The development from Kant to Hegel [microform] : with chapters on the philosophy of religion / by Andrew Seth. / Seth Pringle-Pattison, A. (Andrew), 1856-1931

VICTORIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
TORONTO, ONTARIO 





SOURCE: 



//. n JJJWJ^o i 





WITH CHAPTERS ON 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 



BY 

MDEEW SETH, M,A,, 

ASSISTANT TO THE PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS IK THE 

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, AND LATE UIBBERT 

TRAVELLING SCHOLAR. 




trustees. 



WILLIAMS AND NORGATE, 

14, HENRIETTA STREET, CO VENT GARDEN, LONDON; 
AND 20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH. 

1882. 



LONDON: 

U. NORMAL A~D SON, PRINTERS, HART 8TRF.ET, 
COYMIT GAIDEN. 



PREFACE. 

THE First Part of this Essay was originally written in 
Germany, in the summer of 1880, at the conclusion of 
my two years term of study as Hibbert Travelling 
Scholar. Since the resolution of the Hibbert Trustees 
to publish the Essay, I have taken the opportunity of 
re-writing it almost entirely, with the view of offering, 
as far as possible, a real contribution to the study of 
German Philosophy in England. The Second Part, on 
the Philosophy of Religion, has been added at the special 
request of the Trustees. 

In tracing the development of Kantian thought in the 
hands of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, I have restricted 
my attention to the fundamental metaphysical position 
occupied by the respective thinkers. The plan of the 
Essay made this imperative, and I think it will also bo 
found to conduce to clearness. The many able works 
on Kant which have recently appeared in English, per 
mitted me to dispense with an elaborate account of his 
philosophy. I have confined myself, therefore, in the 
first chapter to a critical statement of results. The 
apparently disproportionate number of pages devoted to 
Fichte, may be defended on the ground that the 
difference between Kant and Fichte is more radical than 
that between Fichte and his two successors. In Fichte, the 



11 I KEFACE. 

principle of Idealism is first disengaged from the Kantian 
thought, and it remains henceforth common ground. I 
have given, therefore, a pretty full account of the process 
by which Fichte reached his metaphysical theory, as well 
as a criticism of the weaknesses peculiar to his form of 
statement. Fichte has received so little attention in this 
country in comparison with what has been bestowed on 
Kant, and even on Hegel, that the sketch may perhaps 
bo of use in the way of focussing his distinctive 
philosophic position. 

In the Second Part, on the contrary, the transition is 
made directly from Kant to Hegel, without mention of 
the special views of Fichte and Schelliug on the 
Philosophy of Religion. The treatment of Christianity 
by Fichte in his later period is, in the main, an anticipa 
tion of the Hegelian theory. But, however interesting a 
Fichtian or a Schellingian Philosophy of Religion might 
be in a monograph, they are not vital in the interests of 
the historical development here traced, and a considerable 
amount of repetition is saved by their omission. I have 
been at special pains to give a full account of Kant s 
remarkable book, Religion within the Limits of Mere 
Reason, because neither its historical importance, nor its 
organic connection with Kant s general scheme of thought, 
is, as a rule, sufficiently recognized. 

EDIXBCBGH, 

February, 1892. 



CONTENTS. 



PART I. 
THE METAPHYSICAL GROUNDWORK. 

PAGE 

CHAPTER I. RESULTS OF THE KANTIAN CRITIQUE 

OF KNOWLEDGE .... 1 

CHAPTER II. FICHTE ...... 15 

(1) Fichte s Criticism of Kant . .17 

(2) Dogmatism and Idealism (tho 

theoretical Wissenschaftslehre) 20 

(3) Fichte s relation to Kant s Prac 

tical Philosophy . . .29 

(4) The Practical Ego and the Anstoss 

as explanation of reality . . 33 

(5) General statement and criticism of 

Fichte s philosophical position . 38 

CHAPTER III. SCHELLING , 52 

(1) The Naturphilosophie . . .53 

(2) Tho Philosophy of Identity . . 59 

CHAPTER IV. HEGEL 68 

(1) His criticism of his predecessors 69 

(2) The dialectic method . . 73 

(3) Logic, Nature and Spirit . . 76 



CONTENTS. 
PART II. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 



PAGE 

91 



INTRODUCTORY 

CHAPTER I. THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY OP RELIGION 96 

(1) The foundation in Ethics . . 96 

(2) The Religion within the Limits 

of Mere Reason . . .108 

CHAPTER II. CRITICISM OP THE KANTIAN STANDPOINT 

AND TRANSITION TO HEGEL . .133 

(1) The distinction of Kant from the 

Aufkldrung . . . .133 

(2) Criticism of Kant s position . 138 

(3) Outline of the Hegelian Philosophy 

of Religion . 145 



(4) Concluding remarks 



165 



PART I. 

THE DEVELOPMENT FROM KANT TO 
HEGEL 



CHAPTER I. 

KANT. 

THOUGH the estimates of what Kant did are various, 
there is a general agreement among competent authorities 
that his Critical investigations form a new point of 
departure in philosophy. People differ in their reading 
of Kant and in their evaluation of his results. His name 
is invoked in support of mutually incompatible doctrines, 
according as stress is laid upon this or the other element 
of his thought. But at the bottom of all these conflict 
ing opinions lies the conviction that the Kantian system, 
and whatever claims to be its legitimate out-growth, have 
a present-day interest and application beyond the historic 
value which all the systems of the past possess. So much 
has been written on Kant lately in English, that it would 
be a thankless labour in me to seek to unravel anew the 
tangled skein of Critical thought. I have confined myself, 
therefore, to a general statement of what, in my opinion, 
are Kant s most valuable results, and what are the incon 
sistencies that prevent us from regarding his system as 
final. This will probably be sufficient to suggest to the 
reader the process of criticism by which my positions 
have been reached. My present purpose is to show how 
the question Kant asked himself, and the method ho 

1 



2 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

followed in answering it, expanded under his hands and 
those of his immediate successors in Germany into a new 
solution of metaphysical problems. The second part of 
the essay indicates the bearing of this new solution on 
the philosophy of religion. 

Kant s uniform method in his various investigations 
cannot bo better described than in his own well-worn 
phrase an inquiry into the conditions of tho possibility 
of experience. His results are a retrogressive conclusion 
from the facts of ordinary and scientific experience. What 
conditions are requisite, in order that tho fact of know 
ledge may bo possible ? What are the presuppositions 
which the very notion of ethical action involves ? How, 
or on what conditions, are the feeling of beauty .and tho 
idea of organic co-ordination possible ? In this way tho 
problems of the three Critiques may be brought together, 
and tho identity of their method perceived. In each caso 
a portion or phase of human experience is analyzed, in 
order to discover the conditions of its possibility. There 
is no question of demonstrating its actuality. It is use 
less, for example, to discuss tho existence of matter. Wo 
all know, or science at least can tell us, what we actually 
see and feel. The Kantian question is what notions and 
existences are necessary to the constitution of the experi 
ence, such as we know it ? But the transcendental method 
does not consist, as it has sometimes been said to do, in 
taking the facts and re-baptizing them as faculties or 
conditions for the production of themselves. The answer 
to Kant s question can be neither more nor less than an 
analysis of experience into its constituent elements. If 
the analysis is correct and exhaustive, it will embrace a 
demonstration of the organic interdependence of these 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 



elements. When this is done, the demand for a produc 
ing cause will probably be found to be out of place. For , 
experience, viewed as such a unity, no cause can be 
assigned except itself. 

The Critique of Pure Reason, to which we at present 
confine ourselves, is usually, and correctly, described as a 
contribution to " Erkenntnisstheorie," or Theory of 
Knowledge. It is of the utmost importance to grasp at 
the outset the meaning of the term. Otherwise the whole 
drift and scope of the transcendental method is missed. 
If Kant was merely trying to show the presence in the 
individual of certain faculties or aptitudes for the acquire 
ment of knowledge, then wo may admit at once the 
relevancy of Herbert Spencer s proof that their connate- 
ness in the individual is the result of tho consolidated 
experiences of his ancestors. But if that was Kant s aim, 
ho ceases to have any distinctive place in philosophy at 
all, except as the last a jiriori speculator who is worth tho 
pains of slaughtering in public. Kant may bo partly to 
blame for tho misconception, by the psychological aspect 
which he sometimes communicates to his investigation ;* 
but ho was well aware of the difference between tho method 
of the transcendental logic in his hands, and the historical 
or descriptive procedure of empirical psychology. In dis 
cussing the principles of his method, Kant distinguishes 
rigidly between what he calls the quid fact! and the quid 

* His too free use of words like " Gcmtith," and his adherence 
to tho scheme of faculties which he inherited from the Wolflians 
are partly responsible for this. Still more, perhaps, the separation 
on which he insisted between the world of knowledge and tho 
world of being. His phraseology is nowhere more misleading 
than when he is emphasizing the subjective or non-noumenal 
character of our knowledge. Tho whole system of reason appears 
in such passages retracted within the narrow theatre of the: 
individual mind. 

1 * 



1 Th<- Development from Kant io Hegd. 

juris.* An answer to the former question would imply a 
comparative observation of nil known varieties of cogni 
tive effort. A natural history of the inchoate intelligence 
of children, of savages, and of non-human animals might 
bo in place here. But its merely probable conclusions 
would have no bearing, according to Kant, on the strictly 
necessary results of the transcendental method. Tho/ 
transcendental method is the demonstration, in the case on 
any conception, that without it knowledge could not exist. 
It analyzes what is involved in the very notion of rational 
"knowledge. Only such a method can give the required 
"deduction" or vindication of the necessary place of 
the conception in reason, and of its jus or right to function 
in the constitution of experience. Kant is continually 
insisting that this transcendental account of the nature of 
knowledge, as knowledge (or, as he elsewhere calls it, tho 
logical form of all cognition), is wholly independent of 
the extent to which the elements of its synthesis aro 
apprehended in this or the other empirical consciousness. 
He says, in one place, of the idea or empirical consciousness 
of tho Ego the supremo condition of knowledge that 
whether it be clear or obscure " matters not here, no, not 
even whether it actually exist or no."f The recurring 
use of the terms "possible" and " capable "J is itself 
an indication how distinctly the perfectly general character 
of his investigation was impressed upon his mind. 

* Soc Werkc, iii. 1<M5 et teg. (ed. ITartonstpin). 

t J>aran liogt hicr nichts, ja nicht cinmal an dcr Wirklichkeit 
desselben. Wcrkc, iii. 578. 

+ In such expressions as "The I think* must bo capable of 
accompanying all my ideas " (muss begleiton konncn) ; or again 
" Without the relation to an at least possible consciousness (ohne 
das Verhaltniss zu einem wenigstens moglichen Bewusstsein) the 
appearance could never become for us an object of cognition." 
Werkc, iii. 115 and 579. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 



When the conception of knowledge is submitted to 
this analysis, Kant discovers " the static and permanent 
Ego of pure apperception "* to be the fundamental con 
dition of the possibility of all connected experience. But 
the Ego, or permanent subject, is static only in the sense 
that it does not pass with its ideas : it is not static in the 
sense that we can remain standing by its blank identity. 
The unity of apperception, as Kant calls it, cannot be 
rendered intelligible except in reference to an object, 
whose synthesis it is. Here the peculiar enchainment or 
involution of conceptions becomes apparent, on which the 
method relies for its convincing power. The knowing 
Self, though the first or supreme condition of experience, 
demands in turn, as the indispensable pro-requisite of its 
existence, a knowable world to which it is related. It 
would be irrelevant to carry out the process further here, 
and to show how the intelligible connection of subject and 
object, or, in other words, the existence of the intelligible 
universe, is proved to depend on such principles as those 
of substantiality, causality, etc. It is enough to have 
indicated the principle of the demonstration. 

Previous philosophy, proceeding on the presupposition 
of an essential dualism between thought and things, had 
ended with Hume in scepticism as to the possibility of 
real knowledge. The result of the Kantian method was 
to abolish this latent postulate. But Kant himself, in his 
" refutation " of Hume, proceeded throughout on the / 
same assumption, which, in his case too, brought the 
same sceptical conclusion in its train. If Kant vindicates 
against Hume a certain reality for our knowledge, it is 
still not a knowledge of realities. Man has, on the 
* Werke, iii, 581. 



C TJic Development from Kant to Hegel. 

Kantian scheme, a thoroughly trustworthy and indefi 
nitely perfectible knowledge of phenomena; but these 
are only the images of real things distorted in the glass 
of his own mind. Things in themselves or noumena 
exist in a world beyond,* and man has no faculty by 
which ho can penetrate into that region. Ho cannot 
abjure the nature of his own thought ; he cannot know 
things otherwise than he does know them. But this way 
of stating the case inevitably suggests the inquiry whether 
tbo Kantian demand to know noumena as something 
behind, and different from, phenomena, is anything more 
than the desire to know and not to know a thing at tho 
same time. For, if wo merely exchange human thought 
for some other kind of thought, we are no better off than 
before as regards a knowledge of realities, seeing that the 
realities, in being known, must be equally coloured by tho 
nature of this new thought. Unless, therefore, we could 
escape from thought altogether, that is, know a thing 
without knowing it, wo should never be able to satisfy 
this fantastic demand for reality. f 
\ But Kant left the philosophic question and its dualistic 

* This is tho net result of the Kantian thought, in spite of the 
passages where Kant refuses to assign to noumena more than a 
problematical existence. It may be added, however, that Kant 
opens up a much truer line of thought in his account of the 
Practical Eeason, where he identifies the noumenal world with the 
sphere of ethical action. 

t The boast of Comte that noumena and metaphysic have been 
banished the world together, is a result of the same habit of 
thought. "Whether it take the form of Comtism, or of Neo- 
Xantianism, or simply of scientific empiricism, the idea is very 
prevalent at the present day that the whole activity of metaphysic 
consists in the futile chase after noumena of the sort described. 
So far is this from being the case, that the task laid upon meta 
physic just now is to deliver men from such noumena altogether. 
fck> long as they are merely dubbed unknowable, their oppressive 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 



statement in a very different position from that in which 
he found them. With Hume the world was reared by the 
senses and the imagination out of recurrent impressions. . 
That is to say (though Hume disclaims any hypothesis as 
to the source of the impressions), the mind is throughout 
passive, and played upon by an external something.* Kant 
succeeded in showing that out of mere impressions no ) 
knowledge could arise; and established, as the chief 
factor in knowledge, an active synthesis undertaken by 
thought. The conceptions by which we express the con 
nection and system of things (e.g., number, substance, 
cause, etc.) are the different ways in which the central; 
unity of the Ego arranges and binds up the formless 
manifold of its impressions. These conceptions or cate 
gories it is, which constitute the permanent in the uni 
verse ; and, in transferring them to the subjective side off 
the account, Kant vindicated for mind the chief function 
in the creation of the known world. The further we 
follow Kant in his analysis, the more does the contri 
bution from, the side of things, in the shape of impres 
sions, tend to vanish away. But though Kant goes the 
length of saying that in itself this manifold is " as good 
as nothing at all for us,"t it never actually disappears. 
Indeed, it is inevitable, if the question is approached from 
this side, that there should appear to be a kernel of 
matter, or a prick of sense, round which all the swathings 

shadow remains. Metapliysic must show, and, in Hegel s hands, 
docs show, that they are also contradictions and nonentities, andV 
that in attributing a special and unapproachable reality to the 
abstractions of our own thought, we are guilty of an error in the 
last degree grotesque. 

* Which spmetioies, owing to Hume s habit of " talking with 
the vulgar," takes the definite shape of au orange or a table. 

f Kant, }{fe> c, iii. 57-1. 



8 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

of thought are wrapped. But Kant s own example 
1 showed that this residuum was a vanishing quantity ; and 
the form in which ho presented it the " Ding-an-sich " 
was the first point upon which criticism fastened. This 
remnant of dualism was speedily discovered to be incon 
sistent with other, and more fundamental, doctrines of his 
philosophy ; and, whatever may be thought of the possi 
bility of escaping an ultimate dualism, there will hardly 
be a question that the acuteness of Jacobi, Maimon, and 
Fichte was fatal to the Kantian method of formulating it. 
But Kant s real service to philosophy is not affected by 
such criticism. It OHIH-IS, us has been seen, in his dis 
covery of the true nature of knowledge a discovery 
which, when fully embraced, raises us above a view which 
would compound knowledge of so many subjective and so 
many objective elements. In the Critique the discovery 
of the categories appears, in the first instance, simply as 
a transference of these conceptions from the nature of 
things to the nature of the mind from the objective to 
the subjective side of the account, as was said above. 
But gradually a new sense of the terms subjective and 
objective emerges. Kant s whole industry goes to prove 

(that it is the categories alone which give objectivity 
and pmiKinrmv to things; and but a slight extension of 
his method is required to see that what is true of the 
things that are thought holds equally of the mind or " the 
thing that thinks." Thinker and thing_ are both "as 
. good as nothing at all for us," except as united in know 
ledge. Philosophy (to put the same thing more scholasti- 
cally) found it impossible to reconcile the old subject and 
object, because they were alike empty abstractions, when 
separated from the organism of knowledge, which is tlie 
only whole, and which forms the ultimate objectivity oi thr 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 



universe. The conceptions of reason are the body of 
reality, communicating, in one aspect, stability to things; in 
another aspect, reality to the knowledge of them. What it 
is important to observe is, that these are two aspects of the 
same fact, and that, therefore, we must not start, as pre- 
Kantian philosophy did, with an original separation of 
two poles, which, ex vi terniinorum, cannot be known 
except as united. Kant s permanent achievement was 
the revolution he effected in men s notions of what con 
stitutes reality, and of the direction in which it is to bo 
sought. By presenting the categories as the knot which 
binds man and the world together, he taught his suc 
cessors to seek the reality of the universe in the system 
of these conceptions, and in the unconditionedjbhought 
whose members and instruments they are. 

With the adoption of this general position, Idealism 
becomes independent of the weakness of some of the indi 
vidual arguments which Kant brings forward against 
Hume and the Association school. It becomes unim 
portant for philosophy to insist on the a priori, as against 
the a posteriori, origin of conceptions. The conceptions 
remain the same, though the whole psychology of the 
Associationists be admitted. Indeed, as regards the indi 
vidual, or, at least, the race, the conclusion seems plain 
that all ideas and thoughts, without exception, have been 
beaten out by the slow process of experience. But the 
ultimate attainment of these conceptions is itself the best 
proof that they are involved in the structure of experience, 
independently of their recognition by this or that indi 
vidual knower. They are its impersonal rational condi- V 
tions. In other words, they may be viewed in their own 
nature as constitutive of the universe, apart from the 
process by which the individual comes to know them. 







10 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

Tho conflict of Kant s dualistic presuppositions with 
the spirit of his own method is perhaps nowhere better 
seen than in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, where ho 
criticizes the doctrines of the Wollfian Rational Psycho 
logy. As the lino of argument in this section forms a 
ysuitablo transition to the extension given to the Kantian 
thought by Fichte, it may be well to concentrate attention 
upon it for a little. Arguments about the essence of the 
soul and its necessary immortality confound, Kant says, 
" the possible abstraction from my empirically determined 
existence with the supposed consciousness of a possible 
separate existence of my thinking self/ * Tho " I think " 
is a consciousness which thinks nothing, except as filled 
by the process of experience. Apart from this filling it is 
" a completely empty idea/ and to speak of its existence 
out of reference to that process, as a simple, numerically 
identical and permanent, substance, is to go entirely be 
yond our record. Such definitions are, indeed, inherently 
absurd ; for they attempt to fix down as a particular 
object the subject, which, because it is, as Kant elsewhere 
describes it, " the correlate of all cxistcnce/ t can be 
" cognized only through the thoughts which are its predi 
cates." That is, nothing can be said of the nature of the 
transcendental subject of knowledge, because it is itself 
i iu]tl< yrd in every affirmation, and we cannot, as it were, 
get round it, to make it an object of observation. Tho 
consciousness of myself as an individual, on the other 
hand, is evolved in the process of experience, and is itself 
a definite portion of that process. Tho individual self 
must be accepted as a fact, but it grounds no inference to 
anything beyond its present existence. Thus the whole 
fabric of Rational Psychology falls to the ground. 

* Wtrke, iii. 289. _ f Ibid. iii. G17. 

i. -* **** 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 11 

There are two sides to the foregoing argument. From 
the one point of view, Kant destroys the old Dogmatism 
irretrievably, by laying his hand on the fallacy of tho 
thinking thing ; from the other, he has not quite risen 
to the height of his own thought. It is true that the 
transcendental subject, as the instrument of all knowledge, 
cannot be known as anything apart from the thoughts 
whoso vehicle it is. But it is precisely this attribute of 
the Self which determines it as an all-containing sphere, 
or, in Kant s words, as the correlate of all existence ; and 
as soon as this universal character of the Self is firmly 
grasped, the question as to what lies beyond the circle of 
knowledge cannot be raised. The bounds of existence 
and of knowledge are seen to be, in their notion, coin 
cident. Kant, however, treated this aspect of the subject 
merely as an " inconvenience," which we cannot get over, 
and destroyed the force of such descriptions of the Self, 
by separating it on both sides from the world of reality. 
On tho one side, tho reality of the things-in-themselves 
lies behind its phenomenal knowledge ; on the other, it 
is not itself identified with the essence of the thinking 
person. Kant speaks of the universal form of conscious 
ness as " merely a property (Beschaffenheit) of my 
subject ; "* which is as much as to say that, besides the 
transcendental Self of knowledge and the phenomenal or 
empirical consciousness known by that Self, there is a 
noumenal reality a substantial x behind each phe 
nomenal person. " I-ness }J is a property of that nou 
menal being, so far as it thinks, but its thinking is not 
its very self. In other words, Kant has not emancipated 
himself from tho dogmatic mode of thought. Ho still 
holds to a thinking thing : only he maintains that, for 
* ITerti, iii. 277. 



12 The Development, from Kant to Unjel. 

us, it is incognizable. The demand for some reality to 
which this universal function of thought shall belong as 
its " Beschaffenheit," is the exact counterpart of the- 
assumption of things-in-themselves on the further side of 
knowledge. It is the impossibility of knowing a 
noumenon, not the inadequacy of a conception like sub 
stance to the thinking self, that constitutes, in Kant s eyes, 
the fatal objection to the old Rational Psychology. 

This curious imbroglio of the three selves the I-in- 
itself, the " I think " or transcendental subject, and the 
phenomenal or historic individual arises simply because 
Kant was still in bondage, in part, to the thought he was 
controverting. The idea that there could be a knowledge 
of things in themselves, that is, otherwise than through 
their predicates, never left him. It was " self-evident " 
to him, ho says, " that a thing in itself is of different 
nature from the determinations which merely make up its 
state."* Ilence thought remained to the end with Kant a 
subjective modification, a mode of representing something 
which is, in its own nature, prior to thought. It gives 
the reality neither of thinker nor of thing. It was quite 
in accordance with this general view that, in the section 
we have been considering, Kant should treat as the 

* Werkc, iii. 593. Of course there is a certain truth in saying 
that a thing (still more, a man) is not adequately expressed in any 
one of its states, but only in the sum of them ; and as an infinite 
8crie can never be perfectly summed, it may be said that the 
phenomenal manifestations of a thing never exhaust its nature, 
i.e., the thing itself. But nothing is gained by importing the 
rlrim iit of time into the question ; for all the conditions of the 
future must be present at any moment, though escaping our notice, 
perhaps, through defective analysis. The knowledge of any given 
thing can, in no case, be exhaustive, save to " eyes as piercing as 
those of God." But, in spite of that, the nature or essence of a 
thing is simply the sum of its qualities, viewed as a present unity. 



TJte Metaphysical Ground Work. 13 

poverty of our intelligence what is really the prerogative 
of intelligence as such : viz., that it cannot be bound by 
its own creatures or instruments, least of all by categories 
like substance, which are of use only in the exposition of 
material things. 

But Kant is continually, by his very mode of statement, 
leading us beyond his own point of view. " Self-con 
sciousness," he says, in the first edition of the Critique, 
"is thalfwhich is the condition of all unity, and is yet 
itself unconditioned. It does not so much know itself 
through the categories, as the categories, and, thro ugh them, 
all objects, in absolute unity of apperception, consequently 
through itself"* These striking phrases suggest at 
once the true nature of the universal Self, as it was 
insisted on by his successors, notably by Fichte. The 
insight into this nature and dignity was used by them to 
make Kant s system consistent with itself by freeing it 
from alien presuppositions. The Ding-an-sich had been? 
retained, because thought was supposed to be something 1 
peculiar and subjective. But if the transcendental apper- j 
ception bo nothing less than the consciousness of 
universal thought, then it is evident that the world of | 
knowledge which exists for that thought is not different i 
from the world of reality. The presence of this identical 
Self in the individual becomes at the same time a sufficient 
explanation of the fixity and determinatcncss of external 
experience, which all acknowledge as independent of their 
fluctuating states, and which it was one of the functions 
of the things-in-themselves to account for. The relations 
of the universal and the individual self of God and man 
are thus visibly changed. They no longer stand outside 
of one another as, for example, in a theory like Berkeley s, 
* Wcrke, iii. 617. The italics arc in the original. 



14 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

where tho rationale of a permanent external world is also 

sought in God. God no longer smites us, so to speak, 

I across the void; but through consciousness wo are born 

(into a system of thought, the same for all intelligence, 

land unrolled as a knowablo world in each individual, 

/through the presence in him of a universal function. Man, 

the world, and God are not three separate things, as in tho 

Dogmatic systems which Kant criticized and overthrew. 

(Viewed from the speculative standpoint, that is, from the 
inside, they are seen to bo parts or moments of one 
whole. Kant s Copemican metaphor meant, in fact, more 
than ho himself supposed. Tho comparison virtually 
asserted that we can overcome the presuppositions of our 
station as men upon tho earth, and view tho universe, 
in adumbration at least, as it appears from a universal or 
thcocentric position. 

It was Kant s firm conviction that he had made an 
^end of mctn physic, and substituted for it a doctrine of 
the limits of human reason. What he had really done 
was to transform the notion of the science. The barriers 
which ho supposed to stand in the way of human intelli 
gence have been shown to be only the shadows cast by an 
imperfect logic. On tho other hand the undeniable limi 
tations of partial knowledge do not affect the character 
of our intelligence as such. Tho identity of all thought 
in kind is, indeed, something which we only imagine that 
we ever question. Thus the concentricity, if we may so 
speak, of the creative and the reproductive reason, though 
denied by Kant, became, as the result of his labours, 
tho starting-point and immanent presupposition of his 
followers. In destroying the old, Kant had become the 
founder of a new raetaphysic, in which every question is 
presented to us with a new scope and meaning. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 15 



CHAPTER II. 

FICHTE. 

IT is not necessary here to follow step by step the pro 
gressive criticism by which the new metaphysic was at 
last systematically formulated. Where the earlier expo 
sitions have been manifestly superseded by the later, the 
former cease to have more than a historic value. Besides, 
minor differences ought not to be permitted to obscure a 
fundamental unanimity. The most detailed examination 
would only show, what will be readily admitted without it, 
that Hegel is the summing up and most perfect expression i 
of the general movement of thought known as German 
Idealism. But, for the sake of making clear the full 
meaning of the terms which meet us in Hegel, an indica 
tion is needed of the line along which they were reached. 
The peculiar form of statement in which his theory is 
presented cannot be understood without a review of his 
historical antecedents. This method has also the advan 
tage of giving us Hegel by bits, and so sparing much 
laboured exposition when his special contributions to the 
general system of thought come to be considered. A 
sketch of the main positions of Fichte and Schelling, so 
far as these proved historically important, will be sufficient 
for the present purpose. 

Fichte was always ready to maintain that his own 

system was nothing but " the Kantian doctrine properly 

understood" "genuine Criticism consistently carried 

out."* But he confessed, at the same time, that he had 

* Fichtc s Sammtlichc Wcrke, i. 89 and 4CU. 



16 The Development from Kant to HegeL 

first had to discover the Wissenschaftsleb.ro in his own 
fashion, before he was able to find a good and consistent 
sense in Kant s writings. The disconnected form in which 
Kant had left his conclusions was utterly repugnant to tho 
systematic mind of his successor, who demanded a philo 
sophy in one piece (auseinem Stuck), as the only ultimate 
satisfaction of reason. Accordingly, in tho earliest essay 
in which his advance beyond the form of Kantianism 
becomes apparent, he concludes by saying that, while the 
Kantian philosophy in its inner content stands firm as 
ever, there is still much to do before the materials aro 
marshalled in a well-jointed and irrefragable whole.* Fichto 
determined to take the task upon himself; he resolved to 
bring tho different parts of tho Kantian theory into har- 
mony, and, if possible, to exhibit the universe as tho 
development of a single principle. To this resolve is 
attributable the wide difference which exists on the surface 
between his philosophy and that of Kant, and also the 
radical difference of philosophic method to which that 
striking dissimilarity is mainly due. Kant had to seek 
for his principle or principles, and he proceeded tentatively 
by an analysis of sphere after sphere of experience. Ho 
mined patiently till he had brought to light in each the 
conditions of its possibility. He believed, of course, that 
the results of his three Critiques did not conflict with one 
another; but he did not take much trouble to exhibit 
their connection, still less to reduce them to a unity of 
principle. Fichte, on tho other hand, started with tho 
acceptance of tho principle in which, after patient medita 
tion, he believed that Kant s different investigations 

* Recrntion des Aenesidcmus, Wcrkc, i. 25. The work in which 
he broke ground for his own philosophy (Ueber den Begriffder 
Witteiuchafltlchre) is devoted to expounding his ideal of system. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 17 

centred. He was able, therefore, to dispense with the 
preliminary analysis, and to begin at once to develop the 
principle synthetically. At the same time, it would be a 
misrepresentation of Fichte s procedure to suppose that 
his starting-point depends for proof, in any external or 
logical way, on the previous acceptance of Kant s analysis. 
The principle shines, as he is at pains to show, by its own I 
light, and is therefore above proof; while its actual suffi 
ciency to explain the intelligible world must be evinced 
by the systematic development of that world from it. 
Hence while the principle came to him historically in all 
its significance from Kant, the truth of the starting-point 
and the adequacy of the system stand on their own basis, 
independent of any proof from without. 

Starting from an analysis of perception, Kant was / 
unable to get rid of dualism, because, in the act of per 
ception, subject and object seem to be brought together 
out of a previous state of independent existence. " There > 
is no deception in reason/ as Fichte truly says ; but 
philosophy must explain the meaning of this appearance 
must show how alone it is possible in a word, deduce it. 
Perception, we know from Kant, is an act of synthesis. 
But when perception is so described, the question that 
naturally arises is a synthesis of what ? The " given " 
manifold on Kant s theory was an answer to this 
"what;" and Kant maintained the presence of that ele 
ment to be indispensable to the possibility of a synthetic 
act. That may be true ; but to say that it ia " given " is 
merely to say that it has been assumed that DO :irroiml 
of it has been offered. If philosophy is to be true to her . 
mission, however, she must deduce the seemingly unin- I 
telligible or non-rational from a principle of whoso intelli 
gibility there is no doubt. So Fichte reasoned in presence 

2 



18 The Development from Kant to Hcgcl. 

of the snrd of the Kantian philosophy. The derivation of 
sensation from the impression of a thing-ill -itself, which 
is occasionally suggested or implied by Kant, ho con 
sidered too great an absurdity to credit him with, except 
on his own express testimony. " Should he make such a 
declaration I shall consider the Critique of Pure Reason 
the offspring of the strangest chance rather than the work 
of a mind."* It is impossible, according to Fichte, 
seriously to offer the Ding-an-sich as a philosophical 
explanation of sensation. We have no direct evidence 
of its existence, nor do we know what wo mean by tho 
predication of existence in such a case. We have, in fact, 
explained x by x ; for the Ding-an-sich is merely tho 
duplicate or reflection of our first inexplicable, erected 
into its own cause. In philosophy this method of expla 
nation is inadmissible; we mustjstart there from a prin 
ciple uli<)M> existence- is at onco intelligible and self- 
evident; and deduction consists in proving of any 
conception or fact, that it is involved in tho circle of tho 
conditions of the primary and indemonstrable, but at tho 
same time all-embracing, Fact. In Fichte s own language, 
everything must " hang firmly in a single ring, which is 
fastened to nothing, but maintains itself and tho whole 
system by its own power/ f 

This principle or fact, it need hardly be said, can be no 
other than the Kantian unity of apperception, or, in simpler 
terminology, the Ego. Here Fichte found the " single 
ring " of which he was in quest. Self-consciousness is 

Werke, i. -ISO. By his avowal of this absurdity (in the 
Allgcmeinc Litrraturzcitung, 1799) Kant reduced himself in the 
eyes of his successor to " a three-quarters man," and the 
to the Kantian system became less frequent. 

f Werke, i. 50. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 19 

whut wo ultimately mean by existence, and existence is 
not, in this case, merely problematical. The principle 
lives in the very act by which its existence is appre 
hended; here knowledge and existence are one in the 

fullest and most literal sense. T The act oi self-realization 

/ 

alone has the inevitablcness which Fichte desiderates as 
the distinctive mark of the first principle. It is not, in a 
strict sense, a fact or thing (Thatsache), but a deed an 
action and its product in one (Thathandlung) . Of a 
Thatsache, or objective fact, the reason or cause may 
always be demanded, but not so of self-consciousness, 
which is the condition of all facts, and itself unconditioned. 
The question cannot be asked, because the " I," in asking, 
perpetually supplies the answer. There is, in fact, real 
ized in the__Eo;o the seemingly self-contradictory notion of 
self-creation or causg, ui f The contradiction exists only 
while wo remain in the sphere of objects or things. As 
long as we think even of God as an object outside of us, 
and apart from self-consciousness, the unconditioned 
necessity of His existence is, as Kant describes it, the 
abyss of human reason. " We cannot support the thought 
that a Being whom we regard as tho highest among all 
possible existences, should say to himself, as it were : 
I am from eternity to eternity ; beside me there is 
nothing save what exists by my will ; but whence then 
am I ? J "* We cannot support the thought, because we 
have reduced ourselves to tho chiUVs question Who 
made God? God has been reduced to the sphere of 
things, and there the law of causality inexorably demands 
tho cause of the cause.f But the insupportableness of 

* Kant, Wcrke, iii. 477. 

t So much so, that, as Maimon said, nothing can well be more 
absurd than to seek to prove by causality the existence of an 
uncaused being. 

