Hegel. / Caird, Edward, 1835-1908

Author: Caird, Edward, 1835-1908
Title: Hegel.
Publisher: Edinburgh Blackwood 1883
Tag(s): hegel, georg wilhelm friedrich, 1770-1831; hegel; unity; kant; philosophy; self; consciousness; principle
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Ijbilosopbkal Classics for feglislj genbers 



EDITED BY 



WILLIAM KNIGHT, LL.D. 

PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS 



HEGEL 



The Volumes published of this Series contain- 



1. DESCARTES, 

2. BUTLER, . 

3. BERKELEY, 

4. FICHTE, . 

5. KANT, 

6. HAMILTON, 

7. HEGEL, . 

8. LEIBNIZ, . 

9. VICO, 

10. HOBBES, . 

11. HUME, 

12. SPINOZA, . 

13. BACON. PARr 

14. BACON. Part 

15. LOCKE, . 



I., 
II., 



By Professor Mahafft, Dublin. 
By the Rev. W. Lucas Collins, M.A. 
By Professor Campbell Fraser. 
By Professor Adamson, Glasgow. 
By Professor Wallace, Oxford. 
By Professor Veitch. 
. By the Master of Balliol. 
By John Theodorr Merz. 
By Professor Flint, Edinburgh. 
By Professor Croom Robertson. 
By Professor Knight, St Andrews. 
. By Principal Caird, Glasgow. 
By Professor Nichol. 
By Professor NlCHOL. 
By Professor Campbell Frasek. 



HEGEL 



BY 



EDWAKD CAIED, LL.D. 

hi 

MASTER OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, 
OXFORD 



CHEAP EDITION 



WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 

EDINBURGH AND LONDON 

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6083.92 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



The main authorities for the life of Hegel are the 
biographies of Eosenkranz and Haym, the former a 
pupil and devoted disciple of Hegel, the latter a critic 
whose opposition to Hegel's philosophical principles has 
passed into a kind of personal bitterness, which mis- 
construes his simplest actions. Some additional details 
may be derived from Hotho (' Vorstudien fiir Leben und 
Kunst '), from Euge (' Aus fruherer Zeit '), and from 
Klaiber (' Holderlin, Hegel, und Schelling'). The books 
and articles written in Germany for or against the 
Hegelian philosophy it is impossible to enumerate, for 
almost every one who has written about philosophy in 
recent times has written about Hegel. Daub, Mar- 
heineke, Goschel, Eosenkranz, Erdmann, Gabler, Vatke, 
and Euge are the names of only a few of the most 
important adherents of the school. The ablest attack 
upon Hegelianism which I have seen is by Dr A. 
Schmid (' Entwickelungsgeschichte der Hegelischen 



vi Preface, 

Logik'). To English readers Hegel was first intro- 
duced in the powerful statement of his principles by 
Dr Hutchison Stirling. Mr Wallace, in the introduc- 
tion to his translation of the lesser Logic, and Mr 
Harris, the editor of the American 'Speculative Jour- 
nal,' have since done much to illustrate various aspects 
of the Hegelian philosophy. Other English writers, 
such as the late Professor Green, Mr Bradley, Professor 
Watson, and Professor Adamson, who have not directly 
treated of Hegel, have been greatly influenced by him. 
Mr Seth has recently written an interesting account of 
the movement from Kant to Hegel. 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. PAGE 

I. LEHBJAHRE THE SCHOOL AND THE UNI- 
VERSITY, ..... 1 

II. WANDERJAHRE HEGEL AS A PRIVATE TUTOR 

AT BERNE AND FRANKFORT HIS PHILO 
SOPHY IN ITS DEVELOPMENT, . . 13 

III. HEGEL AND SCHELLING JENA, 1800-1807, 45 

IV. HEGEL AFTER THE D9TTLE OF JENA THE 

SCHOOL AT NURNBERG, . . .65 

V. HEGEL AS A PROFESSOR AT HEIDELBERG AND 

BEBLIN HIS CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE, 77 

VI. THE PROBLEM OF PHILOSOPHY STATEMENT 

OF IT BY KANT, FICHTE, SCHELLING, AND 
HEGEL, . . .112 

VII. THE PRINCIPLE OF CONTRADICTION AND THE 

IDEA OF SPIRIT, . . . 134 



viii Contents. 

VIII. THE HEGELIAN LOGIC, . . 151 
IX. THE APPLICATION OR DEVELOPMENT OP THE 
LOGICAL IDEA RELATION OP THE HEGEL- 
IAN PRINCIPLE TO CHRISTIANITY THE 

HEGELIAN PHILOSOPHY AFTER HEGEL, . 186 



HEGEL. 



CHAPTER I. 

LEHRJAHRE THE SCHOOL AND THE UNIVERSITY. 

The great movement of thought which characterises the 
nineteenth century is a movement through negation to 
reaffirmation, through destruction to reconstruction, 
in Carlyle's language, through the " everlasting no " to 
the "everlasting yea." Its great men are men who, 
like Miraheau, have " swallowed all formulas," yet have 
not in the process lost their faith in the spiritual powers 
and destiny of man ; whose emancipation from the 
weight of the past, from the life of custom and tradi- 
tion, has only revealed to them more clearly the perma- 
nent hasis of human faith and hope, the eternal rock 
on which all human beliefs and institutions are built. 
Their greatness is measured by the completeness with 
which the whole movement of the time, negative and 
positive, has mirrored itself in their intellectual history, 
and by the degree in which they have mastered its striv- 

P. VII. A 



2 Hegel. 

ing elements, and brought them to a unity as factors of 
their own inner life. Their weakness is measured by 
the degree in which they have become the passive 
organs and spokesmen of one or other of the opposite 
principles of revolt or reaction, or have yielded success- 
ively to the alternate tides of popular feeling as they 
swayed from one extreme to the other. Xo man, indeed, 
who is in the midst of such a social and intellectual 
movement, and not yet looking upon it from the vantage- 
ground of history, can completely gather into himself 
the whole spirit of an age, or enter with the sympathy 
of complete understanding into both of its opposed 
enthusiasms. Xo man, even if he does so, can be so 
far independent of the process in which he is a part, as 
never in the hour of revolt to confuse anarchy with 
liberty, and never, when the time of reconstruction 
comes, to be tempted to use for the new building some 
of the " wood, hay, or stubble " of the old which has 
been tried in the fire and found wanting. Xo man is 
allowed to play providence or to escape paying the 
penalty of the limitations of his individuality and his 
time. Any approximation, however, to such a compre- 
hensive result, any life that escapes the fanaticism of 
abstract denial or abstract reaffirmation of the ideals and 
faiths of the past, and escapes it not merely by apply- 
ing the leaden rule of temporary expediency and ordi- 
nary common-sense, but by the way of a deeper insight, 
and a firmer grasp of the unity that binds together all the 
aspects of the many-sided reality, any life, in short, 
which does not merely change with the changing time, 
but has a true progress or development in it, must be of 
the highest interest and instruction for us. In it, as in 



His Family. 3 

a kind of microcosm, we can spel] out more clearly the 
lesson which in the Avider macrocosm it is so hard to 
read. It is this comprehensiveness of experience, this 
openness to hoth of the leading currents of tendency in 
their time, and this constant effort more or less suc- 
cessful and on a wider or smaller scale to reach a point 
of view from which these tendencies might be understood 
and harmonised, that gives such value to the life and 
writings of men so different in every other respect as 
Wordsworth and Carlyle, as Comte and Goethe. It is 
this also which lends interest to the great movement of 
German philosophy which began with Kant, and the 
ultimate meaning of which was expressed by Hegel. 
For that movement was, above all, an attempt to find a 
way through the modern principles of subjective free- 
dom the very principle which produced the Reforma- 
tion of the sixteenth and the Revolution of the eigh- 
teenth century to a reconstruction of the intellectual 
and moral order on which man's life had been based 
in the past. 

George William Frederic Hegel was born at Stuttgart, 
the capital of Wurtemberg, on the 27th August 1770, 
five years before the birth of Schelling, eleven years 
after the birth of Schiller, both of whom, like himself, 
were Wiirtembergers. The inhabitants of the Swabian 
highlands have long been distinguished from the other 
Germans by peculiarities of dialect and character, by a 
mixture of shrewdness and simplicity, of religious en- 
thusiasm and speculative free-thinking, which has led 
Mr Seeley to name them the Scots of Germany. By 
position and race, Swabia belongs to the South, by reli- 
gion to the North, a circumstance which of itself tended 



4 Hegel. 

to keep alive an intenser religious and intellectual life 
in a country that might regard itself as a kind of out- 
post or advanced - guard of Protestantism. In their 
general characteristics the Swabians form a sort of 
middle term between the different branches of the Ger- 
man nation. The hard rationalism and practical energy 
which distinguishes the Protestant North, and especially 
Prussia, is in them softened and widened by what the 
Germans call the GemiithUchkeit of a southern race, 
and has given rise to a certain meditative depth of 
nature, which sometimes leads to abstruseness and mys- 
ticism, but is less apt to let its consciousness of the 
wholeness or organic unity of truth be broken and dis- 
turbed by the antagonisms of reflection. It is worth 
noting in this reference, that while the first two leaders 
in the great philosophical movement of Germany, Kant 
and Fichte those who especially asserted the freedom 
and independence of man, and set the self above the 
not-self belonged to the ]S"orth ; the last two, Schelling 
and Hegel, those who rose above this one-sided idealism 
to a consciousness of the spirituality of the world and 
of man's unity with it and with his fellow-men, belonged 
to the South, and indeed to this same region of Swabia. 
Hegel was of a family which traced its descent to one 
Johann Hegel, who was driven from Carinthia by the 
Austrian persecution of the Protestants towards the end 
of the sixteenth century, and which, during the seven- 
teenth and eighteenth centuries, gave many of its sons 
to the humbler branches of the civil service of "Wurtem- 
berg. His father, of whom Ave know little, was an 
officer in the fiscal service, a man of the orderly habits 
and the conservative instincts natural to his place. His 



At School. 5 

mother, whom he lost in his thirteenth year, and of 
whom he always cherished a grateful remembrance, 
seems to have been a woman of considerable education 
and intelligence. He had a younger brother, Louis, 
who became a soldier and a sister, Christiane, between 
whom and the philosopher there appears to have been a 
strong bond of affection. We catch a glimpse of a quiet 
bourgeois household, governed by a spirit of honesty, 
economy, and industry, and in which the education of 
the children was the most important concern. After 
receiving some instruction from his mother, Hegel was 
sent to a so-called Latin school in his fifth year, and in 
his seventh to the gymnasium of his native city. He 
seems to have been distinguished only as a thoroughly 
teachable boy, ready to acquire knowledge of any kind, 
but with no predominant taste or capacity in any one 
direction. He showed from the first the patient method- 
ical habits of the race of civil servants from which he had 
sprung, and was, in short, that uninteresting character, 
" the good boy who takes prizes in every class, including 
the prize for good conduct." At the age of fourteen he 
began to keep a diary it was the age of diaries but this 
did not indicate in him any premature tendency to self- 
consciousness or self-analysis. In fact he found noth- 
ing particular to chronicle in it, except the progress of 
his reading, and sometimes he uses it merely as a means 
for practising himself in the writing of Latin. There is 
perhaps a tinge of boyish pedantry in the premature seri- 
ousness with which he records the progress of his studies. 
A strong expression of affection and gratitude to one of 
his teachers, called Loffler, who had given him private 
instruction in addition to the regular class lessons, and 



6 Hegel. 

who died when Hegel was in his fifteenth year, is almost 
the only utterance of individual feeling to he found in 
the diary, " How often and how happily did he sit by 
me, and I by him, in the little chamber ! " For the rest, 
the contents of the diary are an echo of the enlightened 
views of the day, which Hegel heard from his teachers, 
and read in the popular text-books of science and philo- 
sophy which they put into his hands. In this spirit he 
points out the evils of intolerance, and the necessity of 
thinking for one's self, condemns the superstitions of 
the vulgar, notices the similarity of the miracles of all 
ages and nations, and suggests that there is not much 
difference between the purchase of heaven's favour by 
direct offerings to the gods and the modern substitute 
of gifts to the Church, all with the wisdom of a little 
Solon of the AufMdrung. 

The one study, however, which seems to have taken a 
deep hold upon him, and which towards the end of his 
school years awakened him for the first time to some 
freshness and originality of remark, was the study of 
Greek poetry. The tragedies of Sophocles especially cast 
an abiding charm on him ; and the " Antigone," which 
he always considered the masterpiece of dramatic poetry, 
was twice translated by him once in prose, and again, 
at the university, in verse. The elective affinity which 
thus drew Hegel to the pure undefiled well of Greek 
art lay very deep in his nature, and produced the great- 
est effect in all his subsequent work, both positively and 
negatively. Even during his youth he seems scarcely 
to have felt any charm in the romance of diseased senti- 
mentalism for which Werther set the fashion in Ger- 
many, and which was afterwards repeated in weaker 



Love of Greek Literattire. 7 

echoes by Schlegel and others. Nor, though as we 
shall see he afterwards came under the power of Chris- 
tian and romantic art, did he ever feel anything but 
repulsion for that formless emotional tendency which 
was often in his day confused with it. " Early pene- 
trated by the nobility and beauty of Greece," says 
Eosenkranz, "he never could recognise genuine Chris- 
tianity in a form which excludes the earnest serenity 
of antique art." His usual universality of intelligent 
sympathy seemed to give way to a certain bitterness 
of antagonism when he Avas brought face to face with 
any example of the Eousseauist disease of self- con- 
sciousness ; and even in a mystic like Hamann, who 
attracted him by the humorous riches of his thoughts, 
Hegel discovered an element of " hypochondria " to 
which he was unable entirely to reconcile himself. But 
Greek art came to him as the vision of a realised 
harmony of existence, in which there was no war of 
subject and object, of ideal and real ; and even from his 
first contact with it, he found in it his native element. 
" At the name of Greece," as he declared to his students 
long afterwards, "the cultivated German feels himself 
at home. Europeans have their religion Avhat is tran- 
scendent and distant from a further source, from the 
East, and especially from Syria ; but what is here, what 
is present, science and art all that makes life satisfy- 
ing, and elevates and adorns it we derive, directly or 
indirectly, from Greece." 

Another important habit Hegel took with him from 
school. In his sixteenth year he had commenced the 
practice of making copious extracts from every book that 
interested him; and to judge from the manuscripts which 



8 Hegel. 

are still preserved, h^already found interest in almost 
every branch of science accessible to him. This habit 
he continued through life ; so that there are very few 
important literary or scientific products of his time in- 
deed few great literary or scientific products of any time 
of which he had not made a full analysis, and even 
copied out the principal parts. In this way he gradually 
accumulated a considerable number of well -arranged 
commonplace-books for in everything he was exact 
and orderly and, wbat was still more valuable, ho 
acquired the habit not only of grasping the general 
meaning of the authors he read, but of entering into 
their specific quality, and appreciating even that subtle 
flavour of individuality which is conveyed in the mi- 
nute turns of style and phraseology. True culture, as 
he afterwards taught, must begin with a resolute self- 
effacement, with a purely receptive attitude ; and it is 
only through such an attitude that we can attain to 
that vital criticism which is virtually the criticism of 
the object by itself. Speaking of the Pythagorean 
method of education, in which the pupil was con- 
demned to silence for five years, Hegel says that, "in 
a sense, this duty of silence is the essential condition 
of all culture and learning. We must begin with being 
able to apprehend the thoughts of others, and this 
implies a disregarding of our own ideas. It is often 
said that the mind is to be cultured from the first 
by questions, objections, and answers, &c. In fact, such 
a method does not give to it real culture, but rather 
makes it external and superficial. By silence, by keep- 
ing ourselves to ourselves, we are not made poorer in 
spirit. Bather by it we gain the capacity of apprehend- 



University Life. 9 

ing things as they really are, and the consciousness that 
subjective opinions and objections are good for nothing, 
so that we cease at last even to have them." This 
counsel is no doubt somewhat hard to follow, and it is 
not without danger of being misinterpreted hi the case 
of minds whose vital power of reaction on what they 
have received is comparatively feeble. But for minds 
whose springs cannot be broken by any weight of infor- 
mation, who possess that " robust intellectual digestion 
which is equal to whole libraries," it is nothing less 
than intellectual salvation. At any rate it is certain that 
Hegel had proved it upon himself from the earliest years. 
At the age of eighteen Hegel left the gymnasium 
for the university. Destined by his parents for the 
Church, he was sent with a bursary to the theological 
seminary of Tubingen an institution in which some 
show of monastic discipline was kept up. The members 
of the " Btift " wore a peculiar dress, and were subjected 
to a somewhat petty system of punishments generally 
by deprivation of the customary portion of wine at 
dinner for all offences against the regular order of the 
place. Of course theology took the first place in the pre- 
scribed order of study, though the course was divided 
into a philosophical and a theological portion, the former 
occupying two, and the latter three years. There was at 
the time no one among the professors of Tubingen who 
was capable of permanently influencing and guiding a 
pupil like Hegel. Some of them acknowledged the 
influence of Kant, then the rising star of philosophy, 
so far as to make him an occasional subject of lecture, 
and even to pervert his principles to the support of the 
old system of doctrine not a difficult thing with an 



10 Hegel. 

author in whom the letter so often falls short of the 
spirit. But there was not among them even one 
thoroughly trained disciple of Kant, who could teach 
the new ideas with sympathy and intelligence. Accord- 
ingly Hegel soon learnt to take the university work as 
a routine to be got over with the minimum of attention, 
and we even find that he was specially reprimanded for 
the frequency with which he had incurred the penalties 
for absence from lecture. There is evidence, however, 
that he steadily pursued his reading in classical authors, 
adding to them many modern writers, especially Rous- 
seau, whose works Avere the key to the great political 
movement then rapidly coming to a head in France. For 
such reading Hegel was well prepared by his previous 
training ; for Rousseau transcended the individualistic 
commonplaces of the philosophical text -books, which 
Hegel had been patiently copying out at school, mainly 
in this, that his passionate fervour of belief, his native 
sympathy with the poorer classes, and his sense of 
social injustice, changed them from the light playthings 
of literature into the winged shafts of speech that make 
men mad. Hegel and his companions, among whom 
was Schilling younger in years than Hegel, but much 
more precocious in intellectual development formed a 
political club, in which the ideas of the Revolution 
were discussed ; and Hegel, we are told, was distin- 
guished among its members as the enthusiastic champion 
of liberty and fraternity. There was even a tradition 
which has now been proved to refer to another time 
that he and Schelling went out one fine spring morning 
to plant a tree of Liberty in the market-place of Tub- 
ingen. At any rate, it is certain that Hegel fully shared 



University Life. 11 

in the wonderful hopes which at the time stirred all 
that was generous and imaginative in Europe. 

" Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
But to be young was very heaven." 

For the rest, Hegel took part in all the usual incidents 
of German student life its camaraderie, its conviviality, 
its enthusiastic friendships, and even, it would seem, its 
love-making, though with a certain staidness and sobriety 
Avhich got him the nickname of " old man " or " old 
fellow." He was, we gather, genial and good-humoured 
in manner, and was generally liked by his fellow-students, 
but not thought to have any very great abilities. . Yet he 
formed special ties of friendship with the two of his fel- 
lows in the Stift who afterwards showed original powers, 
with Schelling, and with a young poet called Hblderlin, 
whose verses are filled with a kind of romantic longing 
for Hellenic art and poetry, similar to that which was 
more powerfully expressed by Schiller in his " Gods of 
Greece." Hegel's association with Hblderlin, with whom 
he is recorded to have studied Plato and Sophocles, was 
especially fitted to deepen in his mind the impressions 
which he already had received in the gymnasium from 
the literature of Greece. Towards the end of his uni- 
versity career, however, his attention began to be turned 
more definitely towards philosophy, especially in its 
relation to theology, and in connection therewith to the 
ethical works of Kant. And the few pages from his 
note - books which are quoted by Rosenkranz show 
already his characteristic poAver of concentrating his 
meaning in pithy sayings, Avords winged at once Avith 
imagination and reflection, Avhich strike their mark like 



12 Hegel. 

a cannon-ball. He had indeed, as we shall see, already- 
entered upon that course of modification and transfor- 
mation of Kantian principles, out of which his own 
philosophy was to spring. These studies were, how- 
ever, altogether hidden from the authorities of the 
Stift, who, when he left Tubingen in 1793, dismissed 
him with a certificate that he was a man of good parts 
and character, somewhat fitful in his work, with little 
gift of speech ; and that he was fairly well acquainted 
with theology and philology, but had bestowed no 
attention whatever on philosophy. 



13 



CHAPTEE II. 

WA.NDERJAHRE. HEGEL AS A PRIVATE TUTOR AT BERNE 

AND FRANKFORT. HIS PHILOSOPHY IN ITS DEVELOP- 
MENT. 

There is very little to record of Hegel's outward life in 
the six years after he left the university. The first 
three were spent by him in the Swiss city of Berne, as 
tutor in an aristocratic family of the name of Von 
Tschugg ; and the last three in a similar position in 
the house of a Frankfort merchant called Gogel. Of 
the special relations between Hegel and his employers 
or pupils we hear nothing ; nor is anything of import- 
ance recorded of his various friends and acquaintances 
in Switzerland, though his biographer has printed the 
journal of an excursion which he made with two of 
them in the Bernese Oberland. A few letters from his 
friends Holderlin and Schelling kept him aware of the 
progress of the philosophical movement in Germany, and 
it was probably in order to get nearer the literary centre 
that in 1796 he applied to Holderlin to help him to a 
situation in Frankfort. In one of his letters to Schel- 
ling he expresses an amused weariness of the petty plots 
and family cabals that made up the politics of the little 



14 Hegel. 

aristocratic canton of Berne ; and, no doubt, his strong 
political interest also made him desire to be in a better 
position for observing the great events which were then 
changing the face of Germany and Europe. In Frank- 
fort, besides, he had the society of his old friend. Hbl- 
derlin, and through him he was brought into close 
relations with another friend a forgotten poet and 
philosopher called Sinclair whose influence helped to 
draw him to the study of the Christian mystics, as well 
as of the romantic art and poetry of the middle ages. 

As regards the development of Hegel's philosophy, 
however, these six uneventful years were the most im- 
portant period of his life. It was his period of fermen- 
tation, in which the many elements of culture he had 
accumulated were obscurely conflicting and combining 
with each other, and in which the native character of 
his genius was gradually revealing itself in the new 
form which it gave to them. The process of accumula- 
tion still went on actively as it went on through all 
his life but it now began to be accompanied by a 
powerful effort to assimilate the matter accumulated, 
and to change the dead mass of information into the 
living tissue of thought. Hegel did not, indeed, as he 
said of Schelling, " carry on his studies in public," and 
it is only through the publication by his biographer of 
extracts from his early note-books that we are enabled 
to get below the rounded utterances of the master to the 
tentative sketches and imperfect studies of the learner. 
But no more instructive revelation of the secrets of in- 
tellectual growth can be found than in the words, some- 
times obscure, but always powerful, and not seldom 
vividly imaginative, in which Hegel struggles for the 



Theological Studies. 15 

expression of a thought which is yet inchoate, and, as it 
were, in process of germination. 

Some of the elements out of which that thought 
evolved itself have been already mentioned. These were 
the classical and especially the Greek literature on the 
one hand, and on the other the so-called Enlightenment 
of the eighteenth century. This Enlightenment Hegel 
had received at first in school in its sober German form, 
in the dry analysis and superficial criticism of the 
post- Wolffian age; but at the university he came to 
know it in its more intensive French form, which was to 
the German enlightenment as wine to water. Through 
Eousseau he proceeded next to Kant's ethical works 
following in logical order the evolution of that idea of 
freedom which was the saving salt of the philosophy of 
the time. If Ave further remember that Hegel, educated 
for the Church, had not as yet ceased to look upon him- 
self as a theologian, we shall not wonder that for several 
years after this his studies were chiefly directed to the 
more concrete and practical questions of religion and 
social ethics, rather than to the abstract metaphysical 
inquiries which were then mainly occupying the followers 
of Kant and Fichte. It is also noteworthy that the 
studies in which he sought for the means of answering 
these questions were primarily historical rather than 
philosophical ; or became philosophical only through his 
persistent effort to comprehend and interpret history. 
At first he was chiefly occupied with the history of reli- 
gion, and especially with the origin of Christianity, and 
its connection with the Greek and Jewish religions ; and 
while engaged with this subject he wrote a complete 
life of Christ, and a treatise on the relation of positive 



16 Hegel. 

to rational religion. In these and other writings of this 
period, however, he always considered religion in close 
relation to the social and political life of nations ; and 
in the Frankfort period, his theological studies gradually 
connected themselves with extensive inquiries into ethics, 
political economy, and finally, into the physical and 
natural sciences. At the same time, this regressive 
movement of thought, as we may call it, led him to 
examine more fully the development of philosophy in 
Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. And in the last year of 
his stay in Frankfort he finally endeavoured to gather 
up the result of his investigations in a systematic- 
sketch of philosophy, of which, however, only the Logic 
and Metaphysic and the Philosophy of Nature were at 
that time completed. 

We may hest understand the process of formation 
through which Hegel's philosophy was going during these 
six years, if we keep hold of two leading conceptions 
which were always present to his mind. The one is the 
idea of freedom or self-determination ; the other is the 
idea of man's life, natural and spiritual, as an organic unity 
of elements, which cannot he separated from each other 
without losing all their meaning and value. The former 
of these was the great principle of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, which was gradually being deepened and trans- 
formed in the writings of Rousseau, of Kant, and finally 
of Fichte. The latter revealed itself to Hegel in the 
first instance through the religious and political life of 
Greece. His main difficulty was that these two equally 
essential ideas seemed to lead in different ways, and to 
he hardly capable of reconciliation with each other. 
With this difficulty we find Hegel wrestling in the first 



Tlie Principle of Freedom. 17 

writing of his which bears the distinct mark of his 
genius ; and it was the sting, and almost agony, of it 
which stimulated his unceasing researches in nearly 
every department of historical and scientific knowledge, 
and his equally unceasing efforts to penetrate into the 
inner meaning and uniting principle of the knowledge 
so acquired. Finally, it was as the solution of this diffi- 
culty that the central idea of his philosophy first revealed 
itself, and it was in constant reference to it that that idea 
was gradually worked out into a systematic view of the 
intelligible world in its relation to the intelligence. It 
is necessary for us, therefore, clearly to understand what 
these opposite tendencies involved, and how, in the 
thought of Hegel, they struggled with each other. 

The principle of Freedom, as it was first asserted in 
the Reformation, involved an opposition of the inner to 
the outer life of man, of conscience to external authority, 
of the individual as self-determined in all his thought 
and action to all the influences and objects by which he 
is, or might be, determined from without In thrusting 
aside the claim of the Church to place itself between 
the individual and God, Luther had proclaimed the 
emancipation of men not only from the leading-strings 
of the Church, but, in effect, from all external authority 
whatever, and even, in a sense, from all merely external 
teaching or revelation of the truth ; for the principle 
which was announced in the first instance in reference 
to religion, the central truth of man's being, must inevi- 
tably make its way to the circumference, and affect all 
other elements of his life. If the true knowledge of 
God be that which comes through the inner witness of 
the spirit, no other truth can ultimately be accepted in 

P. VII. B 



18 Hegel. 

a different way. If the divine law, to which alone ab- 
solute submission is due, is revealed by an inward voice, 
which is one with the voice of our own conscience, no 
other lawful rule and authority can be merely external. 
"We cannot recognise as real any object which is not 
brought into intelligible relation with our own imme- 
diate self-consciousness. TVe cannot recognise as just 
any command in obeying which we are not obeying our 
better self. Luther, therefore, had begun a "war of 
the liberation of humanity," which could not cease until 
everything foreign and alien, everything that was not 
seen to form a part of man's own inward life and being, 
was expelled from all relation to it, and even condemned 
as meaningless and unreal. Sub hoc signo vincas. This 
is the controlling idea which has ruled the modern 
movement of civilisation, and the name in which all its 
great speculative and practical victories have been won. 
This principle of freedom was, however, almost neces- 
sarily narrowed and distorted by the antagonism in 
Avhich it first expressed itself. An idea which is used 
as a weapon of controversy, is on the way to lose its 
universality and to be turned into a half-truth. Thus 
the doctrine that nothing ultimately can have authority 
or even reality for man which is not capable of being 
made his own and identified with his very self, might 
be understood to mean that the truth of things is at 
once revealed to the undeveloped consciousness of the 
savage or the child, and that the immediate desires of the 
natural man are his highest law. In place of the duty 
of knowing for one's self, and of undergoing all the hard 
discipline, intellectual and moral, which is necessary in 
order to know, might be put an assertion of the "rights 



Revolutionary Theories. 19 

of private judgment," which was equivalent to the pro- 
clamation of an anarchy of individual opinion. As the 
modern struggle for emancipation went on, this ambigu- 
ity of the new principle began to reveal itself ; and the 
claims which were first made for the " spiritual man " 
i.e., for man in the infinite possibilities of his nature as 
a rational or self-conscious being, capable of an intel- 
lectual and moral life which takes him out of himself, 
and even of a religious experience which unites him to 
the infinite, were reasserted on behalf of the "natural 
man," i.e., of man conceived merely as a finite individual 
an atom set among other atoms in a finite world, and 
incapable of going beyond it, or even beyond himself, 
either in thought or action. Hence the strange contra- 
diction which we find in the literature of the eighteenth 
century, which with one hand exalts the individual 
almost to a god, while with the other hand it seems to 
strip off the last veil that hides from him that he is a beast. 
The practical paradox, that the age in which the claims 
of humanity Avere most strongly asserted, is also the age 
in which human nature was reduced to its lowest terms, 
that the age of tolerance, philanthropy, and enlighten- 
ment, was also the age of materialism, individualism, 
and scepticism, is explicable only if we remember that 
both equally spring out of the negative form taken by 
the first assertion of human freedom. 

As the individual thus fell back upon himself, throw- 
ing off all relations to that which seemed to be external, 
the specific religious and social ideas of earlier days lost 
power over him ; and their place was taken by the ab- 
stract idea of God and the abstract idea of the equality 
and fraternity of men, ideas Avhich seemed to be higher 



20 Hegel. 

and nobler because they were more general, but which 
for that very reason were emptied of all definite mean- 
ing, as well as of all vital power to hold in check the 
lusts and greeds of man's lower nature. Thus the am- 
bitious but vague proclamation of the religion of nature 
and the rights of man was closely associated with a 
theory which was reducing man to a mere animal indi- 
vidual, a mere subject of sensations and appetites, in- 
capable either of religion or of morality. For an ethics 
which is more than a word, and a religion which is 
more than an aspiration, imply definite relations of men 
to each other and to God, and all such relations were now 
rejected as inconsistent with the freedom of the indivi- 
dual. The French Revolution was the practical demon- 
stration that the mere general idea of religion is not a 
religion, and that the mere general idea of a social unity 
is not a state, but that such abstractions, inspiring as they 
may be as weapons of attack upon the old system, leave 
nothing behind to build up the new one, except the 
unchained passions of the natural man. 

In Eousseau and Kant we find an attempt to develop 
this abstract principle of freedom into a social system, 
without altering its abstract or negative character. Rous- 
seau, indeed, saAV that the claims made in behalf of the 
individual nmst rest on something in him higher than his 
individual nature. Accordingly, he speaks of a r&ison 
commune and a volonte generate, which is different from 
the reason and the will of the individuals as such, and 
which makes them capable of association. But as he 
regards this universal reason and will merely as a com- 
mon element in natures which are otherwise unlike each 
other, and not as a principle which binds them together 



Rousseau and Kant. 21 

by means of their very differences, lie is unable to de- 
velop any organic conception of the social unity. Kant, 
in like manner, sees in the consciousness of self an ele- 
ment which is common to all men, and which makes 
community between them possible ; and in the idea of 
self-determination i.e., of a determination which is con- 
formable to the nature of the self he finds the principle 
of all morality. But as he also is unable to show any 
connection between this general idea and the desires and 
capacities which determine the particular relations of men 
to each other and to the world, his morality remains 
a soul without a body ; and it is only by a mystifica- 
tion that he appears to be able to get beyond his 
general principle, and to derive particular laws of duty 
from it. 

Now it is at this point that Hegel takes up the philo- 
sophical question. To him, as a son of the Protestant X 
Aufklarung, the idea of freedom the idea that in know- 
ledge and action alike man must be self-determined, that 
he must find himself in the object he knows, and realise 
himself in the end to which he devotes himself now 
and always remained axiomatic. In the university, 
when he was " an enthusiastic champion of liberty and 
fraternity," he accepted the idea in all the one-sidedness 
of its first revolutionary expression : and even some years 
afterwards, Ave find him Avriting in the same spirit to 
Schelling in reference to his account of the Fichtean 
exaltation of the ego over the non-ego. " I hold it one J 
of the best signs of the times, that humanity has been 
presented to its own eyes as worthy of reverence. It 
is a proof that the nimbus is vanishing from the heads 
of the oppressors and gods of the earth. Philosophers 



22 Hegel. 

are now proving the dignity of man, and the people 
will soon learn to feel it, and not merely to ask humbly 
for those rights of theirs which have been trampled in 
the dust, but to resume and appropriate them for them- 
selves." The revolutionary tone which shows itself in 
these words soon disappeared from Hegel's writing ; but 
to the principle which underlies them the rejection of 
any merely external limit to the thoughts and actions 
of men he was always faithful, and it was one of 
the main grounds of his subsequent break with Schel- 
ling. And though, in the latter part of his life, Hegel 
is often supposed to have become politically a reaction- 
ary, and though he really did lean to the Conservative 
side in the immediate politics of Prussia, he never to 
any degree modified his belief that the principle of 
- liberty is at the root of the political as of all the spirit- 
ual life of man. Thus, in one of his latest course of 
lectures, he declared that Luther, in asserting that each 
man must find the truth for himself, had laid down the 
guiding idea of all subsequent history. " Thus was 
raised the last banner around which the nations gather 
the banner of the free spirit, which, in apprehending the 
truth, still abides with itself, and which, indeed, can 
only abide by itself as it apprehends the truth. This is 
the banner under which we serve, and which we cany." 
If Hegel, then, ever became in any sense an enemy of 
the Aufklarung, it was only on the ground of a deeper 
interpretation of that principle of freedom which gave 
the Aufklarung its power and value. His controversy 
with it, like his controversy with Kant and Fichte, was 
so frequent and unsparing oidy because he stood so close 
to it, and even, in a sense, on the very same ground 



Criticism of Kant. 23 

with it. He could afford to be more charitable to those 
with whom he had less in common. 

At the same time, while it is true that Hegel never </ 
swerved from the principle of liberty, it is also true that 
the philosophical impulse was first awakened within 
him in a recoil against the abstract and one-sided ex- 
pression of that principle. Already, in the university, 
he had turned away with weariness from the platitudes 
of enlightenment. " He who has much to say of the 
incomprehensible stupidity of mankind, who elaborately 
demonstrates that it is the greatest folly for a people to 
have such prejudices, Avho has always on his tongue the 
watchwords of ' enlightenment,' ' knowledge of man- 
kind,' 'progress and perfectibility of the species,' &c, 
is but a vain babbler of the Aufklarung, and a vendor 
of universal medicines, one who feeds himself with 
empty words, and ignores the holy and .tender web of 
human affections." Nor is Hegel much better satisfied 
with the abstract Kantian morality, though he does not 
yet see his way entirely to reject it. In the same spirit 
in which Aristotle objected to the Socratic doctrine that 
" virtue is knowledge," he points out that a real morality 
implies a habitual temper of mind, which cannot be 
artificially produced by mere teaching, but must be a 
living growth of character, evolved from the earliest 
years by the unconscious influence of a society in which 
religion, laws, and institutions are all moulded by one 
spirit. Eeferring to Kant's admission that a purely 
rational religion is an impossibility, he objects to hi.s 
assertion that all that goes beyond the abstract morality 
of reason, all that is directed to satisfy the feelings and 
the heart, must be regarded as mere irrational fetich- 



24 Hegel. 

worship. The feelings after all, Hegel urges, are not so 
alien to reason as Kant had supposed, " for love is the 
analogue of reason, in so far as it finds itself in other 
men ; or rather, forgetting itself, finds another self in 
others in whom it lives, feels, and energises in the 
same way that reason, as the principle of universal 
laws, recognises itself again in every rational heing." 
Hence it is only "by acting on the heart and the imagina- 
tion that a character can he produced Avhich is truly at 
one with reason \ while a morality which addresses the 
understanding is incapable of any practical effect on 
the mass of men, and indeed tends to produce an irreso- 
lute scrupulous tone of mind which is the reverse of 
moral strength. "Men who are early hathed in the 
Dead Sea of moral platitudes come out of it invulner- 
able like Achilles, hut with the human force washed 
out of them in. the process." 

What is the source of this violent reaction in Hegel's 
mind against the Kantian ideas 1 It is easy to see that 
the idea of a national religion which should harmonise the 
imagination and the heart with the reason, was derived 
by him from Greece. Greek life presented itself to 
Hegel as a solution of a problem which to Kant had 
only been approximately soluble, the problem of com- 
bining the universal with the particular, the reason with 
the feelings. Greek religion was to him the type of a 
cult which is not merely a combination of rational re- 
ligion with more or less of fetich-worship, but in which 
the ceremonial or symbolic element is brought into har- 
mony with the rational. Christianity, on the other 
hand, he at this time regarded as a moral failure, just 
because it did not combine with any specific national 



Judaism. 25 

institutions so as to produce a living development of 
national character. It was a purely spiritual religion, 
which sought to influence men through the reason alone, 
and therefore it remained essentially a religion for in- 
dividuals. " How light in the scale weigh the whole 
! means of grace ' worked by the Church, hacked by the 
most full and learned explanations, when the passions, 
and the power of circumstances, of education, of example, 
and of the Government, are thrown into the opposite 
scale ! The whole history of religion since the beginning 
of the Christian era combines to show that Christianity 
is a religion which can make men good, only if they are 
good already." 

The thought first indicated in this way was followed 
out, and at once deepened and developed, in a number 
of theological papers written during Hegel's residence in 
Switzerland, which might be called " Studies of Jewish 
and Christian religion from a Greek point of vieAV." 
Judaism was to Hegel the type of an unnatural religion, 
a religion of external law, which had no relation to the 
life of the people on whom it was imposed. The Jews, 
he maintained, were a nation whose advance from a 
lower to a higher form of social life had not been a 
process of natural development, but a violent change 
forced on them from without. The transition from the 
simple life of herdsmen to the complex order of the state 
had not in their case taken place gradually and of itself, 
but through foreign influence. Driven forward by cir- 
cumstances and by the ascendancy of a great man, they 
were forced into a struggle for national independence 
while yet no real capacity for political life had been 
formed in them. " Their impulse toward independence 



26 Hegel. 

was merely a craving for dependence on something of 
their own ; " and therefore, in independence they did 
not, like other nations, achieve for themselves a noble 
harmony of natural and spiritual life. They were con- 
fined by this narrow patriotism to a bare and almost 
animal existence, or rose above it only to become the 
fanatical victims of an abstraction. Their God was not 
a better self to which their life was drawn up, but an 
external Lord, whose worship divided them from nature, 
and even made them hate it. Hence their fate is no 
Greek tragedy which purifies the passions by terror and 
pity, for such emotions are called forth only "by the 
necessary error of a noble character." The Jewish 
tragedy rather excites horror and disgust, for their fate is 
" like the fate of Macbeth, who reached beyond nature, 
allied himself with alien powers, and slavishly wor- 
shipped beings not identified with himself; and who, 
after he had trampled under foot all that was holy in 
human nature, was necessarily abandoned by his gods, 
and broken in pieces on the very rock of his own faith." x 
Hegel then proceeds to compare the idea of law as 
presented in Judaism with the Greek idea of fate. Law 
is altogether indifferent to the individual ; it fixes limits 
for him, and attaches to the transgression of those limits 
a penalty that nothing can avert. There is no possi- 
bility of reconciliation with the law; "the soul that 
sinneth, it shall die," and in death there is no recon- 
ciliation. On the other hand, the word " fate " takes us 
into a different and more elevated circle of ideas. A 
man's fate is immediately connected with his own being; 
it is something which, indeed, he may fight against, but 
1 Eosenkranz, p. 492. 



