We are just now witnessing a singular phenomenon in British and
American philosophy. Hegelism, so defunct on its native soil that I
believe but a single youthful disciple of the school is to be counted
among the privat-docenten and younger professors of Germany, and whose
older champions are all passing off the stage, has found among us so
zealous and able a set of propagandists that to-day it may really be
reckoned one of the most powerful influences of the time in the higher
walks of thought. And there is no doubt that, as a movement of
reaction against the traditional British empiricism, the hegelian
influence represents expansion and freedom, and is doing service of a
certain kind. Such service, however, ought not to make us blindly
indulgent. Hegel's philosophy mingles mountain-loads of corruption
with its scanty merits, and must, now that it has become
quasi-official, make ready to defend itself as well as to attack
others. It is with no hope of converting independent thinkers, but
rather with the sole aspiration of showing some chance youthful
disciple that there _is_ another point of view in philosophy that I
fire this skirmisher's shot, which may, I hope, soon be followed by
somebody else's heavier musketry.
{264}
The point of view I have in mind will become clearer if I begin with a
few preparatory remarks on the motives and difficulties of
philosophizing in general.
To show that the real is identical with the ideal may roughly be set
down as the mainspring of philosophic activity. The atomic and
mechanical conception of the world is as ideal from the point of view
of some of our faculties as the teleological one is from the point of
view of others. In the realm of every ideal we can begin anywhere and
roam over the field, each term passing us to its neighbor, each member
calling for the next, and our reason rejoicing in its glad activity.
Where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong together by inward
kinship, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers
of reaction, to see is to approve and to understand.
Much of the real seems at the first blush to follow a different law.
The parts seem, as Hegel has said, to be shot out of a pistol at us.
Each asserts itself as a simple brute fact, uncalled for by the rest,
which, so far as we can see, might even make a better system without
it. Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous--are the adjectives by
which we are tempted to describe it. And yet from out the bosom of it
a partial ideality constantly arises which keeps alive our aspiration
that the whole may some day be construed in ideal form. Not only do
the materials lend themselves under certain circumstances to aesthetic
manipulation, but underlying their worst disjointedness are three great
continua in which for each of us reason's ideal is actually reached. I
mean the continua of memory or personal consciousness, of time and of
space. In {265} these great matrices of all we know, we are absolutely
at home. The things we meet are many, and yet are one; each is itself,
and yet all belong together; continuity reigns, yet individuality is
not lost.
Consider, for example, space. It is a unit. No force can in any way
break, wound, or tear it. It has no joints between which you can pass
your amputating knife, for it penetrates the knife and is not split,
Try to make a hole in space by annihilating an inch of it. To make a
hole you must drive something else through. But what can you drive
through space except what is itself spatial?
But notwithstanding it is this very paragon of unity, space in its
parts contains an infinite variety, and the unity and the variety do
not contradict each other, for they obtain in different respects. The
one is the whole, the many are the parts. Each part is one again, but
only one fraction; and part lies beside part in absolute nextness, the
very picture of peace and non-contradiction. It is true that the space
between two points both unites and divides them, just as the bar of a
dumb-bell both unites and divides the two balls. But the union and the
division are not _secundum idem_: it divides them by keeping them out
of the space between, it unites them by keeping them out of the space
beyond; so the double function presents no inconsistency.
Self-contradiction in space could only ensue if one part tried to oust
another from its position; but the notion of such an absurdity vanishes
in the framing, and cannot stay to vex the mind.[2] Beyond the parts
we see or think at any {266} given time extend further parts; but the
beyond is homogeneous with what is embraced, and follows the same law;
so that no surprises, no foreignness, can ever emerge from space's womb.
Thus with space our intelligence is absolutely intimate; it is
rationality and transparency incarnate. The same may be said of the
ego and of time. But if for simplicity's sake we ignore them, we may
truly say that when we desiderate rational knowledge of the world the
standard set by our knowledge of space is what governs our desire.[3]
Cannot the breaks, the jolts, the margin of foreignness, be exorcised
from other things and leave them unitary like the space they fill?
Could this be done, the philosophic kingdom of heaven would be at hand.
But the moment we turn to the material qualities {267} of being, we
find the continuity ruptured on every side. A fearful jolting begins.
Even if we simplify the world by reducing it to its mechanical bare
poles,--atoms and their motions,--the discontinuity is bad enough. The
laws of clash, the effects of distance upon attraction and repulsion,
all seem arbitrary collocations of data. The atoms themselves are so
many independent facts, the existence of any one of which in no wise
seems to involve the existence of the rest. We have not banished
discontinuity, we have only made it finer-grained. And to get even
that degree of rationality into the universe we have had to butcher a
great part of its contents. The secondary qualities we stripped off
from the reality and swept into the dust-bin labelled 'subjective
illusion,' still _as such_ are facts, and must themselves be
rationalized in some way.
But when we deal with facts believed to be purely subjective, we are
farther than ever from the goal. We have not now the refuge of
distinguishing between the 'reality' and its appearances. Facts of
thought being the only facts, differences of thought become the only
differences, and identities of thought the only identities there are.