2 * 



20 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

which Kant complains vanishes from the Absolute Thesis 
(as Fichte calls it) in which the unity of self-conscious- 
jiess affirms itself as the necessary pre-condition of 
intelligible existi : 

This brings us face to face with a radical antithesis of 
philosophical doctrine which is expounded by Fichte with 
admirable clearness and vigour.* All systems are classi 
fiable, ho maintains, according to their acceptance or non- 
acceptance of this fundamental principle. Every system, 
which has this insight into the uniqueness of the Ego, 
and which makes it the principle by which things are to 
be explained, is Idealistic ; every system is Dogmatic, 
which starts with the existence of things, and, taking the 
Ego as a thing among things, explains it, in the last 
instance, as their product. This opposition of Dogmatism 
and Idealism sums up for Fichte every difference of philo 
sophic thought, and he charcteristically refers the specu 
lative difference to a difference of character. " He who 
is in truth only a product of things will never see himself 
otherwise ; and he will be correct as long as he speaks 
merely of himself and his compeers. . . The kind of 
philosophy we choose depends on the kind of men we 
are ; for a philosophical system is not a piece of dead 
furniture which may be taken up or laid aside at pleasure. 
It is animated by the spirit of the man who makes it his 
own." 

When Dogmatism starts with the assumption of the 
existence-in-themselves of things, the first remark to be 
made is that the Ding-an-sich is not a principle verifiable 
in experience ; for consciousness testifies only to the 

Sec especially Werke, i. 419-449 (Erste Einleilung in die 
Wlutentchafltlclirc) and i. 119-223 (Grundlage, end of first part). 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 21 

existence of things for it. The Ding-an-sich is therefore 
no more than " a fiction which awaits its realization from 
the success of the system." Should Dogmatism fail to 
give an intelligible account of experience, the fiction of 
independent existence with which it set out may be 
dismissed as unfounded. The necessary failure of the 
dogmatic construction is soon apparent. Having chosen 
the sphere of things as its basis of operations, Dogma 
tism finds itself rigidly confined within that world. It 
can render intelligible the mechanical action of thing 
upon thing, but it cannot pass from things to the con 
sciousness of things. Things form, as it were, a single 
or simple series of causes and effects ; but intelligence is, 
in its very nature, a double series knowledge of itself, 
being for itself. When approached thus, intelligence and 
things lie in two worlds, between which there is no bridge. 
The causality of the simple series acts only in that series ; 
thing causes thing, but not the idea of a thing. Every 
attempt to fill up the enormous gap which separates the 
real from the ideal, turns out, as Fichte says, to be no 
better than " a few empty words, which may, indeed, bo 
learned by rote and repeated, but which have never con 
veyed a thought to any man, and never will." It remains, 
therefore, to try our fortune with the principle of Ideal- 
ism, and to make the act or fact of self-consciousness our 
starting-point. Philosophy, as Fichte is never tired of 
telling us, begins in an act of freedom. The first principle 
is not a proposition, but a postulate in the geometric sense 
a demand made upon a man to perform a certain opera 
tion. " Think yourself, construct the notion of yourself, 
and mark how you do it." The immediate consciousness 
of ourselves which we possess in this act is what Fichte 
called intellectual intuition or perception. Much mis- 



22 Thf, Development from Kant to Hegel. 

conception has gathered round the phrase, but there is 
nothing mystical about the fact which it denotes. Intel 
lectual intuition is simply the perception of self which 
accompanies all our consciousness without which, as 
Fichte says, we cannot move hand or foot, cannot come 
to bed or board. -Itjs_the Kantian unity of apperception 
the idea of self-consciousness which constitutes for 
Fichte, as has been seen, " the one firm standing-ground 
for all philosophy." 

But self-consciousness or intelligence must not bo 
treated as itself a thing, a unit, a mind call it as we may 
which has ideas; for in that case there is no vital con 
nection between the nature of intelligence and the form 
of its experience. Intelligence is degraded into a stage, 
as it were, over which ideas pass. Its ideas are not its 
own organic product ; they are merely the " things " of 
Dogmatism under another name, but untransformed. 
Such an Idealism Fichte instances the Bcrkeleian is 
still at the dogmatic standpoint, and it is really quite 
indifferent whether wo talk of ideas or of things. The 
world is still viewed as a mechanically connected series of 
units, and the passage to a consciousness of the ideas 
remains as inexplicable as did the passage to a conscious 
ness of things. It is only the ambiguous term " idea " 
that makes it seem otherwise. If Idealism is to succeed 
where Dogmatism failed, we must go differently to work. 

Intelligence, it has been shown, is not a thing but an 

. ., ,. ,.. ....... .... . _ 

whose nature, therefore, can be definitely known. It is an 
action determined by definite laws, and these laws it is our 
business to discover. The nature of intelligence, as intelli 
gence, has to be analyzed ; and whereas Dogmatism failed 
to derive intelligence from the merely objective, we must 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 23 

bo able to show that the object and, in general, experience 
as we know it, is deducible from the necessary conditions 
of intelligence. The genetic deduction of experience is 
the only t proof admissible of the sufficiency of our 
principle ; for, in Fichte s words, so long as we do not 
exhibit the whole " thing " taking its rise before the eyes 
of the thinker, Dogmatism is not hunted out of its last 
lurking-place. Now, experience is very well defined by 
Fichte as " the system of ideas which are accompanied) 
by the feeling of necessity." This necessity or definite 
determination is manifestly essential to our idea of ex 
perience, and demands explanation. It is, in fact, in a 
slightly different form, the " given " element of Kant, 
which Fichte resolved to connect intelligibly with the 
rest of the system.* Ordinary dogmatic Idealism either 
ignores this feature of experience, or refers it, as Berkeley 
does, to the will of God, who thereby becomes the mere 
equivalent of the Ding-an-sich. In the Wisseuschafts- 
lehre, however, it must be seen to be involved in the 
notion of intelligence. 

The Grundlage begins, therefore, by developing the 
conditions of intelligence, and it soon appears that the 
Absolute Thesis, or the affirmation by the Ego of its own 
existence is impossible, except through the Antithesis of 
a non-Ego, or something which is not Self. The oppo 
sition of Ego and non-Ego within intelligence, or, in 
Fichtian phraseology, the positing in the Absolute Ego of 

* Kant describes the transcendental object on one occasion as 
" that which prevents our cognitions from happening at random or 
at our own pleasure, and communicates to them a definite a 
priori determination " (dasjenige . . . was dawider ist, dass unsere 
Erkenntnisse nicht aufs Gerathewohl oder beliebig, soudern 
a priori auf gewisse Weise bestiuimt seieu). Deduction of 
Categories, First Edition. Wcrkc, iii. 570. 



24 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

a divisible non-Ego, opposed to a divisible Ego, is the 
necessary condition of the possibility of intelligence itself. 
sJu other words, the distinction of subject and object is 
traceable to the very nature of self-consciousness ; but, 
for that very reason, it is not an absolute distinction, see 
ing that the object is posited only for the subject. Fichto 
is at no loss to show that the mutual limitation of Ego 
and non-Ego, which he deduces in his Third Principle, is 
of the essence of intelligence. Through it both are some 
thing (Beide siud etwas) ; without it neither qualitative 
distinction nor intelligence would exist ; all would be a pure 
blank, for affirmation is only possible as against the nega 
tion of something else. The Thesis, therefore, or act of 
self-thinking with which we began, was merely an abstrac 
tion from the synthesis of opposites by which intelligence 
exists. Thesis and antithesis are, in truth, not separate 
acts, but moments of one indivisible act. Even the word 
act or action is perhaps misleading, for, as Fichte is at 
pains to explain, he is not dealing with a narrative of what 
has happened at any time. He does not offer us a cosmo 
gony, or what he derisively terms the biography of a man 
before his birth. The world exists, and so does its last term, 
consciousness; this actual this "absolut Vorhandcnc " 
philosophy has to analyze into its ultimate constituent 
terms. The synthetic presentation of the results of this 
analysis may have the appearance of an original construc 
tion of the universe, and Fichte s mode of statement 
labours at times under grave disadvantages. But it must 
never be forgotten, that what ho is endeavouring to 
expand before us is simply the notion or logical nature 
of intelligence or self-consciousness. The distinctions 
[which intelligence is shown to involve are the conditions 
lor laws of its existence ; their momentary separation in 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 25 

exposition is merely logical and due to the abstraction of 
the philosopher.* 

The non-Ego or Thing is deduced, therefore, as the 
limitation set up by the Ego as essential to intelligence. 
This is the important point to notice in Fichte, in com 
paring him with those whom he calls Dogmatists. His 
Ego and non-Ego are not co-ordinated as two independent 
realities which are inexplicably brought together in per- 
J ception ; all reality, as he says, is in consciousness. This 
is, according to Fichte, the essence of Critical philosophy. 
"Critical philosophy sets up an Absolute Ego, as absolutely 
unconditioned and determmable by nothing higher. . . . 
On the other hand all philosophy is Dogmatic, which equates 
something with the Ego-in-itself, and places the one over 
against the other. This occurs in the supposed higher 
notion of Thing (Ens), which is at the same time set up 
in a perfectly arbitrary fashion as the highest notion of 
all. In the Critical system the Thing is that which is 
posited in the Ego ; in the Dogmatic, that in which the 
Ego is itself posited. Criticism, therefore, is immanent 
because it posits everything in the Ego ; Dogmatism is 
transcendent because it passes beyond the Ego."f Or, as 
Fichte elsewhere puts it : " The essence of transcendental 

* Cf. Werke, ii. 398-9. 

t Werke, i. 119-20. The antithesis hero brought to a point is 
the same which was pointed out before between Dogmatism and 
Idealism, for " completed Criticism " is identical, for Fichte, with 
the Idealism of the Wissenschaftslehre. It is worth noting that, 
in the passage which follows, Spinozism is singled out as the 
typical example of Dogmatism, and, therefore, as the direct 
antithesis of the Wissenschaftslehre ; whereas in the " First In 
troduction " consistent Dogmatism is identified with Materialism. 
Spiuozism cannot fairly be interpreted as Materialism ; yet the 
inconsistency is only apparent. The essential characteristic of 
Dogmatism emphasized by Fichte in both cases is that it treats 



26 The Development from Kant to lleycl. 

Idealism in general, and of the Wissenschaftslehro in 
particular, consists in this that the notion of Being is 
n6t regarded as first and original, but solely as a deduced, 
notion." Action is what the philosopher starts with, and 
among the necessary actions of the Ego is one which 
appears, and must appear, as Being. From the standpoint 
of empirical realism (which is fully justified by philosophy), 
this Being must remain an independent world of things ; 
but, from the philosophical or transcendental standpoint, 
it is none the less seen to be merely the necessary action 
of the Ego.* .M 

It is necessary here to note exactly where wo are. 
Dogmatism lias failed to explain the possibility of know 
ledge, by reason of its taking the object as an absolute or 
transcendent Thing. Nevertheless, the existence of an 
object or non-Ego is admittedly has, indeed, just been 
proved to be essential to the notion of intelligence. 
The failure teaches, therefore, that, if knowledge is to 

the Ego, in "his own phrase, as " an accident of the world ; " and as 
long as the unity of the world is sought, not in intelligence but in 
sonic transcendent substance, the terms in which that substance is 
described arc of comparatively little account. The point of difl er- 
is well put by Professor Adamson, when he says that to 
Dogmatism " the Ego appears as a mechanically determined unit in 
the sum total of things " (Fichtc, p. 127, Philosophical Classics ). 
The clearness with which Professor Adamson brings out the fact 
that the fundamental category of Dogmatism is that of reciprocity 
or mutual mechanical determination is very instructive. Where 
the application of this category is thoroughgoing, the result is 
naturally a system of complete determination not to be dis 
tinguished from Fatalism; as Fichte says, " Jeder consequente 
Dogmatiker ist nothwendig Fatalist." I may take this opportunity 
of acknowledging my indebtedness to Professor Adamson s admir 
able little book for considerable additional light ou the internal 
connection of Fichte s thought. 
Cf. Werkc, i. 498-9. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 27 

exist, there must be no original separation of Ego and 
mm-Kgo ; the non-Ego must be, as its name indicates, in 
a strict sense, the other or negative of the Ego, existing / 
only for the Ego. It must be by an act of its own that the 
Ego assumes the position of apparent determination by an 
"other," which every instance of knowledge exemplifies. 
So far we have got ; but the essential nature of the Ego, 
and the reason of its original act, have not been explained. 
How does the Ego come to oppose a non-Ego to itself, and 
so to limit its own activity ? It is evident that this question 
must be answered, if the Wisseuschaftslehre is to be 
more than a formal analysis of the nature of knowledge. 
Theoretical Wissenschaftslehre is nothing more than such 
a formal analysis. It deals with the relation of subject 
and object in knowledge ; by developing the forms which 
that relation assumes, according as it is viewed from the 
one side or the other, it deduces systematically such 
categories as reciprocity, causality, substantiality. But 
the nature of the relation, and the modes of thinking ib 
are discussed without any reference to the real existence 
of the terms related. The opposites subject and object 
are, Fichto says, "a mere thought without any reality. 
. . . Our consciousness is not filled, and there is nothing 
present in it/ * It has yet to be shown how the poles of 
the relation can exist and have reality. What, Fichto 
asks, is the ground of the whole relation ? Theoretical 
Wissenschaftslehre cannot tell us, because the opposition 
and mutual limitation of Ego and non-Ego is the supposi 
tion with which it starts. The answer will constitute, it 
is easy to see, the ultimate foundation both of the system \l 
and of the universe whose exposition it professes to be. 
From Fichte s method of stating the question it is equally 
* \Vcrkc, i. 224. 



28 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

evident that knowledge does not constitute, for him, the 
primary reality. " All knowledge," he says elsewhere, 
" is only representation or picture, and the demand 
always arises for something that shall correspond to the 
picture. This demand no knowledge can satisfy ; a 
system of knowledge is necessarily a system of mere 
pictures without any reality, meaning, or end (Zweck)."* 
Hut if knowledge is thus contrasted with reality, what is 
it that has, and alone has, reality, meaning, and worth in 
Fichte s eyes ? If knowledge is, according to the state 
ment above, a mere relation, what is, in its proper nature, 
the " something that stands in relation ? " In it reality 
must consist, or rather in what Fichte calls the ground 
of the whole relation that which, out of its own unity, 
creates the opposition which constitutes the fundamental 
form of knowledge. 

The necessity of an original unity has been sufficiently 
set forth in the earlier part of this chapter, and also the 
fact that this unity need be sought only in the Ego. 
From the Ego alone it is impossible to abstract. It is 
that behind which it is impossible to get, and which may 
therefore be said to exist by an inevitable act of Thesis. 
As such it receives from Fichte the name of the Absolute 
^* Ego, and is distinguished by him from "the Ego as 
intelligence," that is, from the Ego as it exists in know 
ledge with a non-Ego opposed to it. The Absolute Ego 
is the foundation of the system ; but in the Absolute Ego, 
as such, there is as yet no trace of the limitation which a 
non-Ego involves. Fichte s view of the nature of the 
Absolute Ego, and the way in which ho constructs the 
world out of its activity, cannot be properly understood 
without a reference to the Kantian theory. 
* Werkc, ii. 246. 






The Metaphysical Ground Work. 29 



Fichte s identification of his " intellectual intuition " 
of the active Ego with the transcendental unity of Kant has 
been already referred to. But in so far as the Ego so 
perceived is the Ego of knowledge, the fountain-head of 
reality has not been reached. It is sufficiently correct 
to say that Fichte elevated the Kantian unity of self-con 
sciousness into the Absolute Ego, but the grounds of its 
elevation were not found by him in the Critique of Pure 
Reason. Kant treated self-consciousness simply as the 
unity to which all human knowledge must be referred ; 






tin. Kgo, for Fichte, is the unity under which all, whether 
in existence or in knowledge, ni.-iy In- subsumed. Tho 
motive of the change was the necessity which Fichto 
felt of unifying the conceptions of the theoretical and the 
practical reason, as they appear in Kant. Fichte s philo 
sophical achievement has, indeed, been described, not 
unfairly, as the discovery of the unity of the Critique of 
Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. Kant, 
according to his usual method, took up the fact of know 
ledge and the fact of morality separately. The supreme 
condition of the one fact he discovered in the unity of 
apperception ; the supreme condition of the other in the 
categorical imperative. But the relation of the unity of 
knowledge to the source of the ethical imperative was left 
obscure, and the organic connection between the two 
spheres was not worked out. Yet, according to Kant s 
own language in the Preface to the Groundwork of the 
Mctaphysic of Ethics, in both spheres "it must after all 
be one and the same reason, which is at work, only 
applied differently ; " and the demonstration of the unity 
of speculative and practical reason in a common principle 
is there desiderated as the result of a completed criticism 
of pure practical reason.* In spite of the separateness 
* Kant, Wirke, iv. 239. Further on, when he is speaking of the 



30 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

of the two inquiries, indications aro not wanting 
that tho Practical Reason is the goal towards which 
Kant is moving all through the theoretical investi 
gation. It is in tho Dialectic that ho determines 
his attitude towards tho traditional problems of m eta- 
physic; and wo find him there, alike in Psychology, 
Cosmology, and Theology, pointing onward to the moral 
reason for a solution of contradictions, and a truer, because 
a fuller, account of the whole of things. It has been usual 
with men of science and many others who have professed 
themselves Kantians, to look upon Kant s moral system 
as a mere excrescence upon the profound investigations of 
the famous Critiquc.-\- But there can be no doubt that, 
for Kant, the one was a necessary complement of tho 
other. Though, after reaching the Practical Reason, ho 
never returned upon his steps to harmonize his earlier 
with his later results, yet the connection between the two 
was clear enough to himself, and he would have been tho 
first to reject the Critique of Pure Reason, taken alone, as 
an utterly inadequate theory of the universe. A position 
like Lange s, in his History of Materialism, which treats 
tho metaphysical presuppositions of the practical reason 

Moral Syllogism, Kant says that " such comparisons " (the fact, 
namely, that the course of moral determination may foe syllogisti- 
cally represented) " justiGably give rise to the expectation of one 
day arriving at an insight into the unity of the whole pure rational 
faculty (theoretical as well as practical), and of foeing able to 
deduce anything from one principle. Such is the inevitable 
requirement of human reason, which finds perfect satisfaction ouly 
in a completely systematic unity of its cognitions. Ibid. v. 95. 

f Heine s witty description of Kant s resuscitation of the Deictic 
corpse for the sake of his poor old serving-man, and out of fear of 
the police the farce after the tragedy, as he calls it is hardly a 
parody of the current belief in many quarters. Sec Hcine a 
Sum ml ti -/,- Wcrke, v. 201-5 (Zur Geschichtc der Keligion and 
Philosophic in Dcutschland). 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 31 

as mere products of the poetic imagination, cannot free 
itself from the charge of a superficial appreciation of the 
Kantian thought. It is abundantly clear, of course, that 
we cannot accept these Postulates in the mechanical and 
Deistic form in which Kant presents them. But it is quite 
unallowable to solve the difficulty by lopping off the 
offending members. The system is a whole, and if it 
cannot be accepted as it stands, it must be reconstructed 
from within in such a way that these Postulates or Ideas 
shall lose their character of appendages, and be trans 
formed into immanent principles of experience in the 
theoretical, no less than in the practical, sphere. This 
was substantially what Fichte undertook to do. 

In opposition to the view of the relation of the two 
Critiques which has just been repudiated, it would bo 
much more in the spirit of Kant to say that he finds the 
ultimate explanation of the world in ethics. The term 
" nouinenon," which had been used in the Critique of Pure 
Reason as convertible with the incomprehensible thing- 
in-itself, is applied in the Critique of Practical Reason 
exclusively to the intelligible world of ethical ends into 
which the consciousness of duty introduces us. The 
phenomenality of the world of sense is placed, not in its 
relation to an incognizable thing behind, but to the world 
of duty within, which appears, therefore, as the true 
noumenon, and, in a manner, the final cause of the other.* 
Kant says in the Preface to the second Critique that the 
idea of freedom, as demonstrated by an apodictic law of 

* The identification of the ideas, noumenon, and final cause, 
determines a man s whole philosophical attitude. Expressed gene 
rally, it means that the " explanation" of things is to be sought in 
their rtXoc in the perfection of their form not in their crude 
and formless time-beginning. 



32 Tlic Development from Kant to 

practical reason, " forms the topstonc of the whole edifice 
of a system of pure reason, speculative as well as prac 
tical." From this standpoint, his whole laborious 
investigations appear as a progress towards this concep 
tion, in which alone ho finds a solution of the riddle of 
the earth. It was from this standpoint that Fichto 
started, and his reconstruction of the system was under- 
/ taken in the light of this, its last, term. We know from 
his letters with what lofty joy Fichte entered into the 
heritage of moral freedom from which he had long fancied 
himself debarred by his philosophical system. It was 
natural that the ethical side of the Kantian theory should 
first impress him, for his inmost personality must have 
seemed to him reflected in the all-determining activity of 
the practical Ego. The bracing air of the Kantian ethics 
infused new vigour into his life. 

The universal and indisputable authority which belongs 
|to the categorical imperative is derived by Kant from the 
principle of the autonomy of the will. Here alone, and not 
in any hetcronomous or material determinant, can we find 
the ground of obligation; Kant calls it " the sole principle 
of morality."* \Ve are self-legislative, and we cannot 
escape from our own law. The law " springs from our 
will as intelligence, accordingly from our true or proper 
self;"t and a will whoso content is rationality must bo 
recognized as the law of his proper self, not only by tho 
individual who enunciates it, but by every rational being. 
Fichte, coming upon expressions like these, was fain to 
inquire into the nature of this "proper" and universally 
legislating self. Ho hardly needed to advance beyond 
the letter of Kant s language to assert that absolute and 

Kant. Werke, iv. 288. f Hid. p. 308. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 33 

universal obligation implied an absolute and universal self I ^ 
as the source of the law. The individuals are the bearers v 
of this self which lays upon them the duty of realizing it 
increasingly from, day to day. The connection of this self 
with the world of knowledge was the next point to bo 
more precisely determined ; and here the harmonizing of 
the speculative and the practical reason in a common 
principle, which Kant had desiderated, could only mean 
for Fichte the deduction of the one from the other. Nor 
was there any doubt in his mind as to which was the most 
fundamental function of the two. Freedom and activity, V 
rather than intelligence, we have seen to be the epithets 
by which he described the essential nature of the Ego. 
He based his belief in the reality of his own self-con 
sciousness solely on the presence within us of the moral 
law, on the immediate feeling of moral destiny. " Only 
through this medium of the moral law do I perceive 
myself."* The supremacy which Kant had accorded to 
tin 1 pr;ict ic,-il reason was taken, th.TiTniv, l>y Fiditr in ;i 
much more literal and exclusive sense than it had borne 
to the elder philosopher. The activity of the practical < 
Ego became the sole principle by which the existence of 
the intelligible world was to be explained. 

But morality, as we know it, is strife or effort ; practice 
to use a term whose associations are more general is the 
continuous surmounting of obstacles. These are met by 
the Ego as something foreign. They do not belong, of 

* Nur durch dieses Medium des Sittengesetzes erkenne ich mich. 
Werke, i. 4G6, where " the belief in the reality " of the intellectual 
intuition is placed upon this foundation. Cf. also the Bestimmuny 
des Menschen ( Werke, ii. 24-1 et seg.) where self-consciousness, as 
more than a momentary reflex of passing states, is similarly made 
to depend on the " belief" or " immediate feeling " of the ethical 
consciousness. 

3 



34 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

right, to its own nature ; for the original notion of the 
Ego is absolute self-position, which re-appears in the 
mandate of absolute self-determination which morality 
lays down. Whence, then, come the obstacles that fret 
and impede the activity^of the Ego ? Or, since the oppo- 

(sition which the Ego experiences may be generalized as 
the non-Ego, how does the Ego come to find a non-Ego 
opposed to it ? Here at last we come to the explanation 
which Fichte is prepared to offer of Kant s " given " 
element. There is no inclination in Fichte, it need hardly 
be said, to uuder-rate the reality of the opposition. The 
strenuousness, almost fierceness, of the struggle to over 
come it is sufficient evidence that it is no sham or agreeable 
delusion. But that for which Kant had found it necessary 
( to call in a Ding-an-sich is deduced by Fichte as a 
) necessity of the moral consciousness. Without opposition, 
i the Ego would have no object on which to exercise its 
1 activity ; no effort, no consciousness, no moral life would 
/ be possible. The non-Ego, therefore (and with it the 
duality of consciousness), is set up by the Absolute Ego 
as a means for the realization of its own existence as 
] Tactical. But when we inquire into the "how" of this 
procedure, the answer will probably be regarded as not 
free from considerable difficulties. The pure activity of 
the Ego is merely self-position, or, in Fichte s phrase, an 
activity that returns upon itself. As such, however, it 
may be metaphorically described as " a mathematical self- 
constitutive point, in which no direction, indeed nothing 
at all, can be distinguished." But by reflection we can 
distinguish in such an Ego between a centrifugal and a 
centripetal direction ; the essential centripetal motion of 
return upon self presupposes, in fact, a centrifugal direc 
tion of activity from which the return is made. " So far 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 35 

as the Ego reflects," Fichte says, "the direction of its 
activity is centripetal; so far as it is that which is reflected 
upon, the direction of its activity is centrifugal, and that to 
infinity." But in an Ego for which these two directions are 
absolutely one, there would be no distinction of subject and y 
object, and consequently no self-consciousness.* Where 
the Ego is " all in all," it is " for that very reason nothing." 
If, however, the outgoing activity of the Ego receive a 
shock or Anstoss at any point, then it will, as it were, 
be driven back upon itself; its infinity will no longer be 
actual but potential an idea to be realized, a duty, an 
Aufgabe. After the Anstoss the Ego may be said to 
exist realiter as an infinite striving (Streben), in which 
of course the notion of a counter-striving is involved. 

An AnxtttxH or shock of opposition of this nature is 
the explanation Fichte gives of the non-Ego or of the 
finitude of human consciousness. That it takes place as a 
fact, he says, cannot by any possibility be deduced from 
the Ego; but it certainly may be proved that it must 
take place, if an actual consciousness is to be possible. 
To the finite spirit its obstructed activity appears as 
feeling, which, when it comes to reflect upon it, it neces 
sarily refers to the causation of an external object. The 
whole process of reflection by which the "original 
feeling" is transformed for the empirical Ego into a 
world of things may be traced with precision. The 
element of feeling and its consequences constitute the 
essence of finitude ; and the neglect of this original 
feeling leads, according to Fichte, " to a baseless trans- 

* Fichte applies this to the self-consciousness of God, or, as he 
elsewhere calls it, " the unthinkable idea of Deity " (i. 254). The 
impossibility of distinguishing consciousness from its object in such 
an idea makes it, he says, " inexplicable and incomprehensible for 
all finite reason." 

3 * 



36 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

cendent Idealism and an incomplete philosophy which 
fails to explain the merely sensible predicates of objects." 
Only in this original feeling is reality, whether of the Ego 
or of the non-Ego, .^jiven t me as a fact; and though 
I may deduce limitation in general as condition of the 
possibility of self-consciousness, I am absolutely precluded 
from deducing the particularity of the limitation in which 
consists my existence as thin individual. To do so would 
be, as it were, to annihilate my own existence. At the 
same time, from the speculative standpoint, I am able to 
recognize that the existence of the apparently hostile 
reality is explicable in the last resort only by reference to 
the finite Ego itself; it exists "for it as a necessary 
noumenon." This is, according to Fichte, the circle in 
which the finite spirit is enclosed a circle whose bounds 
may be expanded to infinity, but which can never be 
overstepped.* 

Such is Fichte s famous theory of the Anstoss as 
the origin of the limitation which appears in sense-affec 
tion. As has just been seen, it is_not deducible in any 
other \\riv thnii a^ a necessary means towards the existence 
of srlf-r<>nsri<>usness and the moral faculty. It is more 
1 a metaphorical way of formulating the fact of limitation 
than, in the strict sense, an explanation. But, taking the 
theory in the meantime without further comment, we 
have now before us the essential outlines of what Fichto 
called his "practical" Idealism. " Ou^I^^Jjgm," he 
ays, " is not dogmatic but practical, that is, it determines 

In giving an account of this abstruse and somewhat entangled 
peculation, I have kept more than usually close to Fichte s own 
form of statement, only endeavouring to bring his utterances 
together into clear sequence. The quotations in the last two para, 
graphs are from the practical part of the Grundlagc and from the 
Second Introduction (Wcrke, i. pp. 246-328 and 453-518). 



The Metaphysical U round Work. 37 

not what is, but what ought to be."* " If the Wissen- 
schaftslehre is asked for a metaphysic, as a supposed 
science of things-in-theruselves, it must refer to its prac 
tical section. This alone speaks of an original reality ; 
and if the Wissenschaftslehre should be asked how things- 
in -themselves are constituted, the answer must be : As 
we have to make them. "f "Original reality," therefore, 
is not anything, in the vulgar sense, "existent : it is a 
task, a duty, an ideal. This brings out very well the 
foundation of the system, but it evidently calls for a 
slight re-statement of the nature of the Absolute Ego, 
which formed our apparent starting-point. We have 
found, as we proceeded, that there is no self-conscious- 
ness in the Absolute Ego as such, indeed nothing distin- * 
guishable at all. Reality comes in with the opposition, 
and the Streben which is its result. And it ought to be 
remarked that it is not the Absolute, but the practical and 
limited, Ego that strives; if it be said that it is the 
impediment offered to the striving of the Absolute Ego 
that is the rationale of the non-Ego, this is not true save 
by a certain license of speech, which induces us to transfer 
to the Absolute Ego an assertion true " only of a future 
relation/ that is, after the Ego shall have become limited. 
Of the Absolute Ego in itself that is, regarded as in. 
some way the cause of finite Egos no assertion can be 

made. Criticism is compelled to say that it is not an Ego 


at all ; and its absolute barrenness of predicates makes 

the assertion and the denial of its so-called existence com 
pletely identical propositions. The edge of this criticism , 
cannot be turned as long as the Absolute Ego is regarded . 
as a separate fact and, in some sort, the antecedent cause 

* Werkc, i. 156. 

f Ibid. i. 280. " So wic wir sic maclicn sollon." 



38 TJie Development from Kant to Ifegel. 

of finite intelligences. As such, it is a mere abstraction 
from the reality of these intelligences; "it is every 
thing/ Fichte says, "and it is nothing." But his 
exposition has led him to a point from which the relation 
of the Absolute and the finite Ego appears in a truer 
. light. There is no need to sever the Absolute Ego from 
,the striving consciousness, which is our sole real datum. 
, It is present in this consciousness as " the idea of our 

absolute existence,"* and, as such, forms the motive or 
I 

driving power of the whole struggle. " The Ego demands 
Ahat it should embrace all reality and fill infinity. At tho 
bottom of this demand there lies necessarily the idea of 
tho absolutely posited, infinite Ego ; and this is tho 
Absolute Ego of which wo have spoken. "f In this sense, 
undoubtedly, tho Absolute Ego may be said to bo the 
ground or first cause of the phenomenon; but the Ego ia 
then not the Ego as fact, but the " Idea of the Ego," which 
exists only as an Ideal to be realized. To return to Fichte s 
phrase, his Idealism does not teach us what is, but what 
is to be. The Idea is an eternal " Thou shalt " or tiollen, 
(that lies at the root of man s existence, impelling him 
onwards to a never-ending task. The completion of the 
task would mean that tho Ego had subdued all things to 
itself, and was able to view them as determinations of its 
own existence. But the Idea is, in its very nature, 
unrealizable, because the extinction of opposition which 
complete realization implies would signify the cessation of 
the strife on which consciousness and, with it, morality 
depend. 