The Idea of Fate, 27 

which is really a part of his own life. Hence, from this 
point of view, a crime committed "by an individual is to 
be viewed as an outrage upon himself, and the doom 
which threatens him in consequence is not a mere pun- 
ishment inflicted by a foreign hand, but the counterpart 
of his own deed. In slaying his victim, the murderer 
thinks he has removed an enemy, and enlarged his own 
life ; but really it is one life that is in him and his victim, 
and in striking at another he has struck at himself. 
What threatens him, therefore, as his fate, is just his 
own life made by his deed into a stranger and an enemy. 
This he cannot slay : it is immortal, and rises from its 
grave as an awful spectre, a Clytemnestra which rouses 
the Eumenides against him ; a Banquo's ghost " which 
is not annihilated by death, but the moment after takes 
its seat at the banquet, not as a sharer of the meal, but 
as an evil spirit for Macbeth." 

Just this, however, that the penalty is not externally 
imposed by law, but is simply the fate of the criminal, 
the recoil of his deed upon himself, makes atonement 
possible. The guilty conscience of the criminal is his 
recognition that his own life is in that which he has 
tried to destroy, and hence it must pass into a longing 
regret for that which he has thus lost. The criminal, 
therefore, feels an awe before the fate that weighs upon 
him, which is quite different from the fear of punish- 
ment; for the fear of punishment is the fear of some- 
thing foreign to him, and the prayers that would avert 
it are slavish. His fear of fate, on the other hand, is a 
terror before himself, a consciousness of the agony of 
divided life, and his prayers to it are not supplications 
to a master, but rather the beginning of a return to the 



28 Hegel. 

estranged self. Hence, in this recognition of that which 
is lost as life, and as his own life, lies the possibility 
of the complete recovery of it. It is the beginning of 
that love in which life is restored to itself, and fate is 
reconciled in which " the stings of conscience are blunt- 
ed, and the evil spirit is expelled from the deed." 

The idea of fate, however, is not necessarily connected 
with crime. It is not like the law which only punishes 
offences against a foreknown command. In the eye of 
fate all action is guilt, for it is necessarily one-sided ; it 
has a special interest or object ; it injures other equally 
vital interests or objects. By the very fact that a man 
acts, "he enters the arena of combat as power against 
power," and so subjects himself to fate. Kor by refrain- 
ing from action can he escape the fate which overtakes 
the one-sidedness of action. "The vakmr that struggles 
is better than the weakness that endures ; for though it 
fails, it knew beforehand the possibility of failure, and 
consciously made itself liable to it, while suffering pas- 
sivity is merely caught in its defect, and does not oppose 
a fulness of energy to it." But neither activity nor 
passivity can escape its fate. There is, however, still 
another higher way a way which combines in one the 
activity that combats and the patience that endures the 
way of Christ, and of all those who have been called 
" beautiful souls." Such souls follow the path of suffer- 
ing, in so far as they abandon all their personal rights, 
and refuse to contend for them ; but they pursue also 
the path of valour, in so far as they rise above this loss 
of particular right and interest, and feel no pain in it. 
Thus they save their lives in losing them, or assert them- 
selves just when they let go everything with which 



Christianity. 29 

immediately their life seemed to be identified. Fate 
cannot wound such spirits, for, " like the sensitive 
plant, they withdraw at a touch into themselves," and 
escape from the life in which they could be injured. 
"So Jesus demanded of his friends that they should 
forsake father and mother, and all that they had, in order 
that they might not be bound by any tie to the unhal- 
lowed world, and so be brought within the reach of fate. 
' If any one take thy coat, let him have thy cloak also ; ' 
' If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.' " Further : 
" A soul that is thus lifted above all regard for its 
rights, and disentangled from everything objective, has 
nothing to forgive to him who injures it. It is ready 
for reconciliation, capable at once of entering again into 
vital relations of love and friendship with him;" for 
whatever he may have done, he cannot have injured 
it. It has nothing even of that "righteous wrath, 
that conscientious hate which springs from a sense of 
wrong, not to the individual, but to justice. For such 
righteous hate, Avhile it sets up certain duties and rights 
as absolute, and refuses forgiveness to him who has 
violated them, takes away from itself the possibility of 
receiving forgiveness for its own errors, or of being 
reconciled with the fate that springs from them." For- 
giveness of sins, therefore, is not the removal of pun- 
ishment, for punishment cannot be avoided; nor is it 
the removal of the consciousness of guilt, for the deed 
cannot be undone ; it is "fate reconciled by love." x 

On this view, the spirit of Christ is the spirit which 
withdraws out of the conflict, letting drop every partic- 
ular interest, and thus, in its universality and freedom, 
1 Rosenkranz, p. 497. 



30 Hegel. 

escaping all the claims of the finite. It is reconciled to 
every fate, and has forgiven every enemy. But just here, 
as Hegel thinks, lies its limit and imperfection. " Jesus 
has the guilt of innocency, and his elevation ahove every 
fate brings with it the most unhappy of fates." The 
meaning of this somewhat obscure utterance is, that as 
Christ purchased reconciliation by withdrawing out of 
the sphere in which private interests and rights conflict 
with each other, his very negation of these becomes a 
limit to him. All sides are against him who does not 
strike for any side. Priest and magistrate, Pharisee and 
.Sadducee, xmite against him who is above their divi- 
sions, and does not recognise as vital any of the interests 
for Avhich they are contending. His very withdrawal 
from the sphere of battle is the source of a more bitter 
hostility, and makes his people reject him, and turn 
from his doctrine to a desperate struggle for the narrow 
ideal of national life. His teaching, indeed, is eagerly 
accepted by other men who have no share in the fate of 
the Jewish nationality ; but with them, too, it remains 
incapable of being brought into unity with any of the 
finite interests of life. The unity of love reached by 
the negation of all particular rights and duties remains 
incapable of expansion into any lgBW order of secular life ; 
and as it cannot become the principle of the life of the 
world, it is obliged to fall back on the spiritual unity of 
the Church a society of men withdrawn from the world, 
and living solely for this concentrated life of devotional 
feeling. " Beyond the relation that arises out of the 
common faith, and the manifestation of this community 
in appropriate religious acts, the Christian Church re- 
mains incapable of any objective aim incapable of co- 



Christianity. 31 

operation for any other end than the spread of the faith, 
and incapable of finding expression or satisfaction in any 
of the various manifestations and partial forms of our 
manifold life. For in following any other direction, it 
could not recognise itself : it would have forsaken the 
pure love which is its sole spirit, and have become 
untrue to its God. This limitation of love to itself, 
thjs flight from all forms, even if its own spirit were 
breathing in them, this removal from all fate, is its 
greatest fate ; and this is the point at which Jesus is 
connected with fate, and, in the sublimest way indeed, 
suffers from it." Hence, also, the ever-dubious attitude 
of the Church to the world, never able either to divide 
itself from it since love is supposed to be the universal 
principle ; nor to reconcile itself with it for love is not 
able to enter into its particular and finite relations. 
" Between the extremes of friendship, hate, and in- 
difference to the world, the Christian consciousness has 
gone backwards and forwards; but it is its fate that 
Church and State, divine service and life, piety and 
virtue, can never for it melt into one." 

The result is, then, that Christianity produces, or 
indicates, an unhealthy division between religion and 
life. It does not solve the problem, which, in its way, 
the Greek religion, inasmuch as it simply idealised the 
actual forces of the political life, proved itself competent 
to solve. " To the Greek, the idea of his fatherland, 
his State, was the invisible, the higher reality, for which 
he laboured, and which formed his persistent motive. 
This was his end and aim of the world, or the end and 
aim of Ms world, which he found expressed in reality, 
and which he himself helped to express and to maintain. 



32 Hegel. 

In comparison with this idea, his own individuality was 
as nothing : it was its endurance its continued life 
that he sought, and this he was himself able to realise. 
To desire or pray for permanence or eternal life for him- 
self as an individual, could not occur to him ; or, at 
least, it was only in moments of inaction and despond- 
ency that he could feel a stronger wish and relation to 
his individual self. Cato did not turn for comfort to 
Plato's " Phaedo," till that which had hitherto been for 
him the highest order of things Ma world, his repub- 
lic was destroyed : then only did he take refuge in 
a yet higher order." Religion, in short, was to the 
ancients simply the idealisation of the actual powers of 
man's life of the higher passions that moved him 
of the ideal interests of the social and political life in 
which he lived. Rome, however, in conquering the 
nations, put an end to this religion of free citizens, 
whose highest was within their own grasp. It turned 
the State from an organic unity of life, which took up 
into itself the whole being of its citizens, into a dead 
mechanism of government, externally applied to a 
powerless mass of subjects. "Then death must have 
become terrible to the citizen, because nothing of his 
own survived him ; whereas the republic survived the 
republican, and he could cherish the thought that it 
his soul- -was eternal." After this time, greater de- 
mands began to be made upon religion, and the imper- 
fect human-like gods, which had been sufficient for the 
imagination so long as human life itself was so full of 
divinity, could no longer satisfy the cravings of the spirit. 
" The spirit of man could not cease to seek somewhere 
for the absolute, for independence, for power; and as this 



Objective Religion. . 33 

was no longer to be met with in the will of man, it had 
to he found in the God of Christianity a God who was 
lifted beyond the sphere of the powers and will of man, 
yet not beyond reach of his prayers and cries ; for the 
realisation of a moral idea could now only be wished, 
it could no longer be willed." The divine kingdom, 
however, which, it was at first hoped, would be realised 
immediately, had soon to be put off to the end of the 
world. " In fact, so soon as the realisation of an idea is 
put beyond the limits of human power, it does not matter 
how far off it is placed ; and the further it was removed, 
with the more wonderful colours could it be painted by 
the oriental imagination." But this separation of God 
from man has had fatal effects. " The objectivity of God 
has gone hand in hand with the slavery and corruption 
of man." While there was a living organisation of 
society, the social life of man was itself regarded as a 
manifestation of the divine, and God was simply the 
better self of His worshippers ; but when national life 
disappeared, and the Church took the place of the State, 
man became in his own eyes a non-ego, and his God was 
another. " It has been left for our day," says Hegel, 
in the spirit of some of his later followers of the Left, 
" to challenge again as the property of man the treasures 
that were formerly squandered upon heaven to chal- 
lenge them at least in theory. But what age will have 
the courage and energy to make this right a reality, and 
to set man actually in possession of his own 1 " 1 

We see here the compromise between the different 
tendencies contending within him, in which Hegel for 
the time found satisfaction. On the one hand he holds 

1 Haym, p. 474 et seq. 
P. VII. 



34. Hegel. 

to the principle of freedom, and echoes the latest in- 
terpretation of it by Fichte, who at this time regarded 
the choice between idealism and realism between the 
doctrine that the ego produces the non-ego, and the 
doctrine that the non-ego produces the ego as a test of 
moral character. A quite consistent philosophy, Fichte 
allowed, might be developed in both ways, both on the 
realist and on the idealist hypothesis ; but he who was 
free in spirit would find the explanation of the world 
in freedom, and he who was a slave at heart would find 
it in necessity. Hegel, in the main, accepts this lan- 
guage of Fichte, but he does not draw the line between 
self and not -self at the point where Fichte draws it. 
To Fichte as to Kant, the State was still an external 
combination of individuals, a thing of outward order, 
while morality was confined entirely to the inner life. 
But to Hegel, filled with the spirit of Greek literature, 
the social life of the State could not be a thing 
external or indifferent to the moral life of the in- 
dividual ; rather it was the truer self, in which and 
for which the individual was bound to live, and with 
which he was so intimately identified that, while it 
survived, he need not think of any personal immortality. 
It was only outside of this intimate circle that the 
"cold world" lay, which was really external and ob- 
jective. Hence Hegel did not regard the Greek political 
life as involving any sacrifice of the freedom of the 
individual, but rather as the realisation of that freedom ; 
and Greek religion was to him a "subjective" religion, 
whose gods only imaginatively and for a moment drew 
their worshipper away from the centre of his own life, 
but were immediately recognised as powers that are 



New Ideas. 35 

working in his own will and thought. It is only to 
Christianity which he regards as a religion of pure un- 
developed love, and, therefore, as a religion of the other 
world that Hegel applies the Fichtean condemnation 
of an " objective " religion, a worship of the non-ego, a 
religion inconsistent with the freedom of man. Hence 
he describes the revolt against Christianity and the new 
idealistic philosophy as a reclaiming for man of the 
treasures he has lavished upon God; and in a poem 
addressed to Holderlin, Hegel declares that the dese- 
crated altars of Eleusis are being reared again by the 
initiated in their own hearts. How the new revival 
was to differ from the old Greek type, he does not say. 
Christianity, at least, he seems at this time to regard as 
essentially bound up with the medieval dualism, and 
therefore as not containing in itself the principle of a 
new life. 

The transition from this to a higher point of view 
seems to have taken place in the beginning of Hegel's resi- 
dence at Frankfort, and in connection with a remarkable 
change of language which Ave find in his papers Avritten 
about that time. In Switzerland he had used the words 
" life " and " love " to express the highest kind of social 
unity ; now he substitutes the word " spirit." This is 
no mere verbal change. The word "life" suggests the 
idea of an organic unity, and the word " love " implies 
that the members of that unity are conscious beings- 
conscious of the social organism in which they merge 
their separate existence, and conscious also of them- 
selves, were it only in the moment of self- surrender 
by which they give themselves up to that organism. 
In these terms, therefore, Hegel found a means of ex- 



" 



36 Hegel. 

pressing that social unity of which the Greek State was 
to him the type a unity of individuals who regarded 
themselves not as isolated persons, but simply as citizens 
whose life was in the State, and who had no personality 
apart from it. In such a social unity the idea of self is 
involved, hut it is not emphasised ; the division of self- 
conscious individuals disappears like the separateness of 
notes in a harmony. 

" Love took up the harp of life, and smote on all the chord? 
with might, 
Smote the chord of self, which, trembling, passed in music 
out of sight." 

But the term " spirit," or " spiritual unity," seems to 
convey and in Hegel's language always conveys 
the idea of antagonism overcome, contradiction recon- 
ciled, unity reached through the struggle and conflict 
of elements, which, in the first aspect of them, are 
opposed to each other. It was, therefore, the appro- 
priate expression for a unity between the mind and the 
object which is contrasted with it, between mind and 
matter, or between different self - conscious subjects, 
each of whom has a complete consciousness of his own 
independent rights and personality. Such a unity can 
never be, in Hegel's language, immediate i.e., can never 
be ready-made from the first, but always involves a pro- 
cess by which difference is overcome, and opposition 
transformed into agreement. Nor can this be a merely 
natural process i.e., a process in which the ojiposition 
melts away without being heard of. Rather it is a 
process which begins with a distinct consciousness of 
independence to be renounced, of opposition to be over- 



The Idea of Spirit. 37 

come, and which involves, therefore, an explicit surren- 
der of independence, a conscious reconciliation of the 
opposition. 

This use of the term " spirit," in fact, indicates that 
the Greek ideal was becoming unsatisfactory to Hegel, as 
being an incomplete solution of his primary difficulty of 
the connection of the universal and particular. Hitherto 
Hegel's criticism of Kant's abstract opposition of reason 
and passion had been practically this, that though 
diverse they were capable of coincidence, and that the 
(! reeks had actually solved the problem of harmonising 
them. But the unity so attained was, as Hegel now 
saw, exceptional and transitory, the product of specially 
favourable circumstances and of a peculiar national genius. 
For the Greek State, and the ethical harmony of life 
realised in it, could be regarded only as the creation of 
a people of artists, which, by a combination of skill and 
good fortune, had for once moulded the untoward matter 
of human existence into a political work of art. But 
such an achievement, like other works of art, is valu- 
able mainly as an earnest of something more universal. 
" Poetic justice " is an exceptional thing out of poetry, 
because, in the entanglement of human affairs, wo can- 
not easily find a small circle of events which forms a 
whole by itself, and in which the ideal law is clearly 
revealed. But the value of the exception is that it 
points to such a law. Beauty is an accidental or 
momentary coincidence of the universal and the par- 
ticular, of understanding and sense, and an earnest of 
their complete reconciliation. If, however, we are to 
apply the idea of organic unity to the world, if we 
are to regard man as capable of achieving such a unity 



38 Hegel. 

in his own life, we cannot be satisfied with such a 
partial and accidental meeting of ideal and real, of 
the inner and the outer life. We must not think of 
man as struggling with an external power which occa- 
sionally yields him a partial victory. We must be able 
to see that there is a harmony or unity between the 
inward and the outward which is deeper than all their 
antagonism, and which is realising itself even when that 
antagonism seems to be greatest. It must be shown 
not merely that the ego gains an occasional victory over 
the non-ego, but that, in spite of all their apparent oppo- 
sition, it is one principle which is manifesting itself in 
non-ego and ego alike. If, therefore, the idea of organic 
unity was to be used, as Hegel sought to use it, to 
supplement and correct the abstract idea of freedom 
expressed by Kant and Fichte, it was necessary to give 
it a more extended and difficult application than Hegel 
had hitherto attempted. It was no longer enough for 
him to say that there are organisms in the world 
natural and spiritual organisms but the whole Avorld 
must be conceived as itself an organism. That poetic or 
artistic products exist or are achieved by man both in 
art and in life was no longer all that was wanted : it 
was necessary that all nature and history should be seen 
to have the unity of a poem. 

But obviously this new demand involves far greater 
difficulties than have yet been considered. If all the 
world is to be conceived as poetic, rj rov /3iou o-vfx-jraaa 
rpaywSia /cat Ka>/xwSta, our j>oetry must find room for 
much which to the immediate eye of imagination is un- 
poetic and vulgar. If nature is to be taken as an organ- 
ism, it must at least be recognised that it has parts in 



The Idea of Spirit. 39 

it which, regarded in themselves, are inorganic. If all 
things are members in a living whole, the life that ani- 
mates that whole must have a wider definition, it must 
be a life which comprehends even death itself. Pain, 
disharmony, and evil, must be seen to be incapable of 
breaking through the all-embracing unity, and even to 
be themselves the means of realising it. Unreason itself 
must find a place, were it only a place to annihilate itself, 
under the universal rule of reason, which impartially 
rains- its fertilising showers upon the evil and the good, 
and stimulates each in turn to show what is in it ; since 
just in this impartiality lies the security for the triumph 
of good. In such a theory optimism must be reached 
not by the exclusion but by the exhaustion of pessim- 
ism : the ultimate affirmation of philosophy must in- 
clude in itself and overcome all the negations and con- 
tradictions of scepticism. 

At first it would seem as if the problem so stated 
must be regarded as insoluble ; for what is required is 
no less than to find a principle of unity adequate to the 
reconciliation of the strongest antagonisms and contra- 
dictions which language can express. And is not this 
almost like asking that words should be deprived of all 
their meaning 1 Yet, on the other hand, if the world is 
to be conceived as a rational system, if the particular is 
to be combined in organic unity with the universal, if 
man is in any sense to be regarded as free in spite of the 
limiting conditions under which nature seems to bring 
him, the discovery of such a principle is a necessity. 
Fichte, against his will, proved that it is impossible to 
view the inner life of the subject as a rational system 
in itself, unless the object also were brought Avithin the 



40 Hegel. 

compass of that system. He tried, indeed, to escape 
this necessary consequence by treating the connection of 
the ego with the non-ego as a purely negative relation. 
But a negative relation is still a relation. The self is 
bound up in one whole with that not-self to Avhich it is 
opposed, and unless that also can be regarded as in some 
sense rational, there can be no rational system at all. 

Hegel seems at first to have faltered before the prob- 
lem of philosophy thus presented to him, and to have 
felt inclined to take refuge from its difficulty as Schel- 
ling afterwards took refuge in a religious intuition or 
feeling of the unity of all things, an intuition to which 
thought might lead up, but in which its activity must 
disappear. In other words, he seems to have held for 
a short time that reason is unable itself to rise above 
the oppositions and contradictions of things, though it 
is able to see that there is a limit to such oppositions, 
and that there is an absolute unity lying beyond them. 
" Philosophy must end in religion, because philosophy is 
thought, and thought always involves finitude and oppo- 
sition, e.g., the oppositions of subject aijd object, and 
of the mind that thinks to matter that does not think. 
Its business, therefore, is to show the finitude of all 
that is finite, and through reason to demand its com- 
plement or completion in the infinite." 1 

But this solution seems to have been only a moment 
of transition in Hegel's philosophical development. If 
reason can discern that there is a unity in which all dif- 
ference is lost, it must be able to see what that unity is ; 
for the perception of limits is possible oidy to one who 
can see beyond them. The reason that looks through 
1 Rosenkranz, p. 9(3. 



The Idea of Spirit. 41 

all oppositions of things to their unity, must he ahle to 
grasp that unity and to cast the light of it upon these 
very oppositions. If even Schelling could not rest in 
the assertion that the artistic or religious intuition is 
the highest apprehension of truth, hut was driven, with 
some inconsequence, to attempt to reconstruct the world 
from the point of view so reached, still less could Hegel 
he content to vieAV philosophy as a process which ends 
in the absolute unity, and does not give rise to any new 
consciousness of finite things in relation to that unity. 
And the word which Avas to he the key-note of this 
new interpretation of things sub specie (Btemitatis has 
already been named. The world may still he conceived 
as an organic unity, in spite of its extreme division 
and antagonism, because it is spirit/oil, or the revela- 
tion of spirit. For a spiritual unity is a unity which 
can endure the extremest antagonism and conflict nay, 
it is a unity which can be realised only through such 
conflict. The very existence of a spirit is a perpetual 
proof of the unity of opposites. When we consider 
how a spiritual being grows and realises itself, we see 
that it is by a perpetual jn-ocess of self-denial. Intel- 
lecttcally it can develop its powers oidy by going out of 
itself ; by yielding to impressions from Avithout ; by per- 
sistently occupying itself Avith the not-self the world 
of objects ; and Avithout such occupation Avith the exter- 
nal, it could not even be conscious of itself. And if Ave 
regard the practical life of such a being, Ave have to 
give a similar account of it. For all moral growth con- 
sists in learning to go out of self, and so to take a wider 
life into our own. It begins, therefore, in the negation 
of immediate desires and appetites which, if they were 



42 Hegel. 

suffered directly to assert themselves, would assuredly 
defeat their own ends. It is only as the individual gets 
"beyond such particular impulses, and forms in himself a 
will which has regard to something more general, a will 
which acts from the point of view of the family, of the 
state, or of humanity, or at least a will which looks to 
some objective interest or end, that he can be said to 
have a will of his own at all. Spiritual life is thus 
essentially a process of transcending and overcoming 
those very oppositions which seem to be of the most 
intense and absolute character the oppositions of sub- 
ject and object, mind and matter, internal and external ; 
it is, in the Kantian phrase, a " nest of contradictions," 
and yet this does not destroy its unity with itself. If, 
therefore, we regard the ultimate unity as a spiritual 
principle, there is good hope that we may find in it a 
key to the antagonism and conflict of things, and may 
be enabled to see in the world not a mere wilderness and 
chaos of opposing powers, or the Manichajan dualism of 
an absolute good and an absolute evil, but a rational 
order or system, an organic unity in which every member 
has its place and function. 

Such a system we find Hegel seeking to develop for 
himself in the years 1799-1800, the last two years of his 
residence in Frankfort. The peculiarities of this first out- 
line of his philosophy it is unnecessary here to consider : 
what has been already said may be sufficient to show 
that in it Hegel was now seeking to develop his char- 
acteristic idea, that the highest unity is to be reached 
only through the full development and reconciliation of 
the deepest and widest antagonism. Some such concep- 
tion was already involved in the threefold movement of 



First Outline of the System. 43 

thought hy thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which had 
heen suggested hy Kant, and developed, though in a 
somewhat imperfect and external way, hy Fichte and 
Schelling. Hegel distinguishes himself from hoth, even 
in this early sketch, hy the firmness with which he 
grasps the idea of the unity of opposites, not as an ex- 
ternal synthesis, hut as a result of the necessary evolution 
of thought hy means of an antagonism which thought 
itself produces and reconciles. The further explanation 
of this process must, however, he postponed till a later 
chapter. Here it need only he remarked that Hegel has 
already, though with some hesitation and uncertainty, 
marked out the general threefold division of his system, 
which corresponds to the three elements or movements 
just mentioned. The first part of the system consists of 
a Logic and a Metaphysic which, however, are not yet 
completely identified hy Hegel, as they were at a later 
period ; the second is a Philosophy of Nature ; and the 
third, which was not worked out in the Frankfort 
sketch, is the Philosophy of Spirit. 

One other point, the full consideration of which must 
also he reserved for a future chapter, may he mentioned 
here. It is that, with the rise of this new idea of spirit 
as the unity of all differences, Hegel's attitude towards 
Christianity was completely changed. For in the central 
moral principle of Christianity, the principle of self-real- 
isation through self-sacrifice, he found just that move- 
ment through negation to affirmation, through opposition 
to reconciliation, which he was seeking. Or rather, 
perhaps we should say that it was Hegel's study of 
Christianity, assisted hy the contemporary development 
of philosophy, which first suggested to him the idea of 



44 Hegel. 

that movement. Hence if we should seek to gather up 
the Hegelian philosophy in a sentence, as a Frenchman 
once asked Hegel to do, it would be this : that the words 
" die to live " express not only the dialectic of morals, 
but the universal principle of philosophy. For if these 
words truly express the nature of spiritual life, then hi 
spirit may be found a unity which will account for and 
overcome all the antagonisms of life and thought. The 
full meaning of this statement, however, is not to be 
seen Avithout many explanations which cannot as yet 
be "iven. 



45 



CHAPTER III. 

HEGEE AND SCHELLING JENA, 1800-1807. 

During the long mental struggle, the historj r of which 
has heen outlined in the last chapter, Hegel had in the 
main lived for himself, without any attempt to communi- 
cate his thoughts to the world. When he visited his 
family at Stuttgart, on his way from Switzerland to 
Frankfort, his sister found that he had become silent 
and self-absorbed; and about the same time Schelling 
wrote to reproach him with yielding to a kind of irres- 
olution and dejection of spirit that was unworthy of 
him. A depressed, melancholic, almost sentimental tone, 
unusual with Hegel, runs through the somewhat ill- 
constructed verses he had not a good ear for metre 
specimens of which his biographer has published. The 
only literary work which he prepared for the press dur- 
ing the Frankfort period, was an essay on the reforms in 
the constitution of his native Wiirtemberg, the necessity 
of which had been made evident by the rough pressure 
of France : and even this was not published. In philoso- 
phical matters, the conflict of opposing thoughts and sym- 
pathies of which he was not yet master kept him silent. 
But noAv, in the year 1800, when he had at last grasped 



46 Hegel. 

the leading idea of his system, and had commenced to 
work out its application with some degree of systematic 
fulness, he began to long for an opportunity of express- 
ing himself, and of comparing his thoughts with those 
of others. In this view he reopened communication with 
Schelling, with whom his correspondence had apparently 
dropped for some years, and informed his friend that 
he was prepared, or rather that he was almost prepared, 
to take his share in the philosophical battle. Hegel's 
father had died in the beginning of 1799, and the small 
sum of about 300 which he had received as his share 
of the family inheritance, made him for a time inde- 
pendent of the work of teaching. Accordingly, in his 
letter to Schelling, he begs him to recommend some 
economical place of residence, he would prefer a 
Catholic city, in order to have a nearer view of that 
religion, where he could live cheaply (with, as he 
specially states, the advantage of ein gates Bier), en- 
joy some good society, and gather himself together 
before entering into the literary and philosophical hub- 
bub of Jena. He has, he declares, watched Schelling's 
great public career " with admiration and joy," but 
wishes Schelling to know that he himself also has been 
in silence making his way to a philosophical view of 
things. " In my scientific education, which began with 
the endeavour to satisfy humbler wants, I have been 
driven onward to philosophy, and the ideal of youth 
has thus, of necessity, had to take on the form of reflec- 
tion, and transform itself hd<> a system. Now, while 
I am still employed with this task, I begin to ask 
myself where I can find a point of contact to bring my 
thoughts to bear upon human life. Of all the men I 



League with Schelling. 47 

see around me, you are the one in whom I should most 
desire to find a friend, as in other things, so especially 
in reference to this business of getting myself expressed, 
and brought into effective contact with the world; for 
I see that you have apprehended man as he is i.e., with 
a comprehensive sympathy which is unstained by vanity. 
I therefore can look to you with the full confidence 
that you will be able to recognise my disinterested en- 
deavours, and to find a value in them." 

In this appeal to Schelling there is traceable a wish on 
Hegel's part to indicate to his friend that he is substantial- 
ly, though only substantially, at one with him, and that 
though for this reason he can hope to co-operate with 
Schelling, yet that the philosophical form which his 
thoughts have taken has grown by an independent pro- 
cess out of the needs of his own spirit. When we con- 
sider how Hellenic art and life had been to Hegel the 
first key to the spiritual significance of things, how the 
idea of organic unity derived from that source had grad- 
ually transformed itself under the influence of philoso- 
phical criticism, and how, finally, by the aid of the idea 
of spirit, it had been applied, not merely to the State, 
but to. the world as a whole, the special words of this 
announcement will seem significant and characteristic. 
The answer of Schelling is not preserved ; but the result 
was that Hegel gave up the idea of a preliminary retreat 
to Bamberg or any other city, and resorted at once, in 
January 1801, to Jena, to take his place beside Schel- 
ling as a champion of " the philosophy of Identity." In 
July of the same year appeared his first published work, 
' On the Difference between the Systems of Fichte and 
Schelling,' in which Hegel appears as in all essential 



48 Hegel 

points a defender of the latter against the former. The 
dissertation ' De orbitis planetarum,' which he published 
immediately afterwards, pro licentia docendi, and which 
was written very much in the spirit of Schelling's Philo- 
sophy of Nature, though on a subject which Schelling 
had never discussed, confirmed the idea of Hegel's 
complete agreement with Schelling ; and he had soon 
after to contradict the statement of a newspaper that he 
was a fellow-Wurtemberger whom Schelling had brought 
forward under his wing, to be a special pleader in his 
behalf. But though asserting his own independence 
with decision and almost with violence, Hegel was at 
this time quite willing to accept the place of a defender 
of the philosophy of Identity; and in 1802 he united 
with Schelling in the publication of a ' Critical Journal,' 
in which the contributions of the two writers were not 
in any way distinguished from each other a circum- 
stance which, after Hegel's death, led to some contro- 
versy about the authorship of several of the pieces. 

The common point of view which is expressed in this 
Journal, as well as in Hegel's treatise and Schelling's 
successive works of this period, is, as has been said, that 
of the so-called " philosophy of Identity." This may be 
better understood if we remember to what it was opposed. 
It was opposed, on the one hand, to that common-sense 
dualism for which mind and matter, or subject and 
object, are two things absolutely independent of each 
other two things which, if brought into relation at 
all, can only be externally harmonised, like the two 
clocks of Leibnitz, but between which no kindred na- 
ture or principle of unity can be discovered. In like 
manner, it was opposed to the Kantian and the Fichtean 



Fichte and Schelling. 49 

philosophy of subjectivity, which, indeed, had expressed 
the idea of a unity beyond difference a unity of subject 
and object, perception and thought but which had not 
fully developed that idea, or had developed it only in a 
partial and subjective way. Thus, in the Kantian philo- 
sophy, only the phenomenal object was supposed to be 
knowable, while the real object was treated as a thing- 
in-itself i.e., a thing not essentially related to, or 
knowable by, the subject ; and, on the other hand, the 
subject was regarded as incapable of reaching beyond his 
own sensations and impulses beyond the circle of his 
own inner life, so as to know or to act on anything but 
himself. In the Fichtean philosophy, again, the inde- 
pendent existence of things in themselves, outside of the 
circle of subjective phenomena, was denied ; and the non- 
ego was reduced to a negative condition, through which 
the ego realises its own life of self-determination : nay, 
even this negative condition, the ego, by an incompre- 
hensible act, was supposed to produce for, and out of, 
itself. But the effect of this theory of Fichte was, not 
to idealise the object, but rather to explain it away, and 
to confine the ego to a mere inward struggle with itself, 
in which it could never go beyond itself in a real self- 
surrender, and therefore could never return to itself with 
the fruit of a real liberty. The non-ego was thus reduced 
by Fichte to a spectre : but, in spite of that, or just be- 
cause of that, it could never be vanquished or spiritual- 
ised. If it ceased to exist as an outward object, it was 
only to reappear as an incomprehensible opposition of the 
mind to itself. Schelling made the first step out of this 
charmed circle of subjectivity, when he endeavoured 
to show that in nature there is the same movement of 

P. VII. D 



50 Hegel. 

antagonism and reconciliation as in spirit : in other 
words, that nature also has in it a dualism corresponding 
to the dualism of self and not-self in consciousness, and 
that therefore it is one principle which we find mani- 
fested in mind and matter alike. To Fichte's declara- 
tion that " the I is everything," he adds, therefore, the 
converse that "everything is I" i.e., that nature is 
no unreal shadow of the movement of subjective thought, 
hut has manifested in it the very principle which consti- 
tutes the ego in man. Hence, as Schelling expressed it 
and Hegel for a time made no objection to the expres- 
sion there are no qualitative, hut only quantitative, 
differences in things. Each of the two opposites, mind 
and matter, is in itself a subject-ohject, and contains and 
reconciles in itself the opposition of an ideal and a real 
element. And the same is true of every separable form, 
whether of mind or matter ; so that, from the point of 
view of the absolute, everything that exists is an iden- 
tity of subject and object, and all these identities are 
essentially one. 

The essential principle, then, in which Hegel and 
Schelling meet together, is that there is a unity which is 
above all differences, which maintains itself through all 
differences, and in reference to which all differences must 
be explained. They agree also in calling this unity spirit- 
ual, and in asserting it as the articulus stantis vel cadmtia 
pMlosojjMce the point of view at Avhich all true philo- 
sophy must place itself in order to understand the world. 
The programme of the ' Critical Journal' asserts, therefore, 
that " the great immediate interest of philosophy is to 
put God again absolutely at the head of the system as 
the one ground of all, the prindpium essendi et cogno*- 



The Principle of Identity. 51 

eendi, after He has been for a long time placed, either as 
one finitiule alongside of other finitudes, or at the end 
of them all as a postulate, which necessarily implies the 
absoluteness of the finite." In other words, philosophy 
has hitherto started with some fixed opposition, such as 
those of subject and object, of mind and matter, of free- 
dom and necessity, forgetting that these oppositions could 
not be intelligible except on the presupposition of a unity 
that transcends them. Now this presupposed unity, 
"just because it is presupposed, is not present to the 
ordinary consciousness, which, therefore, always thinks 
of the object as essentially different from the subject." 
It is an unconsciously assumed basis of consciousness, 
which philosophy brings to light, and by aid of which it 
transforms our ordinary view of the world. Hence, also, 
scepticism performs a valuable service to philosophy, in 
that it confuses and destroys the distinctions of the 
ordinary consciousness, or exhibits their relative and 
limited character. Thus, when the popular conscious- 
ness (or the common -sense philosophy which makes 
itself the spokesman of that consciousness), asserts that 
the object and the subject of knowledge are essentially 
distinct, scepticism points out that knowledge, as involv- 
ing their relation to each other, is inconsistent with such 
distinctness. In otheV words, scepticism proves, on the 
hypothesis of the distinction of subject and object, that 
knowledge is impossible. But the true conclusion from 
this argument is, that the object is not absolutely dis- 
tinct from the subject that knows it, but in its distinct- 
ness is yet essentially related to, and so one with, it. 
The negative dialectic of the sceptic, therefore, proves 
only that each limited idea contains its own negation, 



52 Hegel. 

and thus carries us back to that identity which is pre- 
supposed in all distinction, and in the light of which 
each distinction is reduced to its proper meaning and 
value, as a manifestation or expression of the unity. 

To Schelling and Hegel it appeared that this idea of 
the unity beyond all differences was the new inspiring 
principle which was to liberate science and life from the 
bonds of abstraction in which they had been hitherto 
held. The Cartesian dualism, with its abstract opposi- 
tion of mind to matter, had, they asserted, only given 
philosophical expression to the principle of an all- 
embracing dualism, which was already manifesting 
itself in the political and religious life of Europe in 
the breaking up of the old feudal and Catholic system. 
On this principle of division, and therefore of death, 
all the sciences had been based, and they had there- 
fore been built up into "a temple of the understand- 
ing which reason had deserted." Now at last the 
literature of the time was beginning to show a weari- 
ness of this shallow expansion, this accumulation of 
dead facts, to which the spiritual bond was wanting. 
A longing had been awakened, as it were " a thirst of 
Dives for a drop of fire "- a curious metaphor " for a 
concentration of living intuition," which might destroy 
the divisions of reflection, and reveal again the organic 
unity of the world. It was the business of the philoso- 
phical critics to assist in the development of this new 
consciousness, to carry on vigorously the war against the 
dualistic dogmatism and scepticism of common-sense, to 
recognise and appreciate every manifestation, however 
imperfect, of the great idea of Identity or Unity, and to 
disentangle it from the imperfections of its expression. 



The ' Critical Journal' 53 

In the former point of view, the Journal proposes to 
carry fire and sword into the quarters of writers like 
Schulz, Krug, and even Iieinhold, who held hy the fixed 
oppositions of the finite as if they were absolute ; in the 
latter point of view, it proposes to apply a discriminating 
criticism to the mystics "the beautiful souls" who 
had apprehended " the pure idea of philosophy " with- 
out being able to give it scientific expression, and also 
to the theories of Kant, Fichte, and their followers, 
in which that idea was present, though in a one-sided 
and still preponderantly subjective form. For these 
philosophers, just because of their leaning to the sub- 
jective as opposed to the objective, had "not broken 
through to pure formlessness, or, what is the same thing, 
to the absolute form ;" i.e., they had not, by equal nega- 
tion of all differences, reached the unity in which all 
distinction and differentiation begin, the universal point 
of view from which alone particulars can be truly esti- 
mated and understood. 

The articles in the Journal were unsigned, to indicate 
the unity of spirit in the authors ; but it was mainly by 
Hegel that this programme, especially the latter part of 
it, was carried out, even if we give Schelling the benefit 
of the doubt in all cases in which the authorship of the 
different pieces is uncertain. Schelling, indeed, soon 
directed his main literary activity to a new 'Journal 
for Speculative Physics,' which he established, leaving 
the work of the ' Critical Journal ' to Hegel. Schil- 
ling's removal from Jena in the summer of 1803, which 
put an end to the intimate alliance of the two friends, 
may have had something to do with the cessation of the 
latter Journal. It is, however, clear, that closely as they 



54 Hegel. 

were asociated in their polemical work, Schelling and 
Hegel were certain to diverge from each other as soon 
as an advance was made to a positive definition and 
evolution of the principle of "identity." And this 
divergence is already manifested in the essay which 
constitutes the last number of the Journal, in which 
Hegel retracts the admission of the ecpiality of nature 
and spirit made in his first treatise, and asserts that, 
as the absolute unity or identity is spiritual, so spirit 
" overreaches " nature, or includes it as a factor in its 
own life. 

The truth is, that the ' Critical Journal ' indicates a 
point of coincidence between two minds that were ad- 
vancing in somewhat different directions. Schelling, on 
his side, had never quite freed himself from the Fichtean 
idea, according to which the ego and the non-ego, or 
the two factors that correspond to them in nature, are 
fundamentally irreconcilable. Hence, when he spoke 
of the absolute as the identity in which all such differ- 
ence and opposition is transcended, he was not able to 
think of it as still leaving room for the play of differ- 
ence, but was inclined rather to conceive it as an ab- 
solute oneness, in which all division and distinction 
is submerged and lost. In this spirit he declared that 
the finite is explicable only from itself, but not from 
the infinite, and spoke of the organ of philosophy as an 
" intellectual intuition," analogous to the sensuous intui- 
tion of the artist, but entirely opposed to " reflection," 
i.e., to all thought which moves by reasoning from part 
to part, and does not grasp the whole at once in one 
comprehensive glance of genius. While, therefore, he 
agreed with Hegel in calling the unity spiritual, and in 



Identity and Difference. 55 

conceiving it as a unity of subject and object, of know- 
ing and being, yet he emphasised the unity at the 
expense of the difference, and had much more success in 
showing that they all disappear in it, than that it can 
in any way reproduce them from itself. And when he 
proceeded to develop his system, he seemed externally 
to take up again the finite elements he had rejected, 
rather than to develop them with a new meaning from 
the principle. His unity, therefore, as Hegel afterwards 
said, was a unity of " substance " rather than of spirit ; 
or if it was nominally spiritual, yet the idea of spirit, 
if it be left undifferentiated and undeveloped, is little 
more than the idea of substance. 