Two thoughts that seem different are different to all eternity. We can
no longer speak of heat and light being reconciled in any _tertium
quid_ like wave-motion. For motion is motion, and light is light, and
heat heat forever, and their discontinuity is as absolute as their
existence. Together with the other attributes and things we conceive,
they make up Plato's realm of immutable ideas. Neither _per se_ calls
for the other, hatches it out, is its 'truth,' creates it, or has any
sort of inward community with it except that of being comparable {268}
in an ego and found more or less differing, or more or less resembling,
as the case may be. The world of qualities is a world of things almost
wholly discontinuous _inter se_. Each only says, "I am that I am," and
each says it on its own account and with absolute monotony. The
continuities of which they _partake_, in Plato's phrase, the ego,
space, and time, are for most of them the only grounds of union they
possess.
It might seem as if in the mere 'partaking' there lay a contradiction
of the discontinuity. If the white must partake of space, the heat of
time, and so forth,--do not whiteness and space, heat and time,
mutually call for or help to create each other?
Yes; a few such _à priori_ couplings must be admitted. They are the
axioms: no feeling except as occupying some space and time, or as a
moment in some ego; no motion but of something moved; no thought but of
an object; no time without a previous time,--and the like. But they
are limited in number, and they obtain only between excessively broad
genera of concepts, and leave quite undetermined what the
specifications of those genera shall be. What feeling shall fill
_this_ time, what substance execute _this_ motion, what qualities
combine in _this_ being, are as much unanswered questions as if the
metaphysical axioms never existed at all.
The existence of such syntheses as they are does then but slightly
mitigate the jolt, jolt, jolt we get when we pass over the facts of the
world. Everywhere indeterminate variables, subject only to these few
vague enveloping laws, independent in all besides.--such seems the
truth.
In yet another way, too, ideal and real are so far {269} apart that
their conjunction seems quite hopeless. To eat our cake and have it,
to lose our soul and save it, to enjoy the physical privileges of
selfishness and the moral luxury of altruism at the same time, would be
the ideal. But the real offers us these terms in the shape of mutually
exclusive alternatives of which only one can be true at once; so that
we must choose, and in choosing murder one possibility. The wrench is
absolute: "Either--or!" Just as whenever I bet a hundred dollars on an
event, there comes an instant when I am a hundred dollars richer or
poorer without any intermediate degrees passed over; just as my
wavering between a journey to Portland or to New York does not carry me
from Cambridge in a resultant direction in which both motions are
compounded, say to Albany, but at a given moment results in the
conjunction of reality in all its fulness for one alternative and
impossibility in all its fulness for the other,--so the bachelor joys
are utterly lost from the face of being for the married man, who must
henceforward find his account in something that is not them but is good
enough to make him forget them; so the careless and irresponsible
living in the sunshine, the 'unbuttoning after supper and sleeping upon
benches in the afternoon,' are stars that have set upon the path of him
who in good earnest makes himself a moralist. The transitions are
abrupt, absolute, truly shot out of a pistol; for while many
possibilities are called, the few that are chosen are chosen in all
their sudden completeness.
Must we then think that the world that fills space and time can yield
us no acquaintance of that high and perfect type yielded by empty space
and time themselves? Is what unity there is in the world {270} mainly
derived from the fact that the world is _in_ space and time and
'partakes' of them? Can no vision of it forestall the facts of it, or
know from some fractions the others before the others have arrived?
Are there real logically indeterminate possibilities which forbid there
being any equivalent for the happening of it all but the happening
itself? Can we gain no anticipatory assurance that what is to come
will have no strangeness? Is there no substitute, in short, for life
but the living itself in all its long-drawn weary length and breadth
and thickness?
In the negative reply to all these questions, a modest common-sense
finds no difficulty in acquiescing. To such a way of thinking the
notion of 'partaking' has a deep and real significance. Whoso partakes
of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and
its other partakers. But he claims no more. His share in no wise
negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession
of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and
which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing. Why may
not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all
the qualities of being respect one another's personal sacredness, yet
sit at the common table of space and time?
To me this view seems deeply probable. Things cohere, but the act of
cohesion itself implies but few conditions, and leaves the rest of
their qualifications indeterminate. As the first three notes of a tune
comport many endings, all melodious, but the tune is not named till a
particular ending has actually come,--so the parts actually known of
the universe may comport many ideally possible complements. But as
{271} the facts are not the complements, so the knowledge of the one is
not the knowledge of the other in anything but the few necessary
elements of which all must partake in order to be together at all.
Why, if one act of knowledge could from one point take in the total
perspective, with all mere possibilities abolished, should there ever
have been anything more than that act? Why duplicate it by the tedious
unrolling, inch by inch, of the foredone reality? No answer seems
possible. On the other hand, if we stipulate only a partial community
of partially independent powers, we see perfectly why no one part
controls the whole view, but each detail must come and be actually
given, before, in any special sense, it can be said to be determined at
all. This is the moral view, the view that gives to other powers the
same freedom it would have itself,--not the ridiculous 'freedom to do
right,' which in my mouth can only mean the freedom to do as _I_ think
right, but the freedom to do as _they_ think right, or wrong either.