The two extremes of Fichte s thought are thus the 

Wcrkc, i. 278. " UrspruuglicLc Idee unsercs absoluten 
Seins." 

t Ibid. i. 277. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 39 

" pure Ego " with which he starts and the Idea of the 
Ego or the "Ego as intelligence" which he holds up as 
an ideal of our effort. Between these extremes the Ego 
is practical, and its practical activity represents to Fichte 
the reality of the world. At the end of the Second 
Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte distin 
guishes sharply and instructively between these two poles 
of his thought.* In the farmer the Ego as intellectual 
perception lies merely " the form of Egoity ; " the 
latter^ which he here calls the Ego as Idea, subsumes 
<c the complete matter of Egoity " in the shape of a world 
which is known as completely rational. He adds em 
phatically that the latter is only Idea and will never be 
actual. An infinite progress of approximation is what is . 
laid upon us ; the impossibility of its completion forms 
indeed, as he says elsewhere, the foundation of our belief ^ 
in immortality. The difference between Fichte s earlier 
and later philosophy, and between himself and Hegel, ^ fa 

^ j 

lies largely, I venture to think, in the attitude which he 
takes up here towards this Idea. It is another way of 
saying the same thing to say that it lies in the exclusively 
practical cast of his early Idealism. An Idealism which 
is merely practical looks at things only from one side 
from the side, namely, of every-day life and struggling 
growth. Certainly, as Fichte says, the Idea will never > 
be actual in the sense of being realized by any individual 
Ego. But to submit this practical position as a solution 
of the speculative question is to ignore the radical dis 
tinction of the two spheres. Only in a practical reference 
has the projection of the Idea into the future any mean 
ing. Metaphysically, or in the idea of any whole, con 
siderations of time have no place. Every stage of a 
* Werkc, i. 515-H. 



40 The Development from Kant to llegel. 

development implies the perfect form or idea which is 
being developed, and to make the idea posterior to its 
forms is totally to invert the speculative point of view. 
The question of the "existence" or reality of the Idea 
becomes, therefore, in a manner irrelevant. There is no 
moment at which we can, as it were, lay our hands upon 
it, and say, " here it is realized ; " for the very simple 
reason that only definite portions manageable bits 
. of experience can be so treated. The Idea, on the con 
trary, is the perfect or completed form of experience as 
j such ; it is simply the notion of experience thought out. 
I Practically, then, the universe may be viewed as a pro 
cess in which the Idea is brokenly and dimly realized ; 
: but speculatively the rationale of all process must be 
presented " in a moment of time " as it were, in crys 
talline rest. Both sides are necessary to a complete view 
of experience, and it is absurd to speak of the one as real 
and the other as merely ideal. The Idea is the ultimate 
formula to which the whole process of experience points 
for its solution. Its reality is sufficiently proved by the 
fact that no part of experience can be explained 
explained to the bottom and all round save by reference 
to this Idea of the whole ; this is what everything runs 
itself out to. Moreover, as Fichte would tell us, the 
Idea of which he speaks is not a subjective or arbitrary 
creation : it is a necessary Idea, lying at the root of our 
existence as intelligent beings. It is the Idea, as we 
have seen, which sets on foot and inspires the pursuit of 
itself. Which, then, is most real the Idea or that which 
it creates ? 

Fichte s attitude towards the Idea, as it has been 
sketched, is the necessary consequence of the exclusive 
value which he attached to action and morality, and that 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 41 



again bears on it the very impress of Fichte s 
character. His favourite saying that the cast of a man s 
philosophy depends on the kind of man he is, was never 
more fully verified than in his own case. The uncon 
ditional supremacy which he accords to the practical over 
the theoretical sphere ; the representation of the practical 
of the universe, therefore, in its last terms as an 
eternal Sollen or the pursuit of an ought-to-be that 
never is ; these are but the speculative transcript of 
Fichte s life of unwearied effort. There is the same 
strain of moral intensity in both. But the transcript 
contains also, it must be said, the essential one-sidedness 
of the original. The theoretic joy of knowledge for its 
own sake, which seemed to Aristotle the mark of God 
head, the absolute satisfaction of art, and the peace and 
reconciliation of religion are alike absent from this view 
of the world ; and when every allowance has been made 
for the importance of conduct, the theory must be pro 
nounced insufficient. It is impossible to make existence 
hang in this way on something not yet existent, and, 
from its nature, never to be existent. 

The perception of this on Fichte s part was the motive 
of the later transformation which his system underwent. 
It is not necessary to consider that transformation in 
detail ; it is sufficient to say that the change was, in the 
main, the result of a deeper analysis of the religious^ con- 
sciousness. Religion had been summarily identified with 
"joyful right-doing," but the source of the joy, or, in 
other words, the differentia of the moral and the religious 
consciousness, had been somewhat lightly passed over. 
The theological controversy in which he became involved ) 
at Jena gave a new direction to his meditations; and in the , 
comparative quiet which followed his removal to Berlin, 



42 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

he was largely occupied in attempting to provide from 
his philosophy an adequate theory of religion. The 
modification which resulted was probably due also to the 
desire to popularize his philosophy and make it preach- 
able by accommodating its expression to the language of 
current conceptions. Fichte s was essentially a preacher- 
nature, and unless philosophic conceptions could reach the 
larger world and renovate the spirit of the age, they 
were, in his eyes, comparatively worthless. But the 
change was more than a translation into popular phraseo 
logy* and so far as we are at present concerned with it, 
the difference of standpoint consists in the fact that 
^morality is now regarded simply as a stage on the way to 
Religion and to Science (Wisscnschaft par excellence or 
" completed truth ").* Religion or "the blessed life " is a 
life founded on the consciousness of that, as present and 
already realized, which to morality is always looming in 
Itho future. The j^ligious man, according to Fichte, is ho 
who is aware of his own unity with the source of all life, 
and who finds, therefore, his own will in the divine will 
through which alone anything real can be accomplished. 
And as this will cannot fail of fulfilment, " labour and 
effort have vanished for him." The progressiveness, and 
consequent incompleteness, of the fulfilment in the world 
is a necessary incident of the reflective understanding, 
which spreads out unity into multiplicity and eternity 
into tirno. For humanity and its future he may still, 
therefore, be said to labour and to hope (in this respect 
the divine consciousness within him only intensifies his 
activity) ; but the process is already beyond the stage of 
belief or effort in his own life. " He has God ever- 
present, living within him." That is to say, the iudi- 
* Werke, v. 512 (" j Inwciaung zum scligcn Lcbcn "). 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 43 

viduals are not the first, and the End something outside 
of them to be striven after. The End is prior to the 
individuals, and realizes itself through them, either with 
their will or in spite of it. The power which sets up the 
End provides for its fulfilment ; or rather, from the abso 
lute point of view, in being set up it is already fulfilled. 
The End is expressible religiously as the Will of God, 
with which the individuals are to reconcile themselves. 
They are " blessed" so far as they live in this self- 
fulfilling Will. But, to be perfect, religion must be 
enlightened by knowledge. The highest stage of all is 
" Wissenschaft," in which we get the theory of that 
which in religion exists as a fact of the inner life. 
" Science " comprehends or sees through all the lower 
stages (sense, legality, morality and religion). It offers 
an intelligible account of the relation of the divine Unity 
to its manifestation in a world of finite intelligences, 
and takes rank accordingly as " completed truth." 

The extreme similarity of this position to the Hegelian ., 
account of religion and of its relation to philosophy as 
"Absolutes Wissen," hardly needs to be pointed out. 
But there is another side to Fichte s later philosophy, 
which is so alien to the Hegelian Idealism as to have 
led many to characterize this phase of his speculation as 
nothing more than a mystically expressed Spinozism. 
God, as has been seen, is now cause as well as goal, and, 
as cause, He is perfect in Himself. We are no longer put 
oft with infrequent references to the " idea of Deity," as 
unrealizable and even unthinkable ; we hear now of 
" God," and He is treated as the source from which 
reality proceeds. But God is so much cause or source 
that Ho is separated anew from His manifestation, and 
becomes, in effect, something transcendent a " Being " 



44 The Development from Kant to Ile.gel. 

whoso essence knowledge serves not to reveal but to 
hide. This criticism points, therefore, to a real weak 
ness, and if we look back at the doctrine of the 
Wissenschaftslehre, we shall fiiid, I think, that it was 
inherent in the Fichtian thought from the beginning. 

Attention has been called to Fichte s laborious efforts 
to explain the origin of self-consciousness. They cul 
minated in the theory of the Anstoss. Any plausibility 
or conceivability which this theory may have seemed 
to possess, depended on the Absolute Ego s being taken 
as something prior to self-consciousness and the distinc 
tion of subject and object. As has been already pointed 
out, however, it is absurd to speak of this prins as an Ego ; 
it is, according to Fichte s admissions, predicateless, and 
the phrases which he employs to describe its action are 
those which would naturally be used of a blind force. It 
would be going too far to affirm that, in the works of tho 
Jena period, Fichte treats the Absolute Ego as the ante 
cedent cause of finite intelligences, from which they are 
derived by some mechanical or mechanically conceivable 
process. But he certainly distinguishes imperfectly 
between what may be called a teleological and a mechanical 
explanation of self-consciousness. A teleological explana 
tion accepts self-consciousness as the ultimate fact, and 
lays out its necessary conditions (analyzes its nature) ; a 
i mechanical explanation is not content unless ifc see self- 
. consciousness arising out of prior elements. Fichte wavers 
between the two, and often, I think, conveys the im- 
j pression that his explanation is a real construction in the 
latter sense. He repudiates this idea when distinctly 
formulated, but it is nevertheless subtly present with 
him, and colours his whole method of statement. Tho 
subsequent development of his thought confirms one in 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 45 

the belief that this is so. In the semi-popular Befttim- 
mung des Menschen (1800) he speaks of the Absolute 
Ego, in very questionable phraseology, as " that which is 
neither subject nor object, but which is the ground of 
both, and that out of which both come into being ; " and 
again as " the incomprehensible One," that " separates 
itself into these two."* The distinction between this 
"incomprehensible One" and the Ego, as the form 
of intelligence, was soon to become radical. For the ^ 
Ego in this aspect he had already substituted the term 
Reason (Vernunft) with the view of avoiding the re- 
proach of Subjectivism or Solipsism. In a new form 
which he gave to the Wissenschaftslehre in 1801, 
he substituted for both the expression, " Absolutes 
Wissen ; " but the Absolute itself he placed above and 
beyond all knowledge (jenseits alles Wissens) and there 
fore beyond the reach of Wissenschaftslehre, which is 
merely a doctrine of knowledge. f To this position he 
henceforth remained true. In his later works he talks of 
the Absolute or God as " Being" (Sein) lying behind all 
knowledge, and therefore in its essence inaccessible to in 
telligence. Knowledge is like a prism, which breaks up the \ 
colourless light of the divine nature ; it has for its object > 
the world of multiplicity which is thus created, but it 
cannot look back into the colourless unity of the source 
from which the light streams. This is the metaphor to 
which all Fichte s later philosophy is reducible, and this 
predicateless Being can hardly be otherwise regarded 
than as a direct sublation of the principles of immanent 

* Werl-e, ii. 225. 

f " Darstellung dor Wisacnschaftslelire aus dem Jahre 1801," 
which remained unpublished till after his death. See Werkc, ii. 
3-1G3. 



46 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

Criticism which ho made it and rightly made it his 
chief philosophical merit to have established. It may bo 
said that the separation and transcendency are moro 
apparent than real, inasmuch as the reference to know 
ledge is always retained. But it is, to say the least, a 
misleading position, and contributes not a little to tho 
mysticism which hangs round the later philosophy. 

The explanation seems to bo that Fichte was still under 
the dominion of the metaphysic which believes that a 
thing is an unknowable something behind all its qualities, 
and that to every phenomenon there corresponds an in 
scrutable noumenon. This, as we saw, was one of tho 
considerations which led Kant to his assumption of things- 
in-themselves. Instead of the phenomenon being tho 
appearance of the noumenon, the showing forth of the 
essence, the very knowledge of the phenomenal is held to 
disqualify us for knowing the noumcnal. Fichte cleared 
away all such noumena by making the non-Ego dependent 
on the Ego ; but in the act of so doing he erected tho 
Ego itself into an incognizable noumenon, which soon 
detached itself, in turn, from the Ego of knowledge. 
Until, however, we see that the manifestation of a 
thing in quality and action is the thing, all our speculation 
must remain abortive. The twin categories are insepar 
able, but they do not represent two different realities. 
The " thing " is tho complete synthesis of qualities which 
are never exhausted by us in knowledge. The noumenon 
is always, therefore, a fuller knowledge as yet unreached 
by us, and so each category has its own validity and 
function. But it is not an unattainable reality, and to 
exalt this useful distinction of thought into a barrier 
which thought is unable to surmount is simply to fall 
down and worship our own abstractions. A philosophy 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 47 

which remains entangled in this opposition must inevitably 
end in the paradox that the real is what cannot be known. 
Fichte brings the absurdity of this metaphysic to a some 
what extreme point in the assertion that man s inability 
to know God is in reality his inability to know himself. 
" He does not see himself as he really is ; his seeing can 
never reach to his proper being."* 

We have now criticized, on the one side, the exclusive 
attention to morality, which led Fichte to deny reality to \ 
the Idea, and, on the other side, his tendency to seek a c> 
transcendent ground of the intelligent Ego. These seem, 
to me the chief weaknesses of the Fichtian scheme, and 
so far as his later philosophy escapes the former only by 
giving full rein to the latter, the change cannot receive 
more than a qualified approval. Fichte s statement leaves 
too much ground for the criticism which ranks his Abso- 
lute with the Spinozistic Substance and similar doctrines. 
At the same time, it is possible to avoid laying stress on 
this feature of the later philosophy, and in that case it 
may be said to present us, in a popular and philosophi 
cally imperfect form, with many of the distinctive positions 
of what, in a liberal sense, is known as Hegelianism. The 
truth in regard to Fichte seems to be well expressed by 
his son and editor when he says that Fichte s achieve 
ment was to "awaken the peculiar intuition of trans 
cendental Idealism," namely, the ultimate reference of 
all reality to self-consciousness. The intuition, however, , 
was destined to take definite and permanent shape in 
other hands. There never was a school of Fichtians. 
The absence of th~e fixed letter " in his writings, on 
which Fichte prided himself, contributed to this result. 

* Anweisung zum scligcn Lcben. Werke, v. 643. 



48 The Development from Kant to Jiff/el. 

" My theory/ he says, " may be presented in an infinite 
variety of ways. Everyone will be compelled to think 
ik differently in order to think it for himself/ It was 
natural, then, that most of the re-thinkers drifted away 
from the distinctively Fichtian method of statement. 
Fichte himself was never contented with his exposition ; 
hence the persistent way in which he returned to the 
charge, labouring by increased clearness of style and 
method to force his doctrine on hi:* contemporaries. In 
describing his writings as all bearing more or less the 
character of lectures, Professor Adamson hits off at once 
their strength and their weakness.* They are admirably 
clear, but they do not suggest reflection. Everything 
is ftaid out to the last word, out of consideration for an 
audience of whose stupidity the speaker is profoundly 
convinced ; and at the end Fichte is never quite sure 
whether he has succeeded in making himself intelligible. 
Accordingly, instead of pursuing his own meditations 
further, he begins again at the beginning, and expounds 
the whole afresh from a slightly different point of view. 
Caroline Schlegel described him somewhat maliciously aa 
throwing his doctrine at people s feet like a sack of wool, 
and lifting it only to throw it again. Philosophy owes 
very much, of course, to this persistent repetition on 
Fichte s part ; nevertheless it begets the not unjustifiable 
feeling that, after a time, we get no further under his 
guidance. 

It is mainly, as will be seen, in his more effective 
working out of the principle of Idealism, and in his more 
catholic notion of experience, that Hegel has the advan 
tage OTer the author of the Wissenschaftslehre. Idealism 
is evidently not complete as a system, unless the presence 
Fichte, p. 46 (Blackwood s Philosophical Classics). 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 49 

and the progress of reason be vindicated throughout the 
length and breadth of experience. But Fichte s early 
position made him indifferent to the proof that reason is ; 
his assertion only ran that \iis_to be. Experience, therefore, 
as such, has no interest for him ; and the sole application 
which he made of his principles was in the spheres of juris 
prudence and ethics, where the ought-to-be predominates. 
References to nature and to history are characteristically 
absent from the earlier works. It was on these sides that 
the Fichtian Idealism required to be supplemented, and 
this was done, in the domain of nature by Schelling, in the 
domain of history, still more brilliantly and surefootedly, 
by Hegel. Without the vindication of rational concep 
tions as working themselves out in these spheres, the 
transformation of practical into absolute Idealism would 
have been impossible ; and Hegel found it possible solely 
in virtue of his laborious and faithful study of experience 
in all its forms. Fichte, on the contrary, seemed to 
imagine that, having got the supreme principle in the Ego, 
he would be able to deduce from it all the particulars 
without more ado. It is, of course, impossible to supply 
this deduction except in the most general terms ; and 
the consequence is, as we have seen, that we get little 
more that is vital from the Wissenschaftslehre than the 
enunciation of the general principle. Deduction, in short, 
is arbitrary and unconvincing, so long as it is an exercise 
of subjective ingenuity ; its value depends altogether on 
the extent and the profundity of the preliminary study 
which it represents. It is vain to suppose that the specific 
nature of reason can be learned otherwise than by study 
of the existent Fact. Hegel boasts that his deductions 
represent " the march of the object itself." This is not 
always the case; but where it is true, it is so simply because 

4 



50 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

he has first buried himself in the object. The evolution 
may appear to be completely a priori, but its different 
conceptions and principles are connected by Hegel for no 
other reason than because the study of facts has revealed 
to him the bond that unites them. It would be more 
correct to say that in this way the true meaning of 
a priori emerges, when it is found to be identical with 
the ripest results of so-called a posteriori research. The 
object of philosophy is the completed system of expe 
rience, and the object remains the same whether it be 
regarded in ordine ad universum, as a self-developing 
system, or in ordine ad individuum, as material painfully 
gathered and pieced together. Completeness alone ia 
necessary to exhibit the identity.* 

Fichte s importance as thofounder of German Idealism, 
and tlfo light thrown by a critical examination of his 
system on the subsequent course of Idealistic thought, 
are sufficient justification of the seemingly dispropor 
tionate space which has been here devoted to him. His 
historical mission was to give clear and forcible expres 
sion to the fundamental position of Idealism the 
necessary reference of all existence to self-consciousness. 
This position was what he disentangled from the incon 
gruities with which Kant had left it encumbered, and ho 
preached it with an almost truculent intensity of convic 
tion. Themeaning of a fact is its existence for a subject, 
and its function in respect of the subject exhausts its 
significance : this implicit bond of subject and object 
"* turning out, as it does, to mean their comprehension within 

* Fichte My* : " Das a priori und das a posteriori ist fur einen 
Yollstindigcn Idealismus garnicht zweierlei, sondern ganz cinerlei ; 
es wird nur von zwei Sciten bctrachtct, and ist lediglich durch die 
Art unterschicden, wie man dazu kommt. Werke, i. 447. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 51 

one reason he demonstrated effectively as the duality in y 
unity by which the world subsists. But the principle of 
this rational unity is grasped by Fichte with a rigidity j 
which somehow makes it incapable of development. The 
Ego with its identity, implicit or realized, of subject and 
object, is certainly the one notion which resumes the whole 
process of experience. To appreciate its full significance, 
however, we must be introduced as well to the whole 
hierarchy of notions for which it, as it were, finds room 
within itself. To some extent, this is supplied to us in 
the G-rundlage ; but Fichte s general tendency is to dash 
at once at the central position, forgetting that, in that 
case, it must remain in abstract isolation. Conquered in 
this fashion at the outset, the Ego is the mere form of 
intelligence, apart from the world of rational relations in 
which it finds its content. And, once separated from the 
intelligible world and its conceptions, the Ego, as we have 
seen, is no better an abstraction than any other. It is not 
enough to prove that all existence must be existence for 
an Ego ; the form of egoity is barren, unless the inherent 
rationality of the matter be proved, which grounds the 
possibility of its entering into a rational consciousness. 
What is wanted is a more detailed account of the nature of 
the rational development which the universe of nature and of 
man is maintained to be. The conceptions which guide and 
constitute that development have to be expiscated, brought 
into connection, and elucidated, before we can say that our 
Idealism is more than an abstract position or an aspira 
tion. Only when self-consciousness or spirit appears as \ 
the complex unity to which all those conceptions lead, does 
it lose its formal character, and become, as it were, the 
monogram of the whole riches of reason. 

4* 



52 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 



CHAPTER III. 

SCHELLINQ. 

THE criticism with which Schelling and Hegel relegated 
the Wissenschaftslehre to the rank of a historical and 
superseded system consisted, in a general form, in accus 
ing its Idealism of being essentially subjective in 
character. They did not, of course, mean by that to 
endorse the popular misconception of his system, as a 
scheme of psychological Idealism which reduced the 
universe to the forth-puttings of Herr Fichte s self-asser 
tive Ego. Egoity and individuality, Fichte insists, are 
two entirely different ideas ; and, as he says in his 
Answer to Professor Reinhold, his whole system turns 
on " the assertion in and with the individual of the abso 
lute totality as such."* Nevertheless, even apart from 
the obvious disadvantages of a misleading terminology, 
Fichte s method of summing up philosophy soon began 
to appear narrow and strained to his young disciple, 
Schelling. In spite of his recognition of "the absolute 
totality," Fichte, with his exclusively ethical interest, saw 
the sole realization of the Absolute Ego in the conscious 
ness of the finite individual. He passes at a stride from 
the perfect indefiniteness of the one to the factual exist- 
! ence of the other, connecting them, as we have seen, 
| by an arbitrary pictorial hypothesis (the Anstoss). The 
function of Nature on such a theory is merely to serve as 
the necessary limit of the finite consciousness. Inasmuch, 
therefore, as the existence of Nature, independently of 
the individuals which are, in a sense, her children, does 
* Fichte, Wrrke, ii. 505. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 53 

not seem to be provided for, the theory lays itself open to 
the charge of undue subjectivity. It was the meagreness 
of Fichte s treatment of Nature that impelled Schelling * 
to what he was fond of calling his " Durchbruch zur 
Realitat." Nature will not be dismissed simply as no^-I. 
Only so long as attention is restricted to the practical 
sphere, can it be deemed a sufficient account of Nature to 
say that it is the " obstacle " (even though the obstacle 
be eventually converted into the "material" or means) of 
the Ego s realization. An obstacle, whose distinction it is 
to be not Ego, must always appear alien to intelligence ; 
Nature, on the contrary, is herself a magazine of intelli 
gible forms, and demands to be treated as such. She 
refuses to be stuffed into consciousness in the lump, as it 
were, merely to prevent the latter from being a blank. 
It appeared, therefore, to Schelling a truer Idealism to 
work out the intelligible system of Nature, exhibiting 
thereby its essential oneness with the intelligent nature 
of the Ego. 

Schelling began his philosophical career at the age of 
twenty as an ardent Fichtian. The little book which he 
published at that early period* proved him to have as firm 
a grasp of the principle of the Ego as Fichte himself. 
Two years later the Ideas towards a Philosophy of 
Nature appeared, and from that time the breach 
between the two philosophers extending, unhappily, to 
their personal relations went on widening. Schelling s 
philosophy ran through a number of phases, but his 
name is peculiarly associated with the Naturphilosophie. 
This is the typical achievement in virtue of which he 
forms a link in our historic sequence. The dominating 
idea of the Naturphilosophie may be said to be the exhibi- 
* Vom Ich ah Princip der Philosophic (1795). 



54 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

ttion of Nature as the process of intelligence towards 
consciousness. Nature is more than the dead antithesis 
of conscious thought. It is not definable merely as not- 
Ego; it is also Ego. According to Fichte s formula, 
" the Ego is everything/ that is, all-inclusive ; but that 
is true, Schelling adds, only because " everything=the 
Ego."* That is to say, all natural things and beings 
exhibit intelligence in their structure ; they are each " a 
visible analogon of the mind."f Nature is the prius in 
time of the individual intelligence the ground out of 
which it springs. How could it give rise to the conscious 
intelligence, if it were not originally identical with what 
we regard as intelligent in ourselves ? " Nature," for the 

\Naturphilosophic, "is to be visible intelligence, and 

1 intelligence invisible Nature. "J 

If Fichte in philosophizing set out from the results of 
the Critique of Practical Reason, then Schelling, it has 
been said, took the Critique of Judgment as his starting- 

| point. It was the life of organic beings that first 
suggested to him this general notion of Nature. An 
organism is a self-producing whole, in which notion and 
existence are absolutely fused. It exists as an object, 
and yet its existence is that of a self-shaping intelligence ; 
it is an idea which realizes itself. The organic aspect of 
Nature was simply passed over in Fichte s philosophy. 
But a philosophy evidently cannot bo all-inclusive, if no 
room is found in its idea of Nature for Nature s most 
striking phenomenon. Generalization speedily shows that 
what has been observed in the organism is the root-idea 
of universal Nature; its products are intelligible, yet 
produced without consciousness. If we regard Nature aa 

* Schelling s Sammtliche Werlce, i., iv. 109. 
t Ibid, i., ii. 222. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 55 

a dead product ; if, for example, we transfer the intelli 
gence to a consciousness apart from Nature, impressing 
order and design upon it, we destroy, Schelling says, the 
notion of a Nature altogether. According to its essential 
notion, he maintains, Nature is, in all its parts, living or 
self-producing productivity and product in one. Empi 
rical science deals only with the separate products with 
the objects of nature, or with nature as object ; Natur- 
philosophie treats of the inner life that drives the whole 
of Nature as productivity or as subject.* To Nature 
in this sense Schelling applied at one time the unfortunate 
phrase, soul of the world (Weltseele). Grossly unscientific 
as the expression sounds, he meant by it simply " Nature 
I as the unity of active forces." Nature so regarded is 
identity of productivity and product ; it is causa sui as 
the Ego was, or, in other words, Nature too is subject- 
object. 

Naturphilosophie next proceeds to arrange the realm of 
unconscious intelligence in an ascending series, which 
shall bridge the gulf between the lowest of Nature s 
formations and the fully equipped organism in which 
self-consciousness at last emerges. Inadequate material, 
a fondness for analogy, and a boundless enthusiasm, led 
Schelling and his followers into the wildest vagaries in 
working out the details of this scheme. But the physical 
speculators of to-day have no reason to look on the move 
ment with such contempt as they sometimes express ; in 
outline their own conception of the universe is the same. 
" Matter," says Schelling, in words that remind one of 
Professor Tyndall, "is the universal seed-corn of the 
universe, in which is wrapped up everything that unfolds 

* Cf. Einleilung zum Entwurf eines Systems der Natur 
philosophie, Werke, i., iii. 275 and passim. 



56 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

\ itself in the later development."* But Schelling sees, of 
course, that this matter is itself already an ideal principle. 
As the continual product of temporarily -balanced forces, 
it is a symbol or first form of the Ego. Summed up 
shortly, the characteristics of Natur philosophic may bo 

I set down as a dynamic view of Nature, and an application 
of the principle of development in the widest sense. Its 
errors in detail do not affect our present purpose ; when 
philosophy usurps the function of science, such errors 
and vagaries are inevitable. Philosophy has only to 
establish the general principle of intelligence in Nature ; 
the working out of the principle must always be left to 
men of science. 

Fichte, in his later works, accused Schelling of leading 
men back into the mire of Dogmatism from which he had 
so carefully washed philosophy. The wide-spread mania 
for speculating about Nature, to the exclusion of the more 
distinctively philosophical disciplines, lent colour to the 
accusation. Nevertheless, it rests on a misapprehension 
of what Schelling intended to do,f and depends for its 
justification on isolating the Naturphilosophie from the 
rest of his system of thought. The " Nature " from which 
Fichte delivered speculation was a thing-in-itself out of 
,all relation to intelligence. It was something which, on 
the one hand, could not be brought within the sphere of 
knowledge, and from which, on the other hand, there 
could be no passage to the conscious intelligence. 

* Wcri-e, i., ii. 223. 

i Fichte, however, was referring quite as much to the general habit 
of thought generated by these speculations as to the strictly philo- 
sophical question; and certainly there was visible among those 
he criticized a declension from his own strenuous ethical and 
religious Idealism. This appeared to him as a relapse into 
Dogmatism, or the stage of dependence on the sense-world. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 57 

Fichte s accusation would have been true, if Schelling had 
returned to the assertion of such a nonentity. On the 
contrary, he denied the title of such a " thing " to be 
called a " Nature " at all. But a Nature which sprang into 
existence with the individual consciousness was, in his 
eyes, just as little, in any proper sense, a " Nature/* 
What Schelling did, or attempted to do, was to take 
Nature as we know it, and to exhibit it as, in reality, a func 
tion of intelligence, pointing through all the gradation^ 
of its varied forms towards its necessary goal in self-con 
sciousness. Instead, therefore, of being two things, which 
cannot be brought together except by a disingenuous 
ingenuity exerted on one of the terms, Nature and 
personality become members of one great organism of 
intelligence. The principles of a true Idealism are really 
more effectually conserved by such a view, unless we 
interpret the Fichtian philosophy as simply an attempt to 
prove that Nature has no existence save in the " minds " 
of conscious persons. But such a supposition would 
narrow philosophy to an unworthy issue. Quite apart/ 
from the charge of contradicting common-sense, psycho 
logical Idealism begs the whole philosophical question in 
its enormous assumption of a variety of separate minds, 
receiving impressions or having ideas. Idealism in its 
great historic representatives Plato and Aristotle in 
the ancient world, Schelling and Hegel in the modern 
has dealt hardly at all with the question of the 
existence or the non-existence of matter, as it is 
phrased, about which the " philosopher " of the popular 
imagination is supposed to be continually exercising 
himself. Probably not one of those mentioned has, 
when pressed on the subject, a perfectly satisfactory 
theory to offer of the nature of the " existence " which 



58 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

belongs to the so-called material system, which at once 
unites and separates individual intelligences. Perhaps it 
may be said that to explain it entirely would be to explain 
it away, and so to annihilate the condition of our own 
individuality.* At all events this is not the question 
which engrosses those who may be considered typical 
Idealists. What they have seen and what they labour to 
(delineate is, that the real existence of the material system 
jis comprised in the intelligible forms of which it is the 
vehicle (the surd that remains being merely an abstrac- 
\tion incident to our position as incomplete intelligences) ; 
and that consequently its ratio esscndi, the ultimate 
ratio of all essendi is to be found in a system of intelli 
gence within which both Nature and man may be 
embraced. 

Fichte stumbled probably over the expression " uncon 
scious intelligence," which Schelling often uses to describe 
Nature. And certainly, if it be taken as equal to uncon 
scious consciousness, it is no better than any other con 
tradiction in terms. But to do so implies putting upon 
the Fichtian " Ego " or " pure consciousness " the narrow 
interpretation just adverted to. It implies also that in 
the Ego we place all the emphasis on the consciousness 
the feeling of self, as it might be called and none upon 
the rationality or intelligible content of the self that 
is revealed in consciousness. Schelling s answer to Fichte 
might run upon the lines indicated at the end of the last 
chapter. He would fully admit that when we view the 
universe statically, so to speak, as an eternal fact and 
ask for the ultimate formula in which it may be summed 
up and understood, the only possible answer of Idealism 
since Kant must be expressed in terms of self-conscious- 
* Cf. what was said above pp. 35-6. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 59 

ness, as absolute knowledge or spirit. But he would add 
that, though self-consciousness is the highest form of 
reason or thought, yet it is, in itself, only the form. It is 
its rational content alone that gives value to self-conscious 
ness; so that, in this sense, the thoughts are the true self. 
Philosophy must proceed, therefore, from the abstract 
fact presented by Fichte, to unfold the riches of intelli 
gence as exhibited in the forms of Nature and as Hegel 
added of history. In short, intelligence may be resumed 
in a single fact, but it is also spread out into a whole 
procession of ideal forms. The elucidation and concatena 
tion of these forms became the business of Schelling and 
Hegel. The forms exist side by side, and the existence 
of the more rudimentary does not prejudice or imperil 
the richer developments.* The vindication of each is that 
it is a stage in an ideal history, and that no one stage is 
complete, or indeed possible, without all the rest. But 
the temporary independence which we seem to bestow 
upon this or the other stage in discussing it, never means 
for a moment its isolation from the organism of which it 
is a member. 

This leads us by a direct road to Hegel, but our appre 
ciation of the Hegelian position will gain in precision by a 
glance at the next step which Schelling took by way of 

* Though Spinoza was speaking in quite a different connection, 
his language in reply to the question, why God did not limit him 
self to the creation of perfect forms, has a certain analogy with 
this position. It belongs to the Divine nature, he says, to create 
all possible grades of perfection. " .Nihil aliud respoudco, quam : 
quia ei non defuit materia ad omnia ex summo nimirum ad inlimum 
perfectionis gradum creanda; vel magis proprie loquendo, quia 
ipsius naturae leges adeo amplae fuerunt, ut suliicerent ad omnia 
quae ab aliquo infinite intellectu concipi possunt producenda. 
Ethica, i. Appendix. 