Now it is observable that in all these respects Hegel 
distinguished himself from Schelling even at the time 
when they were most closely allied. In the treatise 
" On the Difference of the Fichtean and Schellingian 
Systems," he insists that the identity of philosophy is 
not an abstract identity as opposed to difference, but a 
spiritual unity which differentiates itself, that through 
opposition and conflict it may reach a higher unity. 
" The necessary diremption is one factor of the life 
which, forms itself by eternal opposition ; and the 
totality, which is in the highest sense vital or organic, 
is produced only by restoration out of the most extreme 
division." Hence the true "intellectual intuition" is 
not an immediate apprehension of truth which is exclu- 
sive of the process of reflection, but includes that pro- 
cess in itself. At the same time, Hegel still holds with 
Schelling that the movement of reflection outside of 
philosophy is quite different from its movement leitliin 
it; and that the highest result to be achieved by the 



56 Hegel. 

former is the felo de se of scepticism, i.e., to carry up 
the finite categories to self-contradiction, and so nega- 
tively prepare the way for the intuition of the absolute 
identity. Philosophy, therefore, in spite of this nega- 
tive introduction, is regarded as starting, in Spinozistic 
fashion, with the absolute. "As an objective totality, 
knowledge furnishes the reason or ground for itself, 
and its parts are grounded at the same time as the 
whole. It is thus a whole which has no more need of 
a special handle in the way of an external reason through 
which it may be proved, than the earth needs a special 
handle to be grasped by the force that carries it round 
the sun." Hence Hegel is very severe in his criticism 
of Keihhold, who would begin by hypothetically assum- 
ing some relative point of view, and making his way 
from it to the principle of philosophy. On the contrary, 
argues Hegel, there is no way from the finite to the 
infinite ; we can only reach the latter if we deny and 
cast loose from the former. The only way to get en- 
trance into philosophy is to throw in one's self headlong 
"a corps perdu Mneinzustiirzen" Beinhold's philoso- 
phy, just because it begins with preliminaries outside 
of philosophy, never gets beyond preliminaries "the 
whole of his force is wasted in the run, and nothing is 
left for the leap." In an amusing squib, written against 
Eeinhold, Schelling refers to this criticism upon hypo- 
thetical philosophy, and speaks of Hegel as " a down- 
right categorical kind of being, who tolerates no ceremony 
with philosophy, but, without waiting for any such grace 
before meat, falls to at once with a good appetite." 

It is, however, just at this point that we find one of the 
genus of division between He< r el and Schellin<r. Hegel's 



Criticism of Schelling. 57 

denial of the need of an introduction to philosophy is 
ambiguous, for the negative propaedeutic of sceptical re- 
flection which he admits is still an introduction. Rein- 
hold's real fault was not that he started with the finite, 
and made his way from it to the infinite, but that he 
did not see that it is through the negation of the former 
that we reach the latter. It is because the finite if 
we take it as an absolute independent existence con- 
tradicts itself, that Ave are driven back upon the infinite. 
On the other hand, this process is not purely negative, 
but has in it a positive element which Schelling, and 
Hegel also at .this time, seemed to neglect. It is not 
simply that, by the self-negation of the finite, room is 
made for the intuitive genius of the philosopher to 
grasp the infinite. The negative attitude toward the 
finite involves in itself an inchoate consciousness of 
the infinite ; " we are near awaking when we dream 
that we dream." Or, to put the matter in a different 
point of view, the ordinary consciousness, because it 
is in its way a thinking consciousness, carries in itself 
the means of its own correction ; and philosophy, in re- 
futing and transforming it, is yet bound to pay it due 
respect as a thinking consciousness, and to refute it 
out of its own mouth. If the philosopher does other- 
wise, if he assumes prophetic airs, or speaks to ordinary 
men from the height of an "immediate insight" or 
" transcendental intuition," from which they are ex- 
cluded, he, as Hegel soon began to assert, is pretending 
" to be of a different species from other men," and is 
" trampling the roots of humanity under foot." Besides, 
in doing so he is actually abandoning his highest claim, 
winch consists simply in this, that he is not speaking 



58 Hegel. 

like an artist to those who have some special natural 
gift or taste, but is interpreting that universal con- 
sciousness Avhich is in all rational beings as such, and 
which, therefore, all are capable of recognising. " If 
philosophy requires of the individual that he should 
lift himself into the pure ether of thought, on the 
other hand the individual has a right to demand of 
philosophy that it should let down a ladder on which 
he may ascend to this point of view; nay, that it 
should show him that he has already this ladder in 
his own possession. This right is founded upon the 
absolute independence which, in every form of con- 
sciousness, be its content what it may, a rational being 
knows himself to possess ; for in every such form there 
is involved the immediate certitude of self-conscious- 
ness a consciousness which is not conditioned by any- 
thing out of itself." 1 In other words, a rational being, 
because he is rational, has a right to demand that the 
highest truth shall be presented to him not as a revela- 
tion of something foreign and strange, but as the expla- 
nation of that which already he is conscious of being. 

The mistake of Schelling, in absolutely opposing 
philosophy to the reflective thought of the finite con- 
sciousness, had another bad effect. It produced a 
neglect of method in philosophy itself. Belying on 
"intellectual intuition," and seeing in everything the 
manifestation of one principle, Schelling and his fol- 
lowers represented the world as a series of " potencies " 
of the absolute ; but in doing so, they rather externally 
fitted the threefold schema of Kant to the given matter 
of the sciences, than developed the particulars out of 
i Hegel, ii. 20. 



Criticism of Sclielling. 59 

the general principle. At most they moved by vague 
analogies, by poetic leaps and bounds, rather than by 
any definite process or evolution of thought. They did 
not do sufficient justice to the different elements of ex- 
perience really to overcome their differences, and bring 
them back to unity. While, therefore, their negative 
dialectic simply blotted out all the difference of finite 
things, and merged them in the absolute, their positive 
dialectic, if it could be called dialectic, was a series of 
superficial analogies, or, at best, happy guesses, which 
might be guided by a true idea, but which did not really 
bring that idea into living contact with the special char- 
acteristics of each sphere of reality. Hegel sought to 
reform this arbitrary procedure by introducing a strict 
dialectical evolution of thought. And the first step 
towards this was to show that the negative, distin- 
guishing, or differentiating movement of thought is 
essentially related to, or rather an essential part of, its 
positive, constructive, or synthetic movement. On the 
one hand, therefore, he points out that in the negative 
movement of thought, by which the finite conscious- 
ness is shown to be in itself contradictory and suicidal, 
there is already involved a positive apprehension of that 
Avhich is beyond the finite ; for, as the negative is a 
definite negative, it includes that which is denied and 
something more, and this something more is already, 
or at least implicitly involves, the idea that solves the 
contradiction. On the other hand, and for the same 
reason, the positive idea the idea of the infinite which 
is reached by negation of the finite cannot be taken 
as merely affirmative or positive ; it contains in itself 
an essential reference to the finite by negation of which 



60 Hegel 

it was reached. We must not, therefore, treat it like 
Spinoza, as a mere terminus ad quern a lion's den, in 
which all the tracks of thought terminate, while none 
are seen to emerge from it. The infinite would have 
no meaning for us, it would be a thought without real- 
ity, if it were not itself the finite seen sub specie cetemi- 
tatis. The mystic intuition of "all things in God" is 
a dream, unless it can unfold its concentrated white 
light into new views of the many forms of nature and 
human life, with all the varied and definite hues and 
shapes. " Am farbigen Abglunz haben loir das Leben." 
A theory of the world as spiritual must face or over- 
come the opposition of spirit and nature; it must not 
simply escape from the contradiction of life into the 
"pure ether" of thought, but must go down into the 
contradiction and explain it. It must, indeed, con- 
ceive the world as a unity, but it must reach this unity 
by a patient exhaustion of those differences and opposi- 
tions which seem to make unity absurd and impossible. 
Hence the negative dialectic of scepticism will find full 
play, not merely before philosophy as an introduction, 
but within it as the means of its evolution. 

Connected with this, finally, is Hegel's more definite 
assertion, which, as we have seen, was already made in 
the last number of the ' Critical Journal,' that the unity 
to which all things must be brought is not some middle 
term between nature and spirit some identity in which 
that, like all other distinctions, is lost ; but that it is the 
unity of spirit with itself, as subordinating and including 
in itself that very nature which seems its absolute oppo- 
site. Only by this idea can we reconcile the freedom of 
man in the sense that what determines him is his own 



Breach with Schelling. 61 

nature, and that alone with his relations to that which is 
not himself, to the external world, and to other rational 
beings. The life of spirit and nature is indeed ulti- 
mately one ; " the infinite expansion of nature, and 
absolute retraction of the ego upon itself, are funda- 
mentally identical ; yet both being equally real, spirit is 
higher than nature. For though in nature we have the 
realisation, the infinitely diversified mediation and evolu- 
tion of the absolute, yet spirit, as being essentially self- 
conscious, when it draws back the universe into itself as 
it does in knowledge, at once includes in itself the out- 
wardly expanded totality of this manifold world, and at 
the same time overreaches and idealises it, taking aAvay 
its externality to itself and to the mind, and reflecting it 
all into the unity of thought." * In other words, nature 
is to be regarded not as another existence side by side 
with mind, but as part of its own life; for though at 
the lower point of view the two may appear as irrecon- 
cilable opposites, at the highest point the life of nature 
is seen to be but an element in the life of spirit. 

The development of these different points of opposi- 
tion between Hegel and Schelling is the main fact of the 
philosophical life of the former during the years 1803-G 
years in which Hegel continued to teach, at first as 
a privat-docent, and, after the beginning of the year 
1805, as an extraordinary professor in the University of 
Jena. During this period Schelling was showing a con- 
tinually increasing bias towards theosophy and mysticism, 
and some of his followers, by their exaggeration of his 
arbitrary methods, were bringing the philosophy of nature 
into discredit. All this tended to repel Hegel more and 
i Hegel, i. 385. 



62 Hegel. 

more from a line of speculation which seemed to pro- 
duce nothing hut continual reiterations of the principle 
of identity, or, if it went beyond this, fell into wayward 
and fanciful constructions hybrids between poetry and 
philosophy with the distinctive merits of neither. Accord- 
ingly, in his Jena lectures we find him insisting with 
even greater emphasis on the necessity of method, of 
clear consciousness as to the meaning and value of the 
categories employed in philosophy, and of a strict logical 
advance from step to step, so that each thought shall be 
evolved by distinct dialectic from that which precedes. 
In the same spirit he insisted, as has been before indicated, 
on the duty of meeting the ordinary consciousness on its 
own ground, and of showing from its own premises the 
necessity of advancing to the philosophical point of view : 
and it was to supply such an introduction to philosophy 
that he wrote his first important work, the ' Phaenomen- 
ology of Spirit.' In this book Hegel gives us a kind of 
genetic psychology or philosophical ' Pilgrim's Progress,' 
in which the individual, beginning with the lowest 
sensuous consciousness which is possible to a rational 
being, is gradually led upwards, by the dialectic of his 
own thought, to the highest speculative idea of the 
world as an organic system, whose principle of unity lies 
in the self-conscious intelligence. The preface to the 
' Phenomenology ' is specially important as a landmark 
in the development of Hegel, because it is in it that he 
first decisively breaks with the school and method or 
rather want of method of Schelling, Avhom, however, 
he never names. Indeed it is, perhaps, not so much 
Schelling himself who is aimed at, as the general ten- 
dency of which he was the least guilty though the 



The Phcenomenology. 63 

most prominent representative, the tendency, viz., to 
make intellectual intuition or immediate feeling, even 
Avhen conceived as the gift of certain privileged natures, 
the organ of philosophy. In opposition to this ten- 
dency, Hegel points out the need for mediation or logical 
development of thought, hoth to bring men to the true 
principle of philosophy, and to develop it to a system. 
In reference to the former, he contends, in language 
which has already been quoted, that no one has a right 
to speak as if he had a vision of truth of which other 
men were incapable, since philosophy must prove its 
claims by meeting every one on his own ground. In 
reference to the latter, he argues that no one can be 
said really to possess a principle unless he can de- 
velop it to its consequences. "The principle of phil- 
osophy, even if it be truly apprehended, is turned to 
falsehood if it is taken only as a principle." "Every- 
thing depends upon the absolute truth being appre- 
hended, not merely as substance but as subject" i.e., 
not as a Spinozistic identity, in which all difference is 
lost, but as a spiritual principle. But as such a prin- 
ciple it can be apprehended, only if it is seen to manifest 
itself in and to transcend all differences, and especially 
the difference of subject and object, man and nature 
only, in short, if it is recognised as the principle of a 
system. For apart from such evolution to a system, the 
mere name of spirit or subject cannot mean much more 
than substance. Schelling's undeveloped spiritualism, 
just because it is undeveloped, is little more than 
Spinozism. 

The ' Phamomenology ' is, in a literary point of view, 
the most perfect of Hegel's works. It wants, indeed, 



64 Hegel. 

the clearness, the dialectical precision, and the just 
proportion of parts which we find in some of his later 
writings ; but it compensates for this by a certain 
imaginative richness and power of utterance, a certain 
fervid fluency, as of a thought which, after long brood- 
ing, had at last burst into expression. The peculiar 
merit of the book is not merely that its dialectical pro- 
cess is assisted in its expression by imagination, but that 
the process itself seems to become poetical and imagi- 
native through its success in overcoming the abstractions 
and reconciling the oppositions with which it deals. It 
is not poetical philosophy ; it is philosophy in its last 
synthesis showing itself to be poetry, thought taking 
fire by the rapidity and intensity of its own movement. 
Hegel called it his " voyage of discovery ; " and it is 
indeed a sort of philosopher's autobiography, in which 
all the main forces that influenced his own develop- 
ment are clearly indicated. It contains the system in 
its first conception, when it had not yet been thoroughly 
objectified, or when the philosopher had not yet at- 
tempted to ascertain his own "personal equation," and 
allow for it : but, for that very reason, it has a special 
value for every one who wishes to study the genesis of 
the system. 



65 



CHAPTEE IV. 

HEGEL AFTER THE BATTLE OF JENA THE SCHOOL 
AT NURNBERG. 

Hegel was rudely awakened from the philosophical 
ecstasy, as we might call it, that breathes through the 
last chapter of the ' Phaenomenology,' by the "thunders 
of Jena." Ever since her first effort to quell the infant 
giant of the Revolution in the French war of 1794-95, 
Prussia, in spite of her great military force, had with- 
drawn from the conflict, and secured her own tran- 
quillity amid the disasters of Germany by a somewhat 
narrow policy of reserve. She had held aloof from all 
the struggles of Austria, and had even condescended 
to receive rewards of territory from Napoleon for her 
steady subservience. She had fallen, as one of her 
statesmen said, into ''that lowest of degradations, to 
steal at another man's bidding." Meanwhile under her 
wing the little state of Weimar had escaped the disasters 
of war, and its university of Jena, with its apostolical 
succession of Eeinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, 
had been the centre of the philosophic movement, as 
Weimar itself, with Goethe and Schiller, was the literary 
centre of Germany. At last, in 1806, Prussia began to 
p. VII. E 



66 Hegel. 

see that she was destined by the conqueror to receive the 
reward of the Cyclops to Ulysses to be " eaten last ; " 
and she gathered herself together for a struggle with 
Napoleon, only to find her army broken to pieces and 
her kingdom dismembered in a campaign of a few 
days. 

Just before the decisive battle of Jena, the French 
soldiers broke into the town and began to plunder. 
Several of them entered Hegel's lodging, and it is re- 
corded that he met their threats by an appeal to one of 
their number on whose breast he noticed the ribbon of 
the Legion of Honour, saying that from a man with 
such a badge, he had a right to expect honourable treat- 
ment for a simple man of letters. As things got worse, 
and fire spread among the houses, Hegel put the last 
pages of the ' Phaenomenology ' in his pocket, left the 
rest of his property to its fate, and took refuge in the 
house of the Pro-rector Gabler, which was protected by 
the presence of a French officer of high rank. After 
the battle Napoleon had the fires stopped, and Hegel 
returned to his lodging, in which he found everything 
in confusion. A few days before, he had written to his 
friend Methammer, "I saw the Emperor, that world- 
soul, riding through the city to reconnoitre. It is in 
truth a strange feeling to see such an individual before 
one, who here, from one point, as he rides on his horse, 
is reaching over the world, and remoulding it. For the 
Prussians one could not prognosticate anything better; 
but in the space between Thursday and Monday, such 
advances have been made as are possible only for this 
extraordinary man. . . . As I let you know before, 
all now wish good fortune to the French army, which 



Political Opinions, 67 

cannot fail in the immense difference between its leaders 
and soldiers, and those of its enemies." 

A word of commentary seems necessary to explain 
this last utterance. Hegel was not, like Goethe, devoid 
of German patriotism. He had already written two 
pamphlets which the rapid progress of events had 
prevented him from publishing in which he endeav- 
oured to trace the causes of the political and military 
weakness of Germany, and also to point out how the 
empire, and the minor States included in it, might be 
regenerated. But as a Southern, he looked to Austria, 
the inheritor of the imperial tradition, as the centre of 
resistance, rather than to Prussia, which at this time 
he regarded as a lifeless machine of bureaucracy. No 
more than any one else could he anticipate how in a few 
years the reforms of Stein and Scharnhorst and Harden- 
berg were to renew the energies of the kingdom of 
Frederic the Great, and to make it the protagonist of 
Germany in the war of liberation. Hence he seems to 
have had no other feeling about the immediate contest 
than contempt for Prussia and admiration for Napoleon, 
who, as he said at a later time, " put the greatest genius 
into military victory only to shoAV how little, after all, 
mere victory counts for." But that he did not, even at 
this time, despair of the ultimate result for Germany, 
is shown by a letter of his addressed to an old pupil 
called Zellmann, who had written to him in a despair- 
ing way about the future. In this letter he tells 
Zellmann to look beyond the immediate failure to its 
causes, and to see in them the promise of recovery. 
" Science," he declares, " is the only theodicy ; it alone 
can keep us from taking events with the stupid aston- 



68 Hegel 

ishment of an animal, or, with short-sighted cleverness, 
ascribing them to the accidents of the moment or 
of the talents of an individual, and supposing that 
the fate of empires depends on a hill being or not 
being occupied by soldiery, as well as from lament- 
ing over them, as at the victory of injustice and the 
defeat of justice. The French nation, by the bath of 
its revolution, has been freed from many institutions 
which the spirit of man has left behind like its" baby 
shoes, and Avhich therefore weighed upon it, as they still 
weigh upon others, as lifeless fetters. What, however, 
is more, the individuals of that nation have, in the shock 
of revolution, cast off the fear of death and the life of 
custom, which in the change of scene has now ceased to 
have any meaning in itself. It is this that gives them 
the prevailing force which they are showing against other 
nations. Hence especially comes their preponderance 
over the cloudy and undeveloped spirit of the Germans, 
who, however, if they are once forced to cast off their 
inertia, will rouse themselves to action, and preserving 
in their contact with outward things the intensity of their 
inner life, will perchance surpass their teachers." 1 

In the meantime, while he was expressing this lofty 
confidence in the justice of destiny, Hegel's own fortunes 
were reduced to the lowest ebb. The war, which de- 
stroyed the university life of Jena, had left him so abso- 
lutely destitute, that we find Goethe commissioning his 
friend Knebel to lend him a few dollars for his immediate 
necessities. In these circumstances, he was glad to 
accept the work, which his friend Niethammer procured 
for him, of editing a newspaper at Bamberg. A German 
i Hegel, xvii. 628. 



Nurnberg Gymnasium. 69 

newspaper in those times could only be a bare record 
of events, without any comment or criticism whatever. 
No independent leading articles were permitted under 
the rule of Napoleon. And Hegel, while he is said to 
have done his editorial work, such as it was, in an effi- 
cient and workmanlike manner, seems to have regarded 
it merely as a temporary means of keeping the wolf 
from the door. In a letter to Knebel, he takes a some- 
what humorous view of his own position ; tells him 
that the smallest contributions of news from his part of 
the country will be thankfully received ; and adds, " I 
have made my guiding - star the Biblical saying, the 
truth of Avhich I have learnt by experience, ' Seek ye 
first food and clothing, and the kingdom of heaven shall 
be added unto you.' " 

After a year of this work, Niethammer, who had 
become what we may call the head of the educational 
department for the Protestant part of Bavaria, got 
Hegel recommended to the somewhat more congenial 
occupation of Rector in the Gymnasium at Nurnberg. 
Bavaria was one of the smaller States of Germany which 
Napoleon treated with special favour, and which he 
aggrandised by accessions of territory, in order to make 
use of them as checks and rivals of the greater German 
powers of Austria and Prussia. What they lost by this 
anti-patriotic position was, however, partly compensated 
by their contact with the reforming spirit of France, 
which enabled them more rapidly to rid themselves of 
the semi-feudal relics of the old imperial system. In 
Bavaria especially, the new ideas of organisation and 
enlightenment inspired the policy of the Government, 
which about this time had drawn into its employment 



70 Hegel. 

not only Hegel and Niethammer, but also Schelling, 
Paulus, Schubert, and others of the best talents of 
Germany. Methammer, Hegel's patron, was zealous 
for the reform of the old system of education, which 
he sought to revive mainly by the aid of a less me- 
chanical study of classical antiquity, but also by the 
introduction into the teaching of the schools of at least 
the elements of the new philosophy. Hegel willingly, 
and with his whole heart, made himself the instrument 
of this movement, so far at least as the first part of the 
scheme was concerned; for to him the classics were for 
general culture what Spinoza was for philosophy the 
" spiritual bath " through which the mind was to be freed 
from the narrowness of its merely natural sympathies, 
and prepared for a wider and freer culture. In this spirit 
he spoke in one of his addresses to his school at the 
end of the academical year. " For some centuries," he 
declares, " this is the ground upon which all culture has 
stood, out of which it has sprung, with which it has 
been in constant connection. As the natural organisms 
plants and animals withdraw themselves from the 
immediate influence of gravity, but yet cannot leave 
behind them this element of their being, so all art and 
science has developed from this basis, and though it has 
become independent in itself, yet has it not freed itself 
from the memory of that more ancient culture. As 
Antaeus renewed his forces by touching his mother 
earth, so science and culture, in every revival of their 
energy, have raised themselves to light out of a return 
to antiquity." Hegel then goes on to condemn the old 
system of teaching Latin to the exclusion of all other 
things, and especially of the mother tongue, "for a 



Study of the Classics. 71 

nation cannot be regarded as cultured which does not 
possess the treasures of science in its own speech." 
Nevertheless, while the ancient tongues must be kept 
in their proper place, they remain the essential basis of 
everything, " the spiritual bath, the profane baptism 
which gives to the soul the first indelible tone and tinc- 
ture for truth and science." " If the first paradise was 
the paradise of human nature, this is the second, the 
higher paradise of the human spirit, which, in its fair 
naturalness, freedom, depth, and brightness, here comes 
forth like a bride out of her chamber. The first wild 
majesty of the rise of spiritual life in the East is in 
classical literature circumscribed by the dignity of form, 
and softened into beauty ; its depth shows itself no 
longer in confusion, obscurity, and inflation, but lies 
open before us in simple clearness ; its brightness is not 
a childish play, but covers a sadness that knows the 
hardness of fate, yet is not by it driven out of freedom 
and measure. I do not think I am asserting too much 
when I say, that he who has not known the works of 
the ancients, has lived without knowing beauty." x 

The introduction of philosophy into the schools Hegel 
did not much approve ; but he conformed to the direction 
of his superiors, and even drew up a kind of Propaedeutic 
to Philosophy, which has since been published, and 
which, with all the rector's explanation, must have 
greatly puzzled the clever boys of Niirnberg. He en- 
couraged his pupils to question and even to interrupt 
him, and often spent the whole hour of instruction in 
meeting the difficulties which they suggested. It re- 
quires, as some one has said, a great mastery over a 
1 Hegel, xvi. 139. 



72 Hegel 

science to teach its rudiments well; and Hegel afterwards 
recognised that, the effort to express himself with the 
necessary simplicity and definiteness, to free his ideas 
from all obscurities of subjective association, and so to 
bring them into relation with untrained minds, was of 
great service to himself, both in increasing his effective- 
ness as a speaker, and in enabling him to give a more 
strictly scientific expression to his system than ; t had 
already received in the ' Phenomenology.' As a school- 
master, he seems to have been thoroughly successful 
showing in the general management of the affairs of the 
school the same practical talent which he had proved in 
the editorship of his newspaper, and at the same time 
gaining the respect and confidence of his pupils by the 
impression of moral and intellectual weight which he 
carried with him. He was a strict disciplinarian, and 
altogether opposed to the Pestalozzian ideas of education 
then in vogue, according to which the teaching must 
accommodate itself to the individuality of the pupil, 
and as little as possible exercise any pressure upon his 
natural tendencies. The basis of sound education was, 
for Hegel, obedience and self-surrender the submission 
of the mind to an external lesson, which must be learnt 
by every one, and even learnt by rote, with utter disre- 
gard of individual tastes and desires ; only out of this 
self-abnegation, and submission to be guided and taught, 
could any originality spring that was worth preserving. 
Yet, in insisting upon strict order and method, Hegel 
seems to have avoided the extreme of petty interference, 
and to have tolerated the frolic and licence of his school- 
boys, even beyond the point which is now considered 
desirable. One of his Niirnberg pupils gives the fol- 



Marriage. 73 

lowing somewhat characteristic anecdote : " I remember 
that in 1812 a dancing-master came to Niirnberg, and, 
with Hegel's permission, opened a course of lessons at 
the gymnasium, for which the members were requested 
to put down their names. Naturally almost every one 
subscribed. After a time, however, some of us became 
discontented. The dancing-master, skilful enough in his 
art, was, as is not unusual, a coxcomb ; the Avearisome 
exercises in mannerly deportment, the standing in stocks 
to turn the toes outwards, &c, were not liked. ... In 
short, some of the scholars planned how to withdraw 
from their engagement. But that was impossible with- 
out Hegel's consent, and I and another were sent to lay 
our grievances before him. But what a reception we 
got ! I scarcely know how we got doAvn the stairs. He 
would not see the dancing-master lose the fees guaranteed 
to him ; and, in short, we were obliged to dance, stand 
in stocks, and make our salutations till the end of the 
summer." 

On September 16, 1811, Hegel was married to Marie 
von Tucher, a lady of an old Niirnberg family. She 
was, we are told, a woman of gentle, aristocratic man- 
ners, of fine feminine impulsiveness and feminine belief 
in impulse ; a friend of Jean Paul, and strongly inter- 
ested in the fine arts, as Ave may gather from the con- 
tents of her husband's letters to her. In many ways 
she was the " opposite counterpart " of the reserved 
strength, the deep -searching systematic reflection, and 
the bourgeois simplicity and even plainness of her hus- 
band, Avho never entirely lost a tinge of provincialism in 
his manners and speech. During the courtship Hegel 
addressed to her some verses, Avhich are rather better 



74 H&jel. 

than those he usually wrote, but which have too much 
philosophic analysis of love to be quite good poetic ex- 
pressions of it. The German open-heartedness in these 
matters allows us to see something of the slight jars which 
were naturally produced at first between people of such 
opposite characters and tendencies as they came to know 
each other more intimately after the engagement. Hegel 
has to explain his ruthless masculine way of denouncing 
certain tendencies and views with which his Marie feels 
some sympathy. " In respect to myself, and the way in 
which I express my views, I confess that when I have 
to condemn principles, I too easily lose sight of the way 
and manner in which they are present in a particular 
individual in this case, in you and that I am apt to 
take them too earnestly because I see them in their uni- 
versal bearing and consequence, which you do not think 
of, which, indeed, for you, are not in them at all. Yet 
you know well, that although character and principles of 
judgment are not the same thing, yet that it is not in- 
different to character what principles of judgment are 
adopted : and I, on my side, know equally well that 
principles of judgment, when they contradict the char- 
acter, are even of less import with your sex than with 
ours. . . . There are men who torment their wives 
in order to gain, from their bearing under provocation, a 
new consciousness of their love and patience. I do not 
think that I am so perverse ; but I can hardly repent 
that I have pained you, so much has the strength and 
inwardness of my love been confirmed by the deeper 
insight into your nature which I have gained." The 
marriage was in all ways a happy one, and Hegel could 
now face the world with a heart at rest. " When a man 



The ' Logic' 75 

has got work which suits him, and a wife whom he 
loves," he writes to his friend Methammer, " he may- 
be said to have made up his accounts with life." Two 
sons were horn of this marriage, Karl and Immanuel 
the former of whom is now a Professor of History at 
Erlangen. Hegel never had a large income, even at the 
height of his fame, and his household was arranged with 
orderly frugality : except in emergencies, he never had 
more than one maid-servant. But he found money to 
make his household life tasteful, and to provide for 
domestic indulgences and surprises. His favourite re- 
creation was in making short excursions with his family. 
During the Xiirnberg period, he had also the happiness 
of having with him for a time his sister Christiane, to 
whom he was much attached. 

During the quiet years at Nurnberg which followed 
his marriage, 1812-16, Hegel produced what is his great- 
est work in a purely scientific point of view, the ' Logic,' 
with all its defects, the one work which the modern 
world has to put beside the ' Metaphysic ' of Aristotle. 
In it the fundamental idea of his system that the 
unity to which all things must be referred is a spiritual 
or self-conscious principle is fully developed, and 
proved in the only way in which such proof is possible, 
by showing that every other category or principle 
which might explain the world, is ultimately resolvable, 
or rather by its own dialectical movement resolves it- 
self, into this. Thus " Being," " Measure," " Essence," 
"Force," "Law," "Substance," " Cause," whatever 
names have been given to the identity that underlies 
all differences, are shown to be expressions of a thought 
which, when it is made explicit, is found to mean or 



76 Hegel. 

involve the principle of self-consciousness. When this 
is proved, therefore, the further work of philosophy 
must be simply to apply this key to the concrete forms 
of nature and history, and to show how, by its means, 
they are to be made intelligible. This, however, will 
be more fully explained in the sequel. 

Hegel, however, had not in the gymnasium quite 
the work that suited him, and frequently during those 
eight years he had been making inquiries as to different 
university appointments, in which he would be freed 
from the practical cares of a school, and find a fit 
audience for the best of his thoughts. Meanwhile his 
fame was gradually rising, and bringing him into rela- 
tions with many philosophical writers and students, who 
were reaching with undefined aims beyond the philo- 
sophies of Fichte and Schelling, and who welcomed the 
new light of the ' Phenomenology ' and the ' Logic' 
All at once, in July 1816, when he was just on the point 
of issuing the last volume of the 'Logic,' he received 
three offers of chairs of philosophy from Erlangen, 
Heidelberg, and Berlin though in the invitation from 
Berlin a certain doubt was expressed whether his long 
cessation from university work had not deprived him of 
the power of effective speech necessary in a university. 
Hegel accepted the invitation to Heidelberg, and at last, 
in his forty -seventh year, attained that position of free- 
dom from other cares, and of direct influence over the 
university teaching of philosophy, which he had so long 
desired. 



77 



CHAPTEE V. 

HEGEL AS A PROFESSOR AT HEIDELBERG AND BERLIN 

HIS CHARACTER AND INFLUENCE. 

During the eight years which Hegel spent in the 
Niirnberg Gymnasium, the fortunes of Germany had 
undergone a great change. The disasters of the Russian 
campaign had given the first shock to the seemingly 
unconquerable power of the French Emperor, and 
Prussia, regenerated by the silent reforms of Stein 
and Hardenberg, had commenced the German insur- 
rection, which ended in the overthrow of Napoleon. 
The Congress of Vienna had done what it could to 
evoke some kind of order out of the confused result of 
war, and also it had sought in some degree to bridle the 
national spirit which the war had called forth. But 
Germany was still agitated like the sea after a storm. 
The undefined expectation of some great result from 
so many sacrifices, the effort of the representatives of 
the old Germanic system to reassert those historical 
rights which had disappeared, the necessity of giving 
some satisfaction to the desire of national unity, and 
the policy of the different dynasties leading them to 
reassert their separate independence, all these tend- 



78 He/jel. 

encies and influences were confusedly struggling with 
each other. On the whole, the desire of peace and 
rest after so many troublous years, and the fear of 
revolution produced by the example of France, pre- 
vailed over all other feelings. The German nation 
had no clear idea of what it wanted, and was not 
willing to rouse itself to any continued efforts to re- 
mould its institutions. All that could be expected 
was that some working compromise should be secured, 
out of which better things might grow, as the times 
became ripe for a new movement of progress. 

Hegel was deeply interested, as we shall see, in the 
political problem, but his first natural feeling was that 
the time had come when the interests of culture and 
philosophy, which had been silenced by the noise of 
battle, might find a hearing ; and this is the idea ex- 
pressed in his introductory address at Heidelberg. 
" While the spirit of the world was so much occupied 
with real interests, it could not turn inwards, or gather 
itself together in itself : but now that the stream of 
events, on which we were carried along so rapidly, has 
been checked now that the German nation has re- 
deemed itself by the sword from the worst of tyrannies, 
and regained its nationality, that foundation of all 
higher life we may hope that besides the kingdom of 
this world, on which all thoughts and efforts have been 
hitherto concentrated, the kingdom of God may also 
be thought of; in other words, that besides political 
and other worldly interests, science and philosophy, 
the free interests of intelligence, may also rise to new- 
ness of life." This hope is the more reasonable, Hegel 
declares, as philosophy is the peculiar vocation of the 



Heidelberg Lectures . 79 

German nation. "History shows ns that even when 
all hut the name of philosophy was lost in other lands, 
it has maintained itself as the peculiar possession of the 
German nation. We have received from nature the 
high calling to he guardians of this sacred fire, as in 
earlier times the world-spirit maintained the highest 
consciousness in the Jewish nation, that from them it 
might rise again as a new spiritual force in the world. 
. . . Let us greet together the dawn of a better time, 
when the spirit, that has hitherto been driven out of 
itself, may return to itself again, and win room and 
space wherein to found a kingdom of its own." 

Hegel began to lecture with an audience of four, 
which, however, gradually increased to twenty for one 
of his courses and thirty for the other. Heidelberg 
afforded him opportunities of extending his knowledge 
of art, and it was there that he first lectured on ./Esthetic. 
The work, however, which mainly engaged him was his 
Encyclopaedia, a general outline of his system, consist- 
ing of short compressed paragraphs, which he often 
made the basis of his lectures. This work was after- 
wards much extended and developed, but in its first 
form it has a compactness, a brief energy and conclu- 
siveness of expression, which he never surpassed. He is 
described as at this time rather withdrawing from gene- 
ral society, and so intensely concentrated on the effort of 
applying his principles to nature and history, as some- 
times to lose all sense of outward things. His students 
thought him idle, because they used to see him standing 
for hours at his window, looking out on the misty hills 
and woods of Heidelberg ; and it is related that on one 
occasion, as he was walking to the university, after a 



80 Hegel. 

heavy rain, he left a shoe in the mud without being 
conscious of the loss. On the general body of the stu- 
dents his influence was not great, but he gradually drew 
to himself those who had any aptitude for philosophy. 
And during his whole stay in Heidelberg his name was 
steadily rising, in spite of the general tendencies of the 
place, which seem to have been rather unfavourable to 
philosophic studies. 

Hegel wrote at this time two rather important papers 
in the ' Heidelberg Jahrbiicher,' one on Jacobi, and the 
other on the constitutional struggles of Wurtemberg, 
papers which first defined Hegel's attitude to the reli- 
gious and political life of his time. Jacobi, like Fichte, 
had been vigorously attacked by Hegel in the ' Critical 
Journal,' when he and Schelling were fighting their 
early battle against the philosophical world ; but now 
greater clearness had brought greater calm, and Hegel 
recognised that in aim, if not in method, he was at one 
with Jacobi. The arbitrary intuitional ways of the 
latter, whose ideas were generally put forth like mere 
"shots from a pistol," his want of dialectic, and his 
inability to recognise his own ideas when they were pre- 
sented to him in other language, Hegel still criticises. 
But he recognises that, after all, Jacobi's intuitions were 
right, and that, in his own way, he had kept alive the 
essential idea of philosophy the idea that the principle 
of all things is spiritual. This amende honorable much 
comforted the old man, who of late had received some- 
what rough usage from Schelling, and who now came 
to Heidelberg to embrace Hegel and thank him for his 
acknowledgment. 

In the second paper, on the proceedings of the Estates 



The Idea of the State. 81 

of Wiirtemberg, we have Hegel's first published utterance 
do politics, though, as we have seen, he had all along 
taken a deep interest in the political movement, and had 
twice before been on the point of giving his views to 
the world. The changes through which his opinions on 
this subject passed went on pari passu with the general 
development of his system. The youthful enthusiasm 
for liberty kindled in him by the French Revolution, 
was changed by the experiences of the time and his own 
advance beyond individualistic views of society, into a 
conception of the state as an organic unity, in which the 
individual should find at once the means of his educa- 
tion as a moral and rational being, and the sphere for 
the exercise of his special gifts. In the time of Hegel's 
closest alliance with Schelling, his conception of the 
unity of the state was so strict that it even approximated 
to a revival of the Greek aristocratic socialism. Even 
then, however, he was conscious that the Greek ideal 
could not be applied without modification to modern 
life ; and that the modern state must seek to combine 
the unity of the ancient republic with an acknowledg- 
ment of the independent rights and personal freedom of 
the individual, which to the ancient republican, to Plato 
and Aristotle, would have seemed anarchy. The modern 
state must not be an extended family or socialistic com- 
munity in which the individual is lost ; nor, on the 
other hand, must it be a mere " social contract " of in- 
dividuals who have no vital relations to each other no 
relations which are not produced by their own will. 
Yet in some sense it must embrace both these ideas, and 
reconcile them in one. Like a family, it must be based 
on nature, on a community of race and language ; it 

P. VII. F 



82 Hegel. 

must rest on relations that are, and are acknowledged to 
be, independent of all the mere caprice of individuals. 
This end, as Hegel thought, could he best attained in a 
hereditary monarchy, where the person of the monarch 
becomes as it were the fixed point which is raised above 
all discussion, the representative of the historical unity 
of the nation. On the other hand, the state must also 
be a "civic society," in which individuals are secured 
in their private rights of person and property, and 
allowed every opportunity of pursuing their particular 
aims and developing their special abilities in competi- 
tion and co-operation with each other. And in order 
that natural unity and social freedom may be combined, 
the monarch must be a constitutional monarch, ruling- 
through his ministers, who are in contact with and re- 
sponsible to the Parliament, and the people must be 
organised in communities and corporations, from which 
again representatives to the Parliament shall be chosen. 
In this way the Government will be at once permanent 
and progressive, raised above the direct revolutionary 
action of the many a real leader of the people, and 
yet continually receiving new support and development 
from the constitutionally expressed will of the nation. 
Hegel, it will be observed, does not think of a constitu- 
tional monarchy as a slightly veiled democracy, at least 
according to Eousseau's idea of democracy as a Govern- 
ment which only collects and records the decisions of its 
subjects; he thinks of it as what indeed every real 
Government must be, whatever its name a guiding and 
directing power. JSbr is this irreconcilable with the 
fact that no Government can be powerful that docs not 
express the will of the people, for, as Hegel says, " the 



The German Umpire. 83 

people never knows what it wills." It is the business 
of Government at once to make it conscious of its will, 
and to carry it into effect. It may be questioned whether 
Hegel was right in supposing that a hereditary monarchy 
is necessary, or Avill in the end prove to be even the best 
expedient, to secure this result. But, in any case, there 
were good grounds for believing that was so under the 
actual conditions of the time in England and in Prussia. 
Hegel's ideal seems, indeed, to have lain midway be- 
tween the English and the Prussian systems, having 
more of democracy than the latter, and implying more 
of direct initiative on the part of the Government than 
the former, as might be expected in the political system 
of one Avho had witnessed the great reforms of Stein and 
Hardenberg. 