After all, what accounts do the nether-most bounds of the universe owe
to me? By what insatiate conceit and lust of intellectual despotism do
I arrogate the right to know their secrets, and from my philosophic
throne to play the only airs they shall march to, as if I were the
Lord's anointed? Is not my knowing them at all a gift and not a right?
And shall it be given before they are given? _Data! gifts!_ something
to be thankful for! It is a gift that we can approach things at all,
and, by means of the time and space of which our minds and they
partake, alter our actions so as to meet them.
There are 'bounds of ord'nance' set for all things, where they must
pause or rue it. 'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for
it, not by it.
{272}
Now, to a mind like Hegel's such pusillanimous twaddle sounds simply
loathsome. Bounds that we can't overpass! Data! facts that say,
"Hands off, till we are given"! possibilities we can't control! a
banquet of which we merely share! Heavens, this is intolerable; such a
world is no world for a philosopher to have to do with. He must have
all or nothing. If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in the
sense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it is rational
at all. It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whose
haphazard sway I will not truckle. But, no! this is not the world.
The world is philosophy's own,--a single block, of which, if she once
get her teeth on any part, the whole shall inevitably become her prey
and feed her all-devouring theoretic maw. Naught shall be but the
necessities she creates and impossibilities; freedom shall mean freedom
to obey her will, ideal and actual shall be one: she, and I as her
champion, will be satisfied on no lower terms.
The insolence of sway, the _hubris_ on which gods take vengeance, is in
temporal and spiritual matters usually admitted to be a vice. A
Bonaparte and a Philip II. are called monsters. But when an
_intellect_ is found insatiate enough to declare that all existence
must bend the knee to its requirements, we do not call its owner a
monster, but a philosophic prophet. May not this be all wrong? Is
there any one of our functions exempted from the common lot of
liability to excess? And where everything else must be contented with
its part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shod
over the whole?
I confess I can see no _à priori_ reason for the exception. He who
claims it must be judged by the {273} consequences of his acts, and by
them alone. Let Hegel then confront the universe with his claim, and
see how he can make the two match.
The universe absolutely refuses to let him travel without jolt. Time,
space, and his ego are continuous; so are degrees of heat, shades of
light and color, and a few other serial things; so too do potatoes call
for salt, and cranberries for sugar, in the taste of one who knows what
salt and sugar are. But on the whole there is nought to soften the
shock of surprise to his intelligence, as it passes from one quality of
being to another. Light is not heat, heat is not light; and to him who
holds the one the other is not given till it give itself. Real being
comes moreover and goes from any concept at its own sweet will, with no
permission asked of the conceiver. In despair must Hegel lift vain
hands of imprecation; and since he will take nothing but the whole, he
must throw away even the part he might retain, and call the nature of
things an _absolute_ muddle and incoherence.
But, hark! What wondrous strain is this that steals upon his ear?
Incoherence itself, may it not be the very sort of coherence I require?
Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency? Is not
jolt passage? Is friction other than a kind of lubrication? Is not a
chasm a filling?--a queer kind of filling, but a filling still. Why
seek for a glue to hold things together when their very falling apart
is the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemed to
disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the
problem stands solved. The paradoxical character of the notion could
not fail to please a mind monstrous even in its native {274} Germany,
where mental excess is endemic. Richard, for a moment brought to bay,
is himself again. He vaults into the saddle, and from that time his
career is that of a philosophic desperado,--one series of outrages upon
the chastity of thought.
And can we not ourselves sympathize with his mood in some degree? The
old receipts of squeezing the thistle and taking the bull by the horns
have many applications. An evil frankly accepted loses half its sting
and all its terror. The Stoics had their cheap and easy way of dealing
with evil. _Call_ your woes goods, they said; refuse to _call_ your
lost blessings by that name,--and you are happy. So of the
unintelligibilities: call them means of intelligibility, and what
further do you require? There is even a more legitimate excuse than
that. In the exceedingness of the facts of life over our formulas lies
a standing temptation at certain times to give up trying to say
anything adequate about them, and to take refuge in wild and whirling
words which but confess our impotence before their ineffability. Thus
Baron Bunsen writes to his wife: "Nothing is near but the far; nothing
true but the highest; nothing credible but the inconceivable; nothing
so real as the impossible; nothing clear but the deepest; nothing so
visible as the invisible; and no life is there but through death." Of
these ecstatic moments the _credo quia impossibile_ is the classical
expression. Hegel's originality lies in his making their mood
permanent and sacramental, and authorized to supersede all others,--not
as a mystical bath and refuge for feeling when tired reason sickens of
her intellectual responsibilities (thank Heaven! that bath is always
ready), but as the very form of intellectual responsibility itself.
