs must be
distinguished from the imperfectmannerin which the arguers presented it. Again and again in his
Logic, as well as in other discussions more especially devoted to
it, he examines this problem. His persistence in this direction
might earn for him that title of 'Knight of the Holy Ghost,' by
which Heine, in one of the delightful poems of his 'Reisebilder,'
describes himself to the maid of Klausthal in the Harz. The poet of
Love and of Freedom had undoubted rights to rank among the sacred
band: but so also had the philosopher. Like the Socrates whom Plato
describes to us, he seems to feel that he has been commissioned to
reveal the truth of God, and quicken men by an insight into the
right wisdom. Nowhere in the modern period of philosophy has higher
spirit breathed in the utterances of a thinker. The same theme is
claimed as the common heritage of philosophy and religion. A letter
to Duboc[2],
the father of a modern German novelist, lets us see how important
this aspect of his system was to Hegel himself. He had been asked
to give a succinct explanation of his standing-ground: and his
answer begins by pointing out that philosophy seeks to apprehend in
reasoned knowledge the same truth which the religious mind has in
its faith.