This ideal of the state was, in its main points at least, 
already developed by Hegel before he left Jena ; for it 
is implied, if not directly expressed, in his unpublished 
pamphlet on the imperial system. This pamphlet ap- 
pears from internal evidence to have been written shortly 
after the Treaty of Luneville, when the imperial system 
had already shown its weakness for the defence of Ger- 
many against the French. It begins with the words, " Ger- 
many is no longer a state, but, as a French writer has 
said, a constituted anarchy." This it has learnt by ex- 
perience in war ; for " war is the touchstone which proves 
whether there is a real coherence in the different parts of 
the state, and whether they are prepared to make any 
sacrifices for it." Hegel therefore calls on his country- 
men not to waste their time in vain complaints of their 
fate, but to try to understand it, and to see in it not 
the working of caprice and accident, but the necessary 



84 Hegel. 

result of the political paralysis into which Germany 
had fallen. The " Holy Eoman Empire " had gradually 
sunk under the ahuses of the feudal system, according 
to which each part of the whole political "body was so 
strongly intrenched in its particular rights, that the 
general power of the state was annihilated. An imperial 
army was a theme for jest, for every contributor tried to 
contribute as little as possible; imperial justice was a 
mockery, for a suit in the courts of the empire never 
came to an end. An endless formalism, which in its 
tenderness for particular rights never allowed any right 
to be realised, might console itself with the maxim, 
Fiat jiistitia pereat mundus ; but it was time to con- 
sider whether that could be really justice which made 
Germany perish. This system, whose weakness had 
long been hidden under the magm nominis umbra of 
the empire, was stripped of its disguise by the calamities 
of the times. " Only the memory of the former bond 
preserves yet a semblance of union, as fallen fruits may 
be known to have belonged to the tree because they lie 
beneath it, though its shadow neither protects them 
from corruption nor from the power of the elements to 
which they now belong." 

Hegel therefore calls for a renewal of the imperial 
authority, which shall not, indeed, imitate the cen- 
tralisation of France, but which, while admitting the 
self-government or " home rule " of the separate pro- 
vinces in matters that concern themselves, shall yet 
bring them together in a real effective political union 
under one monarch and one government. "The great- 
ness of modern states makes it impossible to realise 
the ancient idea of the personal participation of every 



The Future of Germany. 85 

freeman in the general government. Both for exe- 
cution and deliberation, the power of the state must 
gather to a centre. But if this centre is maintained 
in independence by the reverence of the people, and 
consecrated in its unchangeableness in the person of 
a monarch, determined by the natural law of birth, the 
Government may, without fear or jealousy, leave the 
subordinate systems and corporations to determine in 
their own way most of the relations which arise in 
society, and every rank, city, commune, &c, to enjoy 
the freedom of doing that which lies within its sphere." 
Hegel's ideal is therefore not that of a machine moved 
by one spring, which communicates motion to all the 
rest of the endlessly complicated works, but of a social 
organism in which life is continually streaming from 
the centre to the extremities, and back again from them 
to the centre ; and he points out that, while a central- 
ised despotic government has nothing to calculate on 
beyond its definite known resources, a free state has 
besides, in every part of it, points of force from which 
new resources may spring. 

Hegel, however, felt that such a revolution as he 
contemplated, by which the old structure of privilege 
should be turned into an organic state, was one of those 
things which do not come of themselves, but that there 
was need of force to suppress the opposition of the 
different provinces which were so strongly intrenched 
in their particular rights. And in words that are some- 
what prophetic, though the prophecy was long of 
accomplishment, he calls for a hero, to realise by 
" blood and iron " the political regeneration of Germany. 
"Though all parts would gain by Germany becoming 



86 Hegel. 

one state, and though public opinion has been so far 
educated that the need of it is deeply and definitely- 
felt, yet such an event is never the fruit of deliberation, 
but always of force. The common mass of the German 
nation with their provincial estates, which know of 
nothing but the division of the separate sections of 
their race, and look upon their union as something alto- 
gether strange and monstrous, must be gathered into one 
by the violence of a conqueror ; they must be compelled 
by him to regard themselves as belonging to one Ger- 
many. Such a Theseus must have magnanimity enough 
to grant to the nation which he has formed out of scat- 
tered peoples a share in that which is the common 
interest; he must have character enough, if not to 
submit to be rewarded with ingratitude, like Theseus, 
yet to be willing to brave, by reason of the direction of 
government which he keeps in his own hands, the hate 
which Eichelieu and other great men have brought upon 
themselves, when they crushed all particular wills and 
factious interests to secure the general good." 

The rapid advance of events, the succession of blows 
by which Napoleon annihilated the German empire, 
apparently outstripped Hegel's pen, and this pamphlet 
was never completed. Nor, in spite of the great out- 
burst of German patriotism in the war of liberation and 
the hopes which it produced, would the Congress of 
Vienna listen to the idea of a revival of the empire. 
Hence, after the war, Germany resolved itself into a 
very loose confederation of states, each of which was 
left to develop in its own way, only with the under- 
standing that "Estates" or a Parliament were to be 
introduced by every Government for its own subjects. 



Sivcibian Politics. 87 

One of the first states to enter upon the path of 
reform was Wiirtemberg, the territory of which had 
been doubled by the Napoleonic policy. The king, 
one of the most arbitrary and tyrannical of princes, 
but a man of statesmanlike ability, anticipated the 
attack on his despotism by offering to his people a 
charter, in which provision was made for their repre- 
sentation in a parliament, and also, with some reserves, 
for parliamentary control over the legislation and taxa- 
tion of the kingdom, but in which, at the same time, the 
privileges of the nobles, as well as the special rights and 
monopolies guaranteed to certain other classes in the 
old semi -feudal constitution of Wiirtemberg, were abol- 
ished. Suspicion of the king's motives, however, and a 
somewhat reactionary patriotism, united the people with 
the Estates in their rejection of the royal offer, and in 
their demand for the restoration of the "good old laws." 
The death of the king and the accession of a popular 
heir, who had been one of the heroes of the war of 
liberation, did not put an end to this strange struggle 
between a despotic Government seeking to force the 
people to be free, and a people supporting the abuses 
and monopolies of feudalism. But the sympathy of 
Germany, which at first had been with the resistance of 
the Estates, soon began to change sides, and even in 
Wurternberg at least in those parts of it which did not 
belong to the old duchy a party in favour of the king's 
proposals was forming itself. It was at this time that 
Hegel, moved thereto, it is said, by the request of the 
minister Von Vangenheim, struck into the battle. Filled 
as he was with a sense of the evils which the " good old 
laws " had brought upon Germany, he could not but take 



88 Hegel. 

the side of the king ; and nowhere do we find a more 
thorough and merciless exposure of the defects of the 
semi-feudal arrangements pertaining to the imperial sys- 
tem, than in the paper which he wrote on the subject. 
Hegel, however, in his vigorous polemic, shows himself 
more of a partisan than we should have expected, and 
does not give us any glimpses of the reasons which partly 
excused the wrong-headedness and obstinacy of his Swa- 
bian fellow-countrymen. Indeed it has to be allowed 
generally, that in controversy Hegel, if not unfair, is at 
least ruthless. There is no malice, nor, I think, personal 
bitterness in his polemic ; but it is unsparing, unsympa- 
thetic, and gathers itself into weighty words of irony and 
indignation which were felt like blows, and sometimes 
roused violent opposition and anger against him. We 
are often reminded of his own admission to his wife, 
that in assailing principles which seemed to him wrong, 
he forgot to allow for " the manner and way in which 
they are present in particular individuals." And it 
was only to be expected, when he treated thus persons 
as representatives of ideas, that, on the other hand, 
words which were really directed by him against ideas 
should be interpreted as personal attacks. 

The complete expression of Hegel's political theories in 
his \ Philosophy of Eight ' was not published till a later 
date, when he had been transferred to Berlin, Avhich was 
beginning to be recognised as the scientific as well as the 
political centre of Germany. By the thorough reforms 
carried out in the hour of her apparent ruin, by the 
reorganisation of her army and the foundation of Berlin 
University, and by her energy and sacrifices in the war 
of liberation, Prussia had gained, and, as it turned out, 



Berlin University. 89 

permanently gained, the leadership of Germany. And 
though Austria was now seeking, with some success, to 
withdraw her from her political task, and to entangle her 
in a reactionary and repressive policy, yet even at the 
worst, the process of internal improvement was never 
entirely checked, and the alliance which she had formed 
with science and philosophy was never entirely broken. 
In 1816, Hegel had already drawn the attention of Solger, 
Niebuhr, and other men of influence in Berlin, as the one 
man who could fill with credit the vacant chair of Fichte, 
and in 1818 the proposal was renewed and accepted. 

From this time until his death in 1831, Hegel held a 
commanding position as the. greatest teacher of philo- 
sophy in the most important university of Germany. 
He was now in his forty-ninth year, fully possessed of 
himself, strong in the consciousness of the truth which 
he had grasped, and of the method by which he had 
developed it. The long delay of recognition, if it had 
taken away something of the first poetic vividness of 
conception and expression, had brought clearness, defin- 
iteness, and proportion to his treatment of the different 
parts and aspects of knowledge, and had enabled him to 
work out his principles to a system. On the other hand, 
it had inevitably given to his mind a certain rigidity, a 
certain incompliant firmness and disinclination to com- 
promise, which was apt to be felt as tyrannical by those 
who were not in complete sympathy with him. The 
long solitary work of construction, in which he had had 
to be sufficient for himself, had taken away from him 
the capacity to give and take which belongs to youth. 
$br were his eight years' labour as a schoolmaster pro- 
bably without influence on his character. "I am a 



90 Hegel. 

schoolmaster," he once said, "who has to teach philo- 
sophy, and, perhaps partly for that reason, am possessed 
with the idea that philosophy, as truly as geometry, 
must be a regular structure of ideas which is capable of 
being taught." " His main influence upon the Berliners," 
says his biographer, " was that he formally put them to 
school, and with naive infiexibleness made them learn 
his system." Though in a sense his philosophy was 
rooted in the idea of freedom, it was also penetrated 
with the consciousness that real freedom is possible only 
through discipline ; and even the Prussian tendency to 
introduce into everything a kind of military drill was 
not unwelcome to him. As Socrates was compared to 
those figures of Silenus which contained within the image 
of an Olympic god, so it may be said that in Hegel we 
find an idealist, for whom truth is poetry and religion 
one with philosophy, in the dress of a punctual and 
orderly civil servant of the Prussian Government. 

The great danger of a position such as Hegel now 
held, in close alliance with the Government, employed 
by it in testing the candidates for the scholastic pro- 
fession, and often consulted by it in reference to aca- 
demical appointments, was that it tended too much to 
confuse the official and the philosopher, and to cast a 
suspicion of political reserve and accommodation upon 
all the conservative, or apparently conservative, ten- 
dencies of his social and religious speculation. Start- 
ing with the revolutionary principle, Hegel, by the 
natural development of his thought, had, as we have 
seen, been led to a view of things which was neither 
revolutionary nor reactionary, because based upon the 
idea of the evolution of humanity as an organism, lie 



Conservative Tendencies. 91 

had learned to recognise that " the real is the rational," 
that the " soul of the world is just;" yet not in the sense 
of a mere glorification of the status quo, but in the sense 
that history is the progressive manifestation of reason, 
and that, therefore, no true reform is possible which is 
not in its essence a development i.e., which is not 
already contained in germ in that which has to be re- 
formed. It is vain to command the seed to become an 
oak unless it is an acorn. Mere abstract ideals, there- 
fore, are worthless, and their application can only lead 
to a general overturn without reconstruction. The rev- 
olutionary contempt of the past is fatal to all real pro- 
gress, for it is only in the past that we can find such an 
explanation of the present as may enable us to see in 
it the germ of the future, "the spirit of the years to 
come, yearning to mix itself with life." In religion, also, 
Hegel had gradually outgrown the bare negations of the 
Aufklaruny, and the Hellenism of his youth, and had 
learnt to recognise, in the Christian idea of self-realisa- 
tion through self-sacrifice, the principle that explains the 
intellectual and moral life of man and the nature of the 
universe in which he lives. Such a view separated him 
at once from the Revolution and the reaction, from the 
prevailing rationalism and from the reviving orthodoxy; 
and it was certain to be misunderstood by the partisans 
of both. Especially was it natural that to liberals in 
theology and politics Hegel should seem to be an ob- 
scurantist and a political quietist, an " official philoso- 
pher," won by the bribes of place and power to maintain 
the cause of obstruction with the weapons of reason, 
l^or can it be said that Hegel took much pains to avoid 
such misconception. His denunciation of the revolu- 



92 Hegel 

tionary sophisms, and especially of the sentimental 
politics of Fries, whom in the preface to the 'Philoso- 
phy of Eight ' he calls the " ringleader of the hosts of 
shallowness," seemed to be no fair philosophical con- 
troversy at a time when the Government, in the panic 
that followed the minder of Kotzebue, were adopting 
strict measures of repression in the universities, and 
Fries himself was in danger of being driven from his 
chair. When, however, a writer in the ' Literary Eeview ' 
of Halle pointed to this coincidence, and characterised 
Hegel's attack as an " ignoble " persecution of a man 
who was down, Hegel was deeply woimded and incensed, 
and even made the matter worse by complaining to the 
minister, Altenstein, that such an insinuation should be 
directed against him in a Review supported by the 
Government. Hegel declared that he had never once 
thought of Fries as a private person, but only of his 
principles ; but though this declaration might be true 
though, indeed, from a consideration of his general 
character, we may say certainly that it was true yet 
Hegel should have remembered that above all things it 
is needful for a philosopher to take care that the weapons 
of the spirit should not seem to be used to help the 
weapons of the flesh. In like manner, Hegel's approxi- 
mation to orthodoxy, his desire to show that in all 
essentials he was one with the Christian church, and 
his attacks upon the ordinary rationalism, exposed him, 
because of his official position, to the suspicion of com- 
promising unworthily the interests of scientific truth, 
especially as he did not dwell with the same emphasis 
on the great, though in the main formal, changes and 
especially the complete rejection of ordinary supernat- 



Conservative Tendencies. 93 

uralism which are involved in the Hegelian interpre- 
tation of Christianity. 

Yet, on the whole, Hegel's attitude is neither un- 
natural nor inconsistent. If he felt in some degree 
the influence of the Restoration period if a certain 
weariness of political movement is visible in the writ 
inga of his latest years if he shows, as time goes on, 
an increasing proneness to reconciling views, and a 
disinclination to insist on a complete sifting of terms 
upon which the reconciliation should he made, we 
need not wonder at a change which is the ordinary 
residt of age, and Avas above all natural to one who 
had lived through such a period of overturn and re- 
newal. "Finally, after forty years of war and un- 
measurable confusion, an old heart might rejoice to 
see an end of it all, and the beginning of a period of 
peaceful satisfaction," as he said in one of his latest 
lectures, in reference to the French Revolution of 1830. 
But Hegel knew, as he immediately goes on to show, 
that there were discords and unresolved antagonisms 
which would not let men rest in what had been attained. 
Apart from such " tints of the setting sun," such natural 
leaning to rest in the attained, there is no trace of re- 
action in HegeL Nowhere do we find any unfaithful- 
ness to his fundamental principles, or a willingness to 
compromise any of the results that flowed from the 
natural development of his thought. If he attacks the 
Aufkliirung, it is under the "modern standard of the 
free spirit," and with a distinct rejection of the prin- 
ciple of authority in all its forms. If his polemic is 
more frequently directed against the extravagances of 
revolutionary theor}' than against the sophistry of re- 



94 Hegel. 

action, it is not because his philosophy has any special 
kinship with the latter, but rather for an opposite 
reason because of that necessity of development which 
forces every new principle into a struggle with its im- 
mediate predecessor. Hegel, in fact, assumed, perhaps 
prematurely, that the scepticism of the Aufklarung had 
completed its work, and that the conflict with orthodoxy 
and the struggle Avith feudality was so far settled and 
done with, that it was now safe to recognise the sub- 
stantial unity of the life that once expressed itself in 
these forms with that which expressed itself in his own 
philosophy ; while with those who stood nearer to him- 
self, and started from the same principle of reason and 
liberty, he felt himself obliged to fight out the battle 
to the end. 

Meanwhile the allies whom Hegel was Avilling to 
acknowledge were not always willing to acknoAvledge 
him. The orthodox suspected philosophy et dona fer- 
entem, and refused to trust to a dialectical proof of 
Christian ideas, which they feared to be no proof of 
Christianity as they understood it. And if statesmen 
like Altenstein and Hardenberg, who were liberals at 
heart, and Avho promoted Hegel before the reaction 
had fairly set in, Avere willing to look Avith favour 
on his political speculations, yet, toAvards the end of 
Hegel's life, Avhen the policy of repression aams finally 
adopted, a suspicion seems to have arisen in the Court 
that there was some " perilous stuff " in the ' Phil- 
osophy of Right,' as indeed there Avas for a Govern- 
ment which AA^as still refusing to grant many of those 
popular institutions which that book declares to be 
necessary for a free people. Hegel's last days Avere 



Influence as a Teacher. 95 

disturbed by a dispute with his old pupil Gans, which 
is said to have arisen from the democratic inferences 
drawn by the latter from the ' Philosophy of Right.' 
And the rise, after his death, of a branch of the Hegelian 
school, which exaggerated to distortion those very aspects 
of the Hegelian theory on which the philosopher himself 
had seemed to lay less emphasis, was the natural reaction 
from its apparent temporary identification with the Prus- 
sian system of State and Church. Philosophy, like re- 
ligion, must seek to view human life in relation to those 
principles which are at the making and the unmaking 
of states ; it cannot " sit on a hill remote " to reason 
about abstractions ; it cannot but attempt to comprehend 
that greatest of organisms, the State, which, in the " archi- 
tectonic of its rationality," is the highest result of the 
conscious and unconscious working of reason in the life 
of man ; but, like religion, it must suffer loss, when it 
is drawn down into the region of immediate practical 
politics, and confounded with the attack and defence 
of special measures and institutions. 

Hegel's real work, however, had little to do with the 
changing politics of the Government which employed 
him. He was a teacher, and not a statesman, a teacher 
whose main mission in life it was to find expression for 
one great leading idea, which should reconcile men to 
the world, and revive the power that seemed to be 
passing away from the Christian faith, as well as to 
imbue his pupils with the new philosophic method, by 
which that idea was to be developed and applied. For 
this work his position at Berlin gave him a great oppor- 
tunity. During the first ten years of his residence his 
influence on the students of the great university was 



96 Hegel 

continually increasing ; and though after that period the 
decline of hodily vigour, or at least of the buoyancy 
necessary to the successful teacher, began to he percepti- 
ble, he was, till the end of his life, in 1831, recognised 
as occupying in philosophy a place almost analogous to 
that which Goethe held in the world of letters. His 
pupils, indeed, were fond of associating the two names 
together ; and the circumstance that their birthdays fell 
on successive days was used in the year 1826 to unite 
them in one continuous festival, in which the enthusiasm 
of Hegel's present and past students found its culminating 
expression. Hegel himself seemed to take this apotheosis 
as a proof that his work was nearly done, when, in his 
address to his assembled friends, he said, with that grand 
simplicity that always marked his acceptance, of the facts 
of life : " If one lives long enough, one must be content 
to take this also among the experiences of life, no longer 
to see one's self beside, or at the head of, younger men, 
but to stand to them as age to youth ; and that point of 
life has now come for me." 

If we ask for the sources of this influence, we can- 
not attribute it to any of those external advantages 
of address and manner which distinguished Fichte and 
Schelling. Cousin, who may be said to have been 
the pupil of both Hegel and Schelling, contrasts the 
flowing eloquence of the latter with the " powerful, 
though embarrassed, diction, the fixed gaze, and the 
clouded brow " of Hegel, " which seemed to be an 
image of thought turned back upon itself." And from 
Hotho, one of Hegel's most distinguished pupils, we 
have an account of him, which though something may 
be allowed for the fervour of discipleship enables us 



Personal Appearance. 97 

vividly to realise the impression made by him both in 
public and in private. 

"It was at the beginning of my student -life that one 
morning I ventured to present myself, shyly, yet full of 
trust, in Hegel's room. He sat before a broad writing-table, 
and was impatiently turning over the books and papers Which 
lay heaped in some disorder upon it. His figure was bent 
in premature age, and yet had a look of native toughness and 
force ; a yellow-grey dressing-gown hung from his shoulders, 
covering his person down to the ground. There was nothing 
very noticeable in his general external appearance no im- 
posing height or charm of manner ; rather an impression of 
a certain honest downrightness, as of some citizen of the 
olden time, was conveyed in his whole bearing. The hrst 
impression of his face, however, I shall not easily forget. 
Pale ami relaxed, his features hung down as if lifeless ; no 
destructive passion was mirrored in them, but only a long 
history of patient thought. The agony of doubt, the ferment 
of unappeasable mental disturbance, seemed never to have 
tortured, never at least to have overpowered him, in all 
his forty years of brooding, seeking, and finding; only the 
restless impulse to develop the early germ of happily dis- 
covered truth with ever greater depth and riches with ever 
greater strictness of inevitable logic had furrowed the brow, 
the cheeks, the mouth. When his mind was slumbering, 
the features appeared old and withered ; when it awoke, 
they expressed all the earnestness and strength of a thought, 
which, through the persistent effort of years, had been devel- 
oped to completeness. What dignity lay in the whole head, 
in the finely formed nose; the high but somewhat retreating 
brow, the peaceful chin ! The nobleness of good faith and 
thorough rectitude in great and little, the clear conscious- 
ness of having sought satisfaction in truth alone, was, in the 
most individual way, imprinted on every feature. I had ex- 
pected a testing and inspiring discourse about philosophy, 
and was mightily surprised to hear nothing of the kind. 

p. VII. g 



98 Hegel 

Just returned from a tour in the Netherlands, Hegel would 
talk of nothing but the cleanliness of the cities, the charm 
and artificial fertility of the country, the green far-stretching 
meadows, the ponds, canals, tower-like mills, and well-made 
roads, the art treasures, and the formal hut comfortable man- 
ner of living of the citizens ; so that after half an hour I felt 
myself as much at home in Holland as with himself. 

"When, after a few days, I saw him again in the pro- 
fessorial chair, I could not at first accommodate myself 
either to the manner of his outward address or the inward 
sequence of his thoughts. There he sat, with relaxed, half- 
sullen air, and, as he spoke, kept turning backwards and 
forwards the leaves of his long folio manuscript ; a constant 
hacking and coughing disturbed the even flow of speech ; 
every proposition stood isolated by itself, and seemed to 
force its way out all broken and twisted; every word, 
every syllable was, as it were, reluctantly let go, receiving 
from the metallic ring of the broad Swahian dialect a 
strange emphasis, as if it were the most important thing 
to be said. Yet the whole appearance compelled such deep 
respect, such a feeling of reverence, and attracted by such a 
naive expression of overpowering earnestness, that, with all 
my discomfort, and though I may have understood little 
enough of what was said, 1 felt myself irresistibly bound 
to him. And no sooner, by zeal and patience, had I accus- 
tomed myself to these outward defects of his address, than 
they and its inward merits seemed to unite themselves into 
an organic whole, which claimed to be judged by itself alone. 

"An easy- flowing eloquence presupposes that one has 
made up one's final accounts with the matter in hand, and 
therefore an ability of a merely formal kind is able to chatter 
away with cheap attractiveness, without rising above the 
region of commonplace. Hegel's work, on the other hand, 
was to call up the most powerful thoughts out of the deepest 
ground of things, and to bring them as living forces to bear 
upon his audience ; and for this it was necessary that, often 
as they had been meditated and recast through past years, 
at every new expression they should be reproduced afresh 



Hegel as a Lecturer. 99 

in himself. A more vivid and plastic representation of this 
hard conflict and birth-labour of thought than Hegel's man- 
ner of address could not be. conceived. As the oldest pro- 
phets, the more vehemently they struggle with language, 
utter with the more concentrated force that thought which 
they half conquer, and which half conquers them, so did he 
struggle and overcome by the unwieldy verve of his expression. 
Entirely lost in his subject, he seemed to develop it out of 
itself for its own sake, and scarcely at all for the sake of the 
hearer; and an almost paternal anxiety for clearness softened 
the rigid earnestness which otherwise might have repelled 
one from the reception of such hard-won thoughts. Stam- 
mering already at the beginning, he forced his way on, 
made a new beginning, again stopped short, spoke and 
meditated : the exact word seemed ever to be in request, and 
just then it came with infallible certainty. . . . Now one 
felt one had grasped a proposition, and expected a further 
advance to be made. In vain. The thought, instead of 
advancing, kept turning with similar words again and again 
round the same point. Yet if the wearied attention was 
allowed to stray for a moment, one found, on returning, 
that one had lost the thread of the discourse. For slowly 
and carefully, by apparently insignificant intermediate steps, 
a thought had been made to limit itself so as to show its 
one-sidedness, had been broken up into differences and en- 
tangled in contradictions, the solution of whieh suddenly 
brought what seemed most opposed to a higher reunion. 
And thus, ever carefully resuming again what had been 
gone over before, and deepening and transforming it by new 
divisions and richer reconciliations, the wonderful stream of 
thought flowed on, twisting and struggling with itself, now 
isolating and now uniting, now delaying and now springing 
forward with a leap, but always steadily moving to its goal. 
Even one who could follow with full insight and intelligence, 
without looking to the right or to the left, saw himself thrown 
into the most strange tension and agony of mind. To such 
depths was thought carried down, to such infinite oppositions 
was it torn asunder, that all that had been won seemed ever 



100 Hegel. 

again to be lost, and after the highest effort the intelligence 
seemed to be forced to stand in silence at the bounds of its 
faculty. But it was just in these depths of the apparently un- 
decipherable that that powerful spirit lived and moved with 
the greatest certainty and calm. Then first his voice rose, his 
eye glanced sharply over the audience, and lighted up with 
the calmly glowing flame of conviction, while in words that 
now flowed without hesitation, he measured the heights and 
depths of the soul. What he uttered in such moments was 
so clear and exhaustive, of such simple self-eA'idencing power, 
that every one who could grasp it felt as if he had found and 
thought it for himself; and so completely did all previous 
ways of thinking vanish, that scarce a remembrance re- 
mained of the days of dreaming, in which such thoughts 
had not yet been awakened. 

" . . . - From his earliest youth Hegel had given him- 
self with unwearied rectitude of purpose to every kind of 
scientific study ; in later years he had lived for a time, like 
Schiller, estranged from the world, almost as in a cloister, 
while the impulse towards active life was fermenting within 
him. When he emerged from retirement, life subjected him 
to a hard school, outward embarrassments hemmed him in 
on all sides ; and clearly as he saw the necessity of a complete 
remoulding of science, yet at that time he was far from feel- 
ing in himself the power to achieve such a reform by his 
own efforts. For he was one of those strong natures which 
only after a long process of growth, in the full maturity of 
manhood, reveal all their depth, but which then bring to 
the riper completion what has been so long developed in 
silence. When I first knew him his main works were pub- 
lished, his fame stood high, and also in all externals his posi- 
tion was fortunate. This comfort and peace lent to his 
whole bearing except when his temper was fretted or 
blunted by bodily suffering the most thorough kindliness. 
How gladly I met him on his daily walks; though he 
seemed to move forward with effort and without spring, he 
was really more robust and forcible than we younger men. 
He was ready for every pleasure-party, nay, complete re- 



Hegel in Society. 101 

taxation seemed, with advancing years, to have become more 
and more necessary to him. AVho would then have recog- 
nised in him- the deepest spirit of his time? Ever ready for 
talk, he rather sought to avoid, than to encourage, scientific 
subjects : the day's gossip, the on clits of the city, were wel- 
come to him ; political news, the art of the moment, came in 
for a share of his attention ; and as his aim was amusement 
and recreation, he often approved at such moments what at 
other times he would have blamed, defended what he had 
before rejected, and found no end of chaffing me for my judi- 
cial strictness and straitness. What life there was in him at 
such times! Yet if one walked beside him, there was no 
getting on ; for at every other moment he stood still, spoke, 
gesticulated, or sent forth a hearty ringing laugh; and what- 
ever he might say, even when it was untenable and spoken 
to provoke contradiction, one was tempted to agree with 
him, so clearly and vigorously was it expressed. An equally 
agreeable companion he was at concerts and theatres lively, 
inclined to applaud, ever ready for talk and jest, and con- 
tent even, when it came to that, with the commonplaces of 
good society. Especially was he easy to please with his 
favourite singers, actresses, and poets. In business, on the 
other hand, his sharp tinderstanding made him so painfully 
exact in weighing every pro and con, so scrupulous and obsti- 
nate, that men of quick decisive ways were often driven to 
despair by him; yet, if he had once resolved, his firmness 
was immovable. For in practical matters lie had no want 
of insight ; only the execution was difficult for him, ami the 
smaller the matter the more helpless he was. Kepellent 
personalities, who were opposed to the whole direction of his 
efforts, he could not abide, especially when their want of a 
fixed way of thinking had pained him in regard to that 
which he revered most : only in his most happy moods 
could one induce him to have any relations with such 
people. But when friends gathered round him, what an 
attractive loving camaraderie distinguished him from all 
others ! The minute nuance of manners was not in his 
way; but a certain somewhat ceremonious bourgeois frank- 



102 Hegel 

ness united itself so happily, with jest where jest was in 
place, with earnest where the occasion required earnestness, 
and always with an equable good-humour, that all those 
surrounding him were instinctively drawn into the same 
tone. He was fond of the society of ladies ; and where he 
knew them well, the fairest were always sure of a sportive 
devotion, which, in the pleasant security of approaching age, 
had maintained the freshness of youth. The greater the 
retirement in which his earlier laborious years had passed 
away, the greater was his pleasure in later days to live in 
society ; and as if his own depth needed to find a compensa- 
tion in the triviality or commonplace of others, at times he 
took pleasure in people of the commonest stamp, and even 
seemed to cherish for them a kind of good-humoured prefer- 
ence. With what natural dignity, on the other hand, and with 
what unaffected earnestness, did he appear when some public 
occasion made it necessary for him to come forward ! And how 
many long hours of advice, of testing, of confirmation, was he 
ready to devote to those who sought his aid and guidance ! 
If Plato celebrates how Socrates at the banquet preserved 
complete sobriety and measure even in the full tide of enjoy- 
ment, and when all the others were sleeping around, continued 
with Aristophanes and Agathon to drink and philosophise, 
till he left them overcome at cock-crow, and went out to the 
Lyceum to spend the day as usual, and only at the second 
evening cared to lay himself down to rest I may surely 
say that Hegel alone, of all men whom I have seen, brought 
before my eyes this image of joyous, untiring energy, with 
a vivid force of realisation that can never be forgot." l 

Hegel's life at Berlin was not very fertile in direct 
literary effort, though it was there for the most part that 
those lectures were produced and delivered Avhich form 
the greater part of his published works. Besides the 
' Philosophy of Bight,' during this period two more 

1 Hotlio, Vovstudien fur Lebtrn und Kuust, pp. 383-399. 



Last Writings- 103 

editions of the ' Encyclopaedia,' the last Avith consider- 
able alterations, were given to the world, and the first 
volume of the 'Logic' was thoroughly revised. And 
in 1827, the Berlin Jahrbiicher for Scientific Criticism, 
which were in the main, though not entirely, an organ 
of the Hegelian school, began to be issued ; and to this 
Hegel during the following years contributed a number 
of important articles. 

In 1830 he was chosen Rector of the University ; and 
the festival of the third centenary of the Augsburg Con- 
fession gave him an opportunity again to declare his 
adherence to the " Standard of the Free Spirit," set up 
by Luther. The same year brought the July Revolu- 
tion in Paris, and troubled him," as it troubled Niebuhr 
and many others, with the fear that France was again 
about to set the world on fire. Tins feeling shortly after 
found its expression in an article written on the English 
Reform Bill of 1831. In this article there are many 
severe criticisms on the English constitution, which had 
much justification then, and have not altogether ceased 
to be applicable now. But the main point lies in the 
distinction betAveen " formal " and " real " freedom in 
other words, between popular government and rational 
institutions, with which Hegel apparently seeks to con- 
sole his countrymen for the slow development of the 
former in Prussia. The "ungodly jungle" of English 
law, the semi-feudal arrangements of landed inherit- 
ance, the power of the hereditary aristocracy, the abuses 
of the English Church, and in connection with this, the 
English tendency to treat public offices as private pro- 
perty, are compared with the more rational system intro- 
duced into these matters in Prussia by the Crown acting 



104 Hegel. 

through enlightened ministers and civil servants; and 
Hegel is too near the French Revolution not to have 
many fears about a system like the English, in which 
the movement of reform cannot he initiated by the 
Crown, which has lost all real power, but must 
be won by the struggle of popular forces against a 
privileged aristocracy. Yet he sees the inevitable- 
ness of the change embodied in the Reform Bill, and 
points to the English experience of municipal self- 
government as a security against the dangers of revolu- 
tionary principles. The sagacity of many of Hegel's 
remarks has been proved by the subsequent history of 
the political movement in this country ; what is defec- 
tive in them is mainly due to the want of a living 
experience of the working of a free state, and perhaps 
also of a closer view of the English character. It is 
noticeable that even the moderate liberalism of this 
paper was too much for the growing fears of the Prus- 
sian Government, and a second part of it, which Hegel 
was preparing, was stopped by the censor. 

This article was Hegel's last work, if we except a 
preface to the neAV edition of his ' Logic,' which ends 
somewhat sadly with an admission of the defects of 
his own development of the great principle of his phil- 
osophy, and an expression of his fear that the inter- 
val of political quiet, which had given such a favour- 
able opportunity for philosophical culture, had come 
to an end. "One who has taken for his task to 
develop for the first time an independent structure of 
philosophical science in these latter days, must be re- 
in i tided of the story that Plato wrote and rewrote his 
'Republic' seven times over. This remembrance, and 



His Death. 105 

the comparison it suggests, might well awake a desire 
that, for a work which, as belonging to the modern 
world, has to deal with a harder subject, and to work 
upon a material of much greater compass, there might 
he given time to write and rewrite it even seventy 
times and seven. But while he thus thinks of the 
greatness of the task, the writer must content himself 
with what it has been allowed him to attain under the 
pressure of circumstances, under the unavoidable dis- 
sipation of energy caused by the greatness and many- 
sidedness of the interests of the times, and with 
haunting presence of a doubt whether, amid the loud 
noises of the day, and the deafening babble of vain 
opinion that cares for nothing but noise, there is left 
any room for sympathy with the passionless stillness of 
a science of pure thought." 

Seven days after these words, weighty with the 
melancholy of genius, were written, Hegel was struck 
down by a sudden attack of cholera. This pestilence 
had been raging in Berlin during the summer, and 
had caused him to withdraw his family to a country 
house in the neighbourhood, and during the vacation 
almost to break off all connection with the city. But 
in the week previous to his death he had returned to 
his work, and had begun his lectures, on Thursday and 
Friday, the 10th and 11th of November, with a fire 
and energy of expression which surprised his hearers, 
and in which there was, perhaps, something of the 
false strength of disease. On Saturday he still did 
some university duties ; but on Sunday he was sud- 
denly seized by the cholera in its most virulent form, 
and the next day passed away in a quiet sleep, with- 



106 Begd. 

out having ever felt an apprehension of danger, lie 
was buried in a spot which he himself had chosen, 
beside Solger, and Fichte, his great predecessor. "His 
death," wrote Varnhagen von Ense, "was as fortunate 
as death can ever be. With unweakened spirit, in 
vigorous activity, at the height of his fame and influ- 
ence, surrounded by the proofs of his success, content 
with his position, taking a lively share in the social 
pleasures and showing a friendly sympathy in all the 
life of the capital, he passed away from the midst 
of all these interests without regret or pain ; for the 
nature and name of his illness remained unknown to 
him, and he might fall asleep with the dream of re- 
covery. But for lis, what an awful void ! he was the 
corner-stone of our university." 

Of Hegel's personal character and genius it is not 
necessary to add much to what lias already been said. 
What strikes us most in his life, as in his philosophy, 
is the combination of a deeply idealistic, poetical, and 
religious view of the world, with that practical good 
sense and that critical keenness of understanding which 
are usually the possession of another order of minds. 
The inner life of pious feeling, the subtle suggestions 
of art, all the forms in which poetry, religion, and 
philosophy have expressed men's consciousness of the 
infinite, were open secrets to him, and it was in this 
element that he lived and moved with the utmost 
freedom. But though his greatest strength lay in his 
imaginative and speculative grasp of the things of the 
spirit, it was not as an idealistic, still less as a poetic 
genius that he impressed most of the immediate ob- 
servers of his life. Until a comparatively late period, 



Characteristics. 107 

when growing clearness of self-consciousness had brought 
with it greater freedom of utterance, he was generally 
regarded rather as a man of strong understanding and 
definite practical aims, without superstitions or illusions 
of any sort. At college his most intimate friends 
evidently looked upon him as a good-humoured and 
reasonable companion, whose premature sobriety of 
judgment was inconsistent with any idea of genius. 
Even at a much later date the poet Holderlin, who 
knew him as well as any one, calls him a " man of calm 
prosaic understanding" (rukiger Verstandesmeiisch) ; and 
Schelling, though this, it is true, was after his breach 
with Hegel writes of him to the same effect. " Such 
a pure example of inward and outward prose must be 
held sacred in these our over-poetic days : for all of 
us have now and again a touch of sentimentality, and 
against this such a ' spirit that denies ' x is an excellent 
corrective." In these words there is, indeed, a certain 
one-sidedness of judgment, which can only be explained 
as personal bitterness for, after the ' Phaenomenology,' 
it was absurd to speak of Hegel as essentially prosaic ; 
yet there is probably also a recurrence to what was 
really the first impression produced by Hegel on one 
whose weakness was, that he never could understand 
the requirements of prose. 

iSTow this view of Hegel's nature and tendencies was 
undoubtedly and entirely erroneous. The critical under- 
standing that sense of finite conditions which is the 
essence of prose, and which constitutes what is called a 
positive temper of mind in science or practical life was 
powerfully developed in Hegel. But it was by no means 

1 An allusion to the description of Mephistopheles in ' Faust.' 



108 Hegel 

the predominant characteristic of his genius, as we see it 
in his works. There are, however, reasons why it should 
have seemed to he so to those who looked at Hegel 
from the outside. One is that, though he was certainly 
not prosaic, he was almost entirely without an element 
which is most commonly mistaken for poetry, and which, 
in the passage just quoted, Schelling seems to confuse 
with it. To the impression of the beautiful and the 
ideal he was always open, and as we have seen, his 
Avhole thought was for a long period moulded by the 
influence of Greek art and literature. But he was not 
sentimental, and he even had a dislike of the " effusions 
of sensibility," which is rather uncommon in a German, 
and which must have been still more uncommon in the 
age of AVerther. Hence he seems to have affected his 
countrymen somewhat in the same way that the manner 
of Englishmen usually affects them, as showing a lack in 
sympathy and spontaneity, and also such is the natural 
judgment of less reserved natures of poetic feeling. 
Yet the history of literature does not show that the 
native springs of imaginative feeling and expression are 
less genuine and copious in England than in Germany. 
And of few men could it be said with more certainty 
that he had "music in his soul," than of the author of 
the ' Phenomenology ' and the ' Lectures on ^Esthetic.' 

Another characteristic of Hegel was closely connected 
Avith this want of what is technically called " sensibility." 
He never " made his studies in public," or in any way 
gave his thoughts to the world till they were ripe. 
Scarcely even did he communicate them to his most 
intimate friends. The important studies of his youth 
on the history and nature of religion, of which some 



Characteristics. 109 

account has been given in a previous chapter, were pro- 
bably never heard of by any one till they were brought 
to light by his biographer : and it is most likely that, to 
his friends as to the public, his published writings were 
the first revelation of a speculative genius whose depth 
and riches they had scarcely even suspected. In society 
Hegel sought for relaxation, for extraneous interests 
which might break the tension of the inner life of 
thought; and except, perhaps, for a short time during 
his alliance with Schelling, he never really philosophised 
with any one never developed his speculations by the 
living interchange of ideas, but always by solitary medi- 
tation. "In no pursuit," he says and repeats several 
times, " is one so solitary as in philosophy ; " and this is 
specially true of his own philosophic life, which always 
went on below the surface as a hidden process of brood- 
ing thought, and seldom showed itself to others except 
in the completed result. Hence those who witnessed 
the outward life of the diligent tutor, or editor, or 
schoolmaster, or even those, in later days, who met 
Hegel at the whist-table or in the theatre, or listened, 
in general society, to his ready talk about art and 
politics, and indeed about everything except philo- 
sophy, might not suspect that they had seen almost 
nothing of the man. It was only in his direct work as 
a writer and teacher of philosophy that the inner life of 
thought which with him was almost everything freely 
revealed itself. And even in his professorial teaching it 
revealed itself so simply and directly, working on the 
hearers entirely by its own power and not by any of 
the arts of the orator, that the essential depth and earn- 
estness of his character, as well as the poetic insight 



110 Hegel 

which was, so to speak, held in solution by the scien- 
tific strictness of his method, were apparent only to 
the few. 