{275}
And now after this long introduction, let me trace some of Hegel's ways
of applying his discovery. His system resembles a mouse-trap, in which
if you once pass the door you may be lost forever. Safety lies in not
entering. Hegelians have anointed, so to speak, the entrance with
various considerations which, stated in an abstract form, are so
plausible as to slide us unresistingly and almost unwittingly through
the fatal arch. It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that it
is salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving that
its premises are rotten. I shall accordingly confine myself to a few
of the points that captivate beginners most; and assume that if they
break down, so must the system which they prop.
First of all, Hegel has to do utterly away with the sharing and
partaking business he so much loathes. He will not call contradiction
the glue in one place and identity in another; that is too
half-hearted. Contradiction must be a glue universal, and must derive
its credit from being shown to be latently involved in cases that we
hitherto supposed to embody pure continuity. Thus, the relations of an
ego with its objects, of one time with another time, of one place with
another place, of a cause with its effect, of a thing with its
properties, and especially of parts with wholes, must be shown to
involve contradiction. Contradiction, shown to lurk in the very heart
of coherence and continuity, cannot after that be held to defeat them,
and must be taken as the universal solvent,--or, rather, there is no
longer any need of a solvent. To 'dissolve' things in identity was the
dream of earlier cruder schools. Hegel will show that their very
difference is their identity, and that {276} in the act of detachment
the detachment is undone, and they fall into each other's arms.
Now, at the very outset it seems rather odd that a philosopher who
pretends that the world is absolutely rational, or in other words that
it can be completely understood, should fall back on a principle (the
identity of contradictories) which utterly defies understanding, and
obliges him in fact to use the word 'understanding,' whenever it occurs
in his pages, as a term of contempt. Take the case of space we used
above. The common man who looks at space believes there is nothing in
it to be acquainted with beyond what he sees; no hidden machinery, no
secrets, nothing but the parts as they lie side by side and make the
static whole. His intellect is satisfied with accepting space as an
ultimate genus of the given. But Hegel cries to him: "Dupe! dost thou
not see it to be one nest of incompatibilities? Do not the unity of
its wholeness and the diversity of its parts stand in patent
contradiction? Does it not both unite and divide things; and but for
this strange and irreconcilable activity, would it be at all? The
hidden dynamism of self-contradiction is what incessantly produces the
static appearance by which your sense is fooled."
But if the man ask how self-contradiction _can_ do all this, and how
its dynamism may be seen to work, Hegel can only reply by showing him
the space itself and saying: "Lo, _thus_." In other words, instead of
the principle of explanation being more intelligible than the thing to
be explained, it is absolutely unintelligible if taken by itself, and
must appeal to its pretended product to prove its existence. Surely,
such a system of explaining _notum per ignotum_, of {277} making the
_explicans_ borrow credentials from the _explicand_, and of creating
paradoxes and impossibilities where none were suspected, is a strange
candidate for the honor of being a complete rationalizer of the world.
The principle of the contradictoriness of identity and the identity of
contradictories is the essence of the hegelian system. But what
probably washes this principle down most with beginners is the
combination in which its author works it with another principle which
is by no means characteristic of his system, and which, for want of a
better name, might be called the 'principle of totality.' This
principle says that you cannot adequately know even a part until you
know of what whole it forms a part. As Aristotle writes and Hegel
loves to quote, an amputated hand is not even a hand. And as Tennyson
says,--
"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."
Obviously, until we have taken in all the relations, immediate or
remote, into which the thing actually enters or potentially may enter,
we do not know all _about_ the thing.
And obviously for such an exhaustive acquaintance with the thing, an
acquaintance with every other thing, actual and potential, near and
remote, is needed; so that it is quite fair to say that omniscience
alone can completely know any one thing as it stands. Standing in a
world of relations, that world must be known before the thing is fully
known. This doctrine is of course an integral part of empiricism, an
integral part of common-sense. Since when could good men not apprehend
the passing hour {278} in the light of life's larger sweep,--not grow
dispassionate the more they stretched their view? Did the 'law of
sharing' so little legitimate their procedure that a law of identity of
contradictories, forsooth, must be trumped up to give it scope? Out
upon the idea!
Hume's account of causation is a good illustration of the way in which
empiricism may use the principle of totality. We call something a
cause; but we at the same time deny its effect to be in any latent way
contained in or substantially identical with it. We thus cannot tell
what its causality amounts to until its effect has actually supervened.
The effect, then, or something beyond the thing is what makes the thing
to be so far as it is a cause. Humism thus says that its causality is
something adventitious and not necessarily given when its other
attributes are there. Generalizing this, empiricism contends that we
must everywhere distinguish between the intrinsic being of a thing and
its relations, and, among these, between those that are essential to
our knowing it at all and those that may be called adventitious. The
thing as actually present in a given world is there with _all_ its
relations; for it to be known as it _there_ exists, they must be known
too, and it and they form a single fact for any consciousness large
enough to embrace that world as a unity. But what constitutes this
singleness of fact, this unity? Empiricism says, Nothing but the
relation-yielding matrix in which the several items of the world find
themselves embedded,--time, namely, and space, and the mind of the
knower. And it says that were some of the items quite different from
what they are and others the same, still, for aught we can see, an
equally unitary world might be, provided each {279} item were an object
for consciousness and occupied a determinate point in space and time.