GO The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

rounding off his metaphysical system. The advance was 
made iu the unfinished articles entitled, somewhat am 
bitiously, Darstellung meines Systems (1801).* To these 
the author repeatedly referred in later years as the only 
authentic exposition of his philosophy. This phase of 
Schellingian speculation is widely known, by name at 
! least, as theldentitdtsphilosophie or Philosophy of Identity. 
Schulling, according to his own expression, had broken 
through to reality, and vindicated Nature as a work of 
reason. The Naturphilosophie had become in his hands 
a discipline co-ordinate in importance with the Transcen 
dental Idealism (1800), which formed his own develop 
ment of the Wissenschaftslehre. The science of Nature 
and the science of consciousness are, as it were, variations 
of the same theme ; and the Darstellung, as he tells the 
reader in announcing its appearance, is to present " the 
system itself which formed the groundwork of those 
different expositions." Philosophy, as " the absolute 
science," or the science of the absolute, must rise above 
these " one-sided " manifestations of intelligence to view 
it in its own nature. Hence Schelling begins his 
Darstellung with the following definition : " By reason I 
mean absolute reason, or reason so far as it is thought as 
total indifference of the subjective and objective." By 
this abstraction, he adds, reason becomes " the true In- 
itself (an-sich), which coincides precisely with the indiffer 
ence-point of subjective and objective/ Reason is the 
Absolute, as soon as it is thought as here determined, and 
the nature of reason is identity with itself. This absolute 
identity, then, is (not the cause of the universe, but) the 
universe itself. The absolute identity cannot know itself 

* See Werke, i., iv. 105-213, where the quotations that follow may 
be found. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 61 

save by setting itself as subject and object. Nevertheless 
there is no opposition between subject and object as to 
their essence ; the difference is not qualitative but quan 
titative, in that the identity is set, in the first instance, 
with a preponderance of subjectivity, in the second, with 
a preponderance of objectivity. Thus the force which 
gives vent to itself in the mass of matter is the same as 
that which finds expression in the world of mind ; only, 
in the one case, the real is in the ascendant, in the other, 
the ideal. The quantitative difference of subject and object, 
so far as it exists, is the ground of finitude. The apparent 
separation from the absolute identity, which constitutes 
the individuality of things, is, however, the " arbitrary " 
work of reflection or imagination.* No individual thing 
exists in its own right, but all merely as modes or 
" potences " of the absolute identity. The absolute 
identity exists only under the form of all potences. 

The approximation to Spinozistic thought, which is 
apparent in many of these sentences, is still more 
striking in the first fifty propositions of the original 
which they summarize. Schelling refers to the 
approximation in his preface, and emphasizes it 
further by adopting for his exposition the quasi-geo 
metrical method of the " Ethics." In the main, too, the 
same criticism is applicable to both. There is the same 
fundamental truth, and the same perpetual crossing of two 
conflicting lines of thought, marring its expression. The 
unity of the world in God is the truth of Spinozism. The 
manifold life of the world ought, therefore, to be 
recognized as the continual energizing of the divine 
nature. But, by his application of the principle, " Omnis 

* It does not exist " an-sich, oder in Ansehung der absoluten 
Totalitiit." It exists only " in Ansehung dea einzeluen Seins." 



62 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

determinatio est negatio," Spinoza was driven to regard 
all finite differences as a species of Maya or delusion. 
The philosophic view of the universe could be attained, 
he said, only by effacing all deterrainateness ; and, accord 
ingly, the God of the system is formless Substance. The 
life and variety of the universe are quenched in its 
blank identity. Schelling s terminology is in advance of 
Spinoza s, but his result is very similar. His Absolute is 

.called Reason; but, in its true nature, he says, reason 
must be taken as the indifference-point of subjective and 

^objective. " Could we perceive everything that is from 
the point of view of the totality " (sub specie aeternitatis, 
as Spinoza would have said), "we should observe in the 
whole a perfect quantitative equilibrium of subjectivity 
and objectivity nothing, therefore, but pure identity, in 
which nothing is distinguishable."* Pure identity, in 
which nothing is distinguishable this is the ultimate at 
^ which every philosophy must arrive that insists on 
determining God apart from His manifestation. It is, 
in fact, the same fallacy of the thing-in-itself, which we 
traced in Kant and Fichte, that is at work in Spinoza and 
Schelling. There is the same impossible separation of the 
An-sich and the appearance, which degrades the latter to 
something arbitrary, subjective, delusive. The idea that 
a subject is more than the sum of its predicates must 
inevitably lead us to embark on those transcendent specu 
lations which have made philosophy to many a by-word 
and a reproach. This was speedily to be verified in 
Schelling s case. The only Absolute is an Absolute whose 
realization is demonstrable in the process of the world. 
Any other turns to the dust and ashes of unknowability 
within our grasp. 

* Werke, i., iv. 127. Darstsllung, prop. 30. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 63 

It is of no avail that Schelling describes the Absolute 
as reason, if he proceeds to speak of it as predicateless 
ident tj. To adapt a phrase of Haym s, Schelling forgot 
over the absoluteness of reason the rationality of the 
Absolute ; its rationality is no more heard of as soon as 
it is raised to the rank of the Absolute. To tell us that 
the Absolute is Identity that is, identical with itself 
does not, taken alone, throw much light on the nature of 
that which is thus identical. Nor does it help us greatly 
to say that the Absolute is that which is identical in 
subject and object. For this " quantitative " difference, 
we have seen, does not exist " in respect of the totality; " 
and Schelling describes the identity as total indifference, 
which he interprets as entire absence of any reference to 
the distinction.* Hegel, on the other hand, is in earnest 
with Schelling s opening assertion that the Absolute is 
reason or thought ; and he proceeds to show that, just 
because it is reason, it is no blank identity, but possesses 
an elaborate structure of its own. The structure of 
reason may, in a sense, according to Hegel, be examined 
apart from the opposition of subjective and objective ; but 
that opposition is not, as it is always tending to become 
in Schelling, indifferent or extraneous to the nature of 
reason. It is only through the opposition namely, in 
spirit that overcomes it that the Absolute exists, or is 
actual. Hence, too, the Identity, which, with Schelling, 
was a " pure " or blank identity, acquires a new meaning 
in Hegel as the presence of thought to itself in its object. 

Again, it must be said, in spite of Schelling s energetic 
protest against this criticism, that he too often in the 
Darstellung treats siibjectivity and objectivity as if they 
were two measurable forces that annihilate one another, or 
two ingredients that can be mixed like wine and water. At 
* Werke, i., vi. 22-4. 



64 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

all events, on the best interpretation that can be put upon 
his language, it cannot be denied that the Identitatsphilo- 
sophic treats subject and object as two parallel develop 
ments of equal importance and value. In this Schelling 
lost sight of the truth that lay at the bottom of Fichte s 
exclusive attention to the subjective Ego. Hegel renewed 
the perception that the subject, according to its absolute 
notion, includes the object in itself. Subject and object 
do not, therefore, run alongside of one another, but, at 
all points, the subject, as he phrases it, overlaps.* Nature, 
as the " negative" of thought, has its indefeasible place in 
the system, and no attempt is made to undervalue its 
importance and relative independence. But the point to 
be observed is, that we do not remain standing with 
Nature on the one side arid consciousness on the other ; 
there is a development through Nature to consciousness. 
The crown, therefore, of the whole development its ideal 
end and its real presupposition is conscious spirit, in 
which alone is to be recognized the real existence of the 
Absolute. In Schelling, on the contrary, there is no 
reality even about the manifestation of the Absolute in 
the twin series of ascending potences, which he offers as a 
substitute for this development. The real existence of 
the Absolute is something out of all reference to this 
differentiation. What interest is there, then, in the 
progress, if every step takes us further away from " the 
true In-itself" the pure identity of the intellectual 
intuition ? 

It is true, Schelling does not go quite as far as this in 
the Darstellung, which represents, as I have said, the 
conflict of two opposite theories. But he was not long in 
pushing to its legitimate consequences the line of thought 

* " Uebergreifen " is one of the words he uses to express the 
relation. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 65 

I have been endeavouring to expose. In a little tractate 
called Philosophy and Religion, published in 1804, he 
asserts broadly that the existence of the universe is non- 
essential to the Absolute, its relation to the latter being that 
of a mere accident.* Its ground lies, not in the Absolute, 
but in the original assertion by the Ego of its independence. . 
This inexplicable and timeless act is the original sin or y 
primal fall of the spirit, which we expiate in the cycles 
of time-existence. " Egoity is the universal principle of 
finitude," and in it is reached the point of extremest 
distance from God. But when the aphelion is reached 
and passed, the movement towards the perihelion begins. 
All effort should be directed towards the attainment of 
" the great intention of the universe and its history ;" 
this is "none other than completed reconciliation andi 
reabsorption in the Absolute." The extreme similarity 
of much of this to the speculations of Von Hartmann will 
not fail to be remarked. For if egoity is sin, then " the i 
universe and its history" is purely evil and fatuous, 
and had better never have been ; the " Unconscious " is \ 
the rest which all things seek. The Philosophic des 
Unbewussten is, indeed, the lineal descendant of Schel-i 
ling s later philosophizing ; and the connection between 
the two becomes still plainer, if we extend our considera 
tion to the "positive" philosophy, to which Schelling 
turned after Hegel s death. f The chief aim of positive , 
philosophy is to supplement Hegel s account of the : 
rationality of the universe, by an explanation of why there 

* Ein blesses Accidens . . . ausserwescntlich fiir das Absolute. 
Cf. Werkc, i., vi. 41-2. 

t Cf. a very acute and interesting brochure by Von Hartmann, 
entitled Schel ling s positive Philosophic als .Einheit von Hegel 
und Schopenhauer. 

6 



66 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

should bo a universe or a system of reason at all. Hegel 
tells us the quod sit : Schelling wishes to supply an 
answer to the quid sit as well. The more Schelling 
occupied himself with the question of the "why," the 
more he lost himself in the mazes of theosophy. This is 
v |the natural end of every attempt to get behind the "what 
MS," and to explain existence, as it were, by something 
i which shall be before existence. All that can be asked 
of philosophy is, by the help of the most complete 
analysis, to present a reasonable synthesis of the world 
jas we find it. The difference between a true and a false 
philosophy is, that a false philosophy fixes its eyes on 
a part only of the material submitted to it, and would 
explain the whole, therefore, by a principle which is 
adequate merely to one of its parts or stages ; a true 
philosophy, on the other hand, is one which sees life 
steadily, and sees it whole whose principle, therefore, 
embraces in its evolution every phase of the actual. 

With the divorce of Schelling s speculations from the 
actual, they ceased to affect, to any great extent, the 
general history of philosophy. After the year 1804 or 
^1806, Schelling became more and more of a private specu 
lator, while the thread of world-historical philosophy was 
taken up by Hegel. It would be a mistake, however, to 
suppose that the line of thought which has just been 
traced is the only one in Schelling. There is a truer one 
running through the Darstellung. Subject and object, 
though, on the first view, the products of subjective 
limitation and delusion, turn out to be the necessary 
condition of the existence of the Absolute. " The 
Absolute," he says, " in only under the form of subject- 
objectivity." " The absolute identity exists only under 
the form of all potences." This is substantially what has 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 67 

been indicated as the Hegelian position, only not fully 
formulated, and perpetually crossed by the other line of 
thought. Schelling s essentially artistic temperament 
unfitted him for what his sterner colleague called " the 
labour of the notion/ He possessed both the strength 
and the weakness of the artist-nature. The glamour of 
his style,* and the rich glimpses that seem to foreshadow 
so much, are his poetic inheritance. But he was so 
susceptible of the varying aspects of things, that the one 
chased the other with bewildering rapidity, and he had 
no time to crystallize them into a definite form. He made 
his studies, too, before the public, and signalized each 
new departure by a new volume. Hegel, on the contrary, 
thought long and carefully before he published at all. 
He proceeded laboriously and tentatively, boring in every 
province of knowledge, till he seemed to himself to have 
found a principle of universal application. The test of the 
principle came before its public trial ; but, once possessed 
of it, he advanced confidently to the solution of every 
problem. There was no more wavering as to the 
sufficiency of his principle, and just as little shrinking 
from the labour of application. 

* A comparison of the styles of the four philosophers we are 
considering is not without interest. Kant is tiresomely verbose, 
heaping distinction on distinction, and yet never sure that lie has 
made his meaning plain. There is an unmistakable vigour about 
Fichte s style. He can be eloquent, and his sentences are rapped 
down with the brilliance of good rhetoric. But it is a dry light, 
and in the end leaves an impression of hardness. Hegel s sentences 
are wrung from him by the labour of the spirit. They are weighty 
utterances, full of the antithesis of the Notion, and they stick fast 
in the memory. The phrasing and the figures are often powerful. 
But Sc-helling alone presents that combination of lucidity and 
softness which is the mark of a really good style. It may be too 
poetical for the best prose, but it is neither laboured nor abrupt ; 
and the reader floats along the sentences with a genuine emotion 
of pleasure. 

5 * 



68 TJie Development from Kant to Hegel. 



CHAPTER IV. 

HEGEL. 

THOUGH the interest of development does not attach to 
Hegel, the material published in the Life by Rosen- 
kranz enables us to form some idea of the way by which 
he reached his results. The most striking feature of his 
preliminary training is the profound study which ho 
undertook of the genius of Christianity. It would almost 
\ seem as if his system took its rise in the gigantic idea of 
reconciling the Christian spirit with Hellenic ideals, and 
of fusing both in the practical life of the modern world. 
A Life of Christ and a Critique of Positive Religion are 
among the manuscript remains of his Switzerland resi 
dence. As house-tutor there and in Frankfurt, his studies 
were theological and historical rather than philosophical. 
He was five years older than Schelling ; yet we find him 
taking up the serious study of Kant after Schelling was 
already famous. He may almost be said to have turned to 
philosophy as a means of formulating the ideas he had 
formed of the course of collective history, and especially 
of the development of the religious consciousness, which 
rightly seemed to him the bearer of all human culture. 

In the first connected form which he gave to his 
thoughts in Frankfurt between 1797 and 1800 there 
may be seen already struggling to light all the most 
marked peculiarities of the finished system, e.g., the 
appearance of Logic as a co-ordinate discipline with 
Nature and Spirit, the dialectic method, and the deter 
mination of the Absolute as Subject or Spirit. The years 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 69 

at Jena, when he did yeoman s service for Schelling, pro 
duced a series of essays and critiques, in which, sinking 
his peculiar views in those of his more famous friend, he 
defined in clear and sharp outline the position of their 
common philosophy towards the systems of Kant, Fichte, 
Jacobi, and lesser contemporaries. He was probably the 
first to open Schelling s eyes to the real difference 
between his system and that of Fichte. After Schelling s 
departure from Jena, we may fancy Hegel watching with 
dissatisfaction the brilliant but nebulous speculations of 
his friend, and the extravagance and intellectual frivolity 
of the minor men in the domain of Naturphilosophie. 
His deep-seated aversion to all this formless speculation 
was uttered to the world at last in the famous Preface to 
the Phaenomenologie des Geistes (1807). There is a 
bitterness of passion about the weighted sentences, that 
marks it as an outburst of long pent-up irritation. 

" It is not difficult to see," he begins, as soon as he 
has got under way, " that our time is a time of birth and 
transition to a new period. . . . But the notion of the 
whole which we have reached, is as far from being the 
whole itself, as a building is from being finished when its 
foundation is laid. . . . There is wanting both the 
extended application and the specification of its nature ; 
there is wanting still more the development of form.* 
He thus signified that there was reserved for him the task 
of erecting the edifice of reason on the foundation that 
had been laid. The youthful enthusiasm for the new 
principle, " which proceeded straight, without further 
serious toil to the enjoyment of the Idea," was excusable, 
as he said ten years later, only on account of the core 

* Phaenomenologie, Vorrcde. Wcrke,\\. 10-11. For what follows 
sec the Vorredc passim. 



70 The Development from Kant to Hcgcl. 

of truth which it contained. " But these rockets are not 
the empyrean. True thoughts and scientific insight are 
not to be gained except in the labour of the notion." 
This labour of explication is necessary, if we are properly 
to know the nature of our principle. AVithout it, the 
connection which is established between the Absolute and 
the known world is perfectly external, and reduces itself 
to a monotonous formalism. We merely take the material 
as it is offered to us, bring it under " the one motionless 
form of the knowing Subject," and imagine we have 
thereby given an account of it. This procedure (for the 
original of which Fichte no doubt sat) leaves things 
exactly as they were ; it is like dipping them into a 
colourless medium. Nor is Schell ing s Absolute any 
better ; and the elaborate parallelism between subjec 
tivity and objectivity worked out to such instructive 
lengths as " understanding is electricity " or " the 
animal is nitrogen " becomes as unbearable as the repe 
tition of a conjurer s trick when the secret is learned. 
The parallelism does not tell us what either the one or 
the other is. Schelling s method of launching the Abso 
lute upon the reader in the first sentence, like a shot 
from a pistol, is radically fallacious, and can lead to 
nothing better than the unity of undifferentiated sub 
stance. His Absolute is, indeed, no better than the 
night in which all cows are black. The True is not an 
"immediate" or "original" unity, as on Schelling s scheme, 
but an " identity that restores itself," and everything 
depends, according to Hegel, on grasping and expressing 
i the Absolute or the True " not as Substance, but equally 
/ as Subject." This insight puts an end to the notion of a 
formless essence ; there is no essence without its form, 
and the Absolute exists as the system of forms in which 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 71 

Subject develops itself. For Subject is essentially the 
becoming of itself (Sichselbstwerden), and the system or 
process of this development is the True or the Whole. 
Only as the result of the whole process or rather, as 
the result together with its becoming " is the Absolute 
known as it is in truth. Hence Spirit alone, as the 
summation of the development, is the real. It is the 
result, and it is at the same time the beginning, because 
the real beginning is the End or final cause (Zweck). 

Harsh as they may seem, there is yet substantial justice 
in Hegel s criticisms of his predecessors. The principle 
of Idealism appears alike in Fichte and Schelling without 
deduction; it is, as Hegel says, shot out of a pistol. 
Hence it is not fruitful in their hands. Fichte confined 
himself for the most part to firing off the pistol demon 
stratively at short intervals ; and Schelling s constructions, 
though dipped in the dye of the Absolute, have, according 
to Hegel, little or no organic connection with his principle. 
Genial glances into nature and history are not enough ; 
taken alone, they lead to arbitrary theorizing. The labour 
of the notion is required to weld them together into a 
system, which shall penetrate reality by its presence 
at every point. The difference between Schelling and 
Hegel is brought to a point in the idea of the Absolute 
as result. Their relation has often been compared to that 
of Plato and Aristotle, and for various reasons. The 
comparison holds in this respect among others, that 
Schelling, like Plato, sought continually to explain the 
beginning of things, while Hegel, like Aristotlo, looked 
to the End the final form and perfection of things. 
Schelling s Absolute became, under his hands, a formless 
priiis from which formed existence emerged, but which 
contained in itself no raison d etre of that variety of 



72 Tfie Development from Kant to Hegel. 

form. In Hegel all trace of a mechanical causality between 

the Absolute and the world disappears; as a prius, he 

! sees that the Absolute is a mere name or sound. The 

ouly sense in which philosophy can talk of a cause " of 

(the world, is the sense in which the Idea of the whole 
may be called the cause of any of the parts. The cause 
to which we must ultimately turn in the case of any 
development is the inner Idea which shines through each 
of the stages more or less dimly, and to the full realiza 
tion of which all the stages seem, as it were, to be pressing 
on. This Idea is nearly akin to the Aristotlelian re Xo? 
or the perfected evepyeia. It is in the re Xo? or end to 
which the whole creation moves/ that the true explana 
tion of its apparent beginning and subsequent course 
is, according to Hegel, to be sought. The fvepyeia, as 
Aristotle can tell us, is always prior in thought to the 
&vva/j,i<; ; for it is only as the Svvapis of the evepyeia, 
that the Suva/us is named. It is true that, when these 
notions are applied to isolated and partial cases of develop 
ment within experience, it is still found necessary to dis 
tinguish between a prior in thought and a prior in fact. 
But in an all-embracing Whole, such as the Absolute by 
its very notion is, the distinction as necessarily falls away. 
Priority and posteriority in time is a notion which has 
validity only when employed within experience by those 
who stand themselves within the process J used of experi 
ence as a totality, or by one who can see the whole process, 
it is completely devoid of meaning. " The universe," as 
Fichte says, " is an organic whole, no part of which can 
exist without the existence of all the rest ; it cannot have 
come gradually into being, but must have been there 
complete at any period when it existed at all."* If the 
* Fichte, ll erkc, ii. 399. 



The Metaphyical Ground Work. 73 

unscientific understanding imagines, in studying the 
rational articulation of the universe, that it is listening to 
a narrative or story, that is merely "because it cannot 
understand anything but stories." In the Absolute, 
therefore, as such, there is no history ; notion and 
existence are necessarily identical. 

Hegel did more, however, than ci iticize the short 
comings of others ; he took upon himself the task he 
had indicated, namely, the working out of the principle 
of Fichte and Schelling the exhibition of a the True as 
system/ The task is, in one sense, not difficult, he says, 
if we will simply follow out with self-denying fidelity the 
natural dialectic which is to be observed alike in the 
processes of nature and history, and in every conception 
of ordinary thought. The " dialectic method," to which 
we are here introduced, is Hegel s interpretation of the 
triple movement, hinted at in the Kantian table of the 
categories,* and already employed methodically by Fichte 
in his construction by means of Thesis, Antithesis, and 
Synthesis. To Hegel this method presented itself when 
stated most simply and concisely as the systematic recog 
nition of the fact that there is no positive without a nega- 

* Kant, it is hardly necessary to remark, calls attention to the 
fact that the number of categories in each class is always three, 
and that the third category in each triad arises from the combina 
tion of the second with the first (e.g., plurality as unity is totality, 
reality with negation adhering to it is limitation). In the Introduc 
tion to the Critique of Judgment he again calls attention to " the 
almost universal trichotomy of his divisions in pure philosophy," 
and defends it as springing from the nature of the subject. See 
Werke, v. 203. In the Preface to the Phaenomenology, Hegel speaks 
of the Kantian triplicity as being, when raised to its absolute 
significance, " the true form in its true matter." But he adds that 
Kant stumbled upon it by instinct ; he did not comprehend its 
true scope, and so it remained for him dead. 



74 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

tive, and that the negative is yet only the path along which 
thought passes to a fuller positive. The "tremendous power 
of the negative," by which Hegel s imagination was pro 
foundly affected, appears in nature as change, disintegra 
tion, passing away and death. For speculation, it is the 
function that breaks up the simplest unity of thought, by 
introducing into it distinctions that prove it to contain its 
opposite. The true speculative method consists in allow 
ing this function free play; we must not flee from its 
action, but still less must we succumb to the negative. 
It must be looked in the face, and thereby it is conquered, 
and yields up to us a new positive, which combines in a 
fuller truth both the first assertion and the contradiction 
which the one-sided apprehension of it called forth. The 
true and final positive justifies its claim to be regarded as 
such, by allowing room within itself for all the subordinate 
rogations. Thus, to begin with the simplest example, 
the notion of pure, i.e., of changeless and self-identical 
Being lands itself in utter contradiction, and thought is 
seemingly paralyzed, till it reaches a (temporary) solution 
of its difficulty in the notion of existence as a ceaseless 
process of coming into being and passing away that is, 
as Becoming. Taken more generally, the simple positive 
from which we start is the stage of sensuous thought. To 
the child, and to all moments of unreflecting thought, an 
apple, for example, is just an apple; and that seems to 
represent a fact sufficiently simple and complete in itself. 
But reflection supervenes upon the immediacy of sense- 
apprehension, and brings distinctions into the apparently 
simple ; it isolates the different qualities and aspects of 
things, and, by the terms in which it crystallizes them, 
fixes them in opposition to one another. This opposition 
it is the task of speculative philosophy to overcome ; it 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 75 

must " bring fluidity into these hard and fast thoughts/ 
and exhibit, along with their differences, the connections 
by which they organize themselves into one whole. In so 
doing, it is the third and final stage. The ultimate form 
of the negative " das Negative iiberhaupt," as Hegel 
calls it is the difference which exists in consciousness 
between the Ego and its object. But this is overcome in 
the notion of the Subject that in all things knows only 
itself in Spirit that sees in the world of actuality only 
the course of its own development, or "the kingdom 
which it has reared for itself in its own element." 

To this " aether " of absolute knowledge the Phaeno 
menology is intended to be the introduction. Starting 
with ordinary sensuous thought, it leads it out of itself 
by means of its lurking contradictions ; and by the same 
latent dialectic we are driven on from stage to stage, till 
we find that there is no resting-place for the sole of our 
foot save in the absolute standpoint already indicated. 
Moreover, the progress of the particular individual 
towards the consciousness of this goal resumes in its 
stages the slower progress of " the universal individual " 
of history. The Phaenomenology is, therefore, at the same 
time, the outlined record of the advance of human thought 
throughout "the prodigious labour of the world s history." 
In point of fact the parallelism, though undoubted, is 
not always clearly drawn in the Phaenomenology. Hegel 
spoke of the book in after years as his voyage of 
discovery ; and though it is, in some respects, the most 
suggestive of all his works, yet it certainly contains the 
defects as well as the merits of a first treatment. The 
very richness of the material prevents its being thoroughly 
mastered ; and the sudden transitions from the discussion 
of states and processes of the individual consciousness 



76 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

to the characterization of historic systems and phases of 
sentiment, have a confusing effect. As a book, however, 
it does not concern us further here ; for Hegel intimates 
that, when " the element of knowledge " is reached, and 
the opposition of thought and being overcome, we may 
proceed at once to the consideration of the conceptions of 
thought, as such, apart from the opposition of conscious 
ness and its object. Existence and thought are, in this 
element, only two different sides from which the same 
rational content may be regarded. The system of rational 
conceptions constitutes what he calls here, roundly, 
Jx " Logic or speculative philosophy."* 

The movement or concatenation of these thoughts 
appears in the Logic without any reference to a Subject 
for or in which they exist. This has been to many a 
stone of stumbling, inasmuch as it seems to imply tho 
existence of thoughts without a thinker. But the objec 
tion rests on a materialistic notion of thoughts as so 
many thing-like existences in a " mind." It is certainly 
possible to examine the nature of thought in itself the 
ideas of which it consists without reference to any con 
sciousness in which the conceptions are retained. Every 
time we read or speak or think, we treat thought in this 
way as something absolute, and overlook the reference to 
consciousness. The scientific interest and value of con 
ceptions is wholly independent of such a reference. 
No doubt, anyone is at liberty to place alongside of the 
development of the Hegelian Logic a conscious subject 
to be its bearer. But the addition is in a manner idle, 
seeing that it does not affect the nature of the develop- 

* As supplementing the sketch of the Hegelian position which 
follows, I may be allowed to refer to an article on Hegel contri- 
> butcd by me to Mind, for October, 1881. 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 77 

ment at all, but only serves as a permanent mirror in 
which it is reflected. The insistence on such an addition 
is a phase of what Hegel calls pictorial thought. Science 
sees the true subject in the system of its predicates, 
and its object is to examine these thoughts for what they 
are in themselves, and to determine their relations to onej 
another. Hence " the empty Ego " is sunk, as Hegel 
says, in the development of its own substance, till it 
reappears at the end, no longer empty but filled, in the 
notion of the Absolute Idea. In claiming to demonstrate 
the necessity of this notion, the Logic may fairly claim 
to offer a more effectual vindication of the rights of the 
Subject than is contained in the noisy lip-service of many 
other systems. 

It is important to remark the return to Kant which 
Hegel effected in making the Logic the centre of his 
philosophy. The relations of his system to the systems 
of Fichte and Schelling have been already considered ; 
but the impulse to the construction of the Logic came to 
him direct from Kant. Kant also subordinates the Ego, 
as the mere " vehicle " of conceptions, to the conceptions 
of which it is the vehicle ; and in the table of categories 
he attempts an enumeration and arrangement of these 
conceptions. The analysis of the content of universal 
thought which Hegel presents in his Logic is nothing 
but the Kantian list of categories, amended, completed, 
unified, with a thousand interconnections, and without 
Kant s presuppositions about the subjectivity of the 
scheme of thought thus unfolded. Hegel, in Kantian 
language, has merely taken rational experience to pieces, 
and places before us its complete conditions in systematic 
form ; he begins with the simplest, and proceeds to the 
most complex, of the conceptions which we use every day 



78 TJie Development from Kant to Hegel. 

in naming our own thought and action, and the life of 
things around us. That the unity of rational experience 
is identical with the ultimate synthesis of things, goes in 
Hegel, of course, without saying. It is his inheritance 
from his predecessors, and it would bo gratuitous to 
recapitulate here the steps by which it was reached from 
the platform of Kantianism. For the rest, the fresh 
affiliation to Kant, with the revived emphasis upon tho 
content of thought, was in all respects salutary ; for tho 
current philosophizing about the Ego and the non-Ego, 
the Real and the Ideal, and the Absolute, threatened to 
degenerate into a game with counters, on which tho 
signature of reason was getting more and more worn 
away.* 

But though tho antecedents of the Logic are plain 
enough to the historical student, its aspect was different 
to Hegel s contemporaries, who beheld it flung down 
before them in all the completeness of its articulation 
from "Being" to the "Absolute Idea." The end 
returned upon the beginning, like a serpent that takes 
its tail into its mouth ; but the relation of the whole 
chain of conceptions to experience was thrown into the 
background. It appeared to assume nothing, to rest 
upon nothing; the whole seemed a Melchisedek-birth 
out of pure nonentity. The complete articulation of the 
conceptions was taken to denote a process of self-creation; 
and the most extraordinary ideas got abroad as to the 
nature of what Hegel had done, and the results likely to 
follow from his achievement. The " Method " became 

* For this Fichtc and Schelling, as we have soon, were partly to 
blame ; the lesser men were still more in fault. Fichte says, speaking 
of those who had taken up his terminology : " Das leidige Geschwiitz 
von Ich und .Nicht-Ich hat mich herzlich schlccht erbaut." 



The Metaphysical Ground Work. 79 

the rage all over Germany, and the misguided enthusiasm 
of many of its friends was even more deplorable than 
the confused blows showered by alarmed assailants. To 
read many accounts, the primal day of creation the 
process, rather, of the divine self-creation would seem 
to have been lived over again, moment by moment, in 
the brain of the Niirnberg schoolmaster and all by the 
help of his new and magical method. There may have 
been a certain justification for these misconceptions in 
the striking figurative language which Hegel was in the 
habit of employing to illuminate his favourite positions. 
He speaks of the Logic, for instance, as " the exposition 
of God, as He is in His eternal essence before the creation 
of nature and a single human spirit." In a sense, of 
course, this is perfectly true and unobjectionable ; but 
it is to be feared that such utterances have hindered 
his acceptance, from his own day till now, by those 
who pride themselves on being, before all things, 
men of fact and experience. This is the very ecstasy 
of metaphysic, they murmur, and pass on with a 
melancholy but self-complacent smile. This is unfor 
tunate for themselves; it is at the same time a severe 
retribution for the transitory eclat which Hegel gained 
by such phrases in his lifetime. Those, however, who 
have taken the trouble to penetrate further into the 
system, know that the most portentous-looking phrases 
generally cover the most innocent meaning. Hegel 
possessed at times a rare capacity for wielding the 
language of Vorstellung, i.e., of figurative and pictorial 
thought ; but few have distinguished it more rigidly from 
the language of the Begriff, i.e., of philosophical, or, in 
the highest sense, scienti6c statement. He was particu 
larly fond of the phraseology of the religious Vorstcllicny, 



80 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

as a means of philosophical illustration, and considered, 
for reasons which will be afterwards apparent, that he had 
a right to use it. But an unprejudiced student need 
not confound the one mode of statement with the other. 
Phrases like the one quoted above admit of an exegesis, 
which does not, in any sense, lift us off the solid floor 
of experience. Hegel is explaining and justifying his 
abstraction of the thought-content of the Logic from the 
concrete domains of nature and spirit. He is justifying 
the consideration of these pure conceptions apart alike 
from the sensuous phenomena of the material world, and 
from the conscious life of the individual who uses them. 
These conceptions are, to Hegel, the firm foundation, as 
it were, of the two other spheres ; hence the supreme 
importance, in his eyes, of knowing to the very core what 
they are, and how they are connected with one another. 
They are neither more nor less than the matter of intel 
ligence, or, in more Hegelian language, the essence or 
In-itself of reason. This is the plain and perfectly 
unpretending meaning of the phrase alluded to. 

It is important in approaching the Hegelian philosophy, 
and especially the Logic, to divest oneself of extravagant 
expectations. There is nothing magical or mystical about 
it. The notions with which the Logic deals, form, as 
everyone admits, part and parcel of the apparatus of 
everyday thought. The development or genetic 
explanation which Hegel gives us of them, is simply 
their systematic placing. That is, they are exhibited in 
their connection with the conceptions to which they are 
most nearly allied, and emphasis is laid (to use Hegelian 
language) on the transitions by which the one passes into 
the other. Hegel s aim in the Logic is to show that 
reason, in the whole range of its conceptions, is an j 



The Metaphysical Ground WurJc. 81 

.organism. All the notions or categories of thought, in 
other words, are inseparably linked one to another ; so 
that we inevitably fall into error, if we lean upon one 
or another exclusively for the explanation of experience. 
Contradiction and one-sided assertion are the lot of every 
thinker who has not grasped the immanent connection, or, 
as Hegel calls it, the immanent movement and evolution 
of the notions.* The universe, or sum of all phenomena, 
can be mastered, if it is to be mastered at all, only by 
one who is willing to allow to all the categories their 
rights by turns who knows their relative value, and who 
applies them, therefore, to their appropriate spheres. 
Such knowledge is necessary to ensure us against the 
common error of trying to work with the more meagre 
and imperfect, where the richer and more complex alone 
suffice. The distinctive character of the method of 
connection or evolution has already been pointed out. 
Fix on any conception you please, and Hegel promises 
to show that it contains the negation of itself. You 
imagined that you had a simple notion, an undoubted 
positive; and you find it suddenly transformed under 
your hands into a negative. But Hegel does not remain 
in contradiction, or in Scepticism, as this dialectical 
suspense is called when it appears historically. The 
Janus-like nature of each conception is taken by him 
simply as a proof that it cannot stand by itself ; we must 
advance to a fuller expression of truth, in which room 
may be found for both the conflicting aspects of reality. 
Once embarked upon this process, we find that we cannot 
pause till the consciousness of Spirit is reached. Spirit, 

* The conceptions, viewed in this evolution, are called by Hegel 
"notions;" and the systems of all notions is the Notion the 
Begriff. 