Hegel's style is, in many ways, a mirror of his mind. 
It may be described as a good style spoiled by the desire 
of scientific completeness and accuracy, and by the very 
weight of concentrated meaning which it is forced to 
convey. This, indeed, is no more than the fact ; for his 
earlier writing e.g., in the unpublished treatise on the 
relations of positive and natural religion has an ease 
and flow which is wanting to his later works. In the 
' Phenomenology ' there is already a good deal of that 
"repulsive terminology" which has often been com- 
plained of by those who Avill not recognise that it is 
almost as difficult to put metaphysical, as to put physical, 
science into the language of literature. Yet not only in 
that treatise, which is Hegel's literary masterpiece, but 
also in nearly all his works, when the subject allows of 
it, there are long passages which, for verve and beauty 
of expression, challenge comparison with the masters of 
style. Nor, even in his most abstruse works, can one 
read many pages without coming upon some of those 
powerful epigrammatic sayings, lighted up at once with 
dialectic and poetry, with which he loves to clench his 
argument. Generally, however, the stress of thought, 
and the effort to fix it in definite formulas, is too great 
to permit anything like pure literary form; and it is 
only on a second or third reading that we become aware 
of the living flowers of imagination which are scattered 
among the hard stones of the road over which we have 
been carried. The harshness and abstrusenoss of philoso- 



His Style. Ill 

phical terminology, and the painfully subtle Movement 
of an endless dialectic, are almost all that is at first seen 
by the student ; and it is only when he learns how to 
break through this outward husk that he is able to reach 
the kernel of truth truth poetical as well as philoso- 
phical which it conceals. 



112 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE PROBLEM OP PHILOSOPHY STATEMENT OP IT BY 
KANT, FICHTE, SCHELLING, AND HEGEL. 

It is the peculiar strength of the modern time that it 
has reached a clear perception of the finite world as 
finite; that in science it is positive i.e., that it takes 
particular facts for no more than they are; and that 
in practice it is unembarrassed by superstition i.e., by 
the tendency to treat particular tilings and persons as 
mysteriously sacred. The first immediate aAve and rever- 
ence, which arose out of the confusion of the absolute 
and universal with the relative and particular, or, in 
simpler language, of the divine with the human, the 
ideal with the real, has passed away from the world. 
The artist and the poet, indeed, still keep up the con- 
fusion or identification ; it is their work to give 

" To one brief moment caught from fleeting time 
The appropriate calm of blest eternity." 

But we no longer take the artist or poet as a prophet ; 
we cannot seriously and permanently worship the objects 
which he makes us admire. Whenever the evanescent 
light " that never was on sea or land " fades away from 
them, Ave are obliged to see that it never was there, and 



Sdenee and Philosophy. 113 

to treat the things and beings on which it fell as merely 
individual things and beings, like the things and beings 
around them. We are unable to believe in a God who 
is here and not there, in an ideal which is a happy ex- 
ception. And the poet's vision, therefore, will neces- 
sarily become to us a dream, if it is not conceived as 
pointing to something more universal, of which he does 
not speak. The scientific sense, which has gradually 
communicated itself even to many of those who are not 
scientific, forces us to see in particular things not ideals, 
but merely examples of general classes, and to regard 
them all as connected to each other by laws of necessary 
relation, in such a way that they are ipso facto deprived 
of any exceptional or independent position. How can 
we treat anything as deserving of praise or worship for 
itself, if, to explain it, we have to look, not to itself, but 
to its conditions and causes 1 And when science bids us 
treat everything in this manner, how can there be any- 
thing left to reverence ? " Zeus is dethroned, and Vortex 
reigns in his place." l !N T or can we count it a more respect- 
able worship when we are told to adore the unknown, 
which always lies at the end of every finite series of causes 
and effects, so long as no reason is given to suppose that 
what lies beyond our knowledge is other than a continua- 
tion of the chain that lies within it. The undeveloped 
terms of an infinite mathematical series have no prefer- 
ence over those that have been ascertained, and we 
cannot find any special reason for admiration in the 
fact that the series cannot be completed. An endless 
stream of finites is the negation of all worship, and it 
does not matter whether we regard its endlessness or 

1 Aristophanes, " Nubes," 381, 828. 
P. VII. h 



114 Hegel. 

the finitude of its parts. To find an object of reverence, 
we must be able in some way or other to rise to an 
original source of life, out of which this manifold exist- 
ence flows, and which, in all this variety and change, 
never forgets or loses itself. A world of endless deter- 
mination is a prosaic world, into which neither poetry 
nor religion can enter. To rise to either, we must find 
that which is self-determined, we must have shown to 
us a fountain of fresh and original life. "When we have 
found that, the multiplicity of forms, the endless series 
of appearances, will begin to take an ideal meaning, be- 
cause we shall see in them the Protean masks of a Being 
which is never absolutely hidden, but in the perishing 
of one form and the coming of another is ever more 
fully revealing itself. It is by this suggestion of such a 
self-revealing unity that Goethe at a touch gives poetic 
life to the picture of change which modern science has 
set before us : 

" In the floods of life, in the storm of dee< Is, 
Up and down I fly, 
Hither, thither weave, 

From birth to grave, 

An endless weft, 

A changing sea 

Of glowing life. 
Thus in the whistling loom of Time I ply, 
Weaving the living robe of Deity." 

The great question of philosophy is whether such a 
unity in totality, such a self-determined principle of in- 
finite change, can in any sense be verified, or made an 
object of knowledge. And this for us is so difficult a 
question, just because the modern consciousness of the 



Science and Philosophy. 115 

natural world, as an interconnection of phenomenal 
causes, is so clear and precise. No longer is it possible, 
as it once Avas, to intercalate the ideal, the divine, as it 
were surreptitiously, as one existence in a world otherwise 
secular and natural. Under the acknowledged reign of 
law, the world is a connected drama in which there is 
no place for episodes. Hence we can find the ideal any- 
where, only by finding it everywhere; we can see any- 
thing higher in the world than contingent and finite 
existences, only by recasting our view of it as a whole ; 
we can get beyond the scientific conception of pheno- 
mena in their connection as causes and effects, only by 
transforming that conception itself, by awakening science 
to a new consciousness of its presuppositions, and by lead- 
ing it through this consciousness to a reinterpretation of 
its results. It no longer avails to assail finite science 
from the outside, in the way of finding exceptions to 
its laws, or phenomena which it cannot explain. A 
long discipline has taught it to regard such exceptional 
or residual phenomena simply as the means of correcting 
and widening its ideas of law. If it is assailable at all, 
it is from the inside, in its fundamental conception of 
law itself, in its idea of that universal necessity under 
which it reduces all things. 

Now the great idealistic movement of Germany was, 
in its essence, an attempt to find a basis of this kind. 
Kant, its first representative, asked where a place can 
be found for " God, freedom, immortality," consistently 
with the universal reign of law in the natural world 
in other words, consistently with the necessary connec- 
tion of all objects of experience in space and time. Nor 
did he seek to find such a place by questioning the uni- 



116 Hegel. 

versality of this necessary interdependence of all things 
and events ; rather he reasserted it, and finally con- 
firmed it, hy the proof that such universality is the pre- 
condition of all intelligible experience. Objects, things, 
and events a world of experience exist for us, and 
can exist for us, only in so far as our sensitive impres- 
sions are determined and related to each other according 
to universal principles. Objectivity and universality are 
equivalents of each other, and to say that an object 
might exist which was not definitely determined as to 
its quality and quantity, or definitely related to all other 
objects in space and time both in its persistence and in 
its changes, is to use Avords without meaning. If we 
could imagine such an object or, what is the same 
thing, if we could imagine a series of impressions or 
perceptions which yet it was impossible to bring under 
the general laws of the connection of experience we 
should be conceiving of something inconsistent with 
the very existence of experience. If there were such 
objects, they could not be objects for tcs. 

While, however, the reign of law is thus determined 
to be absolute for all objects of experience, and while 
the principle of rational empiricism, that there exists a 
universal and unchangeable order of things, is thus raised 
from a presumption to a certitude, it is just here, at the 
point where the last possibility of escape from the neces- 
sity of nature seems to be closed up, that Kant finds the 
means of deliverance. This order of nature, which seems 
to shut us in, is no foreign necessity to Avhich Ave are 
subjected. It is Ave Avho forge our OAvn chains. It is our 
oAvn understanding that prescribes the laAV of necessary 
connection for its objects, as it is our own sensibility 



Nature and Freedom. 117 

that supplies the forms of tune and space under which 
they appear to us. In so far, therefore, as the general 
framework or systematic form of the whole goes, it is we 
who make the nature by which we fear to have our 
freedom, our spiritual life, or independent self-deter- 
mining energy, extinguished. And as it is just this 
general systematic form in which lies the necessity from 
which we are shrinking, it may be said in strict truth 
that we are afraid of our own shadow, of that which 
the unconscious working of our own minds has created. 
What we took for " things in themselves," independent 
forces by which we were controlled, are really pheno- 
mena things which exist only for us, and which exist, 
even for us, only by the activity of our own thought. It 
is true, indeed, that we too form, in one point of view, 
a part of this phenomenal world ; we are present to our- 
selves as objects existing, like other objects, in space 
and time, and going through changes which are deter- 
mined according to necessary laws. But this pheno- 
menal presence to ourselves is not our whole being. 1 
am not merely one object among many other objects in 
the world of which I am conscious ; I am the conscious 
self without which there would be no world of objects 
at all. A conscious being, as such, cannot simply reckon 
itself among the things it knows, for while they exist 
only for it, it also exists for itself. It not only has a 
place among objects, but it is the subject for which they 
exist. As such it is not one of the conditioned sub- 
stances in time and space, whose changes are to be ex- 
plained by the things that condition it ; it is the prin- 
ciple in relation to which such conditioned things exist, 
the cause of the necessity to which they are subjected. 



118 Hegel 

It is not in time and space at all, for these are Lut the 
forms of its perceptions forms which cling to its objects 
as objects, but cannot be applied to it, the subject for 
which these objects exist. The source of the categories 
the principles of necessary connection in experience 
cannot be brought under the categories. The thinking 
self cannot be subjected to the forms of sense under 
which the phenomenal world is presented to it. Even 
if we could say nothing else about it, we could at least 
deny of it all the predicates which are by their very 
nature determinations not of a subject, but of an object. 
But can we say nothing else 1 Is the subject a mere 
unity to which knowledge is referred, and which, there- 
fore, is not only exempted from all the determinations 
of objects, but is void of all determination of its own ? 
Can we say only that it is free in the negative sense, that 
that necessity of relation which belongs to phenomena, 
as such, cannot be predicated of it, seeing it determines 
other things, but not itself 1 Or can Ave go on to show 
that it is free in the positive sense, that it determines 
itself, and can we follow it in this self-determination, and 
trace out the forms in which it manifests its freedom? The 
answer, Kant holds, is given by the moral consciousness, 
which is a consciousness of ourselves as universal sub- 
jects, and not as particular objects. This is shown by the 
fact that conscience ignores all external determination. 
It is the consciousness of a law which takes no account 
of the circumstances of the phenomenal self, or of the 
necessary conditions under which its changes take place. 
In thinking of ourselves as under this law, we necessarily 
regard ourselves as free as the authors, and the sole 
authors, of our actions ; we abstract from all the limits 



Nature and Freedom. 119 

of nature and necessity from all the impulse of desires 
within, and all the pressure of circumstances without 
us. For this law is a " categorical imperative " that 
listens to no excuses, but with its " Thou oughtst, 
therefore thou canst," absolutely throws upon ourselves 
the responsibility for our own deeds. Such a law we 
might be disposed to treat as an illusion, because of its 
direct contradiction to our empirical consciousness of our- 
selves, if we had no other consciousness of ourselves; but 
our previous examination of the empirical consciousness 
has already obliged us to refuse to apply to the subject 
the knowledge which we have of ourselves as objects of 
experience. The necessity of nature is thus taken out 
of the way by the proof that the knowing self is not a 
natural phenomenon, and the moral consciousness finds 
nothing to resist its absolute claim to belief and obedi- 
ence. The " primacy of practical reason " is thus estab- 
lished, and a place is found for the freedom of spirit, 
without any doubt being cast upon the necessity of 
nature. 

And with this freedom come, according to Kant, the 
other elements of our higher consciousness immortality 
and God. For the primacy of the practical reason in- 
volves that the necessity of nature is somehow har- 
monised with the law T of freedom, however little it may 
be possible for us to comprehend this harmony. Hence 
the phenomenal self the subject of feeling and desire 
must conform itself to the real or noumenal self; and 
the pure ^/-determination of the latter must determine 
also the whole nature of the former. But we are not 
able to represent this to ourselves except as a gradual 
process of transformation of our sensuous nature by our 



120 Hegel 

freedom, a process of transformation which, because of 
the essential difference of the two, can never be com- 
pleted ; and thus the moral law postulates the immor- 
tality of man as a subject, who is at once natural and 
moral. In like manner we are compelled, in accord- 
ance with the primacy of practical reason, to suppose 
that the whole system of phenomena which we call 
nature is in harmony with the purely self-determined life 
of spirit ; in other words, we are obliged to assume a cor- 
respondence of happiness, or our state as natural beings 
determined from without, with goodness, or our state as 
moral beings, who are determined only by themselves 
from within ; and this, again, leads us back to God as the 
absolute Being, in whom, and by whom, the two opposite 
worlds are brought to a unity. Thus, then, Kant finds 
a way of reconstructing the spiritual, without prejudice 
to the natural, world. For if, on the one hand, the world 
of nature is treated as phenomenal, while the world of 
spirit is regarded as the real, and the only real, world; yet, 
on the other hand, the phenomenal world is recognised as 
the only world of knowledge, while the real world is 
said to be present to us merely in faith. Xow faith is 
essentially a subjective consciousness, which cannot be 
made objective ; for to make anything objective is to 
conceive it as a one thing among others in space and 
thne, and determined in relation to the others by the 
law of necessity. So much is this the case, that we are 
not able to represent to ourselves the law of freedom 
except by thinking of it as if it were a law of nature. 
For what is the law of freedom ] It is that we should 
be determined only by the self ; but the self is nothing 
in particular \ it is the unity to which all knowledge is 



Strength and Weakness of Kant. 121 

referred ; its only essential character is its universality. 
Hence, to be determined by the self is to be determined 
by the idea of universality. To find out what is morally 
right, we have only to ask what actions may be univer- 
salised, and the moral law may be expressed in the for- 
mula : "Act as if by your action the maxim or rule 
which it involves were about to be turned into a uni- 
versal laAv of nature." 

Without following Kant any further, it is possible 
now to point out what are the merits and what are the 
defects of his philosophy, viewed as a reconciliation of 
nature and spirit, or of experience and that higher ra- 
tional consciousness which is expressed in religion and 
philosophy. Its main merit is, that it shows that ex- 
perience rests on something which, in the ordinary sense, 
is beyond experience ; or, what is the same thing in an- 
other point of view, that it brings out the relativity of 
being to thought, of objective reality to the conscious 
self for which it is. In this point of view in so far as 
it shows that reality as known is phenomenal, or essen- 
tially related to consciousness, the Kantian argument is 
irresistible. Its weakness lies in this, that it does not 
carry the demonstration to its legitimate result ; it still 
retains the idea of a " thing in itself," out of relation to 
thought, even Avhere it regards such a thing as prob- 
lematical ; and it admits the idea of a subjective affec- 
tion, in relation to which the thinking self is passive, 
though it confesses that it is only by the reaction of 
the thinking self that such an affection can be turned 
into an object of knowledge. Through the rift of 
this irponov if/ev8os there creeps into the system an 
absolutely irreconcilable dualism, which yet Kant is 



122 Hegel 

continually attempting to heal. Sense and under- 
standing, necessity and freedom, the phenomenal and 
the real self, nature and spirit, knowledge and faith, are 
pairs of opposites which he can never either separate 
or reconcile. He cannot separate them, for his whole 
philosophy starts from the proof that nature is pheno- 
menal, and must be referred to that which is not itself 
natural ; and, on the other hand, he necessarily conceives 
the noumenal that which is set up against the pheno- 
menal as the absolutely real, and as determining, and in 
a sense including in itself, the phenomenal. Yet he can- 
not reconcile them ; for he has assumed, to begin with, 
that there is in the object as opposed to the subject, in sense 
as opposed to spirit, a foreign element which can never 
be exorcised or completely assimilated, although both in 
knowledge and in action it may be partially subdued 
and subordinated. The antithesis has thus no higher 
unity beyond it, which can bring its antagonistic mem- 
bers to a final reconciliation ; and that reunion of these 
members, therefore, which is, after all, necessary to the 
system, must remain a postulate or requirement, which 
cannot be realised which can even be seen to be in- 
capable of realisation. The result of Kant, therefore, 
seems to be to put the very problem to be solved for 
the solution, to show the equal necessity of two ele- 
ments, which are each of them proved to have no mean- 
ing except in relation to the other, while yet this re- 
lation is conceived as purely negative, and therefore 
since a purely negative relation is no relation at all as 
absolutely impossible. 

It was perhaps just because a consciousness of this 
truth that a relation, even if negative, always implies 



Ducdi&in in Kant. 123 

a unity beyond it was wanting to Kant, that he could 
admit the necessary relation of physical and metaphy- 
sical reality to each other, while yet denying the possi- 
bility of reaching more than an external harmony be- 
tween them. | Yet it is clear, to consider only Kant's 
first principle, that to say that existence means exist- 
ence for consciousness, implies not merely that there 
is a relation between consciousness on the one side 
and existence on the other (in which case the relation 
would exist, not for the conscious being himself, but 
for some one else), but it implies also that conscious- 
ness transcends the dualism between itself and its 
object. It means, in short, that. though, within certain 
limits, we oppose the subject to the object, the con- 
sciousness to that of which it is conscious, yet that 
from a higher point of view this antagonism is within 
consciousness ; or, to put it from the other side, that 
consciousness, as such, overreaches the division betAveen 
itself and its object. And the same reasoning must be 
applied to all the other contrasts which in the system 
of Kant spring out of this fundamental opposition the 
contrasts of necessity and freedom, of nature and spirit, 
of phenomenal and noumenal. A philosophy that would 
work out the true lesson of the Kantian idealism must 
not weaken or slur over any of these oppositions ; but as 
little can it deal with them as absolute oppositions, or, 
what is the same thing, treat the two terms as both 
standing on the same level, as if the one were as compre- 
hensive as the other. For if it does so, it must neces- 
sarily end by contradicting the premises from which it 
starts, by refusing to admit any relation between . terms, 
whose relation was the very starting-point of the Avhole 



124 Hegel. 

reasoning. / One who, like Kant, refers nature to spirit, 
necessity to freedom, the phenomenon to the noumenon, 
must be prepared to explain the former out of the 
latter ; in the language of Hegel, to show that spirit is 
the truth of nature, that freedom is the truth of neces- 
sity, that the noumenon is the truth of the phenomenon 
i.e., that in spite of their relative opposition, there is 
a point of view from which the former term in each 
case includes the latter, as the whole includes the parts. 
Or, to take the example already given, he must show 
that consciousness, though it may he primarily regarded 
as the subject of knowledge, is not simply opposed to 
the object, but necessarily includes it in itself. 

To gather to a point what has just been said, Kant 
proves that the system of nature and necessity is not 
independent of intelligence, but exists only for it. But 
the intelligence is not only consciousness, but self-con- 
sciousness not only theoretical, but practical. It" not 
only is determined, and so apprehends itself as belong- 
ing to the world of nature, but it determines itself, and 
so is conscious of itself as belonging to a world of its 
own a world of freedom. And this world of freedom 
it is obliged to conceive as the reality, of which the 
other is merely the phenomenon. What Kant, how- 
ever, does not perceive, is that, on his own showing, 
these two worlds are essentially relative to each other, 
so that either, taken apart from the other, becomes an 
empty abstraction. He has, indeed, proved that exist- 
ence unrelated to a conscious self is such an abstraction. 
But it is clear that the pure self, in its universality as 
opposed to all the matter of the desires is equally 
abstract. To will the self, and only the self, is to will 



Dualism in Kant. 125 

nothing at all. Self-consciousness always implies con- 
sciousness of something else than self, and could not 
exist without it. Self-determination, therefore, though 
it may be relatively opposed to determination by the 
not-self, cannot be absolutely opposed to it, for with 
the not-self the self also would disappear. But if this 
be true, the world of intelligence and freedom can- 
not be different from the world of nature and neces- 
sity; it can only be the same world, seen in a new 
light, or subjected to a further interpretation. And this 
new interpretation must show that the necessity of na- 
ture is itself explicable as a necessary element or factor 
in the manifestation of the principle of the free life of 
intelligence. Not, indeed, that the point of view of 
Kant, from which the two kingdoms of necessity and 
freedom seem to be in extreme opposition to eacli other, 
is to be entirely rejected. On the contrary, that opposi- 
tion forms a necessary stage in thought and reality. The 
drama of human life is the struggle of freedom with 
necessity, of spirit with nature, which in all its forms, 
within and without us, seems to the purely moral con- 
sciousness to wear the guise of an enemy. But the 
possibility of the struggle itself, and of a final victory in 
it, lies in this, that the enemy exists in order to be con- 
quered ; or rather, that the opposition is, in its ultimate 
interpretation, an opposition of spirit to itself, and the 
struggle but the pains that accompany its process of 
development. 

There are two bypaths in following which it is pos- 
sible to lose the full meaning of the thought just 
expressed. On the one hand, it is possible to dwell 
on the higher reality of spirit in such a sense as not 



126 Hegel. 

to leave due place for the lower reality of nature : it 
is possible to emphasise Kant's demonstration of the 
phenomenal character of the world of experience, till 
that world is reduced to a mere semblance or appear- 
ance, and to exaggerate his assertion of the noumenal 
character of the world of intelligence, till the pure ab- 
stract consciousness of self is identified with the abso- 
lute. On the other hand, it is possible to insist on the 
unity which is presupposed in all the opposition and an- 
tagonism of the nature and the spirit, till the opposition 
and antagonism itself is reduced to an illusion ; it is pos- 
sible, in other words, to treat all differences as mainly 
accidental shiftings of the external mask under which 
the absolute identity is hidden, and to regard all con- 
flict and antagonism as but the play of shadows, " such 
stuff as dreams are made of," while the one reality is 
the external repose of the infinite substance in itself. 
These two byways of interpretation which are the 
natural results of a partial apprehension of the full 
problem stated by Kant were followed by Fichte and 
Schelling respectively. Fichte, following the way of a 
one-sided idealism, reduces nature to a mere negative 
condition, which spirit by some incomprehensible act 
lays down for itself. To attain consciousness of 
itself, the absolute ego must limit itself, and by this 
self-limitation it gives rise to a non-ego, which, how- 
ever, is quite as much a part of -itself as the limited 
ego, with which alone it is consciously identified. The 
infinity of the ego, however, reappears as an impulse 
to strive against this self-made limit, and by continual 
removal of it to a greater and greater distance, to 
approximate to that jmre consciousness of itself which 



Fichte and Schilling. 127 

it tan never attain, because in doing so it would at 
once cease to be conscious at all, and so cease to be. 
This is the strange enchanted round, within which the 
speculation of Fichte circles, seeking an outlet in vain. 
In the attempt to reduce nature to a nonentity a self- 
created object of thought and to make spirit all in 
all, he turned the life of spirit itself into something- 
shadowy and spectral, a conflict with a ghost that 
could not be laid. To the strong, almost ascetic spirit 
of a Fichte, rejoicing in stern self-command to put 
nature beneath his feet, and regarding the -world but 
as an arena for the moral athlete to win his victories 
over himself, such a theory might commend itself by 
its apparent exaltation of the ego at the expense of 
the non^ego. But we need not wonder that the sym- 
pathetic imaginative genius of Schelling soon broke 
away from it, to assert that the intelligence could find 
itself in nature as well as in itself : or that he sought 
to substitute for Fichte's principle that " Ich ist Alles," 
the wider principle that " Alles ist Ich " i.e., that it is 
one ideal principle which manifests itself in the natural 
and the spiritual world alike. Unfortunately, in cor- 
recting Fichte's over-statement of one of the two sides 
of the Kantian philosophy, Schelling fell into an equal 
over-statement on the other side. In opposing a sub- 
jective idealism which found reality only in the self, 
he was led, by gradual but necessary steps, to reject 
idealism altogether, and to seek the real in a coequal 
unity of nature and spirit, which gave no preference to 
the one above the other as a manifestation of the abso- 
lute. But to say that the absolute equally manifests 
itself in nature and spirit, is almost equivalent to saying 



1 28 Hegel. 

that it does not manifest itself at all ; for if the distin- 
guishing characters of mind and matter are treated as 
unimportant, and their identity alone is insisted on, 
what distinctions can be of importance 1 The absolute 
unity becomes necessarily a pure " indifference," as 
Schelling called it, an absolute which rests in itself 
and withdraws itself from all contact with the intelli- 
gence, and which can be apprehended, if at all, only in 
a Xeoplatonic ecstasy of immediate intuition. In this 
way Schelling, though content for a time, with Hegel, 
to speak of the absolute as spirit or reason, gradually 
withdrew from these words all their fulness of meaning, 
until it became necessary and just for Hegel to reassert 
against him the primitive lesson of Kantian philosophy, 
that "the absolute is not substance but subject" i.e., 
that the unity, to which all things are to be referred and 
in which they must find their idtimate explanation, is 
the unity of self-consciousness. 

"When, however, Hegel thus rejected both these 
partial solutions of the Kantian problem, solutions 
which really involve the omission of one or other of 
its elements, and when he again restated the problem 
itself in all its fulness, he could no longer, like Kant, 
escape from its difficulties by an alternation between 
intelligible and phenomenal i reality, or between the 
spheres of reason and faith. \ For him it was necessary 
to show that the kingdoms of nature and spirit are one, 
in spite of all their antagonisms ; nay, it was necessary 
for him to show that this antagonism itself is the mani- 
festation of their unity. The freedom that belongs to 
man as a rational and moral being could no longer be 
saved by lifting it, as it were, into another world, a twos 



The Problem of Hegd. 129 

vor/Tos, out of the reach of physical necessity ; it must 
be shown to realise itself in and through that necessity 
itself. " Out of the eater must come forth meat ; out 
of the strong, sweetness." What had been regarded as 
absolute opposites or contradictories, mind and matter, ' 
spirit and nature, self-determination and determination 
by the not-self, must be united and reconciled, and that 
not by an external harmony, but by bringing out into 
distinct consciousness the unity that lies beyond their 
difference, and gives it its meaning. To do this, indeed, 
was to break with all the ideas of logical method that 
had hitherto ruled the schools; it was to treat as ulti- 
mately pliant and evanescent the most tixed distinctions 
of the old metaphysics. Yet it was not to be done, as 
it had often been done by mystics like Bbhme and 
intuitionists like Jaeobi, by simply rejecting the claims 
of the logical understanding to lay down any law for 
the higher matters of the spirit. Such a resource was 
not permitted to one who, like Hegel, declared that 
self-consciousness itself was the ideal unity, by which, 
or in reference to which, the world must be explained. 
In a philosophy that acknowledged such a principle, the 
movement of thought, by which the most fixed distinc- 
tions of the understanding were dissolved and its most 
absolute oppositions transcended, must be a logical move- 
ment, and it must be conscious of its own logic. Its 
" reason," to use a common distinction, must not be set 
against its " understanding," but must include and satisfy 
it. If its higher philosophical or religious truth was not 
brought down into the region of common-sense, at least 
it must gain a clear conscience toward common-sense by 
p. VII. I 



130 Hegel. 

fulfilling all its reasonable demands, and leaving it no 
excuse to deny the rationality of that which transcended 
it. Especially must such a philosophy be ready to meet 
on its own ground that higher kind of common -sense 
called science ; it must be scientific, even if it was neces- 
sary for it to be something more. It is this that makes 
Hegel so vehement in his opposition to all those who, 
like Schelling, lay claim to a special immediate vision or 
intellectual intuition of truth from which the mass of 
men are excluded. To those who quote the Scripture 
that "God giveth" truth "to his beloved in sleep,'' 1 
he is ready to assume the sceptical attitude of ration- 
alism, and to point out that "what is given to men 
in sleep is for the most part dreams." Yet it is not 
in the interest of rationalism that Hegel speaks, but 
in the interest of that ideal truth which rationalism 
denies. J But it is his inmost conviction that there are 
not two truths, but one, and that that is no secure path 
to a higher kind of knowledge, which begins by a quarrel 
with the facts of life and the ordinary consciousness of 
these facts. ! As the late Professor Green has said, that 
" there is no other genuine enthusiasm of humanity than 
one which has travelled the common highway of reason 
the life of the good neighbour and honest citizen and 
can never forget that it is only on a further stage of 
the same journey ; " so, in Hegel's view, philosophy can 
permanently vindicate that highest synthesis which lifts 
thought from the finite to the infinite, only when it has 
fully recognised and done justice to the finite conscious- 
ness with which it starts. The claim of special inspira- 
1 Psalm cxxvii. 2 see German translation. 



Idealism and Dualism. 131 

tion is an anachronism for the modern spirit which 
demands that the saint should also he a man of the 
world, and that the prophet should show the logical ne- 
cessity of his vision. For " a man's a man for a' that," 
and, however sensuous and rude his consciousness of him- 
self and of the world may he, it is, after all, a rational 
consciousness, and it claims the royal right of reason to 
have its errors disproved out of itself. And a philos- 
ophy which does not find sufficient premises to prove 
itself in the intelligence of every one, and which is 
forced to have recourse to mere ex cathedra assertion, 
is confessing its impotence. 

But this resolve to bring together poetry with prose, 
religion with experience, philosophy with the science of 
the finite, the " vision and the faculty divine " with com- 
mon - sense and the natural understanding, obviously 
entails upon speculation a harder task than it has ever 
before encountered. Dualism in some form or other 
lias for centuries lightened the task of philosophy by 
a sort of double book-keeping or division of labour, by 
which the hardest contrasts and antagonisms of life 
were evaded. Even for Kant, who brings the two 
worlds face to face, there is still a " great gulf fixed " 
between them, and moral freedom moves safely in a 
vacant " kingdom of ends," where it never comes in 
contact with any necessity of nature. But for Hegel, 
all such devices to keep the peace, so to speak, between 
heaven and earth to put some interval of separation 
" between the pass and fell incensed points of mighty 
opposites " are vain and fruitless. \ If the Kantian prin- 
ciple, that self-consciousness or self-determining spirit 



132 Hegd. 

is the ultimate reality of things, is to be maintained, it 
must be shown to be a principle capable of explaining 
the phenomenal world. That very necessity of nature, 
from which Kant sought to find an escape for man's 
higher life, must be shown to be the means of realising 
it. How this is possible we shall consider afterwards; 
for the present it need only be remarked, that it is just 
Hegel's determination to avoid all shifts and subter- 
fuges, to encounter fairly all the difficulties of the 
spiritual or ideal interpretation of life, and to work 
out that interpretation faithfully even in those spheres 
which an ideal philosophy has not usually ventured to 
touch, that forces him to deal with the problem of the 
reconciliation of opposites./ It is no freak of an over- 
subtle logic, " trying for once in a way to stand on its 
head," that leads him to ask whether, beneath all the 
antagonisms of thought and reality, even those that 
have been hitherto conceived to be absolute contradic. 
tions, there is not a principle of unity, which in its de- 
velopment at once explains the opposition, shows its 
relative character and its limits, and finally dissolves it. 
This question was, in fact, forced on him by the gradual 
transformation of the Kantian philosophy in Fichte and 
Schelling. Their speculations made it manifest that the 
idealism of Kant could be maintained, only if self-con- 
sciousness were found to be a principle adequate to the 
explanation of that which is the very opposite of self- 
consciousness i.e., only if spirit could be shown to be 
the reason of nature, and mind to be the key to matter. 
And the apparent breach with common-sense which is 
involved in Hegel's denial of the law of contradiction 



Philosophy and Common-sense. 133 

as ordinarily understood, was the direct result of the very 
strength of common-sense in Hegel himself, which would 
not let him he content without bringing his highest 
spiritual consciousness into relation with the teachings 
of the ordinary understanding, and demanding that in 
one way or another the difference between the two should 
be brought to a definite issue. 



134 



CHAPTEK VII. 

THE PRINCIPLE OF CONTRADICTION AND THE IDEA 
OF SPIRIT. 

When Aristotle laid down the Law of Contradiction as 
the highest law of thought, and opposed it to the Hera- 
clitean principle of universal flux, he argued that, unless 
distinction is maintained, unless things are definitely 
what they are, and are kept to their definition, know- 
ledge and thought become impossible. If A and not-A 
are the same, it is no longer possible to find any meaning 
in the simplest statements. Even the doctrine of flux 
itself must mean something, and that obviously implies 
that it does not mean anything else ; even the sceptic, 
therefore, when he assails the law of contradiction, tacitly 
gives in his adhesion to the truth he assails. To this 
argument no objection can be taken, if it be regarded as 
vindicating one necessary aspect or element of thought, 
and not as expressing its whole nature. Thought is 
always distinction, determination, the marking off of 
one thing from another ; and it is characteristic of Aris- 
totle the great definer that he should single out this 
aspect of it. But thought is not only distinction, it is at 
the same time relation. If it marks off one thing from 



Law of Contradiction. 135 

another, it, at the same time, connects one thing with 
another. Nor can either of these functions of thought 
he separated from the other : as Aristotle himself said, 
the knowledge of opposites is one. A thing which has 
nothing to distinguish it is unthinkable, but equally un- 
thinkable is a thing which is so separated from all other 
things as to have no community with them. If, therefore, 
the law of contradiction be taken as asserting the self- 
identity of things or thoughts in a sense that excludes 
their community in other words, if it be not taken as 
limited by another law which asserts the relativity of 
the things or thoughts distinguished it involves a false 
abstraction. A half-truth is necessarily distorted into a 
falsehood when taken as the whole truth. An absolute 
distinction by its very nature would be self-contradictory, 
for it would cut oil* all connection between the things 
it distinguished. It would annihilate the relation im- 
plied in the distinction, and so it would annihilate the 
distinction itself. If, therefore, we say that everything 
every intelligible object or thought as such must de- 
differentiated from all others, yet we must equally say 
that no object or thought can be absolutely differ- 
entiated ; in other words, differentiated so as to exclude 
any identity or unity which transcends the difference. An 
absolute difference is something which cannot exist with- 
in the intelligible world, and the thought which attempts 
to fix such a difference is unconscious of its own mean- 
ing. If it could succeed, it would, ipso facto, commit 
suicide. We can stretch the bow to the utmost point 
consistent with its not breaking, but if we go an inch fur- 
ther, it ceases to be stretched at all. We can embrace in 
one thought the widest antagonism consistent with the 



136 ffef/ef. 

unity uf thought itself, but an antagonism inconsistent 
with that unity is unthinkable, for the simple reason 
that, when the unity disappears, the antagonism also 
disappears with it. 

If then the world, as an intelligible world, is a world 
of distinction, differentiation, individuality, it is equally 
true that in it, as an intelligible world, there are no 
absolute separations or oppositions, no antagonisms 
which cannot be reconciled. All difference presup- 
poses a unity, and is itself, indeed, an expression of that 
unity ; and if we let it expand and develop itself to the 
utmost, yet ultimately it must exhaust itself, and return 
into the unity. This is all that Hegel means when he, as 
is often asserted, " denies the validity of the laws of iden- 
tity and contradiction." All he denies, in fact, is their 
absolute validity. "Every finite thing is itself, and no 
other." True, Hegel would answer, but with a caveat. 
Every finite thing, by the fact that it is finite, has an 
essential relation to that which limits it, and thus it con- 
tains the principle of its destruction in itself. It is 
therefore, in this sense, a self -contradictory existence, 
which at once is itself and its other, itself and not itself. 
It is at war with itself, and its very life-process is the 
process of its dissolution. In an absolute sense, it can- 
not be said to be, any more than not to be. "Even- 
definite thought, by the fact that it is definite, excludes 
other thoughts, and especially the opposite thought." 
True, Hegel would answer, but with a ennui. Every 
definite thought, by the fact that it is definite, has a 
necessary relation to its negative, and cannot be separated 
from it without losing its own meaning. In the very 
definiteness with which it affirms itself, therefore, is con- 



Law of Relativity. 137 

tamed the proof that; its affirmation is not absolute. Ii' 
we fix our attention upon it, to the exclusion of its 
negative, if we try to hold it to itself alone, it disappears. 
To maintain it and do it full justice is already to go 
beyond it. Hence we are obliged to modify the as- 
sertion, that every definite thought absolutely excludes 
its negative, and to admit that, in this point of view, ii 
also includes or involves it. It is, and it is not, itself, 
for it contains in itself its own negation. If we are to 
reassert it again, it can only be so far as we combine it 
with its negative in a higher thought, in which, there- 
fore, it is partly denied and partly affirmed. 

Thus neither things nor thoughts can be treated as 
simply self-identical as independent or atomic exist- 
ences, which are related only to themselves. They are 
essentially parts of a whole, or stages in a process, and 
as such they cany us beyond themselves, the moment we 
clearly understand them. Nor can we escape from this 
conclusion by saying that it is merely a subjective illu- 
sion, and that the objects really remain, though our 
mind passes from the one to the other. In regard to 
thoughts, this is obviously a subterfuge ; for the thought 
is not something different from the process which our 
minds go through in apprehending it it is that process. 
And in regard to "things," the distinction is equally 
inapplicable; for what we are considering is the con- 
ditions essential to the intelligible, as such, and the 
things " of which we speak must be at least intelli- 
gible, since they exist for our intelligence. The truth 
therefore is, that definiteness, finitude, or determination. 
as such, though they have an affirmative or positive 
meaning* also contain or involve in themselves their 



138 Hegel 

own negation. There is a community or unity between 
them and their opposites, which overreaches their differ- 
ence or opposition, though it does not by any means 
exclude that difference or opposition in its proper place, 
and within its proper limits. Of any definite existence 
or thought, therefore, it may be said with quite as much 
truth that it is not, as that it is, its own bare self. This 
appears paradoxical, only because we are accustomed to 
think that the whole truth about a thing can be ex- 
pressed once for all in a proposition ; and here we find 
that two opposite propositions can be asserted with 
equal truth. The key, however, to the difficulty is, 
that neither the assertion nor the denial, nor even both 
together, exhaust all that is to be said. To know an 
object, we. must follow the process of its existence, in 
which it manifests all that is in it, and so by that very 
manifestation exhausts itself, and is taken up as an 
element into a higher existence.* 

The thought that there is a unity which lies beneath 
all opposition, and that, therefore, all opposition is cap- 
able of reconciliation, is unfamiliar to our ordinary con- 
sciousness for reasons that may easily be explained. 
That unity is not usually an object of consciousness, 
just becaiise it is the presupposition of all consciousness. 
It escapes notice, because it is the ground on which we 
stand, or the atmosphere in which we breathe; because it 
is not one thing or thought rather than another, but that 
through which all things are, and are known. Hence 
Ave can scarcely become conscious of its existence until 
something leads us to question its truth. Our life is 
an antagonism and a struggle, which rests upon a basis 
of unity, and would nut be possible without it. But 



Absolute Contradiction, impossible. 139 

immersed in the conflict, and occupied with our adver- 
sary, we cannot at the same moment rise to the con- 
sciousness of that power which is working in him and 
in us alike. Rather are we disposed to exaggerate the 
breadth of the gulf that separates us, and the intensity 
of the repulsion that sets us at war with each other. 
We disown the community that binds opposite ideas 
together, because we think that in no other way can we 
emphasise sufficiently our own watchword. We lose 
sight of truth itself, that we may assert our truth. Of 
this we may find examples in every sphere of life. 
Thus we find the scientific man exaggerating the con- 
trasts of subjective and objective, thought and fact, to a 
point which would make all science unmeaning. The 
demand so often made, " Give us facts, and not hypo- 
theses or ideas," does not mean what it says; for enough 
of facts may be collected say, about the articles in a 
room, or the history of an hour's life in it to break 
down the strongest memory. What it does mean is, 
"(Jive us facts that will answer the questions of our 
intelligence" i.e., facts that are ideas. But the scien- 
tific man feels so strongly the necessity of struggling 
against subjective opinions and "anticipations of na- 
ture " in his own mind and the minds of others in order 
that he may reach the objective truth, the ideas which 
are facts, that thought itself seems to be his enemy. 
In his struggle against " mere ideas," he loses sight of 
that ultimate unity of thought and things which is the 
presupposition of all his endeavours, and indeed the 
very principle which he is seeking to develop and to 
verify. It is, however, the moral and religious con- 
sciousness, which, just because its conflicts are those 



140 Hegel. 

that most deeply divide us against ourselves and against 
each other, is most obstinate and stiff-necked in insisting 
on the absoluteness of its divisions and oppositions. 
Thus pious feeling is prone to exaggerate the division 
between divine and human, and even fears to admit the 
possibility of the intelligence of man apprehending in 
any sense the nature of God. "Our fittest eloquence 
is our silence when we confess without confession that 
Thy glory is inexplicable and beyond our reach." Such 
words may have a certain relative truth ; but if we took 
them in their literal meaning, that divine and human 
reason are different in kind, and that God cannot be 
known, religion would be an impossibility. In like 
manner, the moral sense is jealous of the admission that 
good overreaches the antagonism between itself and evil, 
or in any sense comprehends, even if it be at the same 
time declared that it transcends, that antagonism : such 
an idea seems to it "a confusion of right and wrong." 
Yet the great moral teacher of our time, avIio above all 
has insisted that there is a hell as well as a heaven, is 
driven to meet what he thinks a superficial benevolence 
towards " scoundrels " with the cry, " Yes, they are my 
brethren, hence this rage and sorrow!" In other words, 
"Admit the antagonism which I assert in all its real 
depth and intensity, and I will admit that there is a 
unity beyond it." It is the unity itself which gives its 
bitter meaning to the difference, while at the same time 
it contains the pledge that the difference can and even 
must be reconciled. 