All the adventitious relations would in such a world be changed, along
with the intrinsic natures and places of the beings between which they
obtained; but the 'principle of totality' in knowledge would in no wise
be affected.
But Hegelism dogmatically denies all this to be possible. In the first
place it says there are no intrinsic natures that may change; in the
second it says there are no adventitious relations. When the relations
of what we call a thing are told, no _caput mortuum_ of intrinsicality,
no 'nature,' is left. The relations soak up all there is of the thing;
the 'items' of the world are but _foci_ of relation with other _foci_
of relation; and all the relations are necessary. The unity of the
world has nothing to do with any 'matrix.' The matrix and the items,
each with all, make a unity, simply because each in truth is all the
rest. The proof lies in the _hegelian_ principle of totality, which
demands that if any one part be posited alone all the others shall
forthwith _emanate_ from it and infallibly reproduce the whole. In the
_modus operandi_ of the emanation comes in, as I said, that partnership
of the principle of totality with that of the identity of
contradictories which so recommends the latter to beginners in Hegel's
philosophy. To posit one item alone is to deny the rest; to deny them
is to refer to them; to refer to them is to begin, at least, to bring
them on the scene; and to begin is in the fulness of time to end.
If we call this a monism, Hegel is quick to cry, Not so! To say simply
that the one item is the rest {280} of the universe is as false and
one-sided as to say that it is simply itself. It is both and neither;
and the only condition on which we gain the right to affirm that it is,
is that we fail not to keep affirming all the while that it is not, as
well. Thus the truth refuses to be expressed in any single act of
judgment or sentence. The world appears as a monism _and_ a pluralism,
just as it appeared in our own introductory exposition.
But the trouble that keeps us and Hegel from ever joining hands over
this apparent formula of brotherhood is that we distinguish, or try to
distinguish, the respects in which the world is one from those in which
it is many, while all such stable distinctions are what he most
abominates. The reader may decide which procedure helps his reason
most. For my own part, the time-honored formula of empiricist
pluralism, that the world cannot be set down in any single proposition,
grows less instead of more intelligible when I add, "And yet the
different propositions that express it are one!" The unity of the
propositions is that of the mind that harbors them. Any one who
insists that their diversity is in any way itself their unity, can only
do so because he loves obscurity and mystification for their own pure
sakes.
Where you meet with a contradiction among realities, Herbart used to
say, it shows you have failed to make a real distinction. Hegel's
sovereign method of going to work and saving all possible
contradictions, lies in pertinaciously refusing to distinguish. He
takes what is true of a term _secundum quid_, treats it as true of the
same term _simpliciter_, and then, of course, applies it to the term
_secundum aliud_. A {281} good example of this is found in the first
triad. This triad shows that the mutability of the real world is due
to the fact that being constantly negates itself; that whatever _is_ by
the same act _is not_, and gets undone and swept away; and that thus
the irremediable torrent of life about which so much rhetoric has been
written has its roots in an ineluctable necessity which lies revealed
to our logical reason. This notion of a being which forever stumbles
over its own feet, and has to change in order to exist at all, is a
very picturesque symbol of the reality, and is probably one of the
points that make young readers feel as if a deep core of truth lay in
the system.
But how is the reasoning done? Pure being is assumed, without
determinations, being _secundum quid_. In this respect it agrees with
nothing. Therefore _simpliciter_ it is nothing; wherever we find it,
it is nothing; crowned with complete determinations then, or _secundum
aliud_, it is nothing still, and _hebt sich auf_.
It is as if we said, Man without his clothes may be named 'the naked.'
Therefore man _simpliciter_ is the naked; and finally man with his hat,
shoes, and overcoat on is the naked still.
Of course we may in this instance or any other repeat that the
conclusion is strictly true, however comical it seems. Man within the
clothes is naked, just as he is without them. Man would never have
invented the clothes had he not been naked. The fact of his being clad
at all does prove his essential nudity. And so in general,--the form
of any judgment, being the addition of a predicate to a subject, shows
that the subject has been conceived without the predicate, and thus by
a strained metaphor may {282} be called the predicate's negation. Well
and good! let the expression pass. But we must notice this. The
judgment has now created a new subject, the naked-clad, and all
propositions regarding this must be judged on their own merits; for
those true of the old subject, 'the naked,' are no longer true of this
one. For instance, we cannot say because the naked pure and simple
must not enter the drawing-room or is in danger of taking cold, that
the naked with his clothes on will also take cold or must stay in his
bedroom. Hold to it eternally that the clad man _is_ still naked if it
amuse you,--'tis designated in the bond; but the so-called
contradiction is a sterile boon. Like Shylock's pound of flesh, it
leads to no consequences. It does not entitle you to one drop of his
Christian blood either in the way of catarrh, social exclusion, or what
further results pure nakedness may involve.
In a version of the first step given by our foremost American
Hegelian,[4] we find this playing with the necessary form of judgment.