G 



82 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

I as the union of self and not-self, is, in a manner, the sum 
(and expression of all the previous contradictions. But, 
borne thus, they are overcome; and Spirit, or concrete 
Self-consciousness, becomes the solution we are in quest 
of. It is not without reason, however, that Hegel speaks 
of the labour of the notion. It sounds at first as if all 
must be plain sailing as soon as we are launched, seeing 
that every advance is made by the application of a stereo 
typed formula. But no judgment could be more mistaken. 
Hegel did not simply adopt his method from his prede 
cessors, nor did it come to him like the image that dropped 
from heaven. Years of grim toil in every department of 
human knowledge were needed to convince him that he had 
really lighted upon a principle of universal application. It 
was the profound acquaintance thus gained with the whole 
course of speculative thought and of universal history, 
that supplied him with the material for the exhibition of 
the method in action. A method or formula would lead 
to nothing but a barren repetition of itself, unless it were 
fed from the looms of fact. The method of the Logic is 
as much analytic as synthetic ; in Hegel s own words, it 
is nothing, unless " we bring the Begriff and the whole 
nature of thought with us." 

The prominence given to the Logic is typical of the 
vHegelian philosophy, as distinguished from the theories 
of Fichte and Schelling. To the analysis there under 
taken is due, in the main, the greater firmness and 
solidity of the Hegelian thought. But, according to the 
structure of the system, the Logic is only the first of an 
xU al triad, in which Nature and Spirit are the second 
and the third. After having examined the conceptions 
in their naked essence, we turn to see them swung round, 
as it were, and presented to us objectively in Nature, 



The Metaphysical Ground n*"o/-A-. 83 

which is called the negative or " other " of reason. From 
Nature, again, we pass into the element of self-conscious 
ness, in which is worked out that " restored identity " of 
Spirit, where all strangeness vanishes from an " other " 
in which reason sees reflected nothing but its own 
features. The nature of the relation existing between 
the members of this triad has been a frequent source of 
misconception to students of Hegel. The besetting sin 
of ordinary thought, against which Hegel carries on an 
unceasing polemic, is Abstraction. Abstraction, as Hegel 
uses the term, is the tendency to take the parts of anything 
out of relation to the whole, and to substantiate them in 
that character as res completes. It is at work here as else 
where. To such a habit of mind Logic naturally appears 
as one fact, Nature as another, and Spirit as a third. 
But for the refutation of this idea, it is sufficient to 
remember that there is no fact at all till Spirit is 
reached, and that it is only with reference to the life of 
Spirit that we can speak either of the logical conceptions 
or of Nature. Hegel often reminds the reader that the 
Absolute exists only as Spirit, so that Spirit is the ; 
beginning as well as the end of his system. " Completed 
Self-consciousness" is, in short, Hegel s Absolute his > 
one Fact and the stages which appear to lead up to it 
are nothing but relatively imperfect, and mutually com 
plementary, ways of regarding its existence. Hegel s 
aim is not to prove the existence of the Absolute, still , 
less to show how it comes into being, but to illuminate V 
the nature of its life. The evolution described in the 
Logic, Nature, and Spirit of the Encyclopedia is not, 
therefore, in any sense, factual ; it is an ideal analysis, or 
an ideal construction, as we like to take it, of something 
which exists as a fact, riz., Self-consciousness. Self- 

* 



8-1 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

consciousness is the supreme example of resolved con 
tradiction, or the unity of opposites, on which the method 
was originally founded. But the opposites are discern 
ible only as sides of the unity ; and just as the Fichtian 
Thesis and Antithesis had a merely ideal existence in 
reference to the Synthesis (partial or complete) which 
communicated reality to both, so Logic and Nature are 
similarly abstractions from the only real whole or Syn 
thesis. In this aspect, Hegel suggestively calls the Logic 
" the kingdom of shades," as if to hint that it is but the 
ghost of reality. It is probably more conducive to sober 
thinking to present it habitually in this way (as the 
ghost or abstraction of a factual universe), rather than in 
the a priori fashion which suits the Hegelian method. 

Nevertheless, the Hegelian mode of statement has its 
advantages, if it is not misconstrued. We have seen 
how the Logic is introduced in the Phaenomenology . 
Every cloud of difference interposed between subject arid 
object melts away from the transparent aether of absolute 
knowledge ; and the two sides collapse, as it were, in 
the identical reason that forms their content. This gives 
us the system of pure thought, as it is developed in the 
Logic. Stress is laid with advantage on the system of 
conceptions, as the element of unity in the world that 
which, in Hegel s language, " shuts us together with 
things." The very nature of this chain of abstractions 
precludes, at the same time, any temptation to regard 
it as a real priii* of the world, such as existed in 
the case of the Fichtian Thesis and the Schellingian 
Absolute. It is easy enough to imagine or believe in the 
" existence " of something which is, by definition, without 
predicates ; but it is more difficult to understand what 
separate existence can be attributed to a list of abstract 



Tit? Metaphysical Ground Work. 85 

notions. An additional barrier is thus put in the way of 
transcendent speculation. There is no reality to which 
we can turn save that of Spirit, as immanent End or 
Idea. Then, as for what is said of the system of thought- 
determinations as passing over or projecting itself into 
Nature ; metaphor apart, these phrases merely mean that 
that system is, as everyone can see, in its very notion, an 
abstraction. The conceptions give the element of identity 
in subject and object, without the element of difference ; 
and in determining them as pure thought, we are im 
plicitly relating them to that which is not pure thought, 
or which seems to be non-rational. They call, therefore, 
for their complement and opposite. The same thing 
may be put teleologically from the side of Spirit ; for, 
as Fichte has sufficiently proved, the idea of its life 
involves the notion of an opposition or otherness, out of 
which its identity is perpetually disengaged and restored. 
When presented under the form of a logical evolution, it 
is plain that the first appearance of the other must be as 
pure otherness, or as, in all respects, the opposite of what 
thought is. The further progress of the evolution then 
consists in the assertion of intelligence in its opposite, till, 
in Spirit, as such, the otherness disappears in identity 
but, this time, in a " restored " or concrete identity. This 
is the course followed in the Hegelian exposition ; and it 
may be said to have the merit of throwing into clear 
light the essential nature of Spirit, and of preparing us 
the better to appreciate its life, through the contrast 
with the preliminary incompleteness of pure thought and 
of Nature. 

Such, then, is the outline of the Hegelian philosophy, 
considered as a rounded system of metaphysic. The 
way in which it has been approached from the systems 



The Develop in en t from Kani to JJf>gel. 



that preceded it, has familiarized UB with the general 
atmosphere of thought in which it moves, and has con 
sequently enabled us to dispense with much detail, except 
on the points which differentiate Hegel from Fichte and 
Schelling. This method of presentment may possibly, 
however, have led to an over-emphasis of these points. 
Notwithstanding the somewhat elaborate criticism to 
which the statements of Fichte and Schelling have been 
subjected, it is certain that a reader, meeting without 
comment an account of the three systems, would be more 
struck by their substantial unanimity than by minor 
differences of execution. Indeed, anyone so minded 
might put together a statement out of Fichte, still more 
out of Schelling, which would seem to anticipate all the 
results of Hegel. Doubtless this is due, to some extent, 
to the fact that we read the propositions of Fichte and 
Schelling in the light which Hegel has provided.* At 
the same time, the identity of tenor and of general result 
is not to be under-estimated. When Fichte had dug out 
of Kant his great principle of the nnconditionedness 
or, better, the self-conditionedness of thought, the 
fundamental conception of Idealism was won. Neither 
Schelling nor Hegel relinquished Fichte s position ; 
they merely broadened the sense in which it must be 
taken, and transformed his inode of statement, where it 
seemed to them inadequate or misleading. That these 
modifications were not -unimportant, and that Hegel s 
statement is the ripest and most accurate, I have tried 
in the foregoing pages to show. If a tendency is to be 
judged by its results, then the special formulas and 
methods of Fichte and Schelling may be held condemned 
Cf. Dr. Hutchison Stirling s remarks in this connection. 



Metaphysical Ground Work. 87 



by the serni-relapse of both these philosophers into a 
species of transcendent mysticism. Nevertheless, the 
point of view from which the philosophical problem is 
approached, is the same in all these systems. It may bo 
said to consist in the perception that, since the aim of 
every philosophy is to exhibit the universe as a rationally 
connected system, the principle of philosophy, as such, 
must be reason or thought: The supremacy and all- 
inclusiveness of thought is, in a way, as much the neces 
sary presupposition, as the conclusion, of their systems. 
All three were dowered in no ordinary measure with 
the confidence of reason in itself/ which forbids it 
ever to recognize an ultimate obstacle, or to give up tho 
hope of completely rationalizing the universe, and so 
presenting, what Fichte called, a philosophy in one piece. 
To many this confidence seems pi esumptiou. But it 
ought to be remembered, that it is possible to present the 
idea of absolute knowledge as the necessary completion 
of the philosophical edifice, without making personal 
claims to the possession of omniscience. It is possible 
to see what is involved in the terms under our hands, 
without being able to realize it for ourselves more than 
partially. And the point to be seized is, that between 
knowledge and omniscience the difference is only one of 
degree. Knowledge, as such, is the Absolute ; or, more 
correctly, the Absolute is knowledge formulated in all its 
implications. The philosophy of Hegel, in its triple 
movement, is essentially a translation into universal 
terms of the return upon self which every instance of 
knowledge exemplifies. Beyond this circle we cannot 
step ; and, accordingly, the life of the world appears 
crystallized in Hegel as the visible evolution of such a 
| corporate self or " universal individual." He has striven 



88 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

to present the universe simply and solely as the process 
of intelligence. As far as actual realization goes, the 
system may be patched and imperfect here and there. 
He may have been foiled occasionally by refractory 
matter, and his reading of the process may be at times 
incorrect. But, at least, he may fairly claim that he has 
laid down the lines on which a complete explanation 
must move. The schema he offers may be worked out 
better, but that its outline must remain the same is 
guaranteed by the nature of intelligence. If it is not 
possible for the finite individual to transport himself 
wholly to the specular mount, from which Spirit gains 
clear pro&pect o er its being s whole, still philosophy, 
in the Hegelian sense, is the insight that this standpoint 
alone represents speculative truth the insight, in other 
words, that this Idea is, in the ordo ad univcrsuin, the 
eternally Real. 



PART II. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 



PART II. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 



INTRODUCTORY. 

PHILOSOPHY, as metaphysic, is occupied in determining i 
with increasing accuracy the definitions and the mutual 
relations of the three great objects of thought God, the 
World, and Man. Religion, in its current acceptation, 
implies a certain theory of the nature of at least two of 
these God and man and their relation to one another. 
Philosophy and religion are, therefore, and have always 
been, most intimately connected. From another point of 
view, again, religion, considered as a subjective manifes 
tation, is so universal a mark of human culture, when it 
advances above the lowest stages, that it cannot be left 
unnoticed by any philosophy which pretends to give an 
exhaustive account of man and his relation to the system 
of which he forms a part. Every epoch of culture has 
derived its specific form and colour from its relation to 
certain religious ideas ; difference of civilization means, 
in the main, difference of religious training. In these 
circumstances, it is perhaps not too much to say that 
the capacity of a philosophy to find room for religion in 
its scheme of things, becomes no unfair gauge of the 
adequacy or inadequacy of the system in question. 

In Christian times, the relations of philosophy and 
religion have been mainly determined by the attitude of 
reason towards the churchly doctrine of revelation. Three 



92 Tlifi Development from Kant to Hegel. 

relations of the human reason to the things of God are 
possible. 

(1) It may be said that the content of theology is 
matter communicated by God in an extraordinary fashion 
truths otherwise unattainable, and on which it is beyond 
the competency of reason to sit in judgment. We have 
thus two spheres arbitrarily separated. As regards their 
mutual relation, theology is at first supreme and law- 
giving; reason, as the handmaiden of faith, is occupied 
solely in applying the premises which it receives from the 
hand of theology. These are the Middle Ages, the Ages 
of Faith. Then we have the relation of indifference, 
typically represented by a man like Bacon. When Bacon, 
in his circumnavigation of the intellectual globe, comes to 
theologia sacra, he steers clear of the subject with the 
remark : " If we proceed to treat of it, we must leave 
the bark of human reason and pass into the ship of the 
Church/ Divinity, he says elsewhere, " is founded upon 
the placets of God." " In such there can be no use of 
absolute reason. We see it familiarly in games of wit, 
as chess or the like. The draughts and first laws of tho 
game are positive . . . and not examinable by reason." 
The position is, in words, the same as that of the Middle 
Ages, but it is formulated in a different interest; tho 
irreverent comparison is significant of the secular spirit 
that characterized Bacon and, in a measure, the whole 
Elizabethan generation. But the relation of indifference, 
or of mock subservience (as it is found in Bayle), is neces- 
parily transient ; it merely marks the end of the period of 
unnatural separation. In the long run, reason claims tho 
whole man. It is in virtue of his reason that he is the 
subject of a revelation ; and he is continually being asked 
to exercise bis reason upon parts of the revelation, even 



The Philosophy of RvUgfon. 93 

by those who most sti enuously maintain the severance of 
the two spheres. It is only because there is a certain reason 
and fitness in the conceptions of revealed religion, that he 
has ever made them his own, and that he continues to use 
them, and to find in them some kind of meaning and 
edification. The external relation of reason to religious 
truth cannot, therefore, continue ; nor can the encroach 
ments of reason be stemmed by temporary distinctions 
between the unnatural and the supernatural. 

(2) A natural movement of revulsion carries reason into 
assuming an extreme or purely negative attitude towards 
revealed religion, such as we find exemplified in the 
current of thought which prevailed during last century. 
The dry light of the understanding has here usurped all 
the ground to itself ; and the explanation of the rise of 
positive religions is sought in the hypothesis of deceit, 
ambition, and priestcraft. Religion is identified with 

morality plus an intellectual adherence to certain dogmas 
)of current philosophy the existence of God and the 
immortality of the soul which are dignified with the title 
of Natural Religion. But it was impossible that this 
dry rationalism should survive the moving of the deeper 
springs of feeling, that marked the close of the century. 
The first revival of a sense of historic probability showed 
the untenable nature of an hypothesis, which derived man s 
greatest onward impulse from a hotbed of corruption and 
deceit. But to overcome the abstract opposition of reason 
and revelation, a philosophy was needed which should 
give a wider scope to reason, and a more inward meaning 
to revelation. 

(3) This is the third position, as occupied by the best 
thinkers of the nineteenth century. It cannot be attained 
without the abandonment of the mechanical philosophy, 



94 The Development frpm Kant tu 

and the unhistorical criticism, of the preceding age. So 
long as the Deistic view of God, and of His relations to 
the world and history, held the field, a revelation neces 
sarily meant simply an interference ab extra with the 
established order of things. Deism does not perceive 
that, by separating God from the world and man, it really 
makes Him finite, by setting up alongside of Him a sphere 
to which His relations are transient and accidental. The 
philosopher to whom the individual self and the sensible 
world form the first reality, gradually comes to think of 
this otiose Deity as a more or less ornamental appendage 
to the scheme of things. In France, the century ended 
in Atheism; and in cosmopolitan circles in England and 
Germany, the belief in God had become little more than 
a form of words. But if Individualism is provably 
untenable, all this will be changed. If man himself be 
/ inexplicable, save as sharing in the wider life of a 
> universal reason ; and if the process of history be realized 
(in an intimate sense, and not with a mere formal acknow 
ledgment) as the exponent of a divine purpose; then 
revelation denotes no longer an interference with the 
natural course of that development, but becomes the 
normal method of expressing the relation of the immanent 
spirit of God to the children of men at great crises of 
their fate. The relation is never broken, the inspiration 
is never withdrawn ; but there are times at which its 
nearness is more particularly felt. To these the religious 
sense of mankind, not without a true instinct, tends to 
restrict the term revelation ; and such a turning-point is, 
for us, the advent of Christianity. 

It was Lessing who first flung this fertile idea into the 
soil of modern thought, where it was destined soon to 
bear fruit an hundredfold. In gpite of his own imperfect 



The Philosophy of Religion. 95 

statement (in the Education of the Human Race and else 
where), he may be said to have founded the Philosophy of 
Religion, in the sense in which it is now understood. 
Lessing and Kant stand together in Germany, closing 
the old age and opening the new. Every epoch-making 
mind has two sides. Like Janus, it looks two ways ; one 
face is turned to the past, the other to the future. No 
one can read Kant intelligently without perceiving two 
tendencies that strive for the mastery. In Lessing the 
conflict between the old and the new is still more painful, 
and communicates an element of unrest to his whole 
life. When he is brought in contact with the manuscripts 
of Reimarus, the unmitigated representative of the 
eighteenth century, he is driven by a kind of revulsion 
to elaborate grounds for the defence of the idea of reve 
lation, and even of certain dogmas of the Christian faith. 
But it was after all a tour de force ; and when he was left 
alone, without the stimulus of opposition, he was apt to 
become once more a man of the Enlightenment like those 
around him. But he never attained their self-com 
placency. In his life-time he gained only the distrust of 
both parties ; now we can sympathize with his struggles, 
and recognize in him the pioneer of a new time. This 
indication of his position and influence must be enough 
in a sketch like the present, which does not aim at going 
beyond the limits fixed by the two names, Kant and 
Hegel. We {ass, therefore, without further preface, to 
consider the treatment which religion receives at the 
hands of Kant. 



96 The Development from Kant to 



CHAPTER I. 

THE KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

THE foundation of the Kantian philosophy in ethics 
has been already pointed out. This being so, it is 
naturally only in connection with Kant s ethical theory 
that his Philosophy of Religion can be understood. The 
immediate consciousness of the moral law introduces us 
to a world of realities, from which, according to Kant, the 
categories and forms of our own thought exclude us in 
the sensible sphere. It is quite possible to accept the gist 
of Kant s position here, and at the same time to hold that 
we know all the reality of the sensible world that there is 
to know. There is no need to adopt Kant s mystification 
about things in themselves, as different from the things 
that are known ; but he is right in saying that the world 
of sense is not noumenal, if by noumenon be understood 
the notion of that which can be an end-in- itself. The 
sensible world is essentially phenomenon ; it exists for 
reason and as a means to rational consciousness. If it 
were possible to think of Nature out of that reference, it 
would be seen to be destitute of anything that could 
fairly be deemed to confer permanent value upon it. Its 
forms might flit for ever across the inane, without the 
suggestion of any end which they were there to realize, 
and which reason must pronounce as worthy, in its own 
self, of being realized. Without such an end-in-itself, 
existence is, literally, to the speculative mind a vain show. 
Philosophy may be intelligibly defined, from this point of 
view, as the search for the supreme end, which shall serve, 
as it were, to justify existence something in the contem- 



Tfie Philosophy of Religion. 97 

plation of which a rational being may find complete and 
permanent satisfaction, and to the advancement of which 
he may unquestioningly subordinate his individual efforts. 
The phenomenalness of the sensible world may be taken 
to mean simply that it does not supply to reason such 
an end. All the forms of its life are ends only in a 
relative sense ; they have their true end outside of them 
selves. It is evident that, in this sense, there can be no 
more than one noumenon. The notion of end-in-itself 
implies that whatever is so designated receives its title 
because all other ends, relatively so-called, hold their 
significance in fee from it, and because there is nothing 
beyond itself with which it can be compared, or to which 
it can be subordinated. The idea of a plurality of ends- 
in-themselves may, at most, be employed, with a certain 
laxity, as indicating the variety of aims which are reduced 
to unity in the one central conception. Nor can there 
be any doubt where this one noumenon is to be found ; 
reason or the rational being alone does not require to go 
outside of itself to seek its end. If it did, we should bo 
embarked upon a hopeless progressus in infinitum, and 
must despair of any answer to the question what is good 
in itself what is the good ? But reason is self-centred, 
and fixes its own end. Even in such a progressus, the 
objects of pursuit would be, to all eternity, such as reason 
dictated to itself as worthy of attainment. Sooner or 
later the acknowledgment is forced from us, that reason 
must itself be dominant in all its ends, and that it is 
impossible to cast off this sway. For reason, in other 
words, the supreme end, of which all the rest are only 
specific determinations, must be the realization of its own 
nature. Reason, therefore, or the rational being, as 
rational, is the sole noumenon or end-in-iiself. 

7 



98 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

This may be described, without misrepresentation, as 
the permanent result of the Kantian Ethics ; and it is 
essentially, from another side, the same as the result of 
the Critique of Knowledge. Just as the source of the 
categories cannot be brought under the categories, so the 
source of all ends cannot itself be subordinated to any of 
the ends it sets up. The pure Ego cannot be compassed 
by any of its lower forms ; " it must be thought through 
itself and all other things through it." So here the 
ultimate, satisfying good of reason must be reason itself. 
In both cases, the subject is recognized as raised above 
the sphere of things as determining; not determined. 
Man bears in his own person the last principle of explana 
tion, whether in a theoretical or in a practical regard. The 
value of Kant s result, however, depends on the interpre 
tation put upon reason, and on the relation in which 
reason is supposed to stand to the worlds of knowledge 
and action. The fruitf ulncss of the principle is impaired, 
in Kant s own system, by the purely formal or abstract 
way in which it is taken. This makes it impossible for 
him to deduce either a real world, or a concrete system 
of duties. In the pure reason, the unity of apperception 
remains a form into which matter is poured from another 
source ; in ethics, similarly, the result must be an impera 
tive that commands nothing in particular, unless reason is 
seen to have creatively specified itself in the historical life 
and institutions of the world. 

Kant s ethical position, however, must be put in a 
clearer light, to be properly understood. " An intelli 
gence," he says, " has this prerogative over all other 
beings, that he fixes his end for himself."* Naiure is 

* Werkf, ir. 285. " Die verniinftige Natur " is Kant s phrase 
here. 



The Philosophy of Religion. 99 

governed by mechanical, chemical and biological laws, 
which it fulfils without knowing them. The animal has 
its ends fixed for it by recurring instinct, and, of itself, it 
does not move out of the beaten circle of these natural 
impulses. The mark of a rational being is that it is 
raised above the government of a succession of impulses. , 
Intelligence consists in the power of realizing mentally; 
a general law or principle, and will is the power of 
determining action accordingly. By the possession of 
these twin faculties, man is differentiated from the brute. 
Will, freedom, personality in its most intimate sense, 
are all contained in the initial self-determination. It 
introduces us, in short, to the knowledge of good and 
evil, and makes us the subjects of another legislation, quite 
different from the natural. Intelligence has not been 
given to man merely to enable him to satisfy his animal 
desires more copiously and exquisitely ; happiness is, in 
fact, far more effectually secured under the guidance of 
instinct than under that of reason. The possession of 
reason intimates another and a higher purpose to be 
realized in human life. With the transference of the reins 
from the hands of nature to our own, comes also the 
responsibility for the course of the driving. A beast 
fulfils its instincts, and is blameless ; man, enlightened 
by consciousness, often abuses them. It is of the essence 
of reason to generate the conception of "ought." 
Morality is founded on this unique conception ; and a 
moral or an immoral life becomes at once possible, 
according as we do, or do not, make its " objective law " 
the subjective law or determinator of our will. The 
relation between the law which reason lays down, and 
our subjective freedom to follow the law or to swerve 
from it, is the subject-matter of morality ; the idea of 

7 * 



100 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

obligation which the relation contains, is formulated by 
Kant in the Categorical Imperative.* 

In accordance with his usual custom, Kant proceeds to 
consider how such a command is possible whence it 
derives its indisputable authority. He finds the explana 
tion in a view of reason such as has been already 
indicated. The law is binding upon all rational beings, 
because it is reason s own law. The aspect of the law 
as a command expressing necessitation is due to the 
fact that we are not purely rational. We have a 
sensitive nature, and are swayed by sensitive deter 
minants ; hence our will is not holy, or in perfect 
conformity to the law. Nevertheless, it is not a foreign 
yoke that is imposed upon us ; we are subject to our own 
legislation. Man as noumenon, or purely rational being, 
gives the law ; man as phenomenon receives it. This is 
the principle of the Autonomy of the Will, by which 
Kant may be said to have solved the question of obliga 
tion. As long as the authority imposing the law is 
separated from the consciousness to which it appeals, its 
right to command may be called in question. The law 
must be such in its conception that every man may be, 
as it were, thrust back on himself, so as to recognize 
in it his own law. The moral Sollen is his necessary 

* It is important to remark that the Categorical Imperative 
is simply the scientific formulation of the universal recognition, 
in some shape or other, of an " ought " and an " ought-not ;" to 
which is added,,in the Kantian Ethics, an account of the conditions 
under which alone such a universally binding command is possible. 
The history of the evolution of the conception of right, with its 
meaning always gaining in purity and complexity, is, therefore, 
quite beside the question investigated by Kant. The possibility of 
the occurrence of a moral action, and, consequently, the possibility 
of Ethics as a science, depends on the existence of such a notion, 
whether the form it assumes be adequate or not. 



The Philosophy of Religion. 101 

Wollen as member of an intelligible world, that is, as a will 
capable of abstracting from the particular determinants 
of sense. The notion of such an absolute law is plainly, 
from another side, the same notion as that of an absolute 
End by which all action must be conditioned. The 
authority of the law springs, on this view, from the fact 
that it enjoins the realization of what we recognize as 
our permanent and essential self. The position is, in 
ethics, the same as that of the self-conditionedness of 
thought in speculation. The End which intelligence 
fixes for itself cannot be, Kant says, a material end 
to be achieved; for in that case the will would be 
determined by something beyond itself. It must be an 
independent end (ein selbststandiger Zweck) ; and " this 
can be nothing else than the Subject of all ends itself."* 
Or, as he says elsewhere, " humanity, as objective End, 
ought to form, as law, the supreme limiting condition of 
all subjective ends."f 

Such, then, is the foundation, and probably the mosty 
valuable part, of Kant s ethical construction. The Cate 
gorical Imperative, or the pure form of universally 
obligatory law, is " the sole fact of pure reason."^ The 
rationale of the possibility of such a command is found in 
the idea of reason or the rational will as self-legislative, 
and so laying down a law which every rational being 
must recognize. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysic 
of Ethics, Kant talks of deducing from this single 
Imperative " all the imperatives of duty." It cannot be 
said, however, that he has succeeded in connecting his 
scheme of duties with his central principle. If he had 

* Werke, iv. 285. In the idea of a good will we must abstract, 
he says, " von allem zu bewirkenden Zwecke." 

t Ibid. iv. 279. 

* Ibid. v. 33, Das einsige Factum dcr rein en Vernunft. 



102 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

paid more attention to the idea of reason as End, and so 
the source of the matter as well as the form of its action, 
it might have been possible to bring the particular and 
the universal more effectively together. But this would 
have meant virtually that reconsideration of the nature of 
the universal Self and its relations to the world, which we 
everywhere miss in Kant, and which even in his ethical 
scheme remains fragmentary. The disjunction of the 
universal Self from the phenomenal world in this instance, 
from the historical world of institutions and customs is 
the source of the formalism which succeeding critics have 
BO copiously blamed in the Kantian Ethics. The notion of 
End remains for Kant strictly convertible with the pure 
form of law. Hence he describes it, in the passages 
quoted above, as " limiting " condition as an End which 
" must be thought negatively, that is, counter to which 
we must not act." This is quite of a piece with his 
unsatisfactory method of exemplifying his formula by 
taking up particular laws empirically, and testing them 
by comparison with its limiting condition. An absolute 
End, however, cannot be reached by abstracting from all 
real ends ; it can be got at only by showing all real ends to 
be included in one conception. And if the notion of a 
universal or noumenal Self is to acquire positive content, 
it must not bo separated from the reason that is in the 
world. Apart from the definite forms of that development, 
the Self is no more than an abstract point of unity. It 
was the impossibility of finding a real End in his abstract 
notion of the rational Self, that made Kant round off his 
ethical system with a conception of the summum bonum 
which is essentially Endaemonistic in character. 

It was through the implications of the Categorical Im- 



The. Philosophy of Religion. 103 

perative that Kant reached the completed theory of the 
world, which he found denied him in the theoretical 
reason. These implications are what he called the Postu 
lates of the Practical Reason ; and they correspond to the 
three Ideas which he designates in the Critique of Pure 
Reason as the proper object of metaphysical inquiry 
God, Freedom and Immortality. The noumenal, and 
therefore unending, existence of the soul ; the possibility 
of a reconciliation between the idea of free causation and 
the completely determined series of conditions demanded 
by reason in accounting for a phenomenon ; and the 
reality of the idea of God, are the questions treated by 
Kant in the Dialectic under the heads of Psychology, 
Cosmology and Theology respectively. In the field of 
pure reason, the Idea of the Ego as noumenal unity, and 
the Idea of God as " the supreme and necessary unity on 
which all empirical reality is based," are simply points of 
view (Gesichtspunkte), by which reason introduces unity 
of system into its experiences. They are " regulative 
principles " or " formal rules " in the process of organizing 
experience ; we proceed as if all the phenomena of the 
internal sense were unified in one unchanging subject, 
and as if all phenomena, subjective and objective, were 
grounded in " one all-embracing Being as their supreme 
and all-sufficient cause." Similarly, we proceed in Cos 
mology according to the regulative Idea of the World as 
an infinite series of necessary causation ; but the possi 
bility is still left open of the existence of an intelligible 
or noumenal freedom alongside of this phenomenal 
determination, should such a conception be imperatively 
demanded on other grounds. The demand comes from 
the side of Ethics. Freedom, Immortality, and the 
Existence of God are involved, Kant maintains, in the 



10-i The Development from Kant to lleycl. 

unconditional Imperative of the moral law. They are 
the conditions requisite for the observance of its com 
mand ; and they lose, therefore at least, so far as the 
practical reason is concerned their merely regulative 
character. They become objects of rational belief (Ver- 
nunftglaube). It is true that, just because the Postulates 
are reached on ethical grounds, they are not to be treated 
as theoretical dogmata. "Moral theology," ho says, 
" is only of immanent use, namely with reference to the 
fulfilment of our destiny here in the world." Indeed, 
to treat the Postulates as scientific facts would be to try 
to defeat the very object of reason in leaving us in this 
comparative twilight; it would make a disinterested 
moral will impossible. But none the less does this 
" moral belief " or " moral certainty " represent Kant s 
definitive notion of the intelligible unity of the world. 

The first of the Postulates to be deduced is that of 
Freedom. It is treated, indeed, by Kant less as a 
Postulate than as a fact ; he calls it the one Idea of pure 
reason whose object is a fact to be reckoned among 
scibilia.* It is immediately deducible from the primary 
fact of the moral law. The Imperative is an absolute 
" Thou shalt;" and, in such a case, if the command is not 
to be quite meaningless, " We can, because we ought." 
Morality and Freedom thus reciprocally condition one 
another ; the moral law is the ratio cognosccndi of 
Freedom, while Freedom is the ratio essendi, or the 
condition of the possibility, of the moral law. Hence, 
in spite of the inevitable determination of every event 
in the phenomenal sphere by antecedent events, Kant 
maintains the perfect freedom of the will, in each case 
of action, to choose between obedience and disobedience 
* Werl-e, v. 483. 



The Philosophy of Religion. 105 

to the law. Phenomenal antecedents can furnish no 
excuse for disobedience, for time does not enter into the 
conception of the immediate relation which exists between 
the will and the moral law. Though all a man s past / 
actions have been bad, yet every fresh act of volition is) 
an absolutely new beginning, in which he has a perfectly I 
free choice between good and evil. He is conscious that 
he might have annulled the whole evil past, and acted 
morally, even while the actual immoral action which 
results is seen to flow with strict necessity from his 
phenomenal character, as revealed in his previous 
actions.* The second Postulate is the Immortality of 

* It is no part of my present purpose to trace the difficulties in 
which Kant s conception of Freedom involves him. By way of 
explaining the last statement, Kant says : " A rational being may 
rightly say of every illegal act he perpetrates, that he could have 
left it undone, although, as phenomenon, it is sufficiently deter 
mined by the past, and so far infallibly necessary ; for Ihe act, with 
all the past that determines it, belongs to a single phenomenal 
character with which he endows himself (einem einzigen Phanomen 
seines Charakters, den er sich selbst verschaflft), and by force 
of M hich he imputes to himself, as a cause independent of 
every sensuous determinant, the causality of those phenomena." 
Similarly Kant speaks of the empirical character as the " sensuous 
schema " of the intelligible. It seems from such passages as if, 
in each individual action, the agent were simply re-affirming 1 the 
original act by which he took that intelligible character to himself. 
This is how the matter appears when it is thought out by Schelling. 
Freedom is placed in an original " timeless " act, which contains 
the seeds of all determination in itself. The letter of Kant leads 
directly to such a theory, as well as to the further application 
of the same idea by Schopenhauer to his doctrine of a blind or 
unconscious Will. Taken as science, Kant s theory of intelligible 
freedom seems to me untenable. There is no such separation 
between the phenomenal and the noumenal as he supposes, and if 
man is not free phenomenally, he is not free at all. In separating 
the man from his "character" intelligible or phenomenal an 
unwarrantable abstraction is involved ; Kant seems to be in quest 



106 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

the Soul. The law demands complete conformity with 
itself; it is to be the sole determinator of the will. In 
a being sensitive as well as rational, this conformity is 
never more than partial. Nevertheless, whatever the 
Imperative demands must be possible ; if a holy will is 
not possible in humanity as a present achievement, it 
must be realizable under the form of an infinite progress 
or continual approximation to the idea of holiness. In this 
way the ethical Imperative guarantees to us an immortality 
in which to work out its behest. But the mere subjection 
of the will to the form of law represents only one side of 
our nature. Man has a phenomenal or sensitive nature, 
which cannot and ought not to be wholly left out of 
account. Subject to the supreme condition of conformity 
to the moral law worthiness man, as a sensitive being, 
asks for Happiness, and figures to himself the summum 
bonum as the combination of Virtue with Happiness. 
Now the moral law simply commands the sacrifice of all 
subjective desires or inclinations when duty calls ; it does 
not provide for the making good to the man of the 
possible, and even probable, loss of happiness which 

of the phantasmal freedom which is supposed to consist in the 
absence of determination by motives. The error of the Deter- 
minists from which this idea is the recoil, involves an equal 
abstraction of the man from his thoughts, and interprets the 
relation between the two as an instance of the mechanical causality 
which exists between two things in nature. The point to be 
grasped in the controversy is that a man and his motives are one, 
and that, consequently, he is in every instance self-determined. 
In reference to the Kantian position, it may be said that, inasmuch 
as the moral law is a permanent motive recognizable as his " proper 
self," a rational being must in every act acknowledge his " respon 
sibility " to follow after, if haply he may attain to, this idea of his 
destiny. The presence of this moral ideal in man as man, and its 
infinitely regenerative power in breaking the yoke of the past, are 
all the farts that I can see to be contained in Kant s statements. 