" The intelligible world is relative to the intelligence." 
This principle, which was expressed by Kant, but of 
wliieh Kant, by his distinctions of phenomenon and 



Unity of the World. 141 

noumenon, reason and faith, evaded the full meaning, is 
taken in earnest by Hegel. He is therefore forced to 
deny the absoluteness even of those antagonisms which 
have been conceived to be altogether insoluble : for any 
absolute antagonism would ultimately imply an irrecon- 
cilable opposition between the intelligence and its object. 
In other words, it would imply that the intelligence is 
not the unity which is presupposed in all the differences 
<if things, and which, therefore, through all these differ- 
ences, returns to itself. The essential unity of all things 
with each other and with the mind that knows them, is 
the adamantine circle within which the strife of opposites 
is waged, and which their utmost violence of conflict 
cannot break. No fact, which is in its nature incapable 
of being explained or reduced to law, no law, which it 
is impossible ever to recognise as essentially related to 
the intelligence that apprehends it, can be admitted to 
exist in the intelligible universe. No absolute defeat of 
the spirit, no defeat that does not contain the elements 
of a greater triumph, can possibly take place in a world 
which is itself nothing but the realisation of spirit. 

In a sense, this principle may be said to be incapable 
of proof, since a proof of it would already presuppose it. 
But a disproof of it would do so equally. And scepti- 
cism, when it brings this very result to light in other 
words, when in its own necessary development it destroys 
itself gives all the proof of it that is necessary. The 
self-contradiction of absolute scepticism makes us con- 
scious of the unity of thought and things, of being and 
knowing, as an ultimate truth, which yet is not an as- 
sumption, because all belief and unbelief, all assertion 
and denial, alike presuppose it. The Kantian " tran- 



142 Hegel. 

scendental deduction" was only a further, though still 
a partial, development of this idea; for it was an 
attempt to show what are the primary elements of 
thought involved in the determination of objects, as 
such ; in other words, to show in detail what is meant 
by that identity or unity of the intelligence and its 
object, which is implied by all knowledge. As scepti- 
cism proved that to doubt the intelligence in general was 
suicidal, because with the intelligence disappears also the 
intelligible; so Kant's deduction proved that to take away 
any special part or form of the intelligence, any category 
of the understanding or form of sensibility, was to make 
knowledge impossible. Unfortunately, for reasons already 
indicated, Kant treats this unity as existing only in the 
phenomenal world of experience ; and while he gives us 
a catalogue of the different elements out of which it is 
made up, he does not show how, in such diversity of 
operation, the intelligence can still be one, and conscious 
of itself as one. Kant, in other words, deals with the 
intelligence as if it were a well-constructed machine, each 
and all of whose parts are necessary for an external pur- 
pose, and are externally combined for that purpose ; but 
not as an organic unity, whose parts are united by the 
one life that expresses itself in them all, and whose pur- 
pose is only that life itself. I But to know the world is 
not an accidental or external purpose of the intelligence ; 
it is the activity through which alone the intelligence 
can become conscious of itself or, in other words, can 
exist as an intelligence at all. And the various cate- 
gories or forms of thought by which it makes the world 
intelligible, are not external instruments it uses, but 
modes of its own activity, or stages in its own develop- 



Transcendental Deduction. 143 

ment. To complete the work of Kant, and clear it from 
these defects, philosophy must not only undertake the 
analysis of intelligence in relation to the intelligible 
world, a work which, after all, leaves us "with the 
parts in our hands, but the informing spiritual unity 
awanting;" it must also retrace, with watchful con- 
sciousness, the unconscious synthetic process in which 
the intelligence first manifests its life, and through 
which it becomes possessor of itself and of its world ; 
and it must show how each of the forms of that life has 
its reason and meaning in the one principle from which 
they spring. In so far as philosophy can succeed in 
this, it may meet scepticism with the further answer 
of a solvitur ambulando; for the rationality of the world 
is best proved by rationalising it. Still, it would be a 
mistake to think that reason's certitude of itself has to 
wait for this completed proof, or that there is no real 
answer to scepticism except omniscience. The primary 
answer of scepticism to itself the answer which it gives 
by refuting itself already is sufficient to show that reason 
can have to do only with itself ; that all its conflicts and 
struggles are with itself, however they may seem to be 
with another ; and that, therefore, there can never come 
into its life an antagonism which it has not in itself the 
means of reconciling. For reason, therefore, there can 
be no foreign object which it is impossible for it, in 
Kant's language, " to unite with its consciousness of 
itself," and no external necessity which it cannot make 
the means of its freedom or self-realisation/) 

To develop this idea, however, and to develop it in 
such a way as to give room for all the oppositions of 
thought anil life, is something more than to feel it, resl 



1 44 Hegel. 

in it, and enjoy it like a mystic. " The life of God the 
life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to 
the ahsohxte unity of all things may he described as a 
play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edi ty- 
ing truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not 
embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and 
labour, involved in the negative aspect of things."' In 
other words, the intuitive apprehension of the absolute 
unity is nothing, unless that unity be brought into rela- 
tion to the differences of the finite world; when it is 
asserted by itself it loses all its meaning.! 1 To the 
man of the world or the man of science, a religious 
or speculative optimism is apt to seem like a child's 
confidence in a world which he has never tried, rather 
than like that peace of spirit which has been confirmed 
by the completed experience of all its effort and pain. 
The words of triumph mean much or little, just in 
proportion to the greatness of the struggle, and the 
thoroughness with which it has been fought out, and 
they will not be listened to with patience on the lips 
of any one who has evaded his strongest enemies. 
The critical spirit is justly jealous of any solution which 
does not show, on the face of it, that the difficulty has 
been thoroughly sounded. Hence there is always a 
difficulty in producing a mutual understanding between 
those, on the one hand, whose minds are directed to the 
particular interests of life or to particular spheres of 
science, and those, on the other hand, who, either as 
poets, or religious men, or philosophers, live habitually 
in contemplation of the unity that is beyond all difference, 
the reconciliation that is above all conflict. By the eoa- 
ditions of their life, the former seem to be as naturally 



Tlie Intelligetice and the World. 1 4-5 

biassed toward a hard and unyielding dualism, which 
distrusts all " ideology," all harmonising and reconcil- 
ing views of existence, as the latter are prone to an easy 
idealism, which charms away the difficulties and recon- 
ciles the oppositions of life as if by a magic word. To 
bring about such an understanding, each of the two sides 
must be drawn out of itself, and brought into relation to 
each other. Now it is Hegel's effort, on the side of 
philosophy, so to overcome the abstractness of the specu- 
lative idea and develop its unity into difference, that he 
may force the scientific or practical consciousness, in its 
turn, to overcome its abstract and one-sided assertion of 
difference, and bring it into relation to the unity of 
thought, j For if the unity of thought, the unity of the 
intelligence with itself, is to be found in all the intelli- 
gible universe, in all the " subtlety of nature," and all 
the complex movement of history, that unity must be 
more than the simple identity which philosophy has 
often found in it. If, as it was the aim or result of 
the Kantian philosophy to prove, self-consciousness is 
the principle of unity to which the world must be re- 
ferred and by which it must be explained, self-conscious- 
ness must be a microcosm, a world in itself, containing 
and resolving in the transparent simplicity or unity of 
its " glassy essence " all the differences and antagonisms 
which, in intensified form, it has to meet with in the 
macrocosm. The intelligence must not, therefore, be 
conceived as n mere resting identity, but rather ns a 
complete process of differentiation and integration, which 
rests only in the sense that its movement returns upon 
itself, f It will thus be, in Aristotle's language, an 
Lvepyua d*ai'7/ov'as : in other words, it will be without 
P. VII. K 



146 Hegel. 

movement or change, not because it is not active, but 
because its activity is determined only by itself. For 
only through such a concrete conception of the intelli- 
gence in itself will it be possible to understand how it 
should be able to reach beyond itself, and so to rise above 
the opposition of thought and tilings. Otherwise it 
must seem impossible that knowledge of the world 
should be attained, except by the absolute passivity of 
the intelligence ; by the mind emptying itself of itself, 
and becoming a pure mirror, or a tabula rasa on which 
the external object may impress its image. 

Xow what is involved in the idea of self-conscious- 
ness? Kant, who first pointed out that the unity of 
the ego is presupposed in all our knowledge, has given 
a curious account of it. " Of the ego," he says, " one 
cannot even say that it is a conception of anything ; it 
is rather a consciousness that accompanies all our con- 
ceptions. In this I, or He, or It the thing which 
thinks we have before us nothing but a transcendental 
subject of thought, an x or unknown quantity, which 
is known only through the thoughts which are its pre- 
dicates, and of which, if we separate it from those 
thoughts, we cannot form the slightest conception. If 
we attempt to do so, we are obliged to revolve round it 
in a continual circle ; for we cannot make any judg- 
ment about it without being obliged to presuppose and 
make use of the idea of it, an inconvenience which is in- 
evitable, because consciousness in itself is not, strictly 
speaking, the idea of a particular object, but a form for 
all ideas which deserve the name of knowledge Le., 
for all ideas through which any object is thought." This 
remark of Kant's brings out the peculiarity of self-con* 



Kant's view of the Ego. 147 

sciousness, that it is no simple unity or identity ; for if 
so, it must be purely an object or purely a subject, but 
really it is both in one ; all other things are for it, but 
it is for itself. This strikes Kant as " an inconvenience," 
which prevents us from knowing it as we may know other 
things, as if the ego somehow, by reason of its duality 
as both subject and object, stood in its own light, and 
was guilty of a kind of circle-reasoning in pretending to 
know itself. But when Ave look at the matter more 
closely, it would seem that Kant is here himself guilty 
of a curious paralogism, in attacking what is our very 
highest type of knowledge, and rejecting it because it 
does not conform to his own preconceived ideas. It is 
as if one should say that it is impossible to see the sun 
because we cannot throw the rays of a candle upon it. 
But as it is the light which reveals both itself and the 
darkness, so) it is self-consciousness through which wo 
know both itself and all other things. If knowledge is 
the relation of an object to a conscious subject, it is the 
more complete, the more intimate the relation ; and it 
becomes perfect when the duality becomes transparent, 
when subject and object are identified, and when the 
duality is seen to be simply the necessary expression of 
the unity, in short, when consciousness passes into self- 
consciousness. " It is just the intelligence itself which 
Kant declares to be unintelligible." And the reason is, 
that Kant's mind was secretly possessed with the pre- 
conception that the one thing entirely intelligible is a 
pure abstract identity Avhich has no division or differ- 
ence in it all. This preconception, however, was shown 
by Kant himself to be a false one. ) It was his special work, 
in the ' Critique of Pure Reason,' to prove that every 






148 Segd. 

object of knowledge, as such, involves a relation to a 
Subject ; in other words, that it is not a simple identity, 
but involves difference, and unity in difference. But if 
so, then self-consciousness is the knowable par excellence, 
insomuch as in it the object, which is distinguished from 
the subject, is, at the same time, most perfectly coales- 
cent with it. | It was, in fact, just because Kant took 
pure identity as his ideal of knowledge, that he was 
driven to seek for absolute truth in a region beyond the 
objective consciousness, or, what to him was the same 
thing, beyond the phenomenal consciousness. And as 
such an identity is really unknowable and incomprehen- 
sible, he was obliged at the same time to confess that 
this region of pure self -identical subjectivity cannot be 
reached by knowledge, but only by faith. If, however, 
Kant's " reason " had thus to enter into the " intelligible 
world " or " kingdom of ends " " halt and maimed," it 
was because he had maimed it himself. It was his own 
definition of truth, or rather his tacit preconception of 
truth, which made truth unattainable to him, and which 
even made him reject its very quintessence and antitype 
in self-consciousness as unintelligible. 

This failure of Kant, however, directly points to a 
new conception of knowledge, and a reform of logic. 
JThe old analytic logic was based on that very idea of 
identity by which Kant was misled. It started with 
the presupposition that each object is an isolated iden- 
tity, itself and nothing more. It accepted the law of 
contradiction in a sense which involved a denial of the 
relativity or community of things. It separated object 
from subject, one thing from another ; or, if it admitted 
relations between things, these were regarded by it as 



Unittj-in-cliffercnce of Mind. 149 

altogether external, or outside of the real nature of the 
tilings in themselves. But such a theory of knowledge 
is, as it were, broken in pieces against the idea of self- 
consciousness, in which the true unity, the pattern of 
all knowledge, is seen to be essentially complex or con- 
crete, a unity of differences, a circle of relations in itself. 
Self -consciousness is the standing enigma for those who 
would separate identity and difference ; for it is not 
merely that, in one aspect of it, self-consciousness is a, 
duality, and in another aspect a unity; duality ami 
unity are so inseparably blended in it, that neither has 
my meaning without the other. Or, to put it still more 
definitely, the self exists as one self only as it opposes 
itself, as object, to itself, as subject, and immediately de- 
nies and transcends that opposition. Only because it is 
such a concrete unity, which has in itself a resolved con- 
tradiction, can the intelligence cope with all the mani- 
foldness and division of the mighty universe, and hope t<> 
master its secrets. As the lightning sleeps in the dew- 
drop, so in the simple and transparent unity of self-con- 
sciousness there is held in equilibrium that vital antag- 
onism of opposites, which, as the opposition of thought 
and things, of mind and matter, of spirit and nature, 
seems to rend the world asunder. The intelligence is 
able to understand the world, or, in other Avords, to 
break down the barrier between itself and things, and 
find itself in them, just because its own existence is 
implicitly the solution of all the division and conflict 
of things. 

To see, however, that this is the case, and that in the 
intelligence, as the subject - object, there lies an ade- 
quate principle for the interpretation of nature and his- 



150 Hajel 

tory, it is necessary that we should explain more fully 
what is involved in the idea of self-consciousness. For 
such an interpretation is possible only in so far as in 
self-consciousness are implicitly contained all the cate- 
gories by which science and philosophy attempt to make 
the world intelligible, a doctrine, the detailed proof of 
which is the object of the Hegelian Logic. 



151 



CHAPTEll VIII. 

THE HEGELIAN LOGIC. 

When we say that knowledge is possible, we imply that 
the intelligence can raise itself above the accidental, 
partial, changing point of view Which belongs to the 
individual as such. If each man were forced to make 
himself the centre of the universe, and to regard things 
as important and real in proportion as they immediately 
affected his senses or were directly instrumental to the 
satisfaction of his wants, neither intellectual nor moral 
life could possibly be his. To make either attainable, 
he must be able to look at things in online ad vmiver- 
sum i.e., he must be able to discount the influences of 
his immediate position and circumstances, even of his 
personal wishes and feelings, and to regard himself in- 
dividually as one object among the other objects he 
knows. He must feel something of the same indiffer- 
ent interest in himself, and apply something of the same 
impartial judgment to himself, which he feels and 
applies in relation tu that which does not affect him 
at all, to that which is distant in time and space from 
the immediate circle of his concerns. To live as a moral 
being, the individual must look at himself and treat him- 



152 Hegel. 

self from the point of view of the family, of the state, 
or of humanity, giving to his own desires and interests 
just the weight which they deserve when regarded from 
such higher centre, and not the exclusive Aveight which 
they claim when they are allowed to speak for them- 
selves- The precept, that we should do to others as we 
would that they should do to us, has a practical value, 
not because in its literal sense it clearly marks out the 
path of duty, for our wishes for another might he as 
unreasonable as our wishes for ourselves, but because 
the effort to put ourselves sympathetically in another's 
place is generally the surest way of lifting us out of the 
close atmosphere of personal feelings. In like manner, 
intellectual life, the life of knowledge, is primarily an 
effort to break away from those things that are, as Aris- 
totle says, " first for us," the immediate appearances and 
apprehensions of sense, which are different for each of 
us, and continually changing, and to reach those things 
that are "first by nature" the laws or principles Avhich 
manifest themselves no more and no less in one set of 
appearances than another. To use an illustration of 
Kant, the confused Ptolemaic system is the one most 
natural to us : we would fain account for everything, in 
however complex and difficult a way, on the supposition 
that the universe revolves round our individual selves. 
Hut science and philosophy seek to introduce the Coper- 
nican system, with its simple and transparent order, by 
changing our point of vieAV to the sun, the universal 
centre around which all things really revolve. 

But can we thus really get out of ourselves ? Can we 
free ourselves from the influence of our surroundings, 
and our very nature as individuals? Or, if we can do 



Universality of Mind. 153 

so to some extent, is there not a limit to the process in 
our very humanity 1 "Man never knows," says Goethe, 
"how anthropomorphic he is." If we can overleap the 
chasm that separates us from our fellow-men, can we 
expect also to get rid of the tendency, more or less 
definitely to humanise nature in the very act of taking 
knowledge of it 1 Or, even supposing that we can tran- 
scend all the divisions that separate finite things and 
beings from each other, is there not still an absolute gulf 
lixed between the finite and the infinite, which confines 
us to time and space, and hinders us from seeing things 
gub .specie ceternitatls ? 

This problem was one which already troubled Aris- 
totle in the dawn of psychology. ' He solves it by the 
doctrine that the intelligence is not, strictly speaking, 
one tiling or being to which you can assign separate 
jualities or attributes, and so distinguish it from other 
things and beings. It is, he declares, a universal 
capacity, and " lias no other nature than this, that it is 
capable." It lias "no foreign element" mingled with 
its pure universality, " which might confuse and inter- 
rupt its view of the object." Hence it is able "to 
master all objects that is to say, to understand them." 
Translating these pregnant words into more modern 
terms, what they imply is, that the intelligence is not 
one thing among others in the intelligible world, but 
the principle in reference to which alone that world 
exists ; and that, therefore, there is nothing in the nature 
of intelligence to prevent it from understanding a uni- 
verse which is essentially the object of intelligence. The 
thinking subject, no doubt, is also an individual among 
other individuals ; but, as a thinking subject, he is free 



154 Hegel. 

of the world, emancipated from the limitations not only 
of his own individual being, but even of his- generic 
nature. The individuality of a self-conscious being, as 
such, rests on a basis of universality ; if he is conscious 
of himself in opposition to that which is not himself, 
he is at the same time conscious of self and not-self in 
relation to each other ; and that implies that he is con- 
scious of the unity that includes both. We may say, 
therefore, that he is not limited to himself; that just 
because he is a self, he transcends himself ; that his life 
includes, in a higher sense, even that which it seems, 
in a lower sense, to exclude. Or, to approach more 
nearly to Aristotle's language, a self is not merely one 
thing or being, distinguished by certain qualities from 
other tilings or beings ; rather he may be said to have 
all qualities or none ; for he is capable of relating him- 
self to all, and so making them parts of his own life : 
yet he is limited to none as a definite and final quali- 
fication of his own being. If he were, he could not be 
conscious of it as an object. ' 

If this view be true, it follows that the intelligence 
of man, as it is implicitly universal, is capable of rising- 
above, and abstracting from, all purely subjective associ- 
ations, and seeing objects as they are in themselves, or, 
what is the same thing, from a universal point of view. 
This act of abstraction, in a more or less definite form, 
is implied in all man's existence, intellectual, moral, 
and even natural, in so far as even in his simplest 
sensuous experience there is the latent working of a 
rational principle. But it is implied in a higher de- 
gree in science : for science is essentially the conscious 
and deliberate effort to break away from subjectivity, 



Objectivity of Thought. 155 

and see things as they objectively are. As such it in- 
volves a severe discipline of self-restraint, and even, we 
might say, a painful process of self-abnegation ; for it is 
by no means an easy thing to thrust aside all our pre- 
conceptions and assumptions, or to allow them to be 
weighed in the scales of nature, Avithout any attempt to 
bias the decision by which they may be found wanting. 
Yet in thus renouncing its subjective prepossessions, the 
mind is not renouncing itself. It is not, as Bacon seems 
to think, reducing itself to a passive mirror of an objec- 
tive world. Eather it is thus making room for its own 
true activity, bringing itself into that central or universal 
attitude in which alone it can show what it is as mind. 
The activity of an intelligence is not pure till it has got 
rid of the accidental or particular element that clings to 
its immediate self, for then only can it rise to a new 
universal life, in which its movement is one with that of 
the object which it contemplates. For it is not, as Aris- 
totle showed, like a thing which has special qualities, 
and which perishes when they are changed. It is not 
involved in the fate of the i)articular opinions and pre- 
possessions which keep it from the knowledge of objects, 
but rather begins to energise freely and powerfully only 
when these have been cast aside. 

Universality is readily confused with emptiness, be- 
cause it is a freedom from all that is particular. And 
so a universal activity may easily be taken for passivity, 
because it is not the self-assertion of the subject of it 
against anything else. In this sense it is sometimes said 
that true science consists in silencing our own ideas that 
nature alone may speak. ]\ T ature, however, can speak 
only to an intelligence, and as an intelligence speaks 



156 Heyel. 

in it. The aim of the negative discipline of science 
is to free the subjective intelligence from all that separ- 
ates it from the object ; but if by this process thought 
were really made passive and empty, along with the 
partiality and one-sidedness of consciousness, conscious- 
ness itself would disappear. The process of the liberation 
of thought from itself, therefore, is not the mere negation 
of thought, which would necessarily be the negation of 
the object of thought also ; it is the negation of thought 
and being alike as separate from each other, and the 
revelation of their implicit unity. Nor is this a pan- 
theistic unity in. which all distinction is lost ; it is simply 
the unity of the intelligence with the intelligible world, 
which is presupposed in their difference, and in the light 
of which alone their difference can be truly understood. 
In abstracting from itself, as separate from and opposed 
to the object, in taking what is called a purely objective 
attitude, the intelligence has already implicitly shown 
that the object is not really a limit to it, or even some- 
thing externally given to it. It could not take the point 
<>f view of the object if that point of view were not its 
own, if in the object it met with something -which was 
absolutely foreign to it. That it can thus, in its utmost 
self-surrender, still maintain itself, that it can rise to a 
unity which is beyond its distinction from the object 
and its opposition to the object, is already the pledge 
that all such opposition and distinction may be over- 
come and resolved ; or, in other words, that the world 
may be shown to be not merely the object but also 
the manifestation of intelligence. When, therefore, the 
mind seems to have freed itself of all content of its own, 
it is just then that it begins to find itself i.e., to find 



Aims of the 'Logic.' 157 

the categories and forms of thought which constitute it 
in the object. When it ceases to witness of itself. 
nature and history begin to witness of it. When it is 
silent, the " stones " begin to " cry out," 

This doctrine, that we need only to cast aside all 
prepossessions, and take the world as it is, to find in- 
telligence in it, is what Hegel attempts to prove in his 
' Logic' Commonly that ' Logic ' is supposed to be the 
groundwork for something quite different, for an at- 
tempt to construct nature a priori, and without reference 
to facts and experience. Now it is true that Hegel does 
there treat of the categories by which nature is made 
intelligible apart from the process of their application. 
This, however, is not because he is unaware that it is 
in the struggle to interpret experience that the intelli- 
gence is made conscious of its own forms. But he is of 
opinion that the categories must be considered in them 
selves and in their relation to each other, rather than 
in relation to the objects to which they are applied or in 
which they are realised, in order that it may be shown 
that there is law and order, unity in difference, in the 
mind as well as in the objects it knows. Hegel, in 
short, is, in his ' Logic,' simply seeking to prove that 
these different categories are not a collection of isolated 
ideas, which Ave find in our minds and of which we 
apply now one, now another, as we might try one after 
another of a bunch of keys upon a number of isolated 
locks; he is seeking to prove that the categories are 
not instruments which the mind lines, but elements in 
a whole, or the stages in a complex process, which in 
iis unity the mind is. For the mind has no key but 
itself to apply to nature; in spelling out the meaning 



158 Hegel. 

of things, it can only move through the circle of its 
own self-consciousness in relation to them. \ Its process 
is, therefore, a continuous process, with a beginning 
and end determined by the nature of self-consciousness 
itself. It is a method, and not merely an accidental 
succession of trials, that is needed to make the world 
scientifically intelligible, and in this method there is 
for the application of each category a time and place, 
which cannot be changed without confusion. Where, 
indeed, shall logical order he found, if it he not in 
the succession of the categories, on which all logical 
method is based 1 ? From the first judgment of percep- 
tion in which it is asserted that a particular object is, 
to the last scientific and philosophic comprehension of 
that object iii its relations to other things and to the 
mind that knows it, there is a necessary sequence which 
cannot be inverted or changed. And our thorough com- 
prehension of the world must depend on the order and 
completeness with which this process of thought is fol- 
lowed out in reference to it. Now this movement it 
is for logic, as the science of method, to trace in ab- 
straMo from category to category up to the idea of self- 
consciousness, which is the category of categories, the 
organic unity of all the other categories. Thus logic 
will reach at once a definition of intelligence as the 
principle of unity in the world, and a complete idea 
of method, as the process by which that principle of 
unity is to be traced out and discovered in all the 

ranifold diversities of things. \\ 
Why does Hegel begin with Being, and not, like 
Kant, with self -consciousness, if it be true that self- 
consciousness is the principle in which the explanation 



The Unscientific Consciousness. 159 

of all tilings is to be found 1 The answer to this ques- 
tion is implied in what has been already said. Hegel, 
no doubt, like Kant, holds that a relation to self-con- 
sciousness is implied in the first apprehension of an 
object, and that Being or Existence is essentially Being 
i >r existence for a self. But this relation of all existence, 
as object, to a conscious subject, is, in the first instance, 
implicit. In asserting that an object is, we do not assert 
that it is essentially related to other objects or to the 
intelligence. On the contrary, in our first way of look- 
ing at things, each object seems to be isolated from all 
the rest, as well as from the mind that knows it. The 
common consciousness at first seems to view the world 
as if it were a mere collection of things, one beside 
another, and a succession of events, one after another, 
without any vital or essential connection; nor does it 
regard the mind, to which these things and events are 
present, as related to them in any less external way 
than that in which they are related to each other. 
And though it might be shown that even in the 
external relation of things as in one space and time, a 
more essential connection of them to each other and 
to thought is presupposed, yet such connection, just 
because it is presupposed in the common consciousness, 
is not present to it. For it, therefore, each thing stands 
by itself, without any but an accidental connection with 
anything else. Thus the common consciousness lives in 
abstraction, though it has never abstracted. It has never, 
indeed, needed to abstract, just because it has never 
been conscious, or at least never been clearly conscious, 
of the whole to which belong the different objects and 
elements which it isolates. Xor does science at first 



160 Hegel 

correct this isolating tendency of common thought ; 
rather it seeks in its first movement to exaggerate that 
tendency, and press it to the utmost point of abstrac- 
tion. For the first accidental connection of things in 
the experience of the individual must he seen to be 
accidental, and the first subjective associations produced 
by such experience in the individual mind must be 
broken, ere the true relativity and connection of objects 
can be known. This is the meaning of the scientific- 
discipline of which we have been speaking, the dis- 
cipline by which the mind, in Baconian phrase, is taught 
to renounce its " idols." The ordinary experimental 
methods destroy such false associations by what is 
really a practical development of the process of ab- 
straction i.e., by isolating the object or quality in 
question from the others with which it has been ac- 
cidentally united. 

Thus, then, the method of exclusion, negation, abstrac- 
tion, in which an object is fixed by itself, and isolated 
from all its usual surroundings, has its place and value 
as the first step in scientific investigation. But that 
method may easily be misinterpreted, and made the 
basis of a false theory, if it be considered by itself; 
for then it will give rise to the doctrine that what a 
thing is, it is in itself, apart from all relation to other 
things or the mind. Such a doctrine is easily accepted 
by common-sense, for it is only its own isolating external 
way of thinking, brought to a clearer consciousness of it- 
self. But, grasped by the understanding, and logically 
worked out to its consequences, it leads directly to the 
conclusion that the reality of things, that which things 
are in themselves, is unknown and unknowable, For all 



Objective Dialectic lfil 

existence is but the manifestation, and all knowledge but 

the apprehension, of relations ; and the attempt to strip 
a thing of its relations must therefore end in reducing 
it to a caput mortuum of abstraction of which nothing 
can be said. The real meaning of the scientific abstrac- 
tion is thus perverted : for science sets a thing by itself, 
not that it may find out what it is apart from all re- 
lations, but that it may disclose its immanent or native 
relativity. It rejects all accidental and extraneous asso- 
ciations that may force its object to reveal its own intel- 
ligible nature -i.e., its essential relation to other things 
and to the mind. Xoav Hegel only applies this same 
method to the forms of thought implied in all existence. 
He takes the categories, the ideas of Being, Existence, 
Cause, &c, each by itself, not in order to divorce each 
of these thoughts from all other thoughts, and from the 
mind which they constitute, but rather for the opposite 
reason, in order to prove that they cannot be so divorced. 
In other words, his object is to show in relation to each 
of the categories that it is not merely capable of being 
associated or combined with the others, but that it has an 
immanent relativity or necessary connection with them, 
so that the other categories spring out of it the moment 
we attempt to confine it to itself. All subjective asso- 
ciations being destroyed, the pure objective association, 
the connection of idea with idea, which arises from, or, 
more strictly speaking, is their own nature, will neces- 
sarily show itself. As the elasticity of the spring 
manifests itself only the more evidently, the more 
firmly it is pressed home to itself, so the more decisively 
a thought is fixed by abstraction in its isolated dennite- 
ness, the more clear it becomes that it has, or rather is, 
v. VII l 



162 Hegel. 

a relativity, 'I.e., that it has other thoughts implicit in 
itself. Ideas are not dead things, hut " have hands and 
feet." And the way in which such relativity springs 
out of a category, just when it is fixed to itself and iso- 
lated from all other categories, has already been indicated 
in what has been said of the "thing in itself." Isolate 
a thing from all its relations, and try to assert it by 
itself; at once you find that you have negated it, as 
well as its relations. The thing in itself is nothing. 
The absolute or pure affirmation, just because it is 
absolute or pure, is its own negation. Referred to 
itself and itself only, it ceases to be itself; for its 
definition, that which made it itself, was its relation 
to that which was not itself. Thus we come upon the 
apparent paradox, that opposites are distinguished only 
when they are related, and that, if we carry the oppo- 
sition to the point in which the relation ceases, the 
distinction ceases at the same time. And this leads 
tis to the further result, that the relation to its opposite 
or negative is the one essential relation out of which a 
thought cannot be forced, the relation which maintains 
itself when all extraneous associations are swept away. 
A thought is essentially the relation or the movement 
towards its opposite or negative ; and this is proved by 
the fact that if it be absolutely isolated from that op- 
posite, it immediately becomes indistinguishable from it. 
Its connection with its opposite is, therefore, the first 
link in the chain of essential relativity that connects it 
with the whole body of other thoughts and with the 
intelligence. 

"Being and not-Being are identical." This myste- 
rious utterance of Hegel, round which so much contro- 



Unity of OpposUes. 1G3 

versy has waged, and which has seemed to many bnt a 
caprice of metaphysic run mad, may now be seen to 
have a serious meaning. It does not mean that Being 
and not-Being are not also distinguished ; but it does 
mean that the distinction is not absolute, and that if it is 
made absolute, at that very moment it disappears. The 
whole truth, therefore, cannot be expressed either by the 
simple statement that Being and not-Being are iden- 
tical, or by the simple statement that they are different. 
But the consideration of what these abstractions are in 
themselves when we isolate them from each other, just 
as a scientific man might isolate a special element in 
order to find the essential relativity or energy that lies 
in it, shows that their truth is not either their identity 
or their difference, but is their identity in difference. 
But one who has apprehended this thought has already 
risen above the abstractions Avhose unity in difference 
he has seen. He is like the scientific man who has 
discovered an identity of principle connecting pheno- 
mena between which formerly he had seen no essential 
relation. By such discovery the mere external view of 
them as different things, related only by adjacent place 
or time, has disappeared, and the one phenomenon 
has become the counterpart or complementary aspect of 
the other. In like manner, the thinker who has fully 
seen into the correlativity of given opposites has reached 
a new attitude of thought in regard to them. They 
have become for him inseparable elements of a higher 
unity, which is now seen to be organic or vital. Or 
the whole thought is seen to be a process through cer- 
tain phases, each of which necessitated the other, and 
by the unity of which it the whole thought is consti- 



1 6+ Begd. 

tuted. Xor docs the movement stop hero. The whole 
thought reached in this way has again its opposite or 
negative, which it at once excludes and involves, and 
the process may he repeated in regard to it, with the 
result of reaching a still higher unity, a more complex 
thought, in which it and its opposite are elements. 
And so on, through ever-widening sweep of difierentia- 
tion and integration, till the whole body of thought is 
seen in its organic unity and development, every fibre 
of it alive with relation to the whole in which it is a 
constituent element. 

Has the process which lias just been described a 
natural beginning and end 1 ? If it be true that self- 
consciousness includes or involves in it all the cate- 
gories, it is obvious that the end is in the full definition 
of self-consciousness i.e., the full analysis or differentia- 
tion of all the contents of the idea of self-consciousness, 
and their integration in that idea, as the unity of them 
all. And, on the other hand, its beginning must ob- 
viously be in the simplest and most abstract categor}', 
which, as we have seen, is the category of Being, 
the category by which a thing is referred to itself, 
as if it had no relation to other things or to the 
mind. And the process which connects the beginning 
with the end is just the gradual revelation of these 
two relativities, to things and to the mind, which 
are implicit or presupposed, but not explicit or con- 
sciously present, in our first immediate attitude of 
thought. The firxt main division of logic, then, will 
have to do with the categories in which, as yet, rela- 
tivity is not expressed ; categories like Being, Quality, 
Quantity, which, though they involve, do not imme- 



The Threefold Logic 165 

diately suggest, any relation of the object to which they 
are applied to any other object. The second main divi- 
sion -will have to do with categories such as Essence 
and Existence, Force and Expression, Substance and 
Accident, Cause and Effect, which force us to go beyond 
the object with which we are dealing, and to connect it 
with other objects, or at least with something that is 
not immediately presented to us in the perception of it. 
And the last main division will have to do with cate- 
gories, such as those of final cause and organic unity, 
by which the object is characterised as related to intel- 
ligence, or as having in it that self-determined nature of 
which the intelligence is the highest type ; or to put it 
otherwise, it will have to do with categories by which the 
object is determined as essentially being, or having in 
it, an ideal unity which is reached and realised in and 
through all the manifoldness of its existence. The gen- 
eral argument of the 'Logic,' when we pursue it through 
all these stages, therefore is this: that reality, which at 
first is present to us as the Being of things which are 
regarded as standing each by itself, determined in quality 
and quantity, but as having no necessary relations to each 
other, comes in the process of thought to be known as 
an endless aggregate: of essentially related and transitory 
existences, each of which exists only as it determines 
and is det ermined by the others, according to universal 
laws, and finally, is discovered to lie in a world of 
objects, each and all of which exist only in so far as 
they exist for intelligence, and in so far as intelligence is 
revealed or realised in them. And that this, indeed, is 
the movement of thought by which the reality of things 
is disclosed, is proved by the demonstration that the 



166 Hegel. 

categories of Being, used in the first attitude of thought, 
which corresponds to our simplest and most unsophisti- 
cated consciousness of things, when fully understood 
and reasoned out, necessarily lead us to the categories of 
Eelation, employed in the second attitude of thought, 
which corresponds generally to the scientific or reflective 
consciousness ; and that these in turn, when fully com- 
prehended and pressed to their consequences, necessarily 
pass into the categories of Ideal Unity, or, as it is some- 
times expressed, "the notion," categories used in the 
third stage of consciousness, Avhich corresponds to philo- 
sophy. Science is the truth of common-sense, because 
the points of view from which the former considers the 
world, include and transcend the points of view from 
which it is regarded by the latter; and philosophy is 
the truth of science for the same reason, because it is 
science and something more. This something more, 
however, in each case is not merely something externally 
added to what went before ; it is a vital growth from 
it, a transformation which takes place in it, by reason 
of latent forces that are already present. In this way 
self-consciousness the last category or point of view 
is seen to sum up and interpret all that went before ; for 
while, like our first immediate consciousness of things, it 
is a direct assertion of independent Being and while, 
like reflection, it includes difference and relation, it goes 
beyond both in so far as it expresses the integration 
of differences a relation of elements which, though 
opposed, are yet identified. 

To attempt to prove these points in detail would be 
to work out again the whole process of the Hegelian 
Logic. The general account of it just given may, how- 



The Prcescimtijic Conscwusness. 167 

over, lje made a little more distinct, if we consider more 
closely the process of knowledge as it advances through 
science to philosophy, jit is obvious that the beginning 
of knowledge lies in taking things by themselves, as 
they lie before ns in perception ; in excluding all precon- 
ceptions, and accurately observing their qualities, and 
determining the quantity of each quality. Such observa- 
tion is the first indispensable basis of science ; but it can 
hardly yet itself be called science. It deserves the name, 
if at all, only where the observer, in his selection of facts 
to observe and his determination of their relative import- 
ance, is really guided by ideas of relation of which he is 
not definitely conscious ; for scientific genius shows itself 
first in a kind of " instinct of reason," which anticipative- 
ly apprehends the fruitful direction for observation and 
experiment. But the pure observer soon finds that the 
qualities and quantities with which he deals are con- 
tinually changing, and that the intelligence cannot find 
in them the fixed object which it seeks, unless it is able 
to go beyond them or beneath them to something that 
cannot be observed. Such a deeper reality, such a prin- 
ciple of permanence in change, is already suggested to 
him by the fact that he does not find the quality and 
quantity of things to change altogether irrespectively of 
each other, but to be linked together in a certain mutual 
dependence, so that, with a little more or a little less of 
the same element, the quality of a thing is suddenly 
altered. But this, as a mere fact, is not any longer 
sufficient for him, when he has come to apprehend that 
change of quality is not an accidental or partial pheno- 
menon, but that every quality as it exists is in process 
of changing. Thus the final experience of that mode of 



168 Hegel 

thought, which fixes each finite thing to itself and takes 
it to be only what it is in itself, is that such things can 
quite as truly be said "not to be" as "to be." Their 
being is a "becoming" or change. Unless, therefore, 
we can get beyond this continual flux of unsubstantial 
things, this endless change of phenomena, the intelli- 
gence is denuded of its objects, and falls back upon itself 
in scepticism. This, in fact, is the first natural effect 
of the growing consciousness that appearances things 
as they are immediately present to us for observation 
are essentially inconstant and fluctuating; for by this 
experience all that common- sense held to be reality is dis- 
cerned to be unreal, and as yet nothing else had disclosed 
itself to take the place of that which has disappeared. 
In this scepticism, however, science is born ; science, 
of which the essential characteristic is to recognise that 
things are not as they seem, but that beyond and 
through the seeming we can apprehend that which 
really is, the one force through the manifold expres- 
sion, the abiding law through the fleeting phenomena. 
The scientific or reflective consciousness, therefore, may 
be said to begin with the negation of the immediate 
reality of finite things, and to aim at finding some 
deeper ground or principle in reference to Avhich they 
may be conceived to have a kind of secondary or 
mediated reality. 