Pure being, he says, has no determinations. But the having none is
itself a determination. Wherefore pure being contradicts its own self,
and so on. Why not take heed to the _meaning_ of what is said? When
we make the predication concerning pure being, our meaning is merely
the denial of all other determinations than the particular one we make.
The showman who advertised his elephant as 'larger than any elephant in
the world except himself' must have been in an hegelian country where
he was afraid that if he were less explicit the audience would
dialectically proceed to say: {283} "This elephant, larger than any in
the world, involves a contradiction; for he himself is in the world,
and so stands endowed with the virtue of being both larger and smaller
than himself,--a perfect hegelian elephant, whose immanent
self-contradictoriness can only be removed in a higher synthesis. Show
us the higher synthesis! We don't care to see such a mere abstract
creature as your elephant." It may be (and it was indeed suggested in
antiquity) that all things are of their own size by being both larger
and smaller than themselves. But in the case of this elephant the
scrupulous showman nipped such philosophizing and all its inconvenient
consequences in the bud, by explicitly intimating that larger than any
_other_ elephant was all he meant.
Hegel's quibble with this word _other_ exemplifies the same fallacy.
All 'others,' as such, are according to him identical. That is,
'otherness,' which can only be predicated of a given thing _A_,
_secundum quid_ (as other than _B_, etc.), is predicated _simpliciter_,
and made to identify the _A_ in question with _B_, which is other only
_secundum aliud_,--namely other than _A_.
Another maxim that Hegelism is never tired of repeating is that "to
know a limit is already to be beyond it." "Stone walls do not a prison
make, nor iron bars a cage." The inmate of the penitentiary shows by
his grumbling that he is still in the stage of abstraction and of
separative thought. The more keenly he thinks of the fun he might be
having outside, the more deeply he ought to feel that the walls
identify him with it. They set him beyond them _secundum quid_, in
imagination, in longing, in despair; _argal_ they take him there
_simpliciter_ and {284} in every way,--in flesh, in power, in deed.
Foolish convict, to ignore his blessings!
Another mode of stating his principle is this: "To know the finite as
such, is also to know the infinite." Expressed in this abstract shape,
the formula is as insignificant as it is unobjectionable. We can cap
every word with a negative particle, and the word _finished_
immediately suggests the word _unfinished_, and we know the two words
together.
But it is an entirely different thing to take the knowledge of a
concrete case of ending, and to say that it virtually makes us
acquainted with other concrete facts _in infinitum_. For, in the first
place, the end may be an absolute one. The _matter_ of the universe,
for instance, is according to all appearances in finite amount; and if
we knew that we had counted the last bit of it, infinite knowledge in
that respect, so far from being given, would be impossible. With
regard to _space_, it is true that in drawing a bound we are aware of
more. But to treat this little fringe as the equal of infinite space
is ridiculous. It resembles infinite space _secundum quid_, or in but
one respect,--its spatial quality. We believe it homogeneous with
whatever spaces may remain; but it would be fatuous to say, because one
dollar in my pocket is homogeneous with all the dollars in the country,
that to have it is to have them. The further points of space are as
numerically distinct from the fringe as the dollars from the dollar,
and not until we have actually intuited them can we be said to 'know'
them _simpliciter_. The hegelian reply is that the _quality_ of space
constitutes its only _worth_; and that there is nothing true, good, or
beautiful to be known {285} in the spaces beyond which is not already
known in the fringe. This introduction of a eulogistic term into a
mathematical question is original. The 'true' and the 'false' infinite
are about as appropriate distinctions in a discussion of cognition as
the good and the naughty rain would be in a treatise on meteorology.
But when we grant that all the worth of the knowledge of distant spaces
is due to the knowledge of what they may carry in them, it then appears
more than ever absurd to say that the knowledge of the fringe is an
equivalent for the infinitude of the distant knowledge. The distant
spaces even _simpliciter_ are not yet yielded to our thinking; and if
they were yielded _simpliciter_, would not be yielded _secundum aliud_,
or in respect to their material filling out.
Shylock's bond was an omnipotent instrument compared with this
knowledge of the finite, which remains the ignorance it always was,
till the infinite by its own act has piece by piece placed itself in
our hands.
Here Hegelism cries out: "By the identity of the knowledges of infinite
and finite I never meant that one could be a _substitute_ for the
other; nor does true philosophy ever mean by identity capacity for
substitution." This sounds suspiciously like the good and the naughty
infinite, or rather like the mysteries of the Trinity and the
Eucharist. To the unsentimental mind there are but two sorts of
identity,--total identity and partial identity. Where the identity is
total, the things can be substituted wholly for one another. Where
substitution is impossible, it must be that the identity is incomplete.
It is the duty of the student then to ascertain the exact _quid,
secundum_ which it obtains, as we have tried to do above. Even the
Catholic will tell you that when he believes in the {286} identity of
the wafer with Christ's body, he does not mean in all respects,--so
that he might use it to exhibit muscular fibre, or a cook make it smell
like baked meat in the oven. He means that in the one sole respect of
nourishing his being in a certain way, it is identical with and can be
substituted for the very body of his Redeemer.