The Philosophy of Religion. 107 

he may sustain. There is thus a breach between the 
consciousness of moral integrity and the happiness which 
consists in the satisfaction of ineradicable and harmless 
subjective desires. The consciousness of rectitude is in 
itself bare ; it is only by a figure of speech that the 
possession of the mens conscia sibi recti can be identified 
with perfect happiness. Worthiness to be happy is, of 
course, in an ethical legislation the first requisite ; but 
the perfect moral world for whose realization man works, 
and in whose ultimate existence he believes, is one in 
which Happiness shall be the necessary consequence of 
moral desert.* This proportionality, however, is not 
realized in the present state of separation between the 
ethical will of the individual and the sway of mechanical 
causality in nature. The causal determination of nature 
by our will is regulated, as to the measure of its success, 
" not by the moral disposition of the will, but by the 
knowledge of the laws of nature and the physical power of 
using them in furtherance of our aims."f The ultimate 
equation of the two sides, which reason in its practical 
function declares to be a " moral necessity," is impossible 
without presupposing the existence of God, as an Author 
of nature, whose causality is regulated by a regard to 
the moral disposition of His creatures. This, then, is 
the third and final Postulate, which completes the edifice 
of Kant s Ethical Theology. In other words, the idea 
of a perfect ethical legislation, which is contained in 
the Categorical Imperative, carries with it the idea of an 

* Happiness (Gliickseligkcit), it may be noted, is defined by, 
Kant as "the satisfaction of all our inclinations (Neigungen) ; 
extensively, as regards their multiplicity ; intensively, as regards 
their degree ; and protensively, as regards their duration." Werke, 
iii. 532. 

f Ibid. v. 119. 



108 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

ultimate harmony between the sensible sphere and the 
practical ends of reason. The moral law, though in itself 
without promise of Happiness, imposes upon us the 
realization of this highest good as " the last object of all 
conduct/ But the actual attainment of this object or 
end is impossible without the independent existence of 
the idea in God, as the union of moral perfection with 
perfect blessedness. God, as " the highest original Good," 
is to Kant the cause of the ultimate adjustment of perfect 
happiness to perfect virtue in the world, and so the 
necessary condition of the summum bonum.* 

Erdmann points out that all the three Critiques close 
with Ethico-theology, or the system of rational belief 
contained in the Postulates of the moral reason. It is 
Kant s substitute for the Rational Theology or dogmatic 

. metaphysic of the schools which he demolished. It is in 
the last analysis a system of ethical teleology, and it 

/ represents, as already remarked, Kant s final notion of 
the unity and government of the world. Criticism may 
be deferred till after consideration of the Kantian Philo 
sophy of Religion, which stands in the most intimate 
connection with the ethical scheme just developed. 

Kant has not left us to gather his Philosophy of 
Religion inferentially from stray references. He has 

* Kant distinguishes between the existence of God, as the 
highest "independent" or "original" Good and the summum 
bonum as " the highest possible Good in a world," or " the deduced 
highest Good." Cf. Werke, iii. 535, v. 135, 138. Speculatively, 
the distinction may be said to be, in one aspect, the same as that 
already drawn between the Idea as real and the same Idea as a 
process of realization in time. But the two are not connected 
in this intimate way by Kant. God is simply cause, and, as- 
such, remains a pure abstraction or deus er marhina. 



The Philosophy of Religion. 109 

expounded his view of the necessary content of true 
religion in a separate work, which, from the place it 
occupies in the development of the German Religions- 
philosophic, has a fair claim to rank, in importance, 
alongside of the three Critiques. This is the Religion 
within the Limits of Mere Reason.* The exposition of 
the doctrines of true or absolute religion necessarily 
implies an account of the relation in which the different 
positive religions of the world stand to this pure religious 
truth. Kant s view of the function of positive religion, 
and his interpretation, in this connection, of the leading 
Christian doctrines form, indeed, the most interesting 
and important part of the book. The language in which 
he expresses his ethico-religious positions is moulded / 
throughout by a reference to the scheme of doctrines 
which the Christian Church has founded upon its sacred 
writings. 

In the Preface, Kant indicates the relation which he ( 
conceives to exist between religion and morality. 
Morality, he says, leads necessarily to religion, the point 
of contact between the two being the notion of the 
siimmum bonum, and of the moral Ruler who realizes it. 
We have seen that the End must not determine the 
will. Nevertheless, there can be no ethical action without 
the notion of some result flowing from our rectitude; 
and, in a completed theory of the issues of life, such as 
religion uniformly professes to give, the notion of the End 
or final cause of all things necessarily comes to the front. f 
The content of philosophical theology and of ethics is, 

* Die Religion innerhalb der G-renzen der blossen Yernunft. 
Wcrke, vi. 95-301. 

t This ethical Idea is here called broadly the " Endzweck aller 
Dinge," and Kant presents it as the only means of combining 
the reference to end which is the basis of freedom with a teleo- 



110 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

in fact, the same ; but the latter deals with the ethical 
consciousness, as such, and its foundation in the Cate 
gorical Imperative ; the former religion, as intellectually 
formulated in philosophical theology presupposes this 
consciousness, and concentrates its attention on the 
metaphysical implications of morality, as the practical 
reason reveals them in its Postulates. However, in spite 
of this difference of attitude, the whole aim of "religion 
proper," according to Kant, is moral or practical, and 
this must never be lost sight of in expounding it. We 
know nothing of the nature of God, for example, except 
so far as His attributes (and His actions) bear upon our 
conduct. Kant s religion, therefore, is his ethic writ 
large ; but it is morality not so much from the point of 

I view of the individual consciousness, as of the divine 
ethical system of which the individual recognizes himself 

( to be a part. This recognition, with all that it may be found 
to imply, constitutes the distinctive mark of the religious, 
as opposed to the purely ethical, consciousness ; so that 
Kant s theory of religion is often summed up correctly, 
perhaps, but somewhat baldly in the statement that 
religion is the recognition and discharge of duty as the 
will of God. 

The first section of the book places Kant at once in 
striking opposition to the easy-going optimism character 
istic of the eighteenth century, and of the general 
movement known as the Illumination or Enlightenment. 
It is entitled " Of the indwelling of the evil principle 
side by side with the good, or on the radical evil in human 

logical view of Nature. It is characteristic of Kant that, two pages 
further on, he treats the necessity of the idea as a species of con 
descension to the " unavoidable limitations of man and his faculty 
of practical reason." 



The Philosophy of Religion. Ill 

nature." Kant begins by balancing against one another 
two opposing theories of human nature and history. The 
first asserts that the world lies in wickedness, and is 
going from bad to worse ; the second which he calls the 
" heroic " sees in the course of history a continuous 
amelioration, due to the natural development of the 
healthy instinct of humanity. Kant proposes to mediate 
between these conflicting hypotheses, by showing that 
man is by nature partly good and partly bad. First, he 
explains what he means by his terms. A man s moral 
quality depends, as Aristotle can tell us, not on the 
quality of his actions taken in themselves, but on the 
nature of the intentions which may be reasonably inferred 
from the actions. In the Kantian phraseology, a man is 
bad when the maxims according to which he guides his 
conduct are bad. Now the cause of evil, if the man is to 
be responsible for it (and responsibility belongs to the 
very notion of moral evil), must lie in the man himself. 
In saying that a man is bad by nature, therefore, there 
can be no talk of shifting the blame from man s own 
shoulders, and laying it upon some inevitable bias. In 
discussing moral questions we never leave the ground^ 
of freedom. The cause of the evil must lie in the free 
adoption of a fundamental maxim or principle of volition. 
The ground or motive of such a choice remains of course 
inexplicable, for we cannot go back upon a free act. But 
the point to be borne in mind is, that the bias, if it 
should be proved to exist, must be first communicated to 
the will by an act of freedom. At the same time, if the 
adoption of a certain maxim as an underlying principle 
of ethical choice is found to be a universal characteristic 
of mankind, the ground of the adoption of this maxim 
and, with it, the good or evil that it may contain may 



112 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

fairly be said to be innate in human nature. It is innate 
in the sense that the will must be conceived to have 
given itself this bias before any opportunity arises for 
employing its freedom within experience. This " first 
subjective ground " may, therefore, be called by the more 
familiar term "disposition" (Gesinnung) ; and, though 
itself freely adopted, it must plainly have determining 
influence upon the whole series of our actions in time. 

Should the disposition of humanity as such, therefore, 
exhibit a " propensity to evil " (Hang zum Bosen), that 
propensity would deserve to be called natural, even though 
it must be held to consist, as has been explained, and as 
Kant repeats, simply " in the subjective ground of the 
possibility of deviation from the maxims of the moral 
law." The deflection of the will from the law must be 
due to the fact that the will has taken to itself another 
maxim, which runs directly counter to the primary maxim 
of implicit obedience ; and this causes a permanent inca 
pacity to make the moral law the consistent maxim of 
conduct an incapacity which may fitly be called, Kant 
says, in the phraseology of Scripture, " the evil heart." 
Now the adoption of this evil heart has been described as 
our own act ; yet it has been as emphatically declared to 
precede all acts. The word " act," therefore, must be taken 
here in two different senses ; and Kant proceeds to explain 
that the origin of the propensity to evil, as the formal 
condition of all the immoral acts of experience, must be 
an ft intelligible act, cognizublu only through reason with 
out any condition of time." It is just as impossible to 
assign a cause for this corruption of the supreme maxim 
of volition, as for any fundamental property of our nature; 
but it may fairly be called, again in the language of the 
Church, an act of original sin (peccatum originarium). 



The PJiilosophy of Religion. 113 

The question of the origin of evil in the human heart is 
manifestly not a question of origin in time ; time has 
nothing to do with the notion of the will or of a moral 
change. It is, indeed, a contradiction in terms to seek 
for the cause in time of a free action, in the same way as 
search is made for the cause of an event in nature. The 
cause of an ethical change must be ethical, and must lie, 
accordingly, simply and solely in the will itself. The 
question is confined, therefore, to the rational origin 
(Vernunftursprung) of the morally bad. That is to say, 
the existence of evil is taken simply as a fact, without 
any reference to time ; and what is sought is the rational 
bond necessary for the thought-connection of this state 
of the human will with the normal (and therefore logically 
prior) state of complete conformity to the moral law. 
Ethically, the passage from the one state to the other, 
as taking place within the will, must necessarily appear 
as an immediate transition. Man is viewed as passing 
directly from a state of innocence to the commission of 
a morally bad action; and, from the ethical standpoint, 
every instance of the morally bad is such a lapse. The 
moral law judges every action as an original use of 
freedom, and finds no excuse for a man in the evil of his 
past, even though it may have become to him, as we say, 
a second nature. This " intelligible " departure from the 
perfect law is represented in Scripture as the Fall of 
man. As a strictly ethical fact, it is independent of con 
siderations of time ; it may be conceived as taking place 
in every immoral act, or, as universally characteristic of 
humanity, it may be conceived as taking place once for 
all. " In Adam all have sinned." The account in 
Genesis, when stripped of its narrative form, agrees, 
according to Kant, in all particulars with the ethical 

3 



114 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

analysis. Even in the detail of the serpent, as a spirit 
tempting humanity to sin, we may see expressed the 
ultimate inexplicability of the origin of evil in a creature 
whose original nature is good. 

Kant thus, in mediating between the two views of 
human nature mentioned at the outset, asserts the 
existence of a radical evil in man. The presence of 
evil consists in the fact that man, though conscious of 
an obligatory law, has yet adopted as maxim of conduct 
the occasional deviation from the same. Its ground is 
not to be sought in the sensitive nature of man, and the 
natural impulses of which that is the root. These have 
in themselves no direct connection with evil, and we are 
moreover not responsible for their existence in us.* Nor 
can it be found in a corruption of the ethically legislative 
reason. Such a corruption would reduce man to a com 
pletely devilish condition. No man, however, can com 
pletely throw off allegiance to the moral law ; it belongs 
to his essence, and refuses to be silenced. The solution 
of the problem of evil must be sought in the relation 
between the rational and the sensitive nature of man. 
The moral law would rule absolutely in his conduct, were 
it not that the sensitive nature (in itself harmless) supplies 
him with other and non-moral incitements to action. The 
evil heart consists in the reversal of the ethical order of 
precedence which subsists between these two classes of 
motives. The man who subordinates the pure motive of 
ethical obedience to " the motives of inclination" which 
may be grouped under the general name of Happiness 

* It is not with flesh and blood, as Kant says, that we have to 
fight, but against principalities and powers ; that is, according to 
his exegesis, against the unseen might of a maxim that infects all 
our willing. 



Th c Ph ilosophy of Re I ig ion . 115 

is, in his intelligible character, bad, even though his 
empirical character, as it appears in his actions, may be 
blameless. The tacit adoption of a maxim of occasional 
deviation from the law in the interest of personal desires, 
is the root of all evil. " This evil is radical, because it 
corrupts the ground of all maxims. Moreover, as natural 
propensity, it cannpt be eradicated ; for that could only 
be done by means of good maxims, and inasmuch as the 
supreme subjective ground of all maxims is ex hypothesi 
corrupt, their adoption becomes impossible."* 

" Nevertheless," Kant continues, " it must be possible 
to gain the mastery over it, seeing that it is found in 
man as a freely acting being." This is the question v 
which next emerges. How is a man who is thus by ( 
nature evil to make himself good ? Whatever a man is 
morally, or is to become, must be his own work ; yet | 
how can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit ? It is 
something that passes our power of comprehension ; but \ 
it must be possible, for the moral law commands its 
performance. The tree, happily, is not wholly corrupt ; 
otherwise the task would be impossible. The moral law 
remains with us, and the susceptibility to ethical ideas 
which it implies is indestructible. What has to be done 
is to restore the law to the place of supremacy among 
motives of action which rightfully belongs to it. But 
the restoration, as we have seen, cannot be effected 
by any gradual process of amelioration. The supreme 
subjective ground of all maxims must be changed, or, in 
other words, the man must be renewed in the spirit of 
his mind. The passage from corruption to purity of 
moral maxim implies a revolution as radical as that of the 

* Wrrke, vi. 131. 

8 * 



110 The Development from Kant to Ilegcl. 

original act of sin ; by a single unalterable resolve, the 
man must undo what was then done. The subject who 
has effected this revolution within himself, is ethically a 
new creature, and is accepted before God from that 
moment as good and well-pleasing in His sight. The 
change is likened in Scripture to a change of heart or a , 
new birth. From such a point moral -education must set 
out ; for all possibility of progress lies in the fundamental, 
if often only half-acknowledged, principle of action which 
is then adopted. It is vain to enforce upon a man the 
performance of special duties, so long as he is not, as it 
were, born again ; the ground slips like sand from under 
our feet. Insight into the possibility of this restoration 
is no more attainable here than in any other case where 
the moral imperative seems to conflict with the deter 
mination of events by their antecedents. But that does 
not affect its real possibility. The principle of the 
natural depravity of the human will is not to be used dog 
matically, so as to exclude the possibility of a regenera 
tion. Its ethical function is simply to forewarn us that 
all is not right as things stand that the state of nature, 
though it may often appear very harmless, is yet, 
from the point of view of ethics, bad. A dogmatic 
assertion of the futility of effort would, on the contrary, 
nip the moral life in the bud. In any case, even though 
the change of heart should be impossible without " higher 
co-operation," all true religion teaches that only he who 
has done all that is in his power he who has not buried 
his talent will be the subject of this divine grace. "It is 
not necessary, therefore, for anyone to know what God 
does for his salvation ; it is essential for him to know 
what he himself has to do, in order to become worthy of 
this assistance." 



The Philosophy of Religion. 117 

The struggle between the original good in man, as 
represented by the moral law, and his present evil 
disposition, forms the subject of the secorid^section of 
the book. Kant entitles it " Of the struggle of the good 
principle with the evil for the dominion over man." The 
Christian Scriptures represent " this intelligible moral 
relation " of two principles in man as persons or powers 
outside of him, contending for the exclusive sovereignty 
over him. The evil spirit appears, in virtue of the Fall, 
as the prince of this world. But in the midst of the 
kingdom of darkness, the Jewish theocracy stood as a 
memorial of " the indefeasible right of the first pro 
prietor/ Among the Jewish people in the fulness of 
time appeared a Person who, according to the belief of 
his followers, announced himself as true man, and yet, 
at the same time, as one whose original innocence was 
unaffected by the compact which the rest of mankind 
had made, in the person of its first forefather, with the 
evil principle. " The prince of this world . . . hath 
nothing in me." By a resolute resistance to temptation, 
he declared war to the death against the evil principle 
and all its works. In its physical aspect, the strife could 
not end otherwise than in the death of him who thus 
attacked a kingdom in arms. But his death is itself the 
culminating " presentment of the good principle, that is, 
of humanity in its moral perfection, as example for the 
imitation of everyone." The kingdom of darkness exists 
still, but its power was broken by the example of that 
death. a To them that believe in his name/ that is, 
Kant interprets, to those who, upborne by his example, 
realize in themselves the same triumph over the assaults 
of evil, the transgressions of the past have no longer any 
terror. A new life has begun within them, and the 



118 The Development from Kant to IlegcL 

fetters of the old have been struck off. Power has been 
given them to become the sons of God. 

According to Kant, we have only to strip this account 
of its " mystic husk," in order to recognixe in it an 
ethical content valid and obligatory for all time. It 
remains, then, to see his interpretation of its " spirit 
and rational meaning." In the first place, without any 
disparagement of its possible historical truth, the narra 
tive form disappears, as such, in a statement of moral 
relations. " The good principle did not descend merely 
at a certain time, but from the origin of the human race 
it has descended from heaven in invisible fashion upon 
humanity." Of this the presence of a perfectly holy 
moral ideal in man alongside of his sensitive nature is 
sufficient proof. Humanity or, more widely, rational 
existence in its moral perfection, Kant here declares 
without reservation to be the only thing that can make a 
world the object of the divine decree and the End of 
creation. This Idea of a perfect humanity was in th^e 
beginning with Cod, and through it, or for the sake of its 
realization, all things were made that were made. It is, in 
short, the only begotten Son in whom God is well pleased. 
To this ideal and prototype of humanity it is our duty to 
raise ourselves; and for this the Idea itself gives us 
strength, being present within us, as if it had descended 
from heaven. There is no objection to saying that the 
ideal is necessarily personified by us in a man, such as is 
represented in the Gospel history ; but, in a practical 
regard, the reality of the idea is independent of its exem 
plification. The prototpye of an example must always be 
sought in our own reason. " Its presence there," Kant 
adds, " is in itself sufficiently incomprehensible, without 
supposing it hypostatizcd besides in a particular man." At 



The Philosophy of Religion. 119 

the same time, such a divinely-minded Teacher, if he did 
appear, would be able to speak of himself with truth, as if 
the ideal of the good were actually manifested by him ; for 
he would speak, in such expressions, only of the spirit 
which ruled his actions. It is of the mind which was 
in Christ Jesus, and which ought also to be in us, that 
account must be taken. The spirit of such a life that 
is to say, ideal humanity, whether realized in a definite 
individual or not isacomplete satisfaction, in the eyes 
of supreme justice, for all men at all times and in all 
worlds. By identifying ourselves with this perfect mind, 
we put away our old heart, and purify the ground of our 
maxims. It is true, the law says : " Be ye perfect as 
your Father in heaven is perfect," and the distance that 
separates us from conformity to the perfect will of God is 
infinite ; so that, in act, this ideal righteousness remains 
unattainable. But the morally purified disposition, as the 
germ from which all good is to develop itself, is accepted 
in lieu of the deed by God, who is the searcher of hearts, 
and who views the infinite progress of the moral life at 
once as a completed whole. The righteousness of the 
perfect Man is imputed to us, and covers our short 
comings. 

The reconciliation of this with the principles of divine 
justice presents certain difficulties, however, which lead 
Kant to go into the theory in greater detail. The new 
heart is accepted before God as the earnest of an unrest 
ing progress in good, which He is pleased to regard as 
equivalent to that perfect righteousness to which, in his 
heart, the man clings. But even though the man 
contracts no new debts after his change of heart, yet, 
from the point of view of justice, the old remain unpaid. 
In avoiding offence for the future, he does no more than 



120 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

his duty, and the doing of his duty to all eternity will 
yield no surplus of merit to weigh against the sins of his 
former life. The evil heart or disposition which he has 
cast off, contained in itself, like a corrupt fountain, an 
infinity of transgressions, and calls, therefore, for an 
infinite punishment. The debt of sin, too, is the most 
personal of all obligations, and must in every case be paid 
by the sinner himself. Yet one who has laid hold on the 
good in the way described cannot be the subject of the 
wrath of God. How is this punishment to be borne by 
the man, consistently with the complete forgiveness of 
sin which accompanies repentance and the new heart ? 
The answer is found by Kant in an analysis of the 
notion of the moral change that has taken place. The 
fundamental principle of the man s action, it must_be 
noted, is changed, so that he is actually, in an ethical sense, 
a new man. Though he is physically the same person, 
ye!,Tn the eye of a divine Judge, he is another. In the 
language of Scripture, the change consists in putting off 
the old man and his deeds, and putting on the new. The 
sacrifice which this implies crucifying the flesh and the 
sufferings which are the inevitable lot of humanity in this 
life (and which the old man might fitly have regarded, 
from the religious point of view, as the punishment of 
his disobedience), are cheerfully assumed and borne by the 
.new man, not unwillingly as the wrath of an angry God, 
but in a spirit of perfect obedience. The pure mind of 
the Son of God present within him bears, as his substitute, 
the penalty of his past sins, redeems him by suffering 
and death, and finally appears as his advocate before the 
Judge. Or, if the idea be personified, it may be said that 
the Son of God himself does all this. The only difference 
between the two forms of expression is, that when we 



The Philosophy of Religion. 121 

adopt the personified form, the death which the new man 
dies daily, appears as a death suffered once for all by the 
representative of mankind. In this way, then, the claims 
of justice are satisfied; for the substitutionary office under 
taken by the new man is something over and above the 
mere punctual discharge of his duty. At the same time, 
it is by an act of grace that this merit is reckoned to our 
account, inasmuch as the ideal of a morally perfect 
humanity exists in us as yet only as a set purpose of 
heart. 

This imperfect, or merely germinal, character of the 
good within him need not, however, disturb unduly the man 
who has undergone this saving change. He must not 
permit himself to be tormented by a continual fear of 
backsliding; he must preserve the due mean between 
over-confidence and a cowardly distrust of the sincerity 
of his repentance. His steadfastness and continuous 
progress in the past form his only standard for judging 
of the probabilities of the future. The man, therefore, 
who can say, on an honest review of his actions, that his 
repentance has stood proof, sees before him the prospect 
of an endless future of the same happy progress. On the 
contrary, he who has always fallen back into evil, or 
sunk from bad to worse, has the outlook into an equally 
endless future of wretchedness. The attraction of the 
one view Heaven gives calmness and strength to the 
former; the horror of the other view Hell serves to 
rouse the conscience of the latter to stem the evil, so far 
as that may yet be.* Certainty of the unchangeable 

* Kant emphasizes here, it will be observed, the ethical ad 
vantages of the popular conception of an eternal state of happiness 
or misery in another life. On the other hand, he points out, in a 
long note, the disadvantages of the same conception when taught 



122 TJie Development from Kant to Hegel. 

nature of our disposition is not possible to man, nor 
would it, if attainable, be morally beneficial ; but a good 
and pure disposition begets a confidence in its own per 
manency, and acts thus as a Paraclete or comforter, when 
our stumblings might cause us grave anxiety. 

The first two sections of the book thus contain a state 
ment of the main doctrines of ethical religion, together 
with an identification of this creed with the leading dogmas 
of Calvinistic Christianity. Kant s method is first to evolve 
the* ethical position, and then, by means of an allegorical 
interpretation of the Christian records, to exhibit its 
radical identity with this or the other doctrine of the 
Church. It hardly needs to be pointed out, however, 
that his statement of ethical truth would never have 
assumed the form it does in this book, but for the fact 
that he found this scheme of doctrine already elaborated, 
and, so to speak, in possession of the field. This is 
particularly obvious in regard to the laborious attempt, 
just considered, to give an ethical interpretation of 
the doctrines of Substitution and the Perseverance of 
the Saints. Throughout, it may bo said, the real 

dogmatically. It is the same with the doctrine that the reckoning 
of each man s deeds is closed inexorably at the end of the present 
life. The doctrine, he says, is one of evident practical utility. It 
is eminently calculated to impress on men the importance of 
present repentance and well-doing. But the assertion of its 
dogmatic truth is just as little within the province of human 
reason as in the former case. " In short," he concludes, " if wo 
limited our judgment to regulative principles of practical applica 
tion, instead of extending it to constitutive principles of the know 
ledge of supersensible objects, it would stand better in very many 
particulars with human wisdom ; and a supposed knowledge of 
what we at bottom know nothing about, would not breed a ground 
less finctte of reasoning, that gleams bright for a while, but turns 
in the end to the bane of morality." See Wcrkc, vi. 164-6. 



The Philosophy of Religion. 123 

start is made from the dogma, which is then allegorized, 
with more or less success, into an ethical truth. The 
whole constitutes an attempt to extract a moral and 
purely rational meaning from a generally accepted 
interpretation of the Christian documents.* This, as 
will presently appear, is of the essence of Kant s 
position towards a positive religion which is received 
by us as a heritage from the past. The two remaining 
sections of the book are devoted to defining the relation 
of positive and publicly established creeds to the moral 
faith, or, more particularly, the function of the former in 
the service of the latter. 

The third section passes from consideration of the 
moral conflict within the individual to the definitive 
triumph of the good principle, which cannot be realized 
except in an ethical community, in which the purpose of the 
individual shall no longer be undermined, as at present, by 

* In addition to the doctrines already involved in the preceding 
account, it may be well, for the sake of completeness, to state 
Kant s interpretation of the Trinity. The doctrine represents for 
him the union of holiness, benevolence and justice in the Divine 
nature ; and the contemplation of God in this triple capacity (as 
law-giver, governor and judge) is useful, he contends, in a moral 
view, as forcing us always to consider any one attribute as limited 
and conditioned by the others. It prevents us from regarding 
Him either as an earthly despot, ruling according to his mere good 
pleasure, or as a Being weakly indulgent to entreaty that has not 
its basis in moral reformation. The service we render Him is 
thus cleared of the anthropomorphic elements that so readily cling 
to it. Kant compares this triplicity in the notion of God with tho 
separation of the legislative, executive and judicial functions in 
the notion of the State. This circumstance seems to him to 
account for the occurrence of the idea in so many religions. It 
ought to be added, however, that hints towards a more vital 
notion of the Trinity are contained in what has been already said 
of the Idea of humanity as the true Son of God. 



124 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

js 

the influence of his fellows. Such a commonwealth, all 
the members of which are governed by the same laws of 
virtue, is, in its very idea, universal and all-embracing ; 
its foundation would be " the foundation of a Kingdom 
of God upon earth."* Its necessity is obvious. The 
isolation and cross-purposes of the ethical state of 
nature permit individuals, even with the best intentions, 
to act as if they were instruments of evil it is the 
duty, therefore, of everyone to abandon that state, and 
become a member of an ethical community. This union 
is necessary for the complete triumph of the good, and 
accordingly it is incumbent upon everyone who aims at 
this triumph in himself and others. This idea of an 
ethical commonwealth is identical with the idea of a 
people of God, by whom the laws of virtue are viewed as 
proceeding from a Lawgiver who is perfect holiness, and 
who searches the hearts of His subjects, so that the 
inmost secrets of their disposition are open before Him. 
The foundation of a kingdom of God is a work which, as 
a matter of fact, can be achieved by God alone. Never 
theless, man must not remain inactive ; on the contrary, 
here, as in all ethical matters, " he must proceed as if 
everything depended on himself." 

The idea of a people of God takes in man s hands the 
form of a Church. The Church, as it owes its foundation 
to man, may be called the visible Church, to distinguish 
it from the invisible universal Church, or the ideal union 
of all upright men in a morally governed universe. The 
only possible foundation of a universal Church (and, in its 
idea, every Church is universal) is the pure faith (derreine 

* Hence the title of the third section : " The victory of the good 
principle over the evil, and the foundation of a Kingdom of God 
upon earth." 



The Philosophy of Religion. 125 

Religionsglaube), which has been already expounded 
Those doctrines alone whose content is purely rational, 
and which are in no way dependent on historical facts, 
can command universal assent. But the natural need of 
mankind for something on which they can lay hold with 
their senses some fact of experience which may serve, 
in a manner, as a voucher for the ideas of reason has 
effectually prevented them, as history testifies, from ever 
founding a Church on this purely ethical belief. It 
is not easy to convince men that constancy in a morally 
good life is all that God asks from them, and that, in the 
performance of their duties to themselves and others, 
they are " constantly in the service of God." They persist 
in regarding God after the manner of an earthly monarch, 
who has need of honour and marks of submission from 
his subjects. There emerges, accordingly, the idea of a 
religion of ritual observance or a cultus (eine gottesdienst- 
liche Religion). Morally indifferent actions are exalted 
even above the performance of duty, because they are 
supposed to be done for God. We invariably find, there 
fore, alongside of the moral code, a set of statutory or 
positive commands, which, as well as the former, are 
supposed to emanate from the divine will. The com 
mandments of morality are discoverable by every man in 
his own reason, and they constitute for humanity as such 
the perfect and sufficient worship of God. It cannot be 
denied, however, that the addition of a set of statutory 
commands seems to be a necessity for man as a member 
of an ethical community ; and these imply the form of a 
revelation, that is, of a historical belief, which, in contra 
distinction to a purely rational faith, may be called the 
belief of the Church (Kirchenglaube). The safest de 
pository of this extra-belief, as it may be called, is found 



126 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

by experience to be a sacred book. But, in some form or 
other, a Kirchcnglaube is found invariably, as if by an 
ordinance of nature, preceding the pure Religionsglaubc. 
In the process of breaking in mankind to an ethical 
commonwealth, the one serves as the vehicle for the 
introduction and propagation of the other. 

This being, then, one of the facts to which we must 
accommodate ourselves,* the question arises, what is the 
proper attitude of reason towards the Church s claim to 
be the depositary of a special revelation. Kant answers 
this question with the full measure of Critical caution. 
He indicates as his own position that of pure Rationalism, 
as opposed to Naturalism on the one hand, and Super- 
naturalism on the other. The pure Rationalist does not, 
like the Naturalist, deny the possibility of a revelation ; 
he is ready even to admit that a revelation may have 
been necessary for the introduction of the true religion. 
But he does not consider a belief in this supernatural 
origin and its accompaniments to be an essential part of 
saving faith, as the Supernaturalist does. The question 
of origin is thus shelved, as a transcendent inquiry which 
is beyond the scope of the critical reason, but which is at 
the same time of no practical moment. A religion must 
be judged, in the end, not by its origin, but by its 
content; its capacity to become a universal religion 
depends on the identity of its content with the moral 
faith which reason reveals. It is part of Kant s aim in 
this book, as wo have seen, to exhibit this identity in the 
case of Christianity. In this connection, he introduces a 
distinction which seems almost to contain a reference to 

* There is a ring of semi-ludicrous resignation about the copious 
array of particles in which Kant reconciles himself to the 
ineritablc : " Wcnn es nun also einmal nirht zu iindcrn steht, u.s.w." 



The Philosophy of Religion. 127 

Lessing s leading thought in the Education of the Human 
Race. A religion, he says, which, objectively, or in 
respect of its content, is a natural religion, may yet, 
subjectively, or in the mode of its first appearance, be 
called a revelation. Where the religion is of such a 
nature that men might have arrived at it, and ought to 
have arrived at it, of their own accord by the mere use of 
their reason, but yet, if left to themselves, would not 
have reached it so early or so generally, there the term 
revelation, in this sense, cannot be objected to.* With 
this suggestion, Kant leaves the matter, and we are at 
liberty to infer, if we like, that this was his personal view 
of the origin of Christianity ; it is evident that he con 
siders the subjective revealedness of a religion a question 
of little importance, when the religion is once there, and 
recognized as a natural or rational faith. 