This scientific consciousness has, however, a certain 
growth or development within itself by which its first 
antagonistic or dualistic mode of thought is gradually 
transcended and transmuted. And as in the first stage 
of thought, which began with purely affirmative deter- 
mination of things, as if they existed in themselves, 



Sc lent iju f f o nsc io usness. 169 

independent of all relation, there was a continual pro- 
gress toward the recognition of the negative or relative 
aspect of them, the aspect in which they are seen to he 
essentially finite and transitory; so in this second stage, 
which hegins with the absolute contrast of real and 
apparent, substance and accident, there is a continual 
progress toward an ever clearer apprehension of the 
essential connection of these two opposite aspects of 
things, and finally, to the discerning of the unity that 
binds them to each other. At first, as is natural, 
the opposition is stated most strongly, so strongly 
that it seems to involve a denial of all relations what- 
ever; as when, in the early Eleatic school, the "one" 
was abstractly opposed to the "many," which was re- 
garded as purely apparent and unreal. But it was 
soon recognised that, by this, absolute separation, both 
terms are deprived of their meaning. If the many, 
the changing, the phenomenal, is unreal in the sense 
that it contains its negative in itself, equally unreal is 
the one, the permanent, the substance, which is ab- 
stractly opposed to these, and which is, in fact, nothing 
but that negative positively expressed. Plato, and still 
more Aristotle, found that what was wanted was not 
" the one beyond the many " merely, but " the one in the 
many." And the progress of science up to the present 
day has been a continuous advance towards the recon- 
ciliation of the two terms in a conception of the inner 
reality or principle of things, which should make that 
reality or principle the complete explanation, and noth- 
ing but the explanation, of their external appearances 
and changing phenomena. Looking at this progressive 
movement of the scientific consciousness, we can under 



170 Hegel. 

stand how it is that modern science, though it lias not 
itself got beyond the dualism of phenomenal and real, 
yet takes up so marked an attitude of antagonism to the 
more decided dualism of earlier days, and is prone to 
denounce as " metaphysical " what is really just an 
initial stage of its own mode of thought. Thus, for 
example, Comte condemns the reference of phenomena 
to " forces " and " substances," which are, he maintains, 
either pure negations or the abstract repetitions of the 
phenomena they are adduced to explain. Science, in 
his view, should confine itself to the investigation of 
the " laws " of the resemblance, coexistence, and succes- 
sion of phenomena, these laws being regarded simply as 
the generalised restatement of the phenomena themselves. 
In thus speaking, however, Comte is really admitting 
what he seems to deny. Such "generalised restate- 
ment " is obviously something more than a simple 
reaffirmation of the phenomena themselves. A law 
is at once the negation and the reaffirmation of the 
phenomena that fall under it : it is contrasted with 
them, as permanent with changing, as unity with mul- 
tiplicity, and yet it is one with them, as the principle 
by reference to which alone they are lifted above mere 
appearances, or illusions of the moment. The defect, 
however, of this whole scientific mode of thought is that, 
while it goes beyond the immediate phenomena to seek 
for an explanation of them, it is never able to find a 
complete explanation. For the principle, to which the 
phenomena are thus referred, never exhausts their mean- 
ing, but rather itself presupposes those very phenomena. 
Tn other words, the law, which is supposed to explain 
the phenomena, though necessarily distinguished from 



Defects of Scientific Thought. 171 

them, is essentially related to them, and, in its turn, 
looks for explanation to them. This double aspect of 
the idea of law sometimes leads writers who are not 
clearly conscious of their own categories into a curious 
inconsistency of statement. For, while at one time they 
tell us that the law is merely the generalised expression 
of the phenomena, as if their translation into the form 
of law were something indifferent and unnecessary, at 
another time they declare with equal emphasis that we 
know the phenomena only when we know their laws, as 
if the law were not merely a generalised repetition of 
the phenomena, but the central principle, in reference 
to which alone the true value and significance of the 
phenomena can be known. 

The key to the difficulty, however, is found when it 
is seen that the scientific mode of thought, though neces- 
sary as a stage of knowledge, has an essential imperfec- 
tion clinging to it, which can be corrected only by going 
beyond it to the philosophical mode of thought, or what 
Hegel calls the Begriff. In scientific reflection we 
have always two terms which are essentially related, and 
in one of which the explanation of the other is sought. 
Yet, just because of this essential relation, the explana- 
tion can never be complete. The categories used arc 
such as substance and accident, force and expression, 
inner and outer being, cause and effect. In each of 
these cases we have an essential relation of tAvo terms 
of such a kind that, though the explanation of the 
second term is always sought in the first, yet the first 
term has no significance except in relation to the second. 
We have, therefore, in employing such categories, neces- 
sarily involved ourselves in a self-contradiction, the self- 



172 Hegel, 

contradiction of explaining everything by a term, which 
yet is essentially relative to that which is to be explained. 
Thus we explain the accidents by referring them to the 
substance ; but the substance has no meaning apart from 
the accidents. Nor does it make any difference if, in- 
stead of such a reciprocity of terms, we have a series, as 
when we say that the cause explains the effect, but is 
itself to be explained by the effect of another cause ; for 
this further need of explanation simply means that the 
cause does not fully explain its effect. Its difference 
from the effect, and its essential relation to it, is the 
very reason that forces us to seek explanation of it in 
another cause. We have therefore, in this and every 
similar movement of thought, a contradiction which 
needs to be solved : for that which is set up in opposi- 
tion to the relative as absolute, and, itidced, as its abso- 
lute, is yet itself correlative Avith it, and so again must 
be recognised as nut being absolute. Those who deal in 
such categories, therefore, fall into a kind of fluctuation 
or alternation of language, of which the above-men- 
tioned uncertainty in regard to law is one instance, 
Nor is this fluctuation a mere accident. The category 
that rules their thoughts forces them to contradict them- 
selves, as it turns first one and then the other of its 
sides to the light. For the most part, however, tbey do 
not bring together the different aspects of their thought, 
and hence they do not feel the difficulty, or the need of 
solving it by a higher category. Often, indeed, tins un- 
consciousness may be an advantage in a work, which re- 
quires rather the thorough and unhesitating application 
of a category than the perception of its limits. For, as 
the higher categories have their full value, only when 



Science and Philosophy . 173 

they come as the solution of difficulties which arise out of 
the lower categories, so the philosophical explanation of 
things, by means of the former, can only be legitimately 
arrived at as the last reinterpretatioii of the scientific 
explanation of them by means of the latter. But, on the 
other hand, the unresolved dualism, which is left by the 
application of the scientific categories, shows the neces- 
sity of a reinterpretatioii of the results of science by other 
higher categories, as it also shows that this reinterpreta- 
tioii which constitutes the peculiar work of philosophy 
is no mere useless or extraneous addition to science, 
but a necessary development of it. Comte, indeed, as 
we have seen, has an easier method of dealing with the 
difficulty, by simply denying altogether the distinction 
between real and phenomenal, between fact and law, 
which gives rise to it. But this, if it Avere taken as 
meaning what it expresses, would be no true solution of 
the problem, but simply a recurrence to that first sensuous 
consciousness for which the opposition of seeming and 
reality did not exist, a consciousness which must be 
disturbed and overthrown, ere even the dawn of science 
is possible. For the doubt and wonder in which science 
arises, is the doubt and wonder that things are not what 
they seem ; and if it is possible, again to find the reality 
in the seeming, it must be by a reconciliation of those 
opposites, and not simply by obliterating the opposition. 
Where, then, are we to find such a complete reconcilia- 
tion 1 The highest conception of the world which science 
presents to us is the conception of a multiplicity of sub- 
stances, acting and reacting on each other, and by their 
action and reaction producing continual changes in each 
other according to unchanging laws. Each substance, 



174 Hegd. 

thus, by the condition of its being, stands in relation to 
that which is opposed to it, and which gives rise to 
changes in it ; yet each maintains itself in change, in so 
far as it changes according to a law i.e., it has a definite 
relation to the other substance, which manifests itself in 
its change. In this way of looking at things, hoAvever, 
there is a certain ambiguity and inconsistency. For, 
while we start with the idea of isolated substances 
which have an existence of their own, and which change 
only because they are brought into relation to each other, 
it appears as we go on that what maintains itself is the 
law of the relation itself, apart from which the sub- 
stances have no existence whatever. Substantiality and 
Kelativity are thus seen to be not two ideas, but one, 
and the truth is to be found not in either separately 
but in their union ; which means that nothing can be 
said to be substantial in the sense of having an exist- 
ence independent of relation, but only in the sense of 
including its relativity in its own being. In other 
words, nothing is substantial except in so far as it is 
a subject or self which maintains itself in change, be- 
cause its change is determined by its own nature, and is 
indeed only the necessary manifestation of that nature. 
To speak of different substances, which yet have no in- 
dependent nature apart from their action and reaction 
on each other, is a manifest contradiction ; for the neces- 
sity to which, according to this view, the different sub- 
stances are supposed to be subjected, is itself the only 
true substance. Or what we really have before us in 
such a reciprocity is not a duality of things externally 
related, but a unity which expresses itself and maintains 
itself in duality. The real substance has to be sought 



Necessity ctnd Freedom. 175 

for, not in the two things taken separately, but in the 
principle which divides, and at the same time unites, 
them. Determination by another is thus always ulti- 
mately to be explained as self-determination, though we 
may have to seek the self in question somewhere else 
than in the things which were at first taken to be sub- 
stantial, but which may turn out to be mere " moments " 
or elements in some higher existence. This is what Hegel 
means by saying that the " truth of necessity is freedom." 
Necessity exists for any thing or being only in so far 
as it is determined by another, and if it has no life or 
movement of its own which is not so determined, it in 
itself has no reality whatever that should make us regard 
it as an individual thing or substance at all : it is but 
one side or phase of the existence of something else, 
which is not determined by another, but by itself. The 
ultimate reality of things, therefore, which the common 
consciousness seeks in their purely unrelated or indepen- 
dent being, and which science seeks in their existence as 
essentially related to each other, is only to be found in 
Avhat we may call their ideal character, as unities of cor- 
relative differences, or unities which manifest themselves 
in difference yet in this difference are still one with 
themselves. Thus that alone can truly be called a reality 
which maintains and realises itself in a process of dif- 
ferentiation and reintegration of differences. " Nothing 
really exists which is not determined and relative, 
nothing which is not in a process of becoming or 
change." This was proved by the first stage of the 
1 Logic,' which carried us from the immediate conscious- 
ness of things to science. " Nothing really exists which 
is not self-determined and self-related, which has not a 



170 Htgd. 

self which it maintains through all its changes." This is 
proved hy the second stage of the ' Logic,' which carries 
us from the first scientific consciousness of the opposition 
of appearances and reality, to the perception that the 
real manifests itself in the appearance and its change : 
or, Avhat is the same thing, the perception that what we 
call the real is fundamentally ideal. For, whereas to 
the reflective consciousness the ideal seems to he an ab- 
stract law or principle, which is different from the facts, 
or represents only one side of the facts, through which 
we apprehend it, it is now seen that this ideal unity 
is the fact of facts, the principle from which they all 
spring, and to which they return. Reality lies, not, 
as common-sense supposes, in the mere individual taken 
hy itself nor, as science seems to teach, in the mere 
particular which is related to other particulars ; it lies 
in the relation, or principle of relation, itself, in the 
universal which differentiates or particularises itself and 
yet is one with itself in its particularity. Or, to express 
all in a word, " the real is the rational or intelligible ; " 
i.e., it is that which is capable of being thoroughly un- 
derstood by the intelligence, just because it has in it the 
essential nature of the intelligence or self-consciousness, 
as a unity which is one with itself, not by the absence 
of difference, but rather by means of the difference, 
which it at once asserts and overcomes. Ij 

The idea which we are now examining may be illus- 
trated by the Leibnitzian conception of the world as a 
universe of monads, each of which is itself a world. 
Each monad or real substance, on this view, is a micro- 
cosm, which ideally, or in its perception*, takes the 
whole life of the world into itself, and yet, in spite of 



Defect of Monadism. 177 

all this ideal relativity, is not really determined l>y 
anything but itself. Each is thus in itself a reflection 
of the whole, while yet it remains a complete whole 
in itself, developing entirely for itself in absolute free- 
dom through all the changes of its purely inward life, 
though these changes correspond exactly to the outward 
movements of the great world without it. In this way, 
by the distinction of the real and ideal aspects of the 
monad, Leibnitz thinks to avoid the difficulty of com- 
bining in it the opposite conceptions of relativity and 
independent being, universality and individuality, 
ssity or determination by others and freedom or 
determination by itself. This .distinction is, however, 
really ;m evasion of the difficulty, and Leibnitz himself 
is obliged to give it up in relation to Clod, the monad 
of monads, in whom, as the absolute unity of ideality 
and reality, lie finds the ground of the harmony between 
the perceptions of each monad and the existence of the 
rest, and the reason why, notwithstanding their indepen- 
dence, they form parts of one world. Thus, though in 
relation to each other these monads may be free, in re- 
lation to God they have no freedom or self-determination 
whatever. 

At this point, however, we come upon a great diffi- 
culty which arises in connection with the conception of 
reality which has just been presented. So soon as we 
are driven to recognise that reality can be found in that 
and that only which has a principle of self-determination 
in itself, we seem forced to recognise that the only 
reality is God. Though, therefore, the necessity of 
nature may have been shown to be freedom, yet it 
would seem that there is room for only one freedom in 

I'. -VII. M 



178 Hegel. 

the world, the freedom of the absolute Being, which re- 
duces all other things and beings to his mere deter- 
minations or the modes of his attributes ; and the only 
other alternative to this would seem to be a monadism 
which isolates each substance from all the others, and 
absolutely confines it to itself, and which leaves room 
neither for ideal nor for real relations between it and 
anything else. In order to escape from this dilemma we 
would require what at first must seem to be an absolute 
contradiction viz., such an idea of the absolute unity 
to which we are obliged to refer all existence, as should 
yet leave room for a real freedom and independence, a 
real self-centred life, in other beings than itself. And if 
such a conception is impossible, Ave do not seem to have 
gained much more by referring all things to an absolute 
subject, than if we had referred them merely to an abso- 
lute substance. 

Now it is the main work of the third part of the 
1 Logic ' to develop such an idea out of the simple con- 
ception of the monad or self - determining principle, 
which was the result reached by the second part of it. 
Here, as in the other cases, we must confine ourselves 
to indicating the general thought which runs through 
this development. The key to the difficulty was partly 
seen by Leibnitz himself, -when he pointed out that a 
true organism is a unity of organisms, organic in all its 
parts. The life of the body is not a principle that 
dominates over dead in embers, and uses them as instru- 
ments to realise itself ; it is in all the members, so that 
each of them in turn may be regarded as means and 
end to the others. There is, no doubt, a unity of the 
whole that subordinates all the parts, but it only sub- 



The Idea of Sdf-determmatimi. 170 

ordinate* them, so to speak, by surrendering or impart- 
ing itself to them, and giving to them a certain indepen- 
dent life, a life which, though embraced in a wider 
circle, is still centred in itself. Xow a ^//-determining 
principle, as such, is necessarily of this sort; it is not 
like a law which is imposed upon a foreign matter, for 
its only matter is itself. In determining, it determines it- 
self; in producing differences, it produces itself in them. 
Its assertion or manifestation of itself is, therefore, in a 
sense, a denying of itself, a giving of itself away. Its 
life is a dying to live. It is true that we must add 
that this negation of itself can never be absolute. In 
the differences and opposition the unity must be main- 
tained. The independence of the separate organs in the 
body must not be such as to break their connection 
with each other, and with the unity of the whole. But 
this connection is maintained, not by an external sub- 
ordination, but by the completeness with Avhich the life 
of the whole is communicated to the parts, so that, to 
realise themselves', they must become subservient to it. 
In like manner a Avorld in which the central principle 
is a self-determining Being, while, in one aspect of it, 
it seems to be a unity in which no room is left for 
difference, in another aspect of it breaks into an infinite 
number of fragments, each of which seems to be centred 
in itself. It is not like the universe of Spinoza, in which 
every difference of mind is lost in the abstract attribute 
of infinite intelligence, and every distinction of matter 
in the abstract attribute of infinite extension; it is a 
universe in which " every thought is a truth, and every 
particle of dust an organisation ; " a macrocosm made up 
of microcosms, which is all in every part. 



] 80 Eegd. 

"Flower in the crannied wall, 
1 pluck you out of the crannies ; 
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower, but if I could understand 

What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is." 

Under such a conception the usual antithesis of in- 
dividualism and pantheism fails us, and our idea of the 
world seems to involve both at once, or to fall into a 
kind of alternation between them, such as is found in 
tin 1 monadism of Leibnitz, or in the later theory of 
Schelling, in which all the differences of things were 
said to he " not qualitative hut merely quantitative," I.e., 
to be differences that from the highest point of view 
might he neglected as unessential. This, however, were 
to forget that though the organism is organic in all its 
parts, yet these parts have their specific determination, 
and that it is through this specific determination that 
they form one whole. It were to forget that though a 
self-determining principle necessarily is present in its 
determinations, and gives them thus a certain indepen- 
dence, yet that they in turn are limited in themselves, 
and only maintain themselves as the principle realises 
itself in them ; or, in other Avords, as they in turn sur- 
render themselves to the life of the whole. Their capa- 
city of so surrendering themselves, in short, is the measure 
of their reality. Thus the unity as a self-determining 
principle is in the differences, hut it is also in their 
negation, by which they pass beyond themselves as 
individuals and so return into the unity. 

" The reality is the universal, which goes out of itself, 
particularises itself, opposes itself to itself, that it may 



Idea of Organic Unity. 181 

reach the deepest and most comprehensive unity with 
itself." .Such expressions seem to be breaking through 
the very limits of language, by continual self-contradic- 
tion ; yet they only distinctly analyse a thought which 
we continually use without analysis when we speak of a 
self, of self-consciousness or of self-determination. And 
as it has been shown that the " truth of necessity is free- 
dom," we are compelled by the very development of the 
scientific conception of law to recognise that the .ulti- 
mate interpretation of things must be in harmony with 
this idea. This, as we have seen, is equivalent to saying 
that the world is an organic unity. By the organic 
unity of the world, however, it- is not meant merely that 
the world as a whole is to be interpreted on the anklogy 
of the living body, or of a plant or animal. Such an 
organism only imperfectly realises the idea of which we 
are speaking; and if the world were organic in this 
fashion, it would not be a self-determined whole, in 
which all differences were brought back to unity. Or, 
even if we suppose all the differences of the world as an 
objective system could be brought to unity by means of 
such an idea, the thought or consciousness for which it 
exists would be left out; for the animal, though an 
organic unity, is not such a unity for itself. It prob- 
ably never rises above the stage of feeling, in which the 
self is not yet clearly distinguished from, and related 
to, the world without. The supreme difference of sub- 
ject and object is wanting to, or imperfectly expressed 
in, its life, and therefore there is not in it the possibility 
of the supreme reconciliation of intelligence with itself. 
If, therefore, the conception of an ideal or self-determin- 
ing principle, with which we begin this third stage of 



182 Hegel. 

the Logic, be fully developed, it will be seen to find its 
final form and expression only in self-consciousness, as 
the unity in difference of subject and object, self and 
not-self ; for here only have we an ideal principle which 
is conscious of itself, and, consequently, complete in 
itself ; here only have we a principle which develops to 
the utmost difference and opposition against itself, and 
yet returns into transparent unity with itself. 

This may be seen more clearly if we consider what the 
life of self -consciousness is. In the first place, self- 
consciousness presupposes consciousness i.e., it is a 
consciousness of self in opposition, yet in relation, to a 
not-self. Yet in this distinction a higher unity is presup- 
posed ; for the self can be conscious of itself as so dis- 
tinguished and related, only in so far as it overreaches 
the distinction between itself and its object. Thus 
beneath the conscious duality of self and not-self there 
is an unconscious unity, which reveals itself in the fact 
that the whole life of an intelligence is an effort to over- 
come its own dualism, in knowledge to find itself, in 
action to realise itself, in an object or a world of objects, 
which at first presents itself as a stranger and even an 
enemy. For, as we have seen in our review of the 
previous stages of the 'Logic,' the world for the im- 
mediate consciousness of man is merely a world of 
things unrelated even to each other; and even when 
science so far overcomes this first consciousness, so as to 
discover law or relation in them, yet this relativity is 
not yet unity, not yet the pure transparent identity-in- 
difference of self-consciousness. Hence the intelligence 
cannot yet find itself in the object, or, what is the same 
thing, cannot see the essential relation of the object to 



TJie Absolute Idea. 183 

itself. When, however, we become conscious that the 
truth of necessity is freedom, or, in other words, that 
the reality of things is to be found in the ideal unity or 
self-determining principle realised in them, the mask of 
strangeness is taken from the face of nature, and we 
begin to find in it the same spiritual principle which we 
arc conscious of in ourselves. The world, however it 
may seem to oppose, is really the field for the realisation 
of intelligence; if it seems to resist us, it is because we 
are not yet at one with ourselves. For " all things must 
work together " for him whose nature is reason, and 
whose activity is only to realise himself as reason i.e., 
to realise the spiritual principle, which is at the same time 
his own nature and the nature of things. The Avholo 
theoretical and practical movement of self-consciousness 
thus culminates in what Hegel calls "the absolute idea" 
i.e., in the idea of a self-consciousness which manifests 
itself in the difference of self and not-self, that through 
this difference, and by overcoming it, it may attain 
the highest unity with itself. This, the last category, 
contains and implies all the other categories ; and, in 
another way, it has been shown to be implied in each 
and all of them. For what the whole 'Logic' has proved 
is, that if we take the categories seriously, abstracting 
from all subjective associations, and fixing our attention 
on their objective dialectic, or, in other words, if we 
leave the categories to define themselves by the necessary 
movement of thought through which they carry us, 
they lead us in the end to this idea of self-consciousness 
as their ultimate meaning or truth. 

From the above sketch of the ' Logic,' which is neces- 
sarily somewhat summary and therefore external, it may 



184 Hegel. 

at least be seen what is the general character of the 
task which Hegel proposed to himself. It was nothing 
hut the completion of that work which had been begun by 
Plato in the ' Parmenides ' and the ' Sophist,' and which 
had first reached something like a systematic form in the 
' Metaphysic ' of Aristotle. For it was Plato Avho first 
separated the categories from their concrete application, 
and tried to follow out for itself the dialectic which be- 
longs to them when thus taken as independent objects. 
And it was Aristotle who first tried to gather these first 
principles of Being and Knowing into a systematic whole, 
culminating in the idea of the absolute reality, or of God as 
the " absolute self -consciousness" (vorjo-is vorytrews). Hegel 
came back to the task with all the advantages of the 
modern development of science, by which the categories 
of reflection had been brought into clear consciousness, 
and shown to contain the keys to the secrets of nature. 
He came back to it after Kant had proved that the cate- 
gories are only forms of expression for the unity of self- 
consciousness in relation to the world of objects. What 
remained for him, therefore, was to show that these 
categories are simply the necessary differentiation of the 
unity of intelligence ; or, what is the same thing, that the 
idea of self-consciousness is the complete integration of 
them all. So far as he was successful in this, the result 
of his Avork was to overcome the dualism, which Aristotle 
had still left, between the pure intelligence and the intel- 
ligible world which is its object. For if, as Kant had 
shown, objects exist only for the conscious self and 
through application of the categories, and if all these 
categories, from the simplest conception of Being up to 
the most complex idea of causality and final causality, are. 



The Real and the Rational, 185 

but elements or moments of a truth which is completely 

stated only in the idea of self-consciousness, it follows 
that the objective world is and can be nothing but the 
manifestation of intelligence, or the means whereby it 
attains the fullest realisation of itself. Thus it is proved 
that there is a spiritual principle of unity, a principle 
of unity which is renewed in every conscious self, 
underlying all the antagonisms of the world, even its 
apparent antagonism to spirit itself. For such a self, 
therefore, there can be no absolute limit, or irreconcil 
able division, within or without. The native faith of 
the intelligence in itself has been justified by a thorough 
discussion and exhaustion of all the sources of scepti- 
cism. In spite of the apparent contingency or external 
necessity by which things seem to be ruled, it has been 
shown that "that only is real which is rational;" and in 
spite of the resistance which things present to what 
seem to be our highest aims and endeavours, it has 
been shown that " that only is rational which is real." 



186 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE APPLICATION UK DEVELOPMENT OF THE LOGICAL 

IDEA RELATION OF THE HEGELIAN PRINOTPLB TO 

CHRISTIANITY. 

The account of the Hegelian Logic given in the last 
chapter may serve as at least a partial answer to some 
of the ordinary objections made to it, objections based 
upon the absoluteness of distinctions to which it attaches 
only a subordinate importance. The Hegelian Logic is 
at once a Logic and a Metaphysic i.e., it treats at once 
of the method and of the matter of knowledge, of the 
processes by which truth is discovered, and of the truth 
itself in its most universal aspects. In Hegel's view there 
is no merely formal process of intelligence no process of 
intelligence which is not also a determination of its ob- 
ject by categories ; and the advance from less to more 
perfect knowledge is a continual transition from one cate- 
gory to another by which that determination is changed, 
and made more complete and accurate. "While, there- 
fore, knowledge is a process which, in its first aspect, 
seems to involve the negation of intellectual activity, 
and the absolute surrender of the mind to an indifferent 
and external object, it is really a process in which the 



A Priori and a Posteriori. 187 

mind is continually bringing that object more and more 
within the net of its categories, and changing its aspect, 
tdl all its strangeness has disappeared, and it has been 
made one with the thought that apprehends it. Thus 
the investigation of the object turns out to be at the 
same time the evolution of the mind in relation to it ; 
and the highest category by which it is determined is 
at the same time the discovery of its essential relativity 
to the mind for which it is, and the recognition that 
in thus dealing with an object, the mind is really deal- 
ing with itself or in other words, with something that 
forms an essential element in its consciousness of self. 
Thus the perfect revelation of what the object is, is 
also the return of intelligence into itself, or rather the 
discovery that in all its travels, it has never really gone 
beyond itself. The highest fruit of knowledge is the 
deepening of self-consciousness. 

We may illustrate this view by reference to the ordi- 
nary opposition of a priori and a posteriori. According 
to Leibnitz, all knowledge was developed from within, 
however it might appear to come from without ; for the 
monad evolved all its ideas and perceptions from itself 
by a pure a priori process. To Locke, on the other 
hand, or at least to many of the school of Locke, know- 
ledge was a filling of the mind with experience from 
without, an inscription written by a foreign hand upon 
a tabula ram. The more ordinary compromise is that 
knowledge is partly apriori and partly a posteriori, that 
we get facts from without, but "necessary ideas" from 
within. Xow Hegel does not adopt either of the two 
opposing methods, nor yet the compromise between 
them. He maintains that all knowledge is a posteriori 



188 Hcyrf. 

in one point of view, and that all knowledge is a prion 
in another. | All is a posteriori; for no knowledge what- 
ever is possible to the mind except through experience, 
and even its consciousness of self is possible only in 
relation to the not-self. Yet all knowledge is a priori, 
for this empirical process, which seems at first to be 
merely the introduction of foreign matter- into the 
mind, is really its own evolution, and our highest 
knowledge is that in which Ave come to the conscious- 
ness of this ideal nature of things, and so transcend 
altogether the opposition of fact and idea. Hegel is 
simply following the footsteps of Aristotle, who, though 
he continually insists that all knowledge is derived from 
experience, also declares that the mind is " potentially 
all that is knowable," and that " fully realised know- 
ledge is identical with its object," i.e., that the full 
development of the knowledge of the intelligible world, 
as such, is one with the evolution of thought to complete 
consciousness of self. 

The reasons by which Hegel was led to this view 
will be evident if Ave go back for a moment to Kant. 
Kant appears to adopt the compromise that knowledge 
is partly a priori and partly a posteriori; but he secretly 
undermines it by the assertion that the a priori element 
is the form, and the a posteriori element the mailer, of 
knowledge. For if by the form be meant the condi- 
tions under which the object is knowable, we cannot 
separate the a posteriori from the a priori. There are 
no " facts " as opposed to " ideas ; " for the simplest fact 
Ave can mention already implies certain ideal principles, 
by. which it is determined as a fact in relation to other 
facts and to the mind that knows it. The intelligence, 



A J'r'mri and a Posteriori. 189 

in so far as it "makes nature," cannot be opposed to 

nature, as one object is opposed to another, for, so far, 
nature and intelligence are identical. Kant, however, 
confines the identity of nature and intelligence to certain 
general principles or laws, and supposes that beyond 
this there is a contingent element which is " given " to 
the intelligence under conditions of space and time, but 
not otherwise determined by it. Hence he thinks that 
the special laws which we discover in nature cannot be 
anticipated a priori, tin nigh the general principles of 
quantity, quality, and relation can be so anticipated. 
There is, therefore, so to speak, an a posteriori residuum 
in nature, or rather it is all a posteriori except the most 
general laws, to which the unity of knowing and being 
is limited. Fur though nature has in it all the content 
of mind, it has also a great deal more, which for mind 
is simply posteriori matter of information, received 
from without, or at least from some unknown source. 
Now Hegel carried out the unity of knowing and 
being, and so of a priori and a posteriorly to complete 
identity, by taking two steps beyond Kant, one of 
which has been indicated. In the first place, as we 
have seen, he added a new genus to Kant's genera of 
categories, the categories of " ideal unity ; " or, what is 
the same thing from another side, he conceived the 
process of knowledge as including another stage beyond 
those enumerated by Kant the stage, namely, of philoso- 
phy as distinguished from science, of reason as distin- 
guished from reflection or understanding. In the second 
place, by the taking this step, Hegel was enabled to 
lake another; for the categories of reason, and especi- 
ally the idea of the unity of subject and object in which 



190 Hegd. 

the 'Logic' ends, enabled Hegel to connect the forms of 
perception, space and time, with the forms of thought, 
in a way that was not possible for Kant, for whom the 
categories of reflection categories like causality and reci- 
procity were the last scientific determination of nature. 
In other words, Hegel's widened conception of the logi- 
cal forms and processes enabled him to bridge over the 
gulf which, for Kant, separated the a posteriori from the 
a priori, the manifold world of objects in time and space 
from the pure unity of thought or consciousness with 
itself. We can only indicate in a general way how 
this was possible. 

So long as the laws of causality and reciprocity were 
conceived to be the ultimate principles of science, it was 
impossible that the gulf between the form and the 
matter of science should be filled up. These laws pre- 
suppose a matter which is external to themselves, and to 
the nature of which they afford us no clue. They are 
principles in accordance Avith which we investigate the 
relations of things, but which do not enable us to de- 
termine the particular nature of the things so related. 
The complete application of these principles, therefore, 
and the discovery of the laws of nature by means of 
them, seems still to leave the intelligence outside of 
the things it thus comes to know. The laws of gravi- 
tation, of chemical affinity, of electric polarity, seem 
still to be purely objective truths, indifferent and ex- 
ternal to the mind that apprehends them. They may 
awake in the imagination an anticipation or presentment 
of the unity of nature and spirit, but they do not clearly 
reveal that unity to the understanding. But it is differ- 
ent when we begin to apply such categories as self- 



Objects without Sttbject. 19] 

determination, final causality, organic unity, and the 
like. In that which is in any sense self-determined, 
the intelligence recognises its counterpart. Such a 
recognition, taking place in an immediate and unreflect- 
ing way, is what unites self-conscious heings to each 
other, and, in a minor sense, to all living heings. In 
man's earliest consciousness of the world, indeed, no 
distinct line is drawn between what has consciousness 
and what has merely life, or between what has life and 
what has not. The advance of reflection, however, 
gradually narrows the familiar Avorld, as it intensifies 
man's consciousness of what he himself is, and his 
sense of difference from the rest of the universe. He 
becomes accustomed to regard objects as determined not 
by themselves, but by other objects, until to modern 
science this mode of viewing them seems the only 
natural one, and instead of finding its own freedom 
in the world, the mind rather begins to consider itself, 
like all other objects, as subjected to the law of external 
necessity. So conceiving of itself as well as of every- 
thing else, or rather regarding the universe as one in 
which, strictly speaking, there is no self present what* 
ever, the intelligence is, as it were, estranged from itself 
and the world. Nature and human nature have both 
alike become for it mere objects without any subject, 
though the real objectivity and necessity of man's life 
is strangely perplexed by an illusion of freedom. Con- 
sciousness, as Professor Huxley represents it, is the 
occasional inactive spectator of a world with which it 
has nothing to do, and in which it falsely imagines 
itself to have the power to do anything. So far from 
finding itself, its own subjectivity, in the objective world 



192 Kegel 

which it observes, the intelligence finds nothing but an 
object even in itself. 

Now the application of such categories as " self- 
determination" or "organic unity" to the world, still 
more the recognition that in these categories is found 
" the truth " or ultimate meaning of all other categories, 
involves a complete inversion of this way of thinking. 
It involves the denial of external necessity as the final 
explanation of anything, and teaches us to seek for 
self-determination, not only in self-conscious beings and 
animals, but, in a sense, even in what Ave call dead 
matter. It makes us regard the world as an organism 
in which even what is termed by distinction the in- 
organic is a vital part or organ. The partial prevalence 
of this mode of thought is shown by the tendency of 
this century, as contrasted with the last, to regard 
human society as an organism, a whole in which there 
is some kind of unity or self which is present in every 
part, and not as a mere collection of units externally 
related to each other. Very often this tendency is accom- 
panied by an imperfect analysis of the idea of organism, 
which practically degrades it to the category of "recipro- 
cal influence;" so that a writer who insists on the organic 
nature of society, will sometimes be found all but deny- 
ing that an animal is anything more than the resultant 
of the action and reaction of its parts. A Comtist, 
however, who tells us that " the family," or that 
" humanity," is a reality, but who vehemently attacks 
the doctrine that "the soul" is anything but an abstrac- 
tion, should look well to the security of the branch 
upon which he is sitting. The soul is an abstraction 
in the same sense, as the family is an abstraction i.e., 



Comtist view of Humanity. 193 

it does not exist without the members, but as a living 
principle of self-determination in them ; but the mem- 
bers also are " abstractions " without it. The imperfect 
realisation of what is involved in a category does not, 
however, affect the truth of the "instinct of reason," 
which leads to its application. It proves only that 
categories which rule the mind are, as not seldom 
happens, at Avar with those of which it is distinctly 
conscious. 

The Comtist conception of humanity as an organism 
in an inorganic world a world to which man as an 
organism is not essentially related, but which, in spite of, 
and even by reason of, its opposition, he gradually sub- 
ordinates to his own needs, or turns into an instrument 
for the realisation of himself is a temporary compro- 
mise of philosophy. And, like other compromises, it 
does complete justice to neither of the opposite modes 
of thought which it would combine, neither to the 
ssary relation between man and the medium in 
which he lives, nor to the self-determination of men in 
relation to that medium. To do such justice is possible 
only when it is seen, in the sense explained in the last 
chapter, that " the truth of necessity is freedom." In 
other words, the ultimate explanation of things is to 
be found only when Ave take into account the fact that 
they are essentially related to the intelligence for which 
they exist, and Avhen we recognise that all that so exists 
for intelligence is essentially a manifestation of intelli- 
gence. The object and all things that exist are ob- 
jects is that in opposition, yet in relation, to which 
the subject is conscious of self. It is a form of the 
life of the subject, and it can be that, only as it has 

P. VII. N 



194 Hegel. 

something of the ideal nature of the subject in itself. 
For a self - determined principle is, as Ave have seen, 
one that is determined, only as its self is present in 
all its determinations ; or, to put the same idea in an- 
other form, an organic unity is one in which the whole 
is in every part. When, therefore, Ave once recognise 
that relation to the conscious subject or self is essential 
to every object, Ave are forced, at the same time, to con- 
ceive it like the organ of a living body as having a 
certain independent self-centred being in itself ; for only 
so can it form an element in the life of intelligence. 
Thus the spiritual or ideal meaning of things is their 
ultimate meaning that in which the secret of their ex- 
istence is to be sought. They are real only as they are 
ideal. The scientific interpretation of things in which 
they are referred to themselves, and regarded as inde- 
pendent of thought) must therefore be subjected to a 
reinterpretation, in Avhich Ave correct the abstraction in- 
volved in that way of looking at them, and regard them 
also in their relation to thought. But this neAV interpre- 
tation is so far from taking aAvay their independence, or 
reducing them, according to the common vieAv of ideal- 
ism, to " mere ideas," or phenomena of a subjective con- 
sciousness, that rather it, for the first time, enables us to 
attribute to them a real independence a being which is 
centred in itself. For while the ordinary scientific idea 
of the Avorld as a system in which everything is de- 
termined from Avithout according to the principles of 
causality, annihilates all distinctions and turns all the 
individuality of things into a semblance, the idea of the 
Avorld as an organic system Avhose centre lies in a self- 
conscious intelligence breaks up this levelling fatalism, 



The Universe Organic. 195 

and reveals in every existence a centre of self-individual- 
ising energy. Where, therefore, science seemed to turn 
all things even life and intelligence itself into dead 
matter, which moves only as it is moved by another, 
philosophy, guided by this new idea, is enabled to 
find life even in that which is inorganic and dead. 
"While to the former the facts and laws of the world 
are an absolute a posteriori, in which the intelligence 
cannot find itself, but which it must simply take as they 
are given, without hoping to understand their reason; to 
the latter there are no facts which are not at heart ideas, 
no reality of nature or spirit which can permanently 
remain as an irreducible surd, an external and incompre- 
hensible datum, for the intelligence. The a posteriori is 
but the a priori in the making. In this sense there 
is no presumption in the strong words of Hegel : " The 
nature of the universe, hidden and shut up in itself as it 
is at first, has no power which can permanently resist the 
courageous efforts of the intelligence : it must at last 
open itself up ; it must reveal all its depth and riches 
to the spirit, and surrender them to be enjoyed by it." 
For this is but saying that the world is essentially in- 
telligible, and therefore may ultimately be seen in its 
unity with the intelligence. 

At the same time this must not be interpreted as if it 
involved anything of what is commonly meant by an 
a priori construction of the world. Hegel is well aware 
that there is a " hard husk " to break through ere it is 
possible to reach the ideal meaning of things, and he is 
aware also that this " hard husk " must be broken by 
science, ere it can be finally dissolved by philosophy. 
In other words, he is aware that the external contingency 



196 Hegel. 

in which things present themselves to the ordinary con- 
sciousness, as simply existing side by side in space, and 
happening contemporaneously or successively in time, 
must yield to the scientific determination of them in 
their laws and causes, ere it is possible for philosophy to 
discover in them the organic manifestation of intelligence. 
" The philosophy of nature takes up the matter, which 
physical science has prepared out of experience, at the 
point where science leaves it, without looking hack to 
experience for its verification. Science, therefore, must 
work into the hands of philosophy, that philosophy in 
turn may translate the universality of reflection which 
science has produced into the higher universality of the 
reason, showing how the intelligible object evolves itself 
out of the intelligence as an organic whole, whose neces- 
sity is in itself. The philosophical way of presenting 
things is not a capricious effort, for once in a way, to 
walk upon one's head, as a change from the ordinary 
method of walking on one's feet or to escape the mon- 
otony of one's ordinary face by painting it; but it is 
because the manner of science does not finally satisfy 
the intelligence that we are obliged to go beyond it." 1 

The " hard husk," however, the contingency of space 
and time, has itself its necessity in the nature of the 
intelligence to which it presents so much resistance, and 
which it seems often to baffle. This is a point on which 
there has often been a misunderstanding of the Hegelian 
system, but which is closely connected with its central 
idea. Thus Schelling objects to the dialectic by which 
Hegel passes from the Logic to the philosophy of nature, 
as a mere tissue of metaphors which conceal an absolute 
i Hegel, vii. 18. 



Spirit and Nature. 197 

break in thought. And at first it is not easy to see more 
than this in Hegel's assertion that " the Idea freely lets 
itself go out of itself, while yet resting in itself, and re- 
maining absolutely secure of itself ; " or again, that " Na- 
ture is the extreme self-alienation (Entaiisserung) of spirit, 
in which it yet remains one with itself." If, however, 
the reader will recall what has already been said of the 
unity of opposites, and of a self-determined principle as 
being one that necessarily goes out of itself, or gives the 
utmost possible freedom to its determination, the obscurity 
and apparently metaphorical character of such expressions 
will partly disappear. 