'The knowledge of opposites is one,' is one of the hegelian first
principles, of which the preceding are perhaps only derivatives. Here
again Hegelism takes 'knowledge' _simpliciter_, and substituting it for
knowledge in a particular respect, avails itself of the confusion to
cover other respects never originally implied. When the knowledge of a
thing is given us, we no doubt think that the thing may or must have an
opposite. This postulate of something opposite we may call a
'knowledge of the opposite' if we like; but it is a knowledge of it in
only that one single respect, that it is something opposite. No number
of opposites to a quality we have never directly experienced could ever
lead us positively to infer what that quality is. There is a jolt
between the negation of them and the actual positing of it in its
proper shape, that twenty logics of Hegel harnessed abreast cannot
drive us smoothly over.
The use of the maxim 'All determination is negation' is the fattest and
most full-blown application of the method of refusing to distinguish.
Taken in its vague confusion, it probably does more than anything else
to produce the sort of flicker and dazzle which are the first mental
conditions for the reception of Hegel's system. The word 'negation'
taken _simpliciter_ is treated as if it covered an indefinite number of
{287} _secundums_, culminating in the very peculiar one of
self-negation. Whence finally the conclusion is drawn that assertions
are universally self-contradictory. As this is an important matter, it
seems worth while to treat it a little minutely.
When I measure out a pint, say of milk, and so determine it, what do I
do? I virtually make two assertions regarding it,--it is this pint; it
is not those other gallons. One of these is an affirmation, the other
a negation. Both have a common subject; but the predicates being
mutually exclusive, the two assertions lie beside each other in endless
peace.
I may with propriety be said to make assertions more remote
still,--assertions of which those other gallons are the subject. As it
is not they, so are they not the pint which it is. The determination
"this is the pint" carries with it the negation,--"those are not the
pints." Here we have the same predicate; but the subjects are
exclusive of each other, so there is again endless peace. In both
couples of propositions negation and affirmation are _secundum aliud_:
this is _a_; this is n't not-_a_. This kind of negation involved in
determination cannot possibly be what Hegel wants for his purposes.
The table is not the chair, the fireplace is not the cupboard,--these
are literal expressions of the law of identity and contradiction, those
principles of the abstracting and separating understanding for which
Hegel has so sovereign a contempt, and which his logic is meant to
supersede.
And accordingly Hegelians pursue the subject further, saying there is
in every determination an element of real conflict. Do you not in
determining the milk to be this pint exclude it forever from the chance
of being those gallons, frustrate it from {288} expansion? And so do
you not equally exclude them from the being which it now maintains as
its own?
Assuredly if you had been hearing of a land flowing with milk and
honey, and had gone there with unlimited expectations of the rivers the
milk would fill; and if you found there was but this single pint in the
whole country,--the determination of the pint would exclude another
determination which your mind had previously made of the milk. There
would be a real conflict resulting in the victory of one side. The
rivers would be negated by the single pint being affirmed; and as
rivers and pint are affirmed of the same milk (first as supposed and
then as found), the contradiction would be complete.
But it is a contradiction that can never by any chance occur in real
nature or being. It can only occur between a false representation of a
being and the true idea of the being when actually cognized. The first
got into a place where it had no rights and had to be ousted. But in
_rerum naturâ_ things do not get into one another's logical places.
The gallons first spoken of never say, "We are the pint;" the pint
never says, "I am the gallons." It never tries to expand; and so there
is no chance for anything to exclude or negate it. It thus remains
affirmed absolutely.
Can it be believed in the teeth of these elementary truths that the
principle _determinatio negatio_ is held throughout Hegel to imply an
active contradiction, conflict, and exclusion? Do the horse-cars
jingling outside negate me writing in this room? Do I, reader, negate
you? Of course, if I say, "Reader, we are two, and therefore I am
two," I negate you, for I am actually thrusting a part into the seat of
the whole. {289} The orthodox logic expresses the fallacy by saying
the we is taken by me distributively instead of collectively; but as
long as I do not make this blunder, and am content with my part, we all
are safe. In _rerum naturâ_, parts remain parts. Can you imagine one
position in space trying to get into the place of another position and
having to be 'contradicted' by that other? Can you imagine your
thought of an object trying to dispossess the real object from its
being, and so being negated by it? The great, the sacred law of
partaking, the noiseless step of continuity, seems something that Hegel
cannot possibly understand. All or nothing is his one idea. For him
each point of space, of time, each feeling in the ego, each quality of
being, is clamoring, "I am the all,--there is nought else but me."
This clamor is its essence, which has to be negated in another act
which gives it its true determination. What there is of affirmative in
this determination is thus the mere residuum left from the negation by
others of the negation it originally applied to them.
But why talk of residuum? The Kilkenny cats of fable could leave a
residuum in the shape of their undevoured tails. But the Kilkenny cats
of existence as it appears in the pages of Hegel are all-devouring, and
leave no residuum. Such is the unexampled fury of their onslaught that
they get clean out of themselves and into each other, nay more, pass
right through each other, and then "return into themselves" ready for
another round, as insatiate, but as inconclusive, as the one that went
before.
