There are no differences but differences of degree between different
degrees of difference and no difference.
This phrase has the true Hegelian ring, being in fact a regular _sich
als sich auf sich selbst beziehende Negativität_. And true Hegelians
will _überhaupt_ be able to read between the lines and feel, at any
rate, what _possible_ ecstasies of cognitive emotion might have bathed
these tattered fragments of thought when they were alive. But for the
assurance of a certain amount of respect from them, I should hardly
have ventured to print what must be such caviare to the general.
But now comes the reverse of the medal. What is the principle of unity
in all this monotonous rain of instances? Although I did not see it at
first, I soon found that it was in each case nothing but the abstract
_genus_ of which the conflicting terms were opposite species. In other
words, although the flood of ontologic _emotion_ was Hegelian through
and through, the _ground_ for it was nothing but the world-old
principle that things are the same only so far and no farther than they
_are_ the same, or partake of a common nature,--the principle that
Hegel most tramples under foot. At the same time the rapture of
beholding a process that was infinite, changed (as the nature of the
infinitude was realized by the mind) into the sense of a dreadful and
ineluctable fate, with whose magnitude every finite effort is
incommensurable and in the light of which whatever happens is
indifferent. This instantaneous revulsion of mood from rapture to
horror is, perhaps, the strongest emotion I have ever experienced. I
got it repeatedly when the inhalation was continued long enough to
produce incipient nausea; and I cannot but regard it as the normal and
inevitable outcome of the {298} intoxication, if sufficiently
prolonged. A pessimistic fatalism, depth within depth of impotence and
indifference, reason and silliness united, not in a higher synthesis,
but in the fact that whichever you choose it is all one,--this is the
upshot of a revelation that began so rosy bright.
Even when the process stops short of this ultimatum, the reader will
have noticed from the phrases quoted how often it ends by losing the
clue. Something 'fades,' 'escapes;' and the feeling of insight is
changed into an intense one of bewilderment, puzzle, confusion,
astonishment. I know no more singular sensation than this intense
bewilderment, with nothing particular left to be bewildered at save the
bewilderment itself. It seems, indeed, _a causa sui_, or 'spirit
become its own object.'
My conclusion is that the togetherness of things in a common world, the
law of sharing, of which I have said so much, may, when perceived,
engender a very powerful emotion, that Hegel was so unusually
susceptible to this emotion throughout his life that its gratification
became his supreme end, and made him tolerably unscrupulous as to the
means he employed; that _indifferentism_ is the true outcome of every
view of the world which makes infinity and continuity to be its
essence, and that pessimistic or optimistic attitudes pertain to the
mere accidental subjectivity of the moment; finally, that the
identification of contradictories, so far from being the
self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a
self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and
terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood
of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.
[1] Reprinted from Mind, April, 1882.
[2] The seeming contradiction between the infinitude of space and the
fact that it is all finished and given and there, can be got over in
more than one way. The simplest way is by idealism, which
distinguishes between space as actual and space as potential. For
idealism, space only exists so far as it is represented; but all
actually represented spaces are finite; it is only possibly
representable spaces that are infinite.
[3] Not only for simplicity's sake do we select space as the paragon of
a rationalizing continuum. Space determines the relations of the items
that enter it in a far more intricate way than does time; in a far more
fixed way than does the ego. By this last clause I mean that if things
are in space at all, they must conform to geometry; while the being in
an ego at all need not make them conform to logic or any other manner
of rationality. Under the sheltering wings of a self the matter of
unreason can lodge itself as safely as any other kind of content. One
cannot but respect the devoutness of the ego-worship of some of our
English-writing Hegelians. But at the same time one cannot help
fearing lest the monotonous contemplation of so barren a principle as
that of the pure formal self (which, be it never so essential a
condition of the existence of a world of organized experience at all,
must notwithstanding take its own _character_ from, not give the
character to, the separate empirical data over which its mantle is
cast), one cannot but fear, I say, lest the religion of the
transcendental ego should, like all religions of the 'one thing
needful,' end by sterilizing and occluding the minds of its believers.
[4] Journal of Speculative Philosophy, viii. 37.
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