Nature is for Hegel that extreme of possible opposition 
to spirit through which, and tlnough which alone, it can 
fully realise itself. We may make this clearer by a short 
reference to the treatment of this contrast in other phi- 
losophies. To the Cartesian school, nature and spirit, 
matter and mind, were absolute opposites, between 
which no link of connection could be detected, and 
which therefore were conceived to be connected only by 
the will of God. Mind was that which is undivided and 
indivisible purely self-determined and active. Matter 
was that which is infinitely divisible and purely passive, 
or determined by another than itself. Each must there- 
fore be explained entirely for itself, and without aid of 
the other. Yet they are bound together by the inex- 
plicable and incomprehensible relation of each to God, 
who, though spiritual, yet acts upon the essentially pas- 
sive matter, and imparts to it activity and motion, and 
who determines the essentially self-determined mind to 
apprehend the phases of this alien matter. 

A similar opposition strangely reappears in the philo- 



198 Hegel. 

sophy of Mr Herbert Spencer, who holds that the world 
is presented to ns in two ways as a series of motions of 
matter and as a series of feelings or ideas of mind ; but 
that we are unable to bring these two views together, or to 
penetrate to the unknown reality which is beneath both. 
ISTow there can be no doubt that, as Descartes saw, 
mind and matter are opposites ; but as they are correla- 
tive opposites and so necessarily united, it is not neces- 
sary to seek for any Deus ex machina to bring them 
together. Mind or self - consciousness " overreaches," 
as Hegel says, this opposition of itself to that which is 
opposed to it as its object ; or, to put it from the other 
side, a self-conscious principle can reveal itself as a self- 
determined principle only in this extreme opposition, and 
in overcoming it. The " free " existence of the world as 
an external aggregate of objects in space, with no appear- 
ance of relation to mind, and the " free " existence of each 
object in the world, as external to the other objects and 
merely in contingent relation to them, are characteristics 
which belong to these objects just because they are the 
manifestations of a self-determined principle, which can 
realise itself only as it goes out of itself, or gives itself 
away, but which in this " self-alienation " remains " se- 
cure of itself and resting in itself." On the other hand, 
this security of intelligence in the freedom of its object 
is possible just because its own nature is what it has 
given to the object, which therefore, in realising itself, 
must return to its source. The movement or process of 
the external world, thus freed or left to itself in its ex- 
ternality, can only be to go into itself, or to " sublate " 
or remove its own externality, and so to return to that 
unity which seems to have abandoned it, and winch it 



Spirit and Nature. 199 

seems at first to have abandoned. It is not merely, 
therefore, that the contingency of nature is discovered 
by science to be the mask or disguise of necessity, and 
this necessity again by philosophy is detected to be the 
mask or disguise of freedom. This of itself would be 
merely a subjective process of knowledge, without any 
objective movement corresponding to it in nature, and 
thus the self-alienation or self-manifestation of the mind 
in nature would be reduced to an illusion. But nature 
itself, regarded as independent of intelligence, is this 
process "writ large," and fixed in the form of an ex- 
ternal hierarchy of existences, which in their relation and 
subordination exhibit the successive stages of develop- 
ment by which the object returns to the subject. In its 
mechanical, chemical, and vital substances, nature pre- 
sents to us, though still in the form of externality, the 
various steps of the process whereby this independence 
of things of each other and of the intelligence, as it 
were, refutes and transcends itself. In the inorganic 
world the ideal principle is present as an inner or hidden 
nature of things, a law of relation between parts ex- 
ternal to each other, which manifests itself only as these 
external parts, in their notions and changes, continually 
betray the secret of their essential relativity to each 
other. In the living being, however, this inner nature 
does not merely underlie the fixed difference of external 
parts, but is revealed in them as a principle of organisa- 
tion, continually distributing itself to them as members 
of one body, which can maintain their independence only 
as they make themselves subordinate to the common life. 
Thus in life we have the differentiating and integrating 
movement of thought expressed in outward form ; and 



200 Hegel. 

Hegel therefore calls it the ideality of nature that in 
which the external, as it were, visibly contradicts and 
refutes its own externality. But this idealisation is 
still imperfect, for it is not conscious of itself; it is 
not present to the living being itself, but only to us. 
Nature rises to self-consciousness only in man, who thus 
becomes conscious not only of it, but of himself in dis- 
tinction from and in relation to it ; and who, in the 
process of his development, has to overcome this still 
remaining antagonism between himself and the world, 
or between consciousness and self-consciousness, and so 
to realise his unity and the unity of all things and beings 
with the absolute spirit " in whom they live, and move, 
and have their being." 

Such is the general outline which Hegel seeks to fill 
up by his philosophy of nature and spirit. In the 
former part of his task, in dealing with nature, and 
especially with the inorganic world, he is least success- 
ful. Obviously, if we adopt Hegel's view, it will be 
more difficult to trace the ideal meaning of nature, 
which is the idea in its extreme self-alienation, than of 
spirit, in which it is returning to itself. The general 
necessity of such an external realisation of the ideal 
principle under conditions of space and time it is not 
difficult to comprehend, and it is easy also to detect a 
link of analogy which runs through all nature, and 
makes it into a continual illustration of ideal relations. 
" Nature," as JNovalis said, "is a kind of illuminated 
table of the contents of the spirit." Gravitation, chem- 
ical affinity, vital nutrition, may be all used as pictures 
of the processes of intellectual and moral life, and many 
so-called philosophical theories have been little more 



Philosophy of Nature. 201 

than logical developments of the consequences of such 
metaphors. Poetry, again, is often little more than a 
continual playing upon the latent accords that bind all 
forms of existence together. When, however, it is 
attempted to turn such poetry into philosophy, to dis- 
cover what exactly is the identity that lies beneath 
these analogies, and to follow logically the filiation and 
connection of its changes of form, the " hard husk " is 
found difficult to penetrate, and it must be the more 
difficult the lower the existence we are examining in 
the scale of being i.e., the further it is from the nature 
of spirit. Hence it is the simplest things of nature 
with which it is hardest for an ideal philosophy to deal. 
The physical is harder for it than the chemical, the 
chemical than the vital, for the same reason which 
makes poetry prefer life to death. The idealistic inter- 
pretation of nature is therefore exposed to serious diffi- 
culties and dangers, especially in the region of mechanics 
and physics ; and indeed it cannot be successfully at- 
tempted at all till science has carried its interpretation 
to an advanced stage. Attempted earlier, it is apt to 
become little better than a systematic and therefore life- 
less kind of poetry, which intuitively grasps at a unity 
it cannot yet define. Of this character, probably, is 
much of Hegel's philosophy of nature. Science in these 
departments had not reached the point which, as Hegel 
himself maintained, it must reach, before the categories 
of reason could be applied to them; and his own know- 
ledge of physics and chemistry was at best second-hand. 
He devoted, indeed, comparatively little of his attention 
to such subjects : all that he published on the Philo- 
sophy of Nature was the outline in the Encyclopaedia, 



202 ' Hegel. 

which, with the addition of some notes taken from his 
Lectures, makes one volume of his works. The prin- 
ciples of the ' Logic ' were used by him for the most part 
as a key to the life of man, and especially to his highest 
spiritual experiences, in morality, art, and religion. Thus 
it is upon "the first and the last things" upon the 
metaphysical principles in which philosophy begins, and 
upon that highest idealisation of man's life in which it 
ends that the main lights of the Hegelian philosophy are 
cast. The intermediate regions of nature, and of human 
life so far as it is most closely linked with nature, are 
only briefly sketched, and remain on the whole a desidera- 
tum. In spite of his encyclopaedic industry, Hegel had 
not the impartial exhaustive curiosity of Aristotle, and 
] (referred to direct his thought to those objects in which 
the ideal meaning is most easily read. His speculation 
therefore, like Plato's, was predominantly guided at 
least where it goes beyond the sphere of abstract meta- 
physic by the practical instincts of the higher life 
of man, by the desire to restore the moral and reli- 
gious basis of human existence, which a revolutionary 
scepticism had destroyed. To this the Lectures, which 
form the greater part of his works, are devoted. It must, 
however, be remembered that we have these Lectures in 
a form which was never authorised by Hegel himself, 
and that they were compiled after his death, mainly 
from the notes of students who were among his audience. 
Even if we could always depend upon the verbal accuracy 
of the report, it is obvious that such discourses, delivered 
with reference to the needs of the hearers, rather than 
to a complete discussion of the subject, cannot be re- 
garded in the same light as works like the 'Logic,' which 



Is Hegdianism Christian ? 203 

came from his hand as a completely reasoned system. 
Their informality and discursive character, however, if 
it takes from their authority as expressions of the 
author's mind and from their value as scientific trea- 
tises, has some compensating advantages, if we regard 
them as a means of education in philosophy ; for in this 
point of view their very artlessness gives them some- 
thing of the same stimulating suggestive power which 
is attained "by the consummate art of the Platonic 
Dialogues. 

To follow out in detail any of these applications of 
the principle of Hegel would he beyond the scope of 
the present volume. It may, however, he desirable to 
indicate, more fully than has yet been done, how it was 
that Hegel could regard this principle as in a special 
sense Christian, and even as identical with the essential 
idea of Christianity. 

In an earlier chapter it has been shown how Hegel 
at first found in Greek literature and Greek life that 
unity of the ideal with the real, of the freedom of 
spirit with the necessity of nature, which Kant and 
Fichte seemed to deny. In the State the Greek saw, 
not a mere external authority, but only the realisation 
of his own freedom ; and in the gods he worshipped, 
not a foreign and despotic power, but only the ideal 
unity of the natural and social organism in which he 
was a member. He was at home in the little Avorld in 
which he lived and moved, which his spirit had made, 
and was continually remaking. Eor him, the division 
of " self " and " not-self " had " passed in music out of 
sight," had been overcome unconsciously without even 
being thought of; for the spirit of his city was, as it 



204 Hegel. 

were, the " substance," the presupposed substratum, of 
his consciousness of himself. Yet just herein, as Hegel 
came to see, lay the fragility, the imperfection, the 
transitory character, of the Greek reconciliation of man 
with the world. It was not based on any deep con- 
sciousness of the antagonism of the inner and outer life, 
or of a spiritual process by which that antagonism coidd 
be overcome. It was a gift received from the hands of 
nature, which was in itself a contradiction, for the 
spirit cannot accept gifts except from itself, and a pos- 
session ceases to be spiritual by the very fact that it is 
not spiritually achieved. As soon, therefore, as reflection 
suggested the idea of a division between the individual 
and his world, at that moment the unity disappeared; 
for it was not based on reason, on any consciousness of 
a unity which transcended the division, but rather on 
an unconsciousness of the division itself. Hence even the 
idealisation of this unconscious reconciliation in Art and 
Poetry, by making it into an object and dealing with 
it freely as such, tended to disturb it, and to substitute 
for it that consciousness of the self in its loneliness 
and opposition to the world, which is expressed in the 
individualistic philosophy of the Stoics, Epicureans, 
and Sceptics. The Aristophanic comedy may be re- 
garded as the last happy moment of the Greek spirit, 
its last triumphant consciousness of self, hi which it 
rejoices over a "world turned upside down," over the 
perversion of all the ideal and real forms of its existence. 
But this happy moment rapidly passes into the stern, 
self-centred life of the Stoic, who withdraws from the 
world into the fortress of his own soul, into the hard 
prose of Roman life, in which the only social bond is the 



Scepticism of Despair. 205 

legal relation of persons, and finally into the despair 
of the sceptic, who, doubting everything, is driven in the 
end to doubt himself, and regarding everything objec- 
tive as an empty appearance, is forced at last to recog- 
nise the very consciousness of self as an illusion. For the 
division of man from the world is his division from him- 
self, and when he shuts himself up within his own soul, 
he finds there nothing but emptiness and vanity. What, 
then, was to heal this division, to reconcile man to the 
world and to himself, and to bring back that joyful 
consciousness which Greece had lost 1 The problem is 
one for the present day, as well as for the earlier days 
of the Roman empire; for now. even more than then, 
the intense sense of personality, of subjective freedom, 
has disturbed man's consciousness of unity with the 
world, and thrown him back upon himself, only to 
awake in him a painful sense of emptiness and weak- 
ness, and a longing for what seems an impossible 
deliverance from himself. 

In the following passage of his earlier work, 'The 
' Phenomenology,' Hegel paints the disease, and hints at 
its cure, in words in which poetry and speculation are 
wonderfully united : 

" The Stoic independence of thought, passing through the 
movement of scepticism, finds its true meaning revealed in a 
consciousness which is at the same time a despair of self. 
To this despairing self-consciousness is revealed the hollow- 
ness both of the real claims vindicated for the abstract per- 
son in Roman law, and also of the ideal claims vindicated 
for the thinking self in Stoicism. It has learnt that the 
claims so vindicated are in truth entirely lost ; that the self 
so asserted is rather absolutely estranged from itself. Its 
despair, therefore, may be regarded as the counterpart and 



206 ffegel, 

completion of that triumphant joy with which the spirit of 
Comedy in Aristophanes rejoices in itself, looking down 
upon the annihilation of all that which is not tlie self. For 
while in this comic consciousness all objective reality is 
alienated from itself and emptied of substantial worth in 
relation to the self ; the despair that follows upon scepticism 
is the tragic fate which immediately falls upon the self Avhich 
thus in its isolation has raised itself to the absolute. It is 
the consciousness of the loss of all reality in the assurance of 
the self, and again of the loss of this last assurance, it is 
that agony of desertion which expresses itself in the hard 
saying that God is dead. 

" Thus, then, the ethical life of the ancient State has dis- 
appeared in the legality of Rome, as the religion which 
idealised that State has vanished in Comedy, and the de- 
spairing self-consciousness is simply the knowledge of all 
that has been lost. For it, as we have seen, neither the 
immediate dignity and value of the individual, nor that 
secondary ideal value which he received from thought, any 
longer exists. Trust in the eternal laws of the gods is 
silenced, like the oracles by which they revealed particular 
events to men. The statues worshipped in earlier religion 
are now dead stones, whose inspiring soul has departed, and 
the hymns of praise that were sung to them are become 
words in which no one believes. The tables of the gods 
are without spiritual meat and drink, and from the games 
and festivals no longer does the spirit of man receive back 
the joyful sense of his unity with the divine.. The works of 
the Muse are now deserted by that spiritual force which drew 
the assurance of itself even out of the very annihilation of all 
glory of gods and men. These works have already become 
what they are for us now fair fruits broken away from the 
tree, which a friendly fate has conveyed to us, as a maiden 
might present those fruits ; for with the fruits she cannot 
give us the real life on which their existence depended, not 
the tree that bore them, not the earth and the elements 
from which they drew their substance, not the climate which 
gave them their peculiar character, nor the vicissitude of the 



Beawahmg of Spirit. 207 

seasons that ruled over the process of their growth. In 
like manner, the fate which has preserved for us the works 
of antique art does not bring with them the world to which 
they belonged not the spring and summer of that ethical 
life in which they blossomed and ripened, but only a dim 
remembrance of such a reality. Our enjoyment of them is 
not, therefore, an act of divine worship in which our con- 
sciousness readies its complete and satisfying truth ; it is 
only the external service which washes away from their 
purity any drops of rain or particles of dust that may adhere 
to them, and which, in place of the inner constituents of the 
ethical life which produced and inspired them, raises up an 
endless scaffolding of the dead elements of their outward 
existence, the language, the historical circumstances, &c, 
which throw light upon them. Our end also in all this 
service is, not to give our own life to them, but merely to 
set them up as pictures before our imagination. But yet, 
as the maiden who presents the plucked fruits is more than 
the nature which first produced them, with all its conditions 
and elements the tree, the air, the light, &c. since in a 
higher way she gathers all this together in the light of the 
self-conscious eye, and the expression of the offering gesture ; 
so the spirit of the fate which presents us with these works of 
art is more than all that was attained in that ancient national 
existence, for it is the realisation in us as an inward life of 
the spirit which in them was still outward and external ; it 
is the spirit of the tragic fate, which gathers all those indi- 
vidualised gods and attributes of the divine substance into 
one Pantheon, the spirit which is conscious in itself of its 
own spiritual nature." 1 

"The spirit that is conscious of itself as spirit." This 
to Hegel is the solution of the difficulty in which the 
individualism of ancient and of modern times has in- 
volved itself. Its value will be understood only if we 
have the difficulty itself clearly before us. The dualism 
i Hegel, ii. 544-546. 



208 Hegel. 

between the object and subject between man and his 
world which the Stoic sought to escape by withdrawing 
into himself, follows him, as the sceptic showed, even 
into the inner life. The soul opposed to the world and 
emptied of it, is found to be opposed to and emptied of 
itself. It finds no inner wealth to console it in its barren 
self-assertion. As the Roman citizen, invested by law 
with absolute rights of person and property, found no 
security for them except in the mere will and brute 
force of the emperor, and thus in practice his absolute 
freedom converted itself into absolute slavery ; so in 
like manner the Stoic consciousness of the absolute 
worth and dignity of the rational life which is present 
to each individual, needed but a little maturing a 
deeper realisation of its own meaning to pass into 
an abject self -despair, into a sense of infinite want, 
and into a superstitious readiness to accept any out- 
Avard oracle or revelation which might deliver it from 
its own inward emptiness. So again, in modern times, 
those nations who have come to regard every kind of 
law and fixed institution as a foreign yoke, and to seek 
for freedom in nihilism and universal revolt, have often 
been found ready, in the inevitable weariness of their 
own caprice, to accept any despotism that will free them 
from themselves. And those men who have most deeply 
been imbued by the modern spirit of subjectivity, which 
knows no authority but itself and opposes its own inner 
light to all external teachings of experience, have not 
unfrequently been driven in the end to save themselves 
from the waywardness and vacuity of mysticism by sub- 
jecting themselves to the outward rule of an authorita- 
tive Church. Such changes are not accidents ; they arc 



Sophistry of Reaction. 209 

simply the natural development of the consciousness of 
self. They show, in the " logic of facts," that extreme 
subjectivity and individualism contains in itself its own 
contradiction, as the acorn contains the oak, Give it 
only the necessary conditions and opportunities of growth, 
and this is what it must result in. 

The lesson to be learnt from this rapid conversion of 
the merely subjective into the merely objective, is not 
that the truth lies in the latter apart from the former. 
The cure for diseases of rationalism and scepticism is not 
implicit faith, any more than despotism is the cure for 
revolution. The assertion of reason and liberty, of the 
subject as against the object in- which he was hitherto 
lost, was a great step in the spiritual development of 
man; and any effort to recover the intellectual an<l moral 
harmony of the inward and the outward life, which 
should begin by withdrawing from the position thus 
gained, would be essentially reactionary, and, in the end, 
futile. For reaction cannot again restore the unity as it 
existed before the distinction and opposition were seen ; 
all that it can do is to put the object, as opposed to the 
subject, in place of the subject as opposed to the object 
in other words, to pass from one extreme to another, 
which is equally imperfect and self-contradictory. Im- 
plicit faith, by its sacrifice of reason, cannot restore the 
first unity of the mind with its object, which the asser- 
tion of " private judgment " has broken ; rather it will 
Vie a unity of slavery, whereas that first unity was im- 
perfect freedom. Or, to take another example, empiri- 
cism cannot furnish a correction for that subjective 
idealism which arises out of the first imperfect inter- 
pretation of the truth, that all objects are essentially 

p. VII. o 



210 Hegel 

related to the subject that knows them. It will only 
he equivalent to a resolve to forget the inconvenient 
fact of the subjectivity of knowledge, and to treat things 
as if they were entirely independent of mind. In these 
and all similar cases, when the distinction or opposition 
is once made, the only real escape from its power, and 
so from the assertion of one of the opposed elements at 
the expense of the other, is to find the limit of the 
opposition, or the point where it gives way to unity. 
And that there is a point where it will so give way, is 
already manifest from the fact, that each of the opposites, 
if taken as absolute, involves its own contradiction. 

What was fatal to the Greek state, and with it to all 
the political and religious life of the ancient world, 
was the assertion that man, as a rational or self-con- 
scious being, is a law and an end to himself. In this it is 
involved that, ultimately, he can know and obey nothing 
but himself. Taken in a one-sided and exclusive sense, 
this doctrine is the denial of all relation of the individual 
either in thought or action to anything but himself ; but 
taken in this sense it contains, as we have seen, its own 
refutation, and passes into its opposite. The truth, how- 
ever, is to be found by considering what this self-contra- 
diction really means. It means, in the first place, that 
the opposition is a relative one, and that the self which 
is opposed to the world, even in such opposition, is essen- 
tially related to it. And it means, in the second place, 
that while the direct and immediate attempt to assert 
and realise the self as against the not-self is suicidal, 
there is a higher assertion and realisation of the self in 
and through the not-self, which, however, is possible 
only in so far as that first suicidal attempt is aban- 



Dying to Live. 211 

doiled. The way to self-realisation is through self- 
renunciation i.e., through renunciation of that natural 
and immediate life of the self in which it is opposed to 
the not-self. Spiritual life is not like natural life a 
direct development and outgoing of energy, which only 
at its utmost point of expansion meets with death as an 
external enemy, and in it finds its limit and its end. On 
the contrary, the life of a spiritual being, as such, is, in a 
true sense, a continual dying. Every step in it is won 
by a break with the immediate or natural self the self 
which is opposed to the not-self ; for only as this self 
dies can the higher self, which is in unity with the 
not-self, be developed. And, on the other hand, just 
for this reason there is for the spiritual self no absolute 
death. Because it is capable of dying to itself, because, 
indeed, as will be more fully shown in the sequel, it 
cannot live but by some kind of dying to self, it cannot 
in any final sense die. As it can make that which most 
seems to limit it a part of its own life, it has no absolute 
limit ; it takes up death into itself as an element, and 
does not therefore need to fear it as an enemy. 

Words like these will, no doubt, seem at first to be 
mystical and metaphorical to those who look at them 
in an external way. And, indeed, they fairly represent 
the usual language of Christian mysticism, or rather, we 
might say more truly, the universal language of the re- 
ligious life of Christianity wherever that life has reached 
any real depth of self-consciousness the language of St 
Paul and of St Augustine, of Thomas a Kempis and 
Martin Luther, as of men like Maurice and Campbell 
in our own day. Such language, however, though not 
denied to have a certain truth in its own sphere, is 



212 Hegel. 

usually kept to that sphere, and not brought down into 
the region of the ordinary understanding, or weighed 
against the words and categories which hold good there. 
What is peculiar to Hegel is, that he brings the two 
regions together and compares them ; that he weighs the 
vivid poetic utterance of spiritual intuition, and the prose 
of common life and of science, together in the same scales ; 
and that he seeks to prove that, as exact and scientific 
definitions of the reality of things, the former has a 
higher truth than the latter. To him, therefore, the 
great aphorism, in which the Christian ethics and theology 
may he said to he summed up, that " he that saveth his 
life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life shall save it," 
is no mere epigrammatic saying, whose self-contradiction is 
not to he regarded too closely ; it is rather the first dis- 
tinct, though as yet undeveloped, expression of the exact 
truth as to the nature of spirit. To show how this is 
possible, it will be best, in the first place, to take the 
words in their immediate ethical meaning. 

Taken, then, in its application to morals, the maxim, 
" Die to live," seems to combine the principle of ascet- 
icism with the principle of hedonism or utilitarianism ; 
for while it points, like the latter, to a positive realisation 
of self, it implies, like the former, that the way to such 
self-realisation is through self-abnegation. Interpreted 
in a coarse external way, it might be supposed to mean 
only that this world must be sacrified in order that the 
next may be won. But such an interpretation is equally 
imperfect on the side of the sacrifice and of the realisa- 
tion. It is imperfect on the side of the sacrifice ; for a 
mere giving up of a present for a future satisfaction is 
far from being a real giving up of the self ; it is only a 



Dying to Live,. 213 

substitution of " other-worldliness " for " worldlinss, M 

and selfishness is not overcome by its gratification being 
postponed. And it is imperfect on the side of the real- 
isation ; for it is not the life of this world, the life re- 
nounced, which is regained, but a life in another world 
which is supposed to be utterly different from it. The 
true interpretation of the maxim is, that the individual 
must die to an isolated life, i.e., a life for and in him- 
self, a life in which the immediate satisfaction of desire 
as his desire is an end in itself, in order that he may 
live the spiritual life, the universal life which really be- 
longs to him as a spiritual or self-conscious being. Now 
it is a simple psychological fact that, as we cannot know 
ourselves except in relation to objects from which we 
distinguish ourselves, so we cannot seek our own pleasure 
except in objects which are distinguishable from that 
pleasure, and which we desire for themselves. Desire 
always in the first instance looks outward to the object, 
and only indirectly through the object at the self ; plea- 
sure comes of the realisation of desire, but the desire is 
primarily for something else than the pleasure ; and 
though it may gradually become tinctured by the con- 
sciousness of the subjective result, it can never entirely 
lose its objective reference. The pleasure-seeker is an 
abstraction : for just in proportion as we approximate 
to the state of the pure hunter for pleasures, for whom 
all objective interest is lost in mere self-seeking, it is 
demonstrable by the nature of the case, and shown by 
experience, that for us all pleasure must cease. As it 
is a condition of our intellectual life that we exist for 
ourselves only as other things and beings exist for us, 
so it is a condition of our practical life that we can 



214 Hegel. 

realise ourselves or live for ourselves only as we live for 
other ends and beings than ourselves, Tims it appears 
that there is an element of self - negation even in our 
most immediate theoretical and practical existence, and 
that we must die to live go out of ourselves to he our- 
selves even in the most sensuous and selfish life we can 
possibly live. Obviously, however, tins does not take 
away the significance of the principle as a moral law, 
but rather for the first time shows the possibility of 
obeying it, as a law which is grounded in the real 
nature of man : a law under which we not only ought 
to live, but under which we must in some measure live, 
if as rational beings we are to live at all. We are 
thus also enabled to remove a misconception which in 
many minds stands in the way of the acceptance of the 
principle of self-sacrifice, as if it involved a mere as- 
cetic self-annihilation or a rejection of all the positive 
elements in life. In view of such a negative interpre- 
tation of the principle, wo can easily understand how 
many should be prepared, with Bentham, to denounce 
the ascetic as a superstitious believer in the "universal 
misery theory," and to declare with Spinoza that philo- 
sophy "should be the meditation not of death, but of 
life." But when it is seen that all that is really posi- 
tive in our life has, in the sense of the principle, a 
negative element in it, and that it is only through such 
negation of self that any positive good can ever be 
attained, it can no longer be apprehended that the 
further development of this negative or self-renouncing 
aspect of morality will impoverish human life, or strip 
it of any of its real sources of joy. In truth, the ab- 
stract distinction drawn between positive self-gratifica- 



Di/mcj to J Arc. 215 

tion and negative self-denial which is at the basis of the 
ordinary opposition of asceticism and hedonism is 
essentially mistaken ; for, in the sense of the distinction, 
there are no pure pleasures possible to man. What we 
have is always a positive mediated by a negative ; and 
if we could absolutely sever either from the other, 
Ave should come in both cases to the same result. The 
absolute pleasure - seeker would, by the opposite road, 
reach the same goal with the absolute ascetic the 
extinction of all desire and pleasure. On the other 
hand, the same line of thought enables us to see that 
the wider and completer is the good i.e., the realisa- 
tion of ourselves which we seek, the deeper and more 
thorough must be the negation of self on which it is 
based. "More life and fuller, that Ave Avant;" but by 
a laAv that cannot be defeated or cheated, this fuller 
life is possible to us only through the sacrifice, renuncia- 
tion, or death of the immediate or natural self the self 
Avhich is opposed to the not-self and which seeks a good 
for itself which is not a good for others. For it is only 
in breaking doAvn the boundary that separates our life 
from the life of others, that Ave can at the same time 
break doAvn the boundary which prevents their life from 
becoming ours. St Paul's saying, " All things are yours, 
for ye are God's," expresses the true conditions on 
Avhich alone the limits of the individual life can be 
removed viz., that it should cease to Avill itself except 
through the Avhole of Avhich it is a part. 

The principle that he Avho loses his life in this sense 
saves it, has, hoAvever, another application. It is already 
seen to be true, in so far as life is measured by its in- 
terests, and in so far as even the pains and soitoavs of 



216 Hegel. 

the wider life contain a kind of compensation in them, 
which makes them rather to be chosen than the nar- 
rower joys. " We can only have the highest happiness 
such as goes along with being a great man by having 
wide thoughts, and much feeling for the rest of the 
world as well as ourselves ; and this sort of happiness 
often brings so much pain with it that we can only 
tell it from pain by its being what we would choose 
before everything else, because our souls see it is 
good." 1 But this inward compensation might seem to 
be reconcilable with a constitution of the universe in 
which all that we call higher interests were, after all, 
sacrificed to an adverse or indifferent fate. Eeally, 
however, it . is not so reconcilable ; for " morality," as 
it has been said, " is the nature of things." The innate 
law of spiritual life cannot fail of its effect outwardly, 
any more than inwardly. To suppose that it could so 
fail would be to suppose that a spiritual being is simply 
one finite existence beside the others, which must " take 
its chance" with them in the struggle for existence. 
This, however, is just that view of things of which the 
whole process of thought, expressed in the Hegelian 
philosophy, is the refutation. For what Hegel sought 
to show is, that the intelligible world is not only, as 
Kant declared, essentially related to the intelligence for 
which it exists, but that, as a consequence of this, it is 
in itself nothing but the manifestation of intelligence. 
\\\ a world which is essentially spiritual, it is impos- 
sible to conceive that the existence of spiritual beings 
should be a means to an external end, or a link like the 
other links in the chain of causation. And it is equally 
1 George Eliot Romola, iii. 290. 



Christian Optimism. . 217 

impossible that in such a world the essential law of 
spiritual life should not be the truth that underlies, 
overreaches, and interprets all other laws. The moral 
principle that we must lose our lives in order to save 
them, has therefore its counterpart and complement in a 
law of the universe, according to which all the evils and 
sorrows that belong to the development of the spiritual 
life (and in a world which is in its essence spiritual, 
this ultimately means all evils and sorrows whatever) 
contain in them " the promise and the potency " of a 
good, in which they are not merely compensated, but 
taken up and transcended. " The wounds of the spirit 
can be healed, so that not even, a scar remains." " Die 
to live," is a principle which can be true only for a being 
for whom, as has been said, there is no absolute death, 
but in all death the means of a higher life. Now it is 
just this belief which constitutes the Christian optimism, 
that "all things work together for good." Pessimism 
is based on the idea that evil is a necessary and absolute 
existence ; and a modified optimism, which opposes it 
merely by dwelling on the positive side of life on the 
fact, or supposed fact, e.g., that there are numbers of 
people who are tolerably happy, and that in most lives 
there is a balance of pleasure over pain is very far from 
being a satisfactory answer to it. The only satisfactory 
answer must lie in the perception of the essentially rel- 
ative character of evil and sorrow itself, and this is 
what is implied in the words " shall save it." The 
Christian optimism is the recognition that in a spiritual 
world a spiritual being, as such, cannot find an absolute 
limit or foreign necessity, against which his life must be 
broken in pieces ; but that, on the contrary, all apparent 



218 Hegel 

outward limits, and even death itself, arc for it but the 
means to a higher freedom and realisation of self. The 
Christian theology is, in its essence, little more than the 
development of this idea ; for its primary doctrine is that 
God the absolute principle to which, as their unity, 
we must refer all things and beings is a " Spirit," i.e., 
a Being whose life is self-determination and self-reve- 
lation a self- revelation which includes also the ele- 
ment of self-sacrifice. For, as we have seen, the com- 
munication or giving out of life, which is involved in 
the idea of such a Being, cannot stop short of the 
communication of a self, and so of Himself to His 
creatures, which are thus " made partakers of the divine 
nature." Or, to put it otherwise, what Christianity 
teaches is only that the law of the life of spirit the 
law of self-realisation through self-abnegation holds 
good for God as for man, and, indeed, that the spirit that 
works in man to " die to live " is the Spirit of God. For 
Hegel such a doctrine was the demonstrated result of 
the whole idealistic movement which is summed up in 
his Logic. So far, then, as Christianity means this, it 
was not in any spirit of external accommodation that 
he tried to connect his doctrine with it. Rather it 
was the discovery of this as the essential meaning of 
Christianity, which first enabled him to recognise it as 
the ultimate lesson of the idealistic movement of thought 
in Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. 

The Hegelian philosophy, some of the main aspects of 
which we have attempted to exhibit, is so comprehensive 
in its range of thought, and it is the product of a time 
still so near our own, that it is not yet easy, or perhaps 



Fate of his Philosophy. 219 

even possible, to fix its permanent value as an element in 
philosophical culture. The tendencies and ideas, which 
it attempts to bring to a unity, are still striving for the 
mastery around lis and within us ; and the sifting process, 
by which a principle is gradually delivered from the acci- 
dents of its first expression, and from the misunderstand- 
ings and prejudices which are due to such accidents, 
is yet far from being completed. When Hegel died, 
his philosophy held all but undisputed predominance 
in Berlin and the other Prussian universities ; and, in 
spite of the protest which Schelling and others kept up 
against it, it was generally acknowledged as the greatest 
intellectual influence in all the scientific schools of Ger- 
many. The criticisms to which it had as yet been sub- 
jected were so superficial, or based on such obvious mis- 
understanding, that the faith of Hegel's disciples was 
as yet put to no very hard test : nor could it be said 
that there was much arrogance in his own attitude when, 
after repelling one or two feeble attacks upon his princi- 
ples, he used the language of the great Frederic in refer- 
ence to the half-barbarous Pandours by whom he was so 
often beset : " This is the sort of fry with which I have 
to keep struggling." But after the death of Hegel all 
this was gradually changed. By the publication of his 
Lectures, the doctrine was at last set before the world in 
its completed form in all its manifold applications. 
Criticism soon began to penetrate beyond the outworks, 
and to assail the central ideas of the system ; and the 
master was no longer there to repel the attack with crush- 
ing dialectic, and to turn it into a means of throwing 
new light upon his principles. In the Hegelian school 
itself, the affinities of different minds for different aspects 



220 Hegel 

of so comprehensive a system began to disturb the unity 
and balance of elements which Hegel had established. 
There were some for whom the main value of the philo- 
sophy lay in its results in the return to religious faith 
and social morality which it seemed to make possible : 
and such minds were sometimes apt to forget that recon- 
struction is not merely restoration, and that it was only 
by developing the principle of freedom itself that Hegel 
was able to discover the sound and permanent elements 
in the institutions and traditions of the past. Those 
who thus mistook or narrowed the principle of develop- 
ment into a defence of things established, were gradually 
gathered into a more or less homogeneous group under 
the name of the " Hegelian Eight." On the other hand, 
there were those to whom the idea of freedom, and 
the negative dialectic by which it was developed, seemed 
the one important element in Hegel ; and for them Hegel- 
ianism tended to become only a more effective and pro- 
found expression of the spirit which had already mani- 
fested its power in the Aufklarung and the Revolution. 
This group formed what was known as the " Hegelian 
Left." Thus, just as the death of Socrates was the signal 
for the rise of a number of antagonistic sects, each of 
which grasped only a fragment of the master's doctrine, 
but gave it a fuller development than the master had 
done, and set it in direct opposition to the other frag- 
ments, so within the Hegelian school a division of ten- 
dency now showed itself, so wide and far-reaching, that 
the same principles which, on the one side, were inter- 
preted as the defence of orthodoxy and reactionary 
politics, were used on the other side for the support of 
atheism and nihilism. And as usually happens in the 



Division of the School. 221 

divisions of religion and politics, there was soon an in- 
creasing number of observers who drew from the contro- 
versy a proof that Hegelianism, or even philosophy itself, 
contained in it no living scientific principle of unity, but 
was merely a confused syncretism of opinions, which 
might be held together for a moment by a tour de force 
of genius, but which necessarily fell asunder as soon a.s 
the master's hand was removed. Such a scepticism is a 
natural and frequently recurring phenomenon of man's 
spiritual life, by reason of the antagonisms through which 
it develops, and it can be overcome only by a deeper 
consciousness of the nature and laws of that develop- 
ment. There is, however, no- reason for wonder or 
despair as to the essential truth of the principles of the 
Hegelian philosophy in the fact that it has gone, or is 
going, through the same phases of life which have been 
traversed by the ideas of Socrates, by the Christian re- 
ligion, and indeed by every living principle which has 
profoundly influenced the mind of man. Hegel himself 
has interpreted his own fate for us. " A party first truly 
shows itself to have won the victory when it breaks up 
into two parties : for so it proves that it contains in itself 
the principle with which at first it had to conflict, and 
thus that it has got beyond the one-sidedness which was 
incidental to its earliest expression. The interest which 
formerly divided itself between it and that to which it 
was opposed now falls entirely within itself, and the 
opposing principle is left behind and forgotten, just 
because it is represented by one of the sides in the new 
controversy which now occupies the minds of men. At 
the same time, it is to be observed that when the old 
principle thus reappears, it is no longer what it was 



222 Hegel. 

before; for it is changed and purified by the higher 
element into which it is now taken up. In this point of 
view, that discord which appears at first to be a lament- 
able breach and dissolution of the unity of a party, is 
really the crowning proof of its success." 1 In other words, 
such discord is the proof of vitality; for it is the conflict 
of elements which, in spite of their apparently absolute 
antagonism, are really held within the unity of one life, 
and which, therefore, must be reconciled by its further 
development. 

That the form and the matter of Hegel the dialecti- 
cal process and the positive or constructive result of his 
philosophy can thus be set against each other, proves 
nothing more than what a survey of his work has already 
shown us, viz., that the development of that philo- 
sophy in Hegel's own works is very incomplete ; or, to 
put it in a slightly different point of view, that the ap- 
plication of the principle expressed in the Hegelian Logic 
to the complex facts of nature and history, was only im- 
perfectly carried out by him. Hence the sifting affinity, 
by which the new principle, like a germinating seed, 
draws to itself the fruitful elements of the life of the 
past, while it repels all that is merely traditional and 
dead, is apt to show itself in an alternation or opposi- 
tion of negative and positive, sceptical and constructive 
tendencies in different minds ; which may thus often 
appear as irreconcilable enemies, though they are really 
the organs of one spiritual life, and the ministers of its 
development. 

It is sometimes said that in Germany Hegel's philoso- 
phy has entirely lost the credit which it partially retains 
> Hegel, ii. 420. 



His permanent Inflttence. 223 

in other countries. And indeed, if by adherence to 
Hegel be meant that kind of discipleship which is con- 
tent to be labelled with the name of Hegelian as a 
complete indication of all its ideas and tendencies, we 
might state the fact still more generally. For there are 
few, if any, in any country, who could now take up the 
same position towards Hegel which was accepted by 
his immediate disciples. To us, at this distance of 
time, Hegel, at the highest, can be only the last great 
philosopher who deserves to be placed on the same level 
with Plato and Aristotle in ancient, and with Spinoza 
and Kant in modern times, and avIio, like them, has 
given an " epoch-making " contribution to the develop- 
ment of the philosophic, or, taking the word in the 
highest sense, the idealistic, interpretation of the world. 
In other words, he can only be the last writer who has 
made a vitally important addition to the proof, that those 
ideas, which are at the root of poetry and religion, are 
also principles of science. But, like these earlier phil- 
osophies, like every other spiritual influence, the Hegel- 
ian philosophy has to die that it may live; to break 
away from the accidents of its first immediate form, 
that it may become an element in the growing life of 
man. And this means that, to a certain extent, it is 
ceasing to be possible to regard it as a separate product, 
the value or truth of which can be weighed by itself. 
For any one whose view is not limited by words or 
superficial appearances, it is not difficult to see that, in 
the scientific life of Germany as of other countries, there 
is no greater power at present than Hegelianism, especially 
in all that relates to metaphysics and ethics, to the phil- 
osophy of history and of religion. It is, however, a nee- 



224 Hegel 

essary part of the greatness of such spiritual force that 
it is not like a definite scientific discovery, whose influ- 
ence we can exactly measure. Eather it is so inextricahly 
entangled with the whole culture of the time, and so 
closely identified with the general movement of thought, 
that we are increasingly unable to say Avhat specially 
belongs to it alone. If we cannot estimate how much 
the poetical culture of modern times owes to Dante or 
to Shakespeare, much less can we precisely determine 
what, in the speculative development to which they all 
contribute, is respectively due to earlier philosophers, to 
Hegel, and to those who, since his day, have attempted 
to supersede, to criticise, or to complete his work. The 
only important question now is, not whether wo arc 
disciples of Hegel, the days of discipleship are past, 
but whether we recognise the existence of a living de- 
velopment of philosophy, and especially of that spiritual 
or idealistic view of things in which* philosophy culmi- 
nates a development which begins in the earliest dawn 
of speculation, and in which Kant and Hegel are, not 
indeed the last names, but the last names in the highest 
order of speculative genius, i Maestri di color die sanno, 



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