If I characterized Hegel's own mood as _hubris_, the insolence of
excess, what shall I say of the mood he ascribes to being? Man makes
the gods in his {290} image; and Hegel, in daring to insult the
spotless _sôphrosune_ of space and time, the bound-respecters, in
branding as strife that law of sharing under whose sacred keeping, like
a strain of music, like an odor of incense (as Emerson says), the dance
of the atoms goes forward still, seems to me but to manifest his own
deformity.
This leads me to animadvert on an erroneous inference which hegelian
idealism makes from the form of the negative judgment. Every negation,
it says, must be an intellectual act. Even the most _naïf_ realism
will hardly pretend that the non-table as such exists _in se_ after the
same fashion as the table does. But table and non-table, since they
are given to our thought together, must be consubstantial. Try to make
the position or affirmation of the table as simple as you can, it is
also the negation of the non-table; and thus positive being itself
seems after all but a function of intelligence, like negation.
Idealism is proved, realism is unthinkable. Now I have not myself the
least objection to idealism,--an hypothesis which voluminous
considerations make plausible, and whose difficulties may be cleared
away any day by new discriminations or discoveries. But I object to
proving by these patent ready-made _à priori_ methods that which can
only be the fruit of a wide and patient induction. For the truth is
that our affirmations and negations do not stand on the same footing at
all, and are anything but consubstantial. An affirmation says
something about an objective existence. A negation says something
_about an affirmation_,--namely, that it is false. There are no
negative predicates or falsities in nature. Being makes no false
hypotheses that have {291} to be contradicted. The only denials she
can be in any way construed to perform are denials of our errors. This
shows plainly enough that denial must be of something mental, since the
thing denied is always a fiction. "The table is not the chair"
supposes the speaker to have been playing with the false notion that it
may have been the chair. But affirmation may perfectly well be of
something having no such necessary and constitutive relation to
thought. Whether it really is of such a thing is for harder
considerations to decide.
If idealism be true, the great question that presents itself is whether
its truth involve the necessity of an infinite, unitary, and omniscient
consciousness, or whether a republic of semi-detached consciousnesses
will do,--consciousnesses united by a certain common fund of
representations, but each possessing a private store which the others
do not share. Either hypothesis is to me conceivable. But whether the
egos be one or many, the _nextness_ of representations to one another
within them is the principle of unification of the universe. To be
thus consciously next to some other representation is the condition to
which each representation must submit, under penalty of being excluded
from this universe, and like Lord Dundreary's bird 'flocking all
alone,' and forming a separate universe by itself. But this is only a
condition of which the representations _partake_; it leaves all their
other determinations undecided. To say, because representation _b_
cannot be in the same universe with _a_ without being _a's neighbor_;
that therefore _a_ possesses, involves, or necessitates _b_, hide and
hair, flesh and fell, all appurtenances and belongings,--is {292} only
the silly hegelian all-or-nothing insatiateness once more.
Hegel's own logic, with all the senseless hocus-pocus of its triads,
utterly fails to prove his position. The only evident compulsion which
representations exert upon one another is compulsion to submit to the
conditions of entrance into the same universe with them--the conditions
of continuity, of selfhood, space, and time--under penalty of being
excluded. But what this universe shall be is a matter of fact which we
cannot decide till we know what representations _have_ submitted to
these its sole conditions. The conditions themselves impose no further
requirements. In short, the notion that real contingency and ambiguity
may be features of the real world is a perfectly unimpeachable
hypothesis. Only in such a world can moral judgments have a claim to
be. For the bad is that which takes the place of something else which
possibly might have been where it now is, and the better is that which
absolutely might be where it absolutely is not. In the universe of
Hegel--the absolute block whose parts have no loose play, the pure
plethora of necessary being with the oxygen of possibility all
suffocated out of its lungs--there can be neither good nor bad, but one
dead level of mere fate.
But I have tired the reader out. The worst of criticising Hegel is
that the very arguments we use against him give forth strange and
hollow sounds that make them seem almost as fantastic as the errors to
which they are addressed. The sense of a universal mirage, of a
ghostly unreality, steals over us, which is the very moonlit atmosphere
of Hegelism itself. What wonder then if, instead of {293} converting,
our words do but rejoice and delight, those already baptized in the
faith of confusion? To their charmed senses we all seem children of
Hegel together, only some of us have not the wit to know our own
father. Just as Romanists are sure to inform us that our reasons
against Papal Christianity unconsciously breathe the purest spirit of
Catholicism, so Hegelism benignantly smiles at our exertions, and
murmurs, "If the red slayer think he slays;" "When me they fly, I am
the wings," etc.
To forefend this unwelcome adoption, let me recapitulate in a few
propositions the reasons why I am not an hegelian.
1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real
contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the
other false. When this happens, one must go forever; nor is there any
'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive.
2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere
negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought.
3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges, because they
are without chasm.
4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only
partially.
5. This partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a
common world.