So far as a religion is objectively a revelation, that is, so 
far as it contains contingent or non-rational matter, it is, 
in Kant s view, temporal and local, and destined to pass 
away. The value of such positive creeds is not to be 
depreciated. They serve as vehicles for the ideas of true 
religion, and they are not to be rudely or thoughtlessly 
attacked. f On the contrary, it is our bounden duty 
to utilize whatever historical Kirchcnglaube we find in 
general acceptance around us. The " empirical belief," 
however, must be interpreted throughout in a practical 
or ethical sense. The theoretical part of the Church s 
creed has no interest for us, except so far as it aids us 

* Wcrke, vi. 254. 

f As Kant says in a note elsewhere, " All deserve the same 
respect, so far as their forms are attempts of poor mortals to body 
forth to themselves the Kingdom of God upon earth ; but all 
deserve the same blame, when they hold the form in which they 
represent this idea for the thing itself." Werke, vi. 274, n. 



128 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

in realizing our duty as the divine will, and in performing 
it as such. This is the supreme canon of interpretation : 
All scripture is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for 
correction, for instruction in righteousness. The inter 
pretation may often appear forced, as regards the text of 
the revelation ; nay, it may often really be so. But the 
interpreter is not, therefore, to be reckoned dishonest, as 
long as he does not pretend that the moral sense which 
he attaches to the symbols of the popular belief or its 
sacred books, is the original sense in which they were 
intended by their authors.* Alongside of this inter 
pretation in the interests of reason, the " learned " or 
historical interpretation may of course assert its place, 
as necessary for the systematizing of the belief of the 
Church as a definite organization within certain limits of 
time and space. But the historical belief is " dead in 
itself;" it is only by the comparative ease with which 
a revelation lends itself to an ethical exegesis, that it 
justifies its claims to a divine origin. Historical belief 
is, in fact, in every case merely a leading-string to bring 
us to pure religion, and ought to be employed with tho 
consciousness that it is nothing more. That Church is 
a true church, whose creed contains the principle of 
continual approximation to this pure belief, so as to enable 
us eventually to dispense with the leading-string. 

There are two articles of a " saving faith," Kant pro 
ceeds, resuming in effect what he had said in the first 
two sections. These are the belief in a satisfaction 
due for sin and the belief in the possibility of finding 

* Kant refers approvingly, in this connection, to the philosophic 
allegorizing of the pagan myths in Inter antiquity ; which forms, 
indeed, an apt parallel to some of his interpretations of Biblical 
dogmas. 



The Philosophy of Religion. 129 

acceptance with God by perseverance in the good life. 
Kant again points ont that a belief in satisfaction or 
substitution (in the sense already explained) is necessary 
only for the theoretical explanation of salvation ; whereas 
the unconditioned command attached to the second article 
makes the improvement of a man s life tho supreme 
principle of a saving faith. But so far as belief, in the 
case of the first article, is fixed simply on the idea of a 
perfect humanity, it is itself ethical ; and the two articles 
represent " one and the same practical idea/ in which 
the standard of holy living is contemplated from two 
opposite sides. But the same cannot be said, if the article 
be taken to mean an empirical belief in the historical 
appearance of the ethical ideal in a definite individual. 
In this form, the idea is closely connected with the non- 
moral notions of expiation which are to be found in 
all religions. " But in the God-man/ Kant says, " it 
is not what the senses apprehend, or what can be known 
of him through experience, but the prototype which lies 
in our reason, that is properly the object of saving faith." 
It is a necessary consequence of our natural development, 
he concludes, that religion should be gradually severed 
" from all empirical grounds of determination, from all 
statutes which rest on history, and which provisionally, 
by means of a Kirchenylaube, unite men for the furtherance 
of the good. So at last pure rational religion will reign 
universally, that God may be all in all/ .... The 
leading-string of sacred tradition which did good service 
in its day, becomes gradually no longer necessary, and is 
felt at last as a fetter, when humanity arrives at man 
hood. When I was a child, I understood as a child ; 
but when I became a man, I put away childish things/ "* 
* Werke, ri. 219. 

9 



130 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

In considering this process as exemplified in the 
historic religions of the world, Kant restricts his view 
to Christianity. He is apparently unable to trace any 
uniformity of development in the other faiths of man 
kind. In particular, it is worth noting that he emphati 
cally denies to Judaism any connection with the Christian 
Church. The political and positive aspect of Jewish 
religion, the national exclusiveness which found expression 
in it, and the want of reference to the immortality of 
the soul, combine to make Kant do less than justice to 
the religious elements which the Hebrews undoubtedly 
possessed. The trouble which the first teachers of 
Christianity took to connect the new belief with historical 
Judaism, he considers to be a natural expedient on the 
part of men anxious to spread their principles among 
a prejudiced and exclusive race, but as in itself proving 
nothing. Of the actual history of Christianity Kant 
takes a very gloomy view. Its origin is obscure, for it 
is passed over without mention by the " learned public " 
of that day ; we do not know, therefore, the effect of its 
doctrines upon the life of its early professors. But its 
later history, as exemplified in the Eastern and Western 
Empires, in the Crusades, and in the ambitious intrigues 
of the Popes, " might well justify the exclamation 
Tantum reliyio potuit suadcre malurum." Such a fate was 
not to be escaped, so far as Christianity was founded on a 
historical belief; but, in spite of this miscarriage, " the 
true first intention " of its institution was evidently " the 
introduction of a pure religious belief, about which there 
could be no conflicting opinions." If asked what period 
in the whole known history of the Church is the best, 
Kant says he has no hesitation in answering the present. 
The universal Church is already bursting the bonds of 



The Philosophy of Religion. 131 

special system in which it has been confined. As 
evidence in support of his opinion, Kant instances the 
general spread of a spirit of modesty and tolerance 
towards the claims of revealed religion, together with 
a firm conviction that in ethics lies the core of the 
whole matter. In the universal acknowledgment of these 
principles consists the coming of the Kingdom of God, 
which, in the sacred records, is represented chiliastically as 
the end of the world. But the universal Church will not 
come with violence and revolution ; it will be the result 
of gradual reform and of ripe reflection. " The kingdom 
of God cometh not with observation." Empirically wo 
cannot see to the end of this development,* but intel 
lectually we must regard ourselves as already citizens of 
such a kingdom. " Behold, the Kingdom of God is within 

you." 

The fourth section, " Of service and spurious service 
under the dominion of the good principle, or of religion 
and priestcraft," is more of the nature of an Appendix ; 
and most of what is important in it has been already 
anticipated. Kant s object is to contrast the pure service 
of God, which consists in a moral life, with the spurious 
notions of service that are the natural growth of a 
statutory system. He maintains the essential identity 
of Christianity with the moral religion ; and, by a some 
what copious reference to the teachings of Christ in the 
Gospels, he has little difficulty in showing their exclusive 

* Indeed, ill a note at another place, Kant treats the idea of a 
universal Church as an Idea of reason, which can never be realized, 
but which is indispensable as a practical regulative principle. 
Every Church, like every kingdom, strives after universal dominion ; 
but always when it seems in a fair way to make good its pretensions, 
a principle of dissolution shows itself, which breaks it up anew into 
different sects. 

<) * 



132 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

reference to purity of heart and life. Even where the 
form of expression is accommodated to the traditions of 
Judaism, there shines through, according to Kant, " a 
doctrine of religion universally intelligible and universally 
convincing." But the " episodic means of recommenda 
tion " employed by Christ and the first teachers of His 
religion, have been exalted by thelogians into essential 
articles of faith, just " as if every Christian were to be 
a Jew, whose Messiah has come." By so doing, the 
doctors of the Church do their best to defeat the intention 
of the Founder of the religion, by imparting to it a 
statutory character. A religion so conceived is the 
natural soil in which false ideas of the service due to God 
spring up. Spurious service consists essentially in the 
notion of winning the divine favour by other means 
than by uprightness of moral will. Whether it be 
sacrifices, or castigations and pilgrimages that we lay on 
ourselves, or ceremonies, solemn festivals, even public 
games (as in Greece and Rome), the idea is the same ; 
something is done specially for God, by way of proving 
our entire submission to His will, and inducing Him to 
look with a kindly eye upon His servants. Usually, the 
more useless the action, the more efficacious is it supposed 
to be. The secret motive of such service is the hope of 
influencing to our advantage the unseen power that 
directs the destiny of man. In all its phases, therefore, 
it is Fetichism. The man supposes himself to influence 
God, and so employs Him as a means to produce an effect 
in the world. In opposition to this, true religion teaches 
that wo have nothing to do but to cultivate a dutiful 
disposition. To such a disposition all things that are 
lacking in its righteousness will be added by Supremo 
Wisdom in some way it matters not how. Everything, 



The Philosophy of Religion. 133 

in short, depends on the order in which the two ideas of 
morality and the service of God are taken. We must 
begin with virtue, and end with the conception of our 
duty as a continual service of God by obedience to His 
will. Otherwise we make God himself an idol. 



CHAPTER II. 

CRITICISM OF THE KANTIAN STANDPOINT AND TRANSITION 
TO HEGEL. 

THERE are two points in which Kant s treatment of 
religion differs from that of the Aitflddrung, viz., in its 
recognition of the important function of positive creeds 
in leading men towards the true faith, and in its repu 
diation of the easy-going Optimism, which is repugnant 
to the very genius of religion. The Aitflddrung was 
profoundly unhistorical in its spirit, and was content, for 
the most part, to consider the genesis of positive religion 
as sufficiently accounted for by priestcraft and deceit. The 
doctrines, symbols, and sacred books of the historical 
faith appear to it, therefore, in a merely obstructive light. 
They are weeds which have to be pulled up ; and when 
the ground is cleared, the doctrines of natural or of 
rational religion will have free course. Man is man all 
the world over; history cannot change the essential 
character of his reason, and reason reveals to him, by its 
natural light, the existence of God and the immortality of 
the soul. Any addition to this creed is superstition, and 
fires the iconoclastic zeal of the century. The attitude of 



134 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

the Anfklarung towards historical religion, or what, for 
it, is the same thing, historical Christianity, is thus one 
of assault ; it is purely negative. Kant s Philosophy of 
Religion, defective as it may be in many ways, represents 
a break with this spirit, and the dawn of something like 
a historical sense. 

To begin with, the mechanical view of religion, as a 
contrivance of priests and lawgivers, is definitely given 
up. Positive or statutory religion is recognized as 
the leading-string which guides tho race towards the 
realization of the Kingdom of God. The leading-string 
is acknowledged to be necessary, if humanity is to attain 
this end ; and a necessary means may fairly be regarded 
as of divine appointment. This implies an entire change 
in the tone of our criticism of historical systems. They 
are no longer subjective delusions to be rudely brushed 
away ; they are the steps on which the human spirit has 
mounted to its present elevation. They may express 
the pure religion imperfectly, and with much admixture 
of error ; but the ladder which has served the childhood 
of thought, and which, it may be, still serves many 
of our fellow. men, is not there simply to be kicked 
contemptuously aside. Destructive criticism finds no 
favour with Kant. It is not that he himself holds to the 
literal sense of the Church s doctrines ; on the contrary, 
it is pretty plain that his personal conclusions on these 
points were not very different from those of the Anfkldrung 
generally. But the prevalent style of negative criticism 
(as exemplified, for instance, in the Wolfenbiittel Frag 
ments), with its delight in demolishing miracles and 
laying bare discrepancies in the Biblical narratives, 
seemed to him to place altogether too much stress on 
the historical. Kant s wholo aim was to separate 



The Philosophy of Religion. 135 

what ho conceived to be the true and eternal content 
of Christianity from the husk of circumstance in 
which those truths were first presented to the world. 
His own canon of interpretation is, as has been seen, 
exclusively ethical ; and all questions of the original 
sense or historical accuracy of the sacred writings, 
are simply left on one side. "We must not dispute 
unnecessarily over the historical weight to be attached 
to anything, if (whatever construction be put upon 
it) it contributes nothing towards making us better 

men Historical knowledge, which has no su -h 

universally valid inward reference, belongs to ihedSiafopa, 
concerning which each may believe what he finds to be 
for his own edification."* He speaks with something 
like contempt of the mode of dealing with Scripture 
which gets from it nothing more than an " unfruitful en 
largement of our historical knowledge ; " and in the same 
breath he places the truths of religion above historical 
proof. There is no point, indeed, on which Kant is more 
explicit than that, when we are once in possession of true 
religion and of the rational grounds on which it is based, 
it can be nowise fruitful to dispute the Biblical narratives 
and the popular interpretation of them. He applies this 
especially to the case of miracles, which constitute the 
crux of ordinary rationalism. The Christian miracles, for 
instance, may all be true, he says, as well as the miracle 
of inspiration, which guarantees the account of them. 
" We may let them all rest on their merits, and even 
continue to reverence the husk which has served to 
publish and to spread such a doctrine ; but the credentials 
of the doctrine rest on a document preserved ineffaceably 
in every soul, and requiring no miracles to attest it."f 
* Werkc, vi. 137, note. t Mid. vi. 181. 



13C The Development from Kant to Ilegel. 

This theoretical possibility of the miraculous, however, 
has nothing to do with religion, as we now understand 
it. Keligion is degraded by being made to rest on such 
evidence ; and practically, he adds somewhat ironically, 
the belief is harmless, for rational men never allow 
for the possible recurrence of such phenomena in the 
business relations of life. But, just because the historical 
is so unimportant in his eyes, Kant deprecates useless or 
wanton attacks upon the contents of the sacred books. 
" It is the most rational and equitable course, in the case 
of a book which is once for all there, to continue to use 
it as the foundation of instruction in the Church."* It 
is understood, of course, that in doing so we labour to 
bring out its really religious side, and endeavour to let 
the adventitious matter fall, as much as may be, out of 
sight. This attitude, we shall see, is shared by Hegel, 
who defends his position on very similar grounds. 

The other point on which Kant parts company from 
the eighteenth century, is his renunciation of the Optim 
istic view of life and of human nature. This brings him, 
at once, much nearer to a distinctively religious stand 
point. It is a commonplace to say that the element of 
religion is not light-hearted satisfaction with the present, 
and a belief that all is going well. It is the need of 
some explanation for the cruel riddles of destiny, that 
drives men to religion ; and though its issue, as a cele 
bration of the victorious purpose of God, is necessarily 
optimistic, yet the pain and the wrong of the present are 
an essential element. The root of religion may even bo 
said to be a consciousness of present sin and misery. 
The human consciousness, as Kant remarks, seems 
instinctively to connect suffering with sin. When mis- 
* Wcrkc, 231. 



The Philosophy of Religion. 137 

fortune comes upon him, man forthwith, as if by an 
impulse of nature, examines himself to see by what 
offence he has deserved the chastisement. Religion 
takes its rise in the consciousness of sin which is the 
result of this introspection. For the savage is sure to 
discover some neglect or some transgression which has 
laid him open to the anger of his god, and his next step 
is to devise some method of atoning for his guilt. The 
mental analysis of the savage may be at fault, and his 
expiation immoral ; yet the notions which his conduct 
involves are the germ of religion. Religion always goes 
within for its explanation, and the unsophisticated voice 
of the religious consciousness is invariably a cry of infinite 
unworthiness. Man is forced to acknowledge the justice 
of his punishment, and to admit that he has no right 
even to the measure of happiness and well-being he 
enjoys. The notion of " sin," which is peculiar to 
religion, contains more than that of wrong-doing. 
Wrong-doing is external and legal in its application, or, 
if the expression be allowable, it is a finite notion. 
Each action is viewed separately, and compared with 
an external standard. But religion, because it moves 
entirely in an inward or spiritual sphere, recognizes no 
such separation. Action even a single action is the 
expression of the whole character. There can, therefore, 
be no measurement of guilt ; the man sees only an infinite 
alienation of his whole being from holiness, and there 
comes the despairing question How, then, can man be 
justified before God ? The consciousness of sin, in other 
words, is the consciousness of the need of a reconciliation 
or atonement. These twin notions of sin and recon 
ciliation are at the root of all that is distinctively 
religious. But both ideas were in abeyance in the 



The Development from Kant to Heyel. 

eighteenth century, and, as a necessary consequence, there 
was a failure to fathom the religious consciousness, and 
it* manifestations in the historical religions of mankind. 
The eighteenth century was convinced that man was on 
the whole good ; and its God was a species of bon Dieu, 
who could not find it in his heart to be an exacting 
master. Hence the significance of Kant s emphatic 
assertion that man is by nature not good, but that, on 
the contrary, there is a radical taint in the human will. 

Nevertheless, it is impossible to regard Kant s treat 
ment as wholly satisfactory, whether as regards the cause 
of evil, or as regards the rationale which he offers of the 
nature of redemption. There is a wire-drawnness in his 
interpretation of the dogmas of the Church, which is the 
result, in part, of a tendency, constitutional in Kant, to 
carry out his scheme too much into detail; in part, of tho 
peculiarly elaborate and juridically conceived theory of 
Christian doctrine, which he assumed as his basis of 
operations. Hence, though there can be no doubt of the 
ingeniousness of the ethical interpretation, this, rather 
than its soundness, is apt to be the quality which most 
impresses the reader. Of course, to have any value at all, 
the interpretation of religion must be ethical ; but the 
unconvincingness of Kant s theory is due to the separation 
of ethics from metaphysics. Hence the ethical problem 
appears as a problem of the individual alone, and to be 
worked out by the individual himself ; and the consequence 
is that Kant hardly seems to regard his own construc 
tion as vital, and occasionally shows a tendency to cast 
it all to the winds, and to return with a fling to tho 
simple moral command. In these respects, the Hegelian 
Philosophy of Religion, though essentially based upon 
the Kantian, has manifest advantages over it. It possesses 



Tlie Philosophy of Religion. 139 

the background of inetaphysic which seems essential 
to religion. Hegel s Religionsphilosophie may even bo 
said to be, in a sense, the centre of its author s 
thinking. 

On the cardinal point of original sin, it must be 
admitted, I think, that Kant s theory of an " intelligible 
act/ as the explanation of the origin of evil, is both 
mystical and unintelligible. It is useless to speak of the 
act as timeless, for the word " act/ and the notion of 
evil as originating, are not thinkable by us except in 
terms of time. To a certain extent, however, Kant s 
language here may perhaps be viewed as an accommodation 
to the narrative form in which the Church presents the 
necessary implication of evil in the human consciousness. 
In describing himself as seeking not the origin in time, 
but the Vemunfturnprung, of evil, he seems to indicate 
that be is showing, not how a creature, supposed to be 
originally good, passed into evil, but how evil is essentially 
bound up with the notion of the human will. This is 
borne out by a comparison of the theory of the Fall given 
in this book with a suggestive interpretation of the 
Mosaic story in a small treatise belonging to the year 
1 78(5, entitled " Probable Beginning of Human History/ * 
The loss of Paradise is there interpreted as the transition 
from mere animality to humanity " from the go-cart 
of instinct to the guidance of reason." The career of 
rational progress which was then begun is "for the race 
a progress from worse to better, but it is not the same 
for the individual. Before reason awoke, there was 
neither command nor prohibition, and therefore no 
transgression. But when reason began its work, and, 

* Mutlmiasslicher Anfaiig dcr Mcnschcngcscliicbtc, Wcrkc, iv. 
312-29. 



140 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

weak as it was, came into conflict with the whole strength 
of the animal nature, evils, and what is worse when 
reason became more cultivated, vices, could not but 
arise, which were unknown to the state of ignorance. 
The state of ignorance was a state of innocence. . . . 
The history of Nature, therefore, begins with good, 
because it is the work of God ; the history of Freedom 
begins with evil, because it is the work of man. For 
the individual, who, in the exercise of his freedom, looks 
only to himself, the change meant loss ; but for Nature, 
whose aims are for the race, it was gain." The Fall from 
a state of animal innocence is thus at the same time the 
condition of the possibility of a life of rational freedom ; 
and as humanity in this capacity is the only thing of 
worth in the world or, to repeat Kant s phrase, the only 
possible object of the divine decree, the Full appears as a 
necessary part of that purpose, and as an advance upon 
the foregoing stage. Nevertheless, it consists essentially 
in the assertion of self, and in the setting up of ends 
other than those which Nature seems to have with the 
animal creature. It is viewed accordingly, in each case, 
as being, in the most intimate sense, a free or personal 
action. It must also inevitably appear as a transgression, 
for the first form of freedom is arbitrary selfishness. 
Consequently responsibility and the consciousness of evil 
are inseparably bound together, the one being possible 
only through the other. Whether we choose to identify 
the intelligible act with such a transition from instinct 
to reason or not, the fact that Kant is formulating is 
simply this inevitable implication of evil in the moral 
consciousness. The fact is, after all, what we must stand 
by ; for an actual genesis of reason and morality out of 
instinct is just as impossible to construct as u supposed 



The Philosophy of Religion. 141 

intelligible act. The man (or animal) must have been 
morally accountable before the primal act, it may be 
argued, if he is to recognize himself as responsible for 
it afterwards, and so on ad infinitum. Consciousness 
cannot be treated in any of its phases as something which 
comes into being. The idea of an absolute beginning, 
in short, has no place in philosophy, because philosophy 
does not deal with a series of events ; it deals with tie 
notions which these events imply, and is content with 
showing how one notion is connected with another and 
with all others. The point in question here is the relation 
of the consciousness of evil to morality, and to the whole 
structure of human progress. The relation of reason to 
sense may certainly constitute the basis of morality, 
whether the inconceivable transition from a merely 
natural to a rational life was ever actually made or not. 
In Hegel we find substantially the same view as in the 
MuthmassUcher Anfang, combined with the same curious 
allegorization of the Biblical story. Hegel is at pains to 
show that the breach of the merely natural harmony 
carries with it the promise of a higher reconciliation in 
reason. By the conception of such a reconciliation as 
involved in the divine purpose, that is to say, philosophi 
cally, as eternally complete in God, he is able, without 
resorting to Kant s artificial doctrine of substitution, to 
put a more vital meaning into the leading tenet of 
historical Christianity. 

Kant s whole theory of religion suffers from the 
limitations of his Critical standpoint. The central 
idea in religion, to which all others return, is the 
idea of God ; and it is just here that the break 
down of Criticism becomes most apparent in the hands 
of its author. It must bo remembered that, in spite 



142 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

of the ample materials which Kant supplies for the 
construction of a new theology, he never got fairly 
outside of the old-fashioned mechanical construction of 
Deism. God is, according to this conception, a Being 
by himself, to whom no necessary relations attach ; but 
He is supposed, by an exercise of will/ to havo 
created the world, and, with it, finite intelligences. 
The manner or the meaning of this creation is not 
explained, and so its assertion becomes simply a word. 
That is to say, reason, in its search for the causes of 
individual things, extends its range, and ends by asking 
for the cause of the collective fabric of things. As a 
temporary satisfaction, this causation is thrown back upon 
a Doing postulated in /time effectwn, and called, in virtue 
of 1 is function, the Great First Cause. The designations 
of S ipreme Being, or Absolute Being, give no additional 
information as to his nature ; and the inferential know 
ledge which Deism professes to have of its God, will 
always be found to dwindle down to the bare assertion 
that he exists. It is against the possibility of proving 
the existence of such a deistic God, that Kant does battle 
in the Pure Reason ; and, in that regard, his arguments 
and those of others must be acknowledged to bo 
conclusive though only in that regard. Take, for 
example, his famous illustration of the hundred dollars. 
I may have an idea of a hundred dollars, but my pocket 
may be empty enough for all that. In like manner, 
Kant argues, I may have an idea of God, but that is 
far from proving, as the supporters of the Outological 
argument would have us believe, the objective existence 
of a Being corresponding to my idea. Clearly, Kant s 
reasoning depends for its validity on the measure of 
analogy between God and the hundred dollars. If 



The Philosophy of Religion. 143 

God is a Being or thing as separable from me as 
the hundred dollars are, then certainly there is no 
passage from idea to reality. Deism puts God at a 
distance in this way ; and Deism, therefore, succumbs to 
Kant s illustration. But if God cannot be, in any sense, 
a thing or object, then the idea of God may very well be 
at the same time His real existence. If the idea of God 
is inseparable from consciousness as such is, in fact, the 
perfect rational synthesis of which every consciousness 
is, and recognizes itself to be, the potential form, 
then this existence in thought seems to give all the 
reality that can be asked for. Unless, indeed, we are 
determined to materialize God into an object of our 
present or future senses, this is the only existence 
of which we can speak. If this idea be substituted 
for the deistic conception, it will be found that the 
utterly bare and self-contradictory notion of a First 
Cause must be exchanged for that of a final cause or 
End. In other words, it is absurd to seek a cause of the 
universe as a whole. The universe exists ; that is all we 
can say about it. But, though a cause cannot be assigned, 
there is a sense in which a reason may. This will be 
found in the Idea, should this be discoverable, which the 
universe realizes. The Idea is then the purpose or raiaon 
d etre, or simply the meaning/ of the universe. For 
the word purpose must not be held to imply a separation 
of the Idea (as in a scheming intellect) from its actual 
realization. 

This notion of the Divine existence, however, has 
been definitely formulated since Kant s time, and 
accordingly it does not interfere with the course of 
his reasoning. In the sphere of pure reason, God 
remains, according to Kant, unknowable and un- 
provable. But Kant did not leave things so ; for the 



1-14 The Development from Kant to Heyel. 

existence of God is, as has been seen, a Postulate of 
the practical reason. What is more, it is postulated 
precisely in the old doistic sense. It is true, there is the 
saving clause, that what is reached on ethical grounds 
has, so far as we are concerned, only an ethical content, 
and is to be employed solely in an ethical interest. And 
for Fichte, accordingly, the notion became at once 
synonymous with that of the moral order of the universe. 
But by Kant the moral order is conceived, in the spirit 
of the baldest Individualism, as the final adjustment of 
happiness and virtue ; and God becomes purely a Deus ex 
machina to effect this combination. The indignity of 
the position is obvious, for He is treated in the scheme 
primarily as a means towards the happiness of the 
particular individual. Once there, He is clothed, of 
course, with the qualities of moral Lawgiver ; but the 
motive of His introduction at all is the one just indicated. 
The law and its authority are sufficiently explained, Kant 
admits, by the notion of the noumenal Self, and so the 
knowledge of duty as the will of God seems, in the 
Kantian scheme, a somewhat superfluous duplication of 
what we already possess. The noumenal and self-legis 
lative Self is, indeed, when properly conceived, identical 
with the will of God, and leaves no room for any 
extraneous Deity. But the thoroughly mechanical idea 
of such a Power weighing happiness against virtue, 
cannot be charmed out of the letter of Kant s theory. 
This has been the stumbling-block which has caused 
many to reject his Ethics in toto, and to identify the 
true Kant exclusively with the Critical scepticism of the 
intellectual theory. This, however, it has been already 
pointed out, is a mistake. Kant was not unfaithful to his 
method in the moral sphere ; it is his method itself which 
is defective. It mny be readily admitted that the great 



The Philosophy of Religion. 145 

excellence of the Critical standpoint is, that it explodes 
the pretended knowledge of transcendent realities in 
which Dogmatic metaphysic had dabbled. But the 
weakness of Kantianism, in the hands of its author, is 
that the ghost of transcendent reality is not laid; it 
cannot be seen, but it is supposed still to stalk on the 
other side of knowledge. The temptation to transcen 
dent speculation cannot be perfectly removed, except by 
a philosophy which is able to view experience as a whole, 
and to see realized in the synthesis of the actual the true 
sense of the objects which such speculation overleaps 
itself to reach. What is known, in a broad sense, as 
Hegelianism, is at least an attempt at such a complete and 
rounded philosophy ; and in it the dualisms which vex us 
in Kant disappear. The ideas of God and man are still 
so far mutually exclusive for Kant, that what is done by 
man in history appears to be necessarily done without 
God. What is done by God, on the contrary as, for 
example, a revelation appears like a hand from behind 
the clouds thrust suddenly into tho web of human affairs. 
Hence the antithesis between Naturalism and Super- 
naturalism, and the non liqu&t, which is the last dictum 
of the Critical reason. Hegelianism abolishes the anti 
thesis, by conceiving the whole process of history as the 
work of God, and a growing revelation of His nature and 
purpose. It remains now to sketch very shortly, more 
by way of indication than of exhaustive exposition, some 
of the leading features of the Philosophy of Religion, as 
they appear from such a standpoint. 

The metaphysical position of Hegel may be summarily 
distinguished from that of Kant, by saying that in the 
later philosophy thought is recognized as absolute or 

10 



146 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

self-conditioning as the unity, in other words, within 
which all oppositions are only relative. Thought is, 
therefore, the source of all the distinctions which make 
up the knowable universe even of the distinction between 
the individual self and the objective world to which it is 
related. Thought itself becomes the object of philosophy, 
and the search for something " real/ beyond and apart 
from thought, is definitely abandoned. The business of 
philosophy is henceforth the explication of the distinctions 
which belong to the nature of thought, and this is other 
wise definable for Hegel as " the explication of God." 

Philosophy thus becomes identical in its object with 
religion ; for the constant aim of religion is to determine 
the nature of (rod, and His purpose in the individual and 
in the world. It is impossible to deny this metaphysical 
character to religion, and to present it simply as a set of 
empirical rules for conduct. " From the beginning of 
the world down to the present day," says Fichte, 
" religion, whatever form it may have assumed, has been 
essentially metaphysie." In other words, it is the need 
of a final synthesis, which both philosophy and religion 
strive to satisfy the one predominantly on the side of the 
intellect, the other predominantly on the side of the 
heart and life. Religion is never content till it apprehend 
the working whereby God is able to subdue all things 
unto Himself. After a more or less sufficient probing of 
the imperfection and wrong in the world, it will invariably 
be found putting forward some conception or theory, 
as the solution of the contradictions that baffle us from day 
to day. The conception may, or it may not, be adequate 
to the difficulties of the case ; that is according to 
circumstances. But it is the presence of this conception 
that imparts to religion the joy and confidence which are 



The Philosophy of Religion. 147 

lacking in morality as such. Religion has been defined 
in our own day as " morality touched by emotion." The 
definition, as applied by its author, is both suggestive 
and beautiful ; but it is still necessary to inquire into the 
source of the emotion. This, I think, is always derived 
from a certain view of the world as a whole, that is to 
say, more or less articulately, from a metaphysical 
conception. It is the subject s identification of himself 
with a divine world-order, that is the perennial source of 
the religious emotion which lifts him who experiences it 
above the lets and hindrances of time. Without this, he 
is an atom struggling in vain with the evil of his own 
nature, and possibly, too, with the misery of surrounding 
circumstances. If he is to be successful in the struggle, 
he must be persuaded that he is not alone, or, in the 
language of religion, that God is for him and that nothing, 
therefore, can be ultimately against him. The triumph 
that he only anticipates in himself and others he must 
conceive as secure of fulfilment in fact, as already fulfilled 
in the eternal purpose of God. The peace which this 
conviction imparts is itself, in a sense, the realization of 
that triumph in the individual his present reconciliation 
with God. It is also the most powerful dynamic that 
can be supplied to morality. 

Kant himself was not able to eliminate the metaphysical 
side of religion entirely, though he considers it necessary 
only for the theoretical explanation of salvation/ and 
always returns by preference to the unvarnished religion 
of right-doing. In the notion of moral perfection as the 
End of creation an End realized in God, and destined to 
be realized in man and in the notion of the Church as a 
corporate unity for the expression of this idea, the world 
is represented by Kant as an ethical whole, in which 

10* 



148 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

atonement is made for the sins of the individual and of 
the moment. This appears much more emphatically in 
Hegel.* The attainment of reconciliation with God is 
the motive of all religions ; the fact of an accomplished 
reconciliation, is, according to Hegel, the deepest 
religious truth. It is revealed in the Christian religion. 
It is at the same time the profoundest insight of 
philosophy, for it is the expression of the essential nature 
of Spirit. True religion and true philosophy coincide; 
for " the absolute content," as Hegel says, must be the 
same. The notion of Spirit is not the absence of con 
tradiction, for that would mean absolute sameness, which 
is equivalent to pure nonentity; it is the solution of 
contradiction, by exhibiting the opposite as held in its 
own unity. Spirit lives by difference, but in all difference 
it is still identity with itself. God was first known as 
Spirit, Hegel says, in the Christian religion, and this is 
the meaning of its central doctrine of the Trinity. The 
determination of God as Triune is not to be taken, as 
Enlightenment takes it, with reference to the number 
three. Rightly understood, it is a reading of the nature 
of God, which is fatal to the abstract unit which Deistic 
free-thought deems so easy of acceptance. This God-in- 
himself, as the idea may be styled, has a connection with 
the world that is purely arbitrary, and serves reason 
merely as & point d appui. He is nothing more than a name 
upon our lips ; we know nothing of his nature, because, 
as so conceived, there is nothing to know. To say that 
God is unknowable, and to say that He is the Supreme 
Being, are, according to Hegel, identical propositions. 

* Hegel s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion arc contained 
in vol. xi and xii of the Werke, but references to religion occur in 
almost every one of his works. 



The Philosophy of Religion. 149 

God cannot be known apart from the world ; He cannot 
be said to exist out of that reference. " Without the 
world, God were not God." " God is the Creator of the 
world ; it belongs to His being, to His essence, to be 

Creator That He is Creator is, moreover, not an 

act undertaken once for all ; what is in the Idea is the 
Idea s own eternal moment and determination."* This 
is expressed in the doctrine of the Trinity, Hegel con 
tinues, by saying that from eternity God has begotten a 
Son, or that He produces himself eternally in his Son. 
But this absolute diremption or distinction of Himself 
from Himself is at the same time perfect identity ; and 
the knowledge of God as the unity of Father and Son is 
the knowledge of Him as Spirit or as the Triune God. 
The Holy Ghost is the " eternal love," which expresses this 
unity this distinction in which there is no difference. 
Here is the " still mystery," which is the source of the 
world s life. It may be otherwise expressed, by saying 
that it is a necessity of the Absolute to create a world of 
finite spirits. God is, in the strictest sense, neither more 
nor less than this self-revelation. Man is as necessary to 
God as God to man. The true infinity of Spirit is 
realized in the knowledge of the Infinite as in the finite, 
and of the finite as in the Infinite, or, as Christianity 
says, in the oneness of God and man. God is this eternal 
process or history. 

But, so far as wo have gone, there seems no room for 
the disturbance or alienation from God, which is the 
subjective root of religion. Where there is no estrange 
ment, reconciliation, in the ordinary sense of the term, can 
have no function. It may fairly be objected to Hegel s 

* Hegel, Wirke, xii. 181 (Philosuphie der Religion, vol. ii). 



150 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

account given above, that it moves too much in the clear 
tether of the Idea, in which distinction is not difference. 
AS Hegel says in the Fhaenomenoloyy, the notion of the 
divine life as a play of love with itself, even though true, 
sinks to insipidity, if " the seriousness, the pain, the 
patience and labour of the negative " is not allowed for. 
The first may be said to be the notion of the universe 
from the divine standpoint ; it is, in fact, in Hegelian 
terminology, the Idea. The second is the human side of 
the relation the Idea as it appears in history. Here the 
world is viewed not in its ideal completeness, as the Son 
who is eternally and essentially one with God, but as the 
world in the more proper sense of the term, in which 
the otherness of the relation is accentuated and comes to 
its right. We have here the other, as the other ; the 
world (of nature and of finite spirit) appears as some 
thing independent of God, and free in itself. It is a 
mark, Hegel characteristically adds, of the freedom and 
security of the Idea, that it permits this relative 
independence without detriment to its ultimate synthesis. 
Nevertheless, he is somewhat at a loss to find a motive 
for passing from the perfect Son to the imperfect world. 
For it is, of course, necessary to suppose that, with the 
freedom, there comes also the weakness and the imperfec 
tion, of separation ; it is the fact of this present evil 
world that calls for explanation. This is the point where 
Hegel approximates most nearly to Schelling. He seems 
to treat the origin of the finite system of things as a species 
of Alfa II or primal apostasy; and, as Plato has recourse 
to the mythical form where clear thought fails him, so 
we find Hegel falling back on Jacob Bohme. The first, 
begotten, he quotes from Bohme, was Lucifer, the light- 
bearer, the bright, the clear one ; but Lucifer lost himself 



The Philosophy of Religion. 151 

in his imaginings, and asserted his independence, and 
fell. " So we pass into the determination of space, of the 
finite world, of the finite spirit." That, at least, is Hegel s 
complacent continuation. The whole reminds the reader 
very much, not to go further afield, of Schelling s little 
treatise on Philosophy and Religion, already referred to.* 
But the point is only touched on by Hegel, and the net 
result is simply that. the finite world, as finite, is due to a 
holding fast of the form of difference. So fur as this 
finitude or difference exists, the restoration of unity 
appears as a process in time something to be gradually 
worked out. Here properly conies in the need of 
reconciliation and, with the need, the idea. 

Reconciliation can be effected only in the sphere of 
Spirit ; and as religion exists only in relation to man or 
finite spirit, we may concentrate attention on the way in 
which tiegel interprets alienation here. " This is the 
place of the conflict of good and evil the place, too, 
where this conflict must be fought out."f For the rest, 
we know that Nature is but the theatre or sphere of spirit. 
But man, as he first appears on that theatre, is simply a 
part of Nature. Man in a state of nature is a cornplexus 
of animal desires, which he fulfils in turn as they arise. 
But the notion or destiny of man is to be intelligent and 
free ; therefore, his existence as a merely natural being 
is in itself, as inadequate to his notion, evil. The state 
of nature or immediacy is simply a starting-point, which 
is to be left behind. Consciousness brings the knowledge 
of this breach between the f is and the ought-to-be, 
and with knowledge comes guilt. In this connection, 
we have the well-known Hegelian interpretation of the 
Fall, which occurs in various parts of the Works. Tho 
connection between evil and knowledge in the story is, 
* Cf. p. 05, supra, f If crkc, xii. 62. 



152 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

according to Hegel, essential. Man was evil in his 
merely natural state, i.e., he was not as he ought to be ; 
but with the dawn of consciousness he knows that he is 
evil. The knowledge of his state opens up to him the 
possibility of escape from it, and he becomes responsible 
for further continuance in it. The " absolute demand " 
made upon man is, that he do not continue in this state ; 
and though the content of the newly awakened will is, to 
begin with, simply the full play of the man s animal 
desires, yet the conviction grows that this ought not so 
to be. In other words, consciousness brings with it a 
eparation between the subject and the natural basis 
of desires with which he was formerly identical ; and the 
separation means (in the long run) the knowledge that 
the true will or self is not to be found in the mere 
satisfaction of the wants of the natural individual. It 
means the knowledge of a higher rational Self, of an 
obligation to realize it, and an infinite falling short of 
attainment. The breach between the natural man and 
that which ho necessarily regards as his essence or 
destiny, is the source (also in the long run) of an infinite 
pain ; and out of pain and unworthiness springs religion 
with its conception of reconciliation. 

Hegel turns to history for the verification of his thesis. 
The sense in man of failure to realize his vocation, and 
the consequent misery of alienation from his true good, 
is what religion calls the consciousness of sin. This 
consciousness continued to deepen in the human heart; 
and of the various religions that appeared on the earth 
none had more than a partial cure for it. It was 
necessary that the lowest depths of suffering should be 
fathomed, before any healing could be effectual; for it is 
a principle of universal application, that a contradiction 
must be strained to its utmost before it can be successfully 



The Philosophy of Religion. 153 

solved. So it was with the religions consciousness. The 
extreme of abandonment and despair was reached in the 
Roman world, before the fulness of time came, and the 
word of reconciliation could be spoken. Profoundly 
dissatisfied with the existent world, men tried, in Stoicism 
and kindred systems, to escape from it by withdrawing 
wholly within themselves. But this flight from the world 
could not be the world s salvation ; it is in itself merely 
a confession of discomfiture. In my relation to the world 
consist my duties ; Stoicism is the renunciation of these, 
and so remains barren. The principle that is destined to 
transform the world bears another aspect. I pray not 
that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but 
that thou shouldest keep them from the evil/ To a 
distracted humanity Christ whispers the tidings of the 
nearness of God. In the midst of unworthiness and 
helplessness there springs up the new consciousness of 
reconciliation. Man, with all his imperfections on his 
head, is still the object of the loving purpose of God. 
God is reconciled, if only man will strip off his painful 
individuality, and believe it. There is a victorious purpose 
in the world, if only he will find himself in it, and work 
joyfully in its light. With this assurance in the ground 
of his heart comes the peace of essential unity with 
what, to his individual effort, is still a flying goal. His 
subjective frailty and shortcomings simply do not count, 
when weighed against the active perception of unity with 
God, which is the substance or element of his life. 

As a matter of fact, the reconciliation must still bo 
worked out on the stage of the individual life and of 
universal history. Faith, as we know, without works is 
dead ; it is an idea which lacks its embodiment in reality. 
But the faith must be there, if man is to work from 
a proper vantage-ground. Hence Christianity teaches 



1 54 The Development from Kant to HeycL 

God s reconciliation of the world with Himself, as a fact 
or as an eternal truth ; and this becomes a presupposition 
for the individual. It is something that is finished, and 
in the strength of which he works. This accomplished 
reconciliation is the basis of the Church or the Christian 
community (Getneinde) ; it is taught in the Church s 
doctrine, and the Church is itself the outward expression 
of the truth. The relation of the subject to the problem 
of salvation is, therefore, essentially different, according 
as he is, or is not, bom within the pale of the Christian 
community. This is expressed by the Church in the 
sacrament of Baptism. Baptism says in symbol that the 
child is not born into a hostile world, but that his world, 
from the beginning, is the Church, which is built upon 
the consciousness of reconciliation. The Church is, in 
its notion, a society where the virtual conquest over evil 
is already achieved, and where, therefore, the individual 
is spared such bitter conflict and outcast wretchedness 
as preceded the formation of the community. The 
education which the Church bestows, smooths his path 
for him ; and, in every respect, he essays the individual 
problem under more favourable conditions. The last and 
most solemn expression of the Church s life is in tho 
Eucharist, or the sacrament of the Supper. Hero tho 
Church celebrates its sense of present reconciliation, and 
the conscious unity of the subject with God. 

But so long as this unity is realized only in the Church, 
there remains an opposition between tho Church and the 
world. The Church, in these circumstances, may bo said 
to represent rather tho idea than tho reality of recon 
ciliation, inasmuch as it is faced by a hostile power in 
which its principles have no application. This opposition 
is tho distinctive mark of Medueval Christianity, in which 
Christianity resembled rather a flight from the world than 



The Philosophy of Religion. 155 

the subjugation of the world to God. The virtues of 
the Church were celibacy and poverty. The world was 
denounced as unholy; and, as a natural consequence of 
the stigma set upon it, it actually was unholy. Men s 
consciences convicted them of sin, when they tampered 
with the accursed thing. But this unhealthy dualism 
could not last, and, in the end, the spirit of world- 
liness possessed itself also of the Church. Instead of 
universal corruption, however, this was the signal for the 
appearance of the true conception of reconciliation, on 
which modern life is built. The Reformation is, in one 
aspect, the denial of that dualism between the Church 
and the world, between religion and secular life, which is 
the mark of Medievalism in all its forms. The relations 
of the family and the State are restored to the divineness 
that belongs to them ; or rather, their divineness is, 
for the first time, consciously realized. In the laws 
and customs of the rational or freely moving State, 
the Church first penetrates the real world with its 
principles. The State is " the true reconciliation, 
whereby the divine realizes itself in the field of reality." 
This final stage of realization in the world must not, of 
course, be held to supersede the inward function of 
religion;* but we recognize here the point to which 
* It would be a misinterpretation of the Hegelian law of stages, 
to suppose that the final stage abolishes those that dialectically 
precede it. Hegel s positions are often represented in a false and 
repulsive light under the influence of this idea. The Philusophic 
dcs Rcchts, for example, is represented as if the ultimate stage of 
Sittlichkcit were meant entirely to supersede the subjective function 
of Moralitdt or conscience. It is obvious that the two sides must 
continue to co-exist ; the only thing that is superseded is the 
abstract conscience that ignores the actual, and insists on judging 
everything anew. So here, the objective reconciliation effected in 
the true State is not intended to supersede, for the individual, the 
subjective life of devotion. 



156 The Development from Kant to llegel. 

Hegel always returns. As he says in the Philosophy of 
History, " The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on 
earth." The secular life of the modern world has been 
built up by Christianity ; it is founded upon Christian 
conceptions of the dignity and the rights of man. The 
secular, therefore, is itself divine. This is, in Hegel s 
view, at once the principle of Protestantism, and the last 
principle of thought. 

As may be imagined from the elaborate parallelism, or 
rather, identity, which he seeks to establish between his 
own philosophical positions and the leading doctrines of 
the Christian Church, Hegel has no sympathy with the 
prevalent modern aversion to theological dogma. He 
aims rather at a philosophic rehabilitation of dogmatic 
Christianity ;* and he is never more in his clement than 
when running out his heavy guns against the theology of 
feeling. The basis of a Church must be a system of 
doctrines, and with their withdrawal the community 
lapses into an aggregation of atoms. It is only principles 
or beliefs that can be held in common ; feeling, as such, 
is purely subjective, and can afford no bond of union. 
Feeling is certainly indispensable in religion. Religion 
must be realized in the element of feeling, if it is to have 
active force in the life. But feeling is in itself a mere 
form ; it is indifferent to its content, and will attach itself, 



* " Die "\Viederherstellung dcr iichtcn Kirchcnlchrc muss von 
der Philosophic ausgehen." Wcrke, xi. 10. Elsewhere he deplores 
the state to which theology has sunk, when it becomes necessary 
for philosophy to undertake the defence of the dogmas of the 
Church against the orthodox theologians themselves. There is a 
flavour of the comical perceptible in the unction with which he 
takes Tholuck to task for the slackness of his zeal in defending the 
doctrine of the Trinity. See in particular the Preface to the 
second edition of the Encyclopaedia. Wcrkc, vi. p. xi. et seq. 



The Philosophy of Religion. 157 

for the matter of that, to any content. It is of the 
utmost importance, then, to understand that religion, like 
philosophy, must found upon "a substantial, objective 
content of truth."* This content, as the theory of the 
relations of God and man, is the absolute content; that is 
to say, it is an expression, in its last terms, of the process 
of the universe, and, as such, is necessarily identical in 
both. But from what has been seen of Hegel s state 
ment of the eternal content of religion, it is evident 
that the doctrines of ordinary Christianity undergo a 
considerable transformation in the process of philosophic 
interpretation. And this, according to Hegel, is no more 
than we need expect; this is, in fact, Hegel s fundamental 
distinction between Vorstellung and Begriff. Religion 
is truth for all ; it is easy of comprehension. The 
poor heard Him gladly. Philosophy is truth for those 
who are capable of the prolonged effort of thought which 
it implies. Philosophy presents truth essentially for the 
intellect truth, therefore, in its exact, scientific, ultimate 
form. Religion presents the same synthesis, but primarily 
for the heart presents it, therefore, in a form calculated 
to affect the feelings, and through them to work upon the 
moral will. Religious enlargement speaks the language of 
imagination; it is saturated with feeling. But its state 
ments cannot be pressed as scientifically exact. Religion, 
Hegel says, is reason thinking naively. -\ It has got hold of 
vital and eternal principles ; but the form in which it 

* Werkc, xvii. 299 (Preface to Hinrich s Religion sphilosophic). 
This Preface, written in 1822, and now printed among the 
1 Vermischte Schriften, throws much light on Hegel s attitude 
towards religion, towards the historical element in Christianity, 
etc. It contains also a bitter polemic against Schleicrmacher, 
without, however, mentioning names. 

f Wfrlre, xi. 117. 



158 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

presents them, while best suited to its own purpose, is not 
adequate to the principles themselves. Facts of the notion, 
constitutive of the universe as such, it treats as pieces of 
contingent history, which have- been, and are no more. 
So with the Fall, so again with the Reconciliation ; its 
form is throughout pictorial and narrative. All this Hegel 
means by saying that religion appears in the form of 
Vorstellung. The distinction between the Vorxtelluny and 
the Bcgriff is all-important, he contends, for it keeps us 
from confounding the living principles of religion with the 
historical form in which they are convoyed. A certain 
historical form is necessary ; but the historical, as such, 
is contingent, and cannot, therefore, form part of the 
essential religious content. That content, when elimi 
nated, is found to be identical with notional truth, or with 
the Bcgrijf. The Bcgriff, however, Hegel seems to say, 
can never, for the mass of mankind, supersede the 
Vorstellung. 

This opens up the whole question of Hegel s relation 
to historical Christianity. A memorable utterance of 
his own may be taken as the authoritative text of what 
follows: Religion must contain nothing but religion; 
it contains, as such, only eternal truths of the spirit.* A 
certain historical form, as just mentioned, is necessary. 
The true religion must appear, must be. The idea must 
have the side of reality, otherwise it is a mere abstraction ; 
and reality implies the circumstantial surroundings of 
space and time. Or, to put it less abstrusely, the 
historical or sensuous form was essential, if the truth was 
ever to become a common possession of mankind. " The 
unity of the divine and human is the thought (Gedanke) 
of man ; but it was necessary that this should first be 
* in-i-iv. xi.152. 



The Philosophy of Reliijion. 159 

believed as true of one individual Man." " The con 
sciousness of the Absolute Idea is produced, in the first 
instance, not for the standpoint of philosophical specula 
tion, but in the form of certainty for mankind/ * It is 
a universal rule that we set out from sensuous certainty, 
from something given, something positive. But the 
given has always to be intelligized ; its meaning has to 
be reached. So the external world is given to us in 
sensation ; but it is not a world till we have constructed 
sensations into a rational system. Religion also comes to 
us as something given, something positive ; to the child 
in the form of education, to the race in the form of 
revelation. But the attitude of thought to sense, or 
to what is merely given, is always negative ; we 
pass from it, and retain only the rational content of 
which it is the bearer. Bv the fact of a historical 

m 

appearance (recognized as a necessary element of the 
truth), we must not, therefore, be misled into elevating 
the particulars of that history to the rank of divine 
verities. The frame, though necessary, does not stand on 
the same level as the work of art that it encloses. f The 
particulars of history are always contingent, that is, they 
may be .so, or they may be otherwise ; no truth of reason 
is involved in their being either. In this way, Hegel says, 
the whole question of miracles ought not to trouble us. Wo 
neither attack them nor defend them ; but the testimony 
they could afford to religious truth was confined to the age 
in which they are said to have been wrought. The spiritual 
cannot be attested by the external or unspiritual, and, in 
regard to miracles, the main point is that we set them 

* Werke, xii. 237 and 238. f Ibid. xvii. 283. 



1(>0 The Development from Kant to IlegeL 

aside.* The demonstration of the spirit is the only 
testimony that can be ultimately accepted. 

The sensuous history in which Christianity first appeared 
is thus merely point of departure (Ausgangspunkt) for 
the spirit, for faith. The doctrine of the Church is 
neither the external history of its Founder, as such, nor 
His own immediate teachings. f It is the meaning of 
the history, as apprehended in the consciousness of the 
Christian Church. It is not to the point to say that this 
meaning is contained in the Bible, and that the whole 
doctrine is, as it were, spelled out of this text. The 
Bible is merely another form of the given ; and as soon 
as we depart from the words of the sacred text, we have 
transformed it. Here, as elsewhere, the spirit is active 
in its receptivity. It is the Church s exegesis of the Bible, 
and not the words of the Bible, as such, that are the 
foundation of faith. The necessity of this passing away 
of the sensuous, or, at all events, of its transformation by 
the spirit, is clearly perceived by the author of the Fourth 
Gospel. The Johannean Christ expresses this insight in 
pregnant words, when he makes the growth of the 
Church dependent on his own departure. "It is 
expedient for you that I go away. . . The hour is come 
that the Son of Man should be glorified. Verily, verily, 
I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the 
ground and die, it nbideth alone : but if it die, it bringeth 
forth much fruit. . . . Greater works than these shall he 
(the believer) do, because I go to my Father." Hence, 

* IVerke, lii. 160. Die Hauptsaohe in dieser Seitc dcr Wunder 
ist, dass man sic in dieser Weiso auf die Seite stellt. 

t Christus Lehre kann als diese unmittelbare niclit christliche 
Dogmatik, nicht Lehre der Kircbe scin. Ibid. xii. 211. 



The Philosophy of Religion. 1C1 

according to Hegel, tlie importance of so far detaching 
the content of Christianity from its first sensuous 
presentment as to regard it in itself as eternal truth/ 
" The true content of Christian faith is to be justified by 
philosophy, not by history/ * Why, then, should wo 
always be returning to the garments of flesh from which 
the spirit has passed ? We get thus but a dead Christ ; 
the living Christ is to be found in the Church that He 
has founded, and in the doctrines of the relation of God 
and man, of which it is the visible symbol. 

The whole position may perhaps be put more generally. 
From the religious point of view, the value or worth of a 
history lies solely in the circumstance that it is the vehicle 
of such and such truths. Strip it of this significance, 
and the history is no more than any other bit of fact, i.e., 
it has no religious bearing. A history affects us, only 
when read in the light of the eternal purpose of God. 
It is that purpose, therefore, which moves us, not the 
bare recital of events ; and by any events the divine 
purpose must be inadequately represented or set forth. 
All spiritual effects must have spiritual causes. It is by 
eternal principles or truths that the mind is influenced ; 
and though certain narratives may have proved themselves 
specially efficacious in bringing home these truths to men s 
minds, still that is no reason for insisting that the narra 
tives, as they stand, are scientifically maintainable in all 
their particulars. That the majority of men find their 
account in holding to the original sense of the narratives, 
is likewise a very inadequate reason for believing this to 
bo the ultimate form of the truth. The mass of men are 
habitually unaware of the true theory of what they never 
theless perform with sufficient correctness. The truth 

Werke, xii. 266. 

n 



162 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

which tho narratives convoy, reaches them and influences 
them, without their being able to indicate exactly how 
it does so. The rationale of the process remains obscure, 
but tho edification is a fact. Beyond this fact tho 
ordinary man does not, as a rule, travel ; and when ho 
does, his reasonings on spiritual causation arc as likely 
to bo wrong as his reasonings on natural causation. Tho 
post hoc ergo propter hoc is the prevalent form of argu 
mentation in both cases. He does not sift tho ante 
cedents. All the prominent circumstances that preceded 
the spiritual phenomenon aro massed together as its 
cause; and ho is as likely as not to point out as tho 
essential element in the causation precisely tho most 
contingent and indifferent circumstance. Spiritual 
instinct is unerring in tho choice of its proper food ; 
but it is helpless, when asked to explain how that food 
nourishes it. 

Nor is it anything to the point, that a great number of 
those who derive benefit from the narratives and religious 
symbols in question perceive no conflict between their 
literal sense and the prerogative of reason in other 
spheres. Tho ordinary man, as Spinoza says, is slow 
to perceive contradictions, because he does not bring 
them together. His thinking is not continuous ; it is 
often, indeed, interrupted and casual to tho last degree 
here a little and there a little. And so it comes 
that he passes from the religious half of his life to tho 
secular half, without observing any inconsistency between 
his presuppositions and general habit of thought in 
tho two spheres. But sooner or later the contradiction 
comes to light. So long as a spirit of simple, unaffected 
piety prevails, it does not appear ; for piety passes, as 
if instinctively, to the inner content, and really lays no 



The Philosophy of Religion. 163 

stress on the finite particulars. They are there, and 
the thought of calling them in question has not arisen ; 
but to the unsophisticated religious consciousness they 
in no wise constitute the foundation of faith. In one 
aspect, it is their unimportance which has saved them 
from question. But when the genuine spirit of religion 
fades out of the Church, its place is taken by an abstract 
logic and a philosophy of the understanding without 
insight into the things of God. Orthodoxy in this form, 
having no root in itself, begins to lay a disproportionate 
weight on the external and historical. It insists on 
making all these indifferent details a matter of faith. 
But hero it is met by the AufJcldrung, or the spirit of 
scientific enlightenment and historical criticism. In a 
historical reference, this is the movement specially asso 
ciated with the activity of the eighteenth century, though 
it goes on still, and in many quarters may be said to be 
only beginning. It is to be noted that Hegel does not 
dispute the place and function of the negative here. He 
speaks of the Enlightenment as " the better sense " of 
mankind rising in revolt against the pretensions of a 
pettifogging orthodoxy; and as regards the contingent 
matter to which this orthodoxy would pin our faith, ho 
unhesitatingly acknowledges the victory of fheAufkldrung 
over its adversary.* Individual utterances in this 
connection may be ambiguous sometimes, perhaps, 
studiously so, but the general tenor of Hegel s thought 
is, I think, not to be mistaken. The calmness with 
which ho regards the Aufkldrung, is due to the fact that, 
on one side, ho is prepared to admit all its contentions. 

* Diese (die Aufkliirung) 1st Mcister geworden iiber diesen 
Glauben. Werke, xi, 150. 



164 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

What he disputes is the inference which Enlightenment 
draws from these admissions. He complains that it knows 
only the negative, and makes no distinction between the 
external or circumstantial, and the true or divine. In 
short, he denies the presupposition on which both ordinary 
orthodoxy and ordinary rationalism proceed, viz., that 
the peculiarly Christian doctrines stand or fall with the 
provable extra-naturalness of certain facts. The condem 
nation of the Aufkldrung in an absolute regard is, that its 
tendency is to sweep away religion altogether along with 
its finite forms. Mere enlightenment is no substitute for 
religion, and the inquiries on which its champions spend 
their energies are likewise essentially non-religious. 
Hence Hegel considered that the Aufkldrung had done its 
work ; it had given its gift to the world, and was hence 
forth barren. Like Kant, therefore, he deprecates, in 
a religious interest, the perpetual renewal of useless 
controversy. Wanton attacks upon the sacred books 
of Christianity indicate a defect in culture quite as much 
as in religious sense. The Church is right, he holds, 
from its own standpoint, in fighting shy of investigations 
into matters of fact, undertaken in a non-religious 
interest.* The reason is, that such investigations lend 
an exaggerated importance to the merely historical an 
importance which it does not possess as treated by the 
Church. This is, of course, not the way in which the 
Church formulates its opposition ; it is Hegel s sympa 
thetic interpretation of her attitude. Hegel s sympathies 
are essentially religious, and this sometimes communicates 

* WerTce, xii. 260. " So thut die Kirche insofern Eecht daran, 
wenn sio solcho Untersuchungen nicht annchmen kann." He 
instances the case of investigations into the reality of the reported 
appearances of Christ after liis death. 



The Philosophy of Religion. 165 

a tone of undue depreciation to his remarks on the 
Aufkldrung. But, as we have seen, he does not send 
Enlightenment away without the portion of goods that 
falls to its share. He considers his own position as 
a vantage-ground beyond both traditional orthodoxy and 
ordinary rationalism. In the strife, therefore, which 
still goes on between these two, Hegel can be invoked 
on neither side. His thoroughgoing distinction of 
Vorstellung and Begriff absolves him from descending 
into the noisy arena. "Thought justifies the content 
of religion, and recognizes its forms, that is to say, the 
determinateness of its historical appearance ; but, in the 
very act of doing so, it recognizes also the limitations of 
the forms."* This sentence from the conclusion of the 
Philosophy of Religion is well adapted to summarize the 
whole attitude of the Hegelian philosophy towards the 
question at issue. 

Such, then, in outline, is the Hegelian Philosophy of 
Religion. So far as it trenches on technically theological 
ground, I am not called upon to criticize it here. Histori 
cally, its direct affiliation to the Kantian position is not to 
be mistaken. The relation of Hegel to Kant in his theory of 
religion is, indeed, an exact parallel to the relation between 
them in respect of the doctrine of knowledge. In both 
cases, the sameness is more striking than the difference. 
Kantianism seems everywhere on the point of casting off 
the presuppositions which bind it to the old metaphysic. 
In evidence of this, it is only necessary to specify, in the 
present case, Kant s whole attitude to positive religion, 
his treatment of the Fall, and even, to some extent, of 
the idea of Reconciliation. But the new motaphysic 
* Werke, xii. 286. 



166 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

developed by Hegel out of Kantianism, does away with 
the abstract distinction between God and man which still 
remains at the Kantian standpoint. God is recognized, 
Hegel says, " not as a Spirit beyond the stars, but as 
Spirit in all spirits ;" and so the course of human history 
is frankly identified with the course of divine self -reve 
lation. The culmination of this religious development* 
is reached in Christianity; and Christianity reveals 
nothing more than that God is essentially this revelation 
of Himself.f In this connection it is that a new signi 
ficance is given to the doctrine of the Trinity, which 
thereby becomes fundamental for the Hegelian Philosophy 
of Religion. This attitude towards the course of history, 
and towards Christianity in particular, is the only one 
which is permissible to an Absolute philosophy. How- 
over fenced about with explanations, the thesis of such a 
philosophy must always be The actual is the rational/ 

The difficulties of such a system are always found in 
accounting for contingency, for imperfection, for suffering 
and evil. It would not bo fair to leave the subject, 
without pointing out in a word or two where the strain 
comes upon Hegelianism, when it is conceived as such 
a final and absolute system. Hegelianism, it may be 
premised, has, in the individual reflection of its author, 
no other basis than the bit-by-bit experience on which 
empiricism builds. This is a matter of course, which 

* The limits and the plan of this sketch make impossible even 
an outline of the course of this development in the historical religions 
of humanity. Hegel s characterizations of the different faiths are 
mines of thought, especially in the later stages, where he comes to 
compare Judaism, Hellenism, and the prosaic secularism of Borne, 
with the absolute religion for which they were destined to make 
way. 

f Werke, xii. 158. 



The Philosophy of Religion. 167 

ought not to require stating ; nevertheless, owing to the 
form which Hegel has given his thoughts, it is frequently 
ignored. Though the particulars, or the e given/ must 
necessarily come first in ordine ad individuum, yet, the 
principle of synthesis having been divined, the Hegelian 
method does not present its results as a collection of 
inductions or deductions, more or less fragmentary, from 
experience. The subjective process by which the results 
are reached is, as it were, suppressed; and an attempt 
is made to lay before us the system of the actual the 
actual as it exists in ordine ad univers.um, or from a divine 
standpoint. It is essential to the success of such an 
undertaking, that the system round itself in itself. What 
we get must be a perfect system of mutual relativity, and 
like the Divine Labourer wo must be able at the end to 
pronounce all things very good. That is just equivalent 
to saying that it must actually be a system, and not the 
disjecta membra of one. The idea of perfection Optimism, 
not as a hope, but as a reality is the very nerve of such 
a synthesis. The world must be seen, as it were, to 
have its genesis in divine perfection, and it must bo 
sealed up there again at the close. In other words (that 
all suspicion of an emanation hypothesis be avoided in 
the expression), there must be no hitch, no flaw, in the 
system, which might bo inconsistent with the perfection 
of the whole. 

Now the objections to which Hegel s synthetic or 
genetic mode of presentment has given rise that his 
philosophy is an a priori system, a metaphysical cobweb 
spun in flagrant disregard of experience, and so forth 
may be summarily dismissed, for they have their root in 
misconception and ignorance. But it is impossible to 
deny that it is precisely when Hegelianism presents itself 



1G8 The Development from Kant to Hegel. 

in system, as a self-cohering explanation of tho whole, 
that we are apt to be least satisfied with it. Tho thoughts 
of tho reader will revert instinctively, in the present 
case, to the hardly disguised failure of tho transition from 
tho Son to the world of finite men and things.* Hegel is 
perfectly at homo in describing tho triune relations of tho 
Idea ; but as soon as their transparency or pellucidity is 
blurred by real difference, tho strain comes upon him. Tho 
transition here is, in its way, an instructive counterpart to 
the unsatisfactory phrases in which the passage is made, 
in the Encyclopaedia, from the necessity of the logical Idea 
to the contingency of Nature. In its general aspect, tho 
problem is no less than to show how the existence of an 
imperfect world is compatible with divine perfection ; 
and, of course, when we start from the perfect, tho 
difficulty of explanation is enhanced. Hegel seems to 
gain the imperfect by a leap. When he has once gained 
it, he is much more successful in exhibiting tho process 
of regeneration. His treatment of evil as an essential 
element in tho consciousness of a sensuous being, for 
example, is profound and fundamental ; but it manifestly 
presupposes tho fact of the manifestation of reason in a 
sensuous creature like man. All imperfection may flow 
from tho combination, but why should this combination 
itself bo necessary ? So, too, there is no point which 
Hegel is fonder of emphasizing than tho labour of tho 
Spirit. The world-spirit, ho says, has had the patience 
to undertake " tho prodigious labour of the world s 
history :" only subjective impatience demands tho attain 
ment of tho goal without tho means. His reference to 
" the seriousness, tho pain, tho patience and labour 
of tho negative/ has been already quoted. It would 
* Cf. p. 150 supra. 



The. Philosophy of Religion. 1C9 

be an egregious mistake, therefore, to suppose that 
Hegel s Optimism is born of a superficial glance that 
ignores the darker sides of existence. Throughout, 
indeed, it takes the shape much more of a deliverance 
from evil than of the unimpeded march of a victorious 
purpose. In this respect, it is a much closer transcript 
of the course of the actual than most Optimistic systems 
are. But the inevitable question rises Whence the 
necessity of this pain and labour in the all-perfect? 
And if we lose our grasp of this idea of an all-perfect 
whole, can we be said still to possess the imposing 
synthesis which Hegel lays claim to ? Hegel might 
answer, that our difficulty is created by the abstract idea 
of perfection with which we start. Such pure perfection 
would be colourless nonentity ; there is no victory 
possible without an adversary, and existence is, in its 
very essence, this conflict of opposites. His own posi 
tion, he might say, is demonstrably identical with that 
of religion, which maintains that evil is permitted for 
the sake of the greater good, or, as philosophy expresses 
it, is involved in its possibility. Evil that is the means 
to good, a dualism that yet is overcome, Optimism upon 
a ground of Pessimism, such, he might say, is the 
character of existence as it reveals itself to us. God 
is this eternal conquest or reconciliation. We have 
no right to make unto ourselves other gods, or to con 
struct an imaginary world, where good shall be possible 
without evil, result without effort. Whether Hegel 
would accept what is hero put into his mouth, and 
whether, if ho would, the position amounts to an abso 
lute philosophy, are questions too wide to discuss further 
in a work whose object is mainly expository. But I 
probably express the conviction of many students, when 

12 



170 



The Dei elopmrnt from Kant to Hegel. 



I say that the strength of Hegelianism lies not so much 
in the definite answer it gives to any of the questions 
which are supposed to constitute philosophy, as in its 
criticism of history. In history, whether it be the history 
of philosophies, of religions, or of nations, Hegel is like 
Antaeus on his mother earth ; his criticisms are invincible, 
and his interpretations are ever fresh. 



TIIK KNI>. 



g 

CO 



tU 

I 

UJ 





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