In a short article like this, it is impossible to give more than a
few indications of the way in which this three-fold _schema_ of the
history of nineteenth-century philosophy should be filled up. To give
any definite impression, the writer must, so to speak, put on the
seven-leagued boots of Jack the Giant Killer; in other words, however
conscious he may be of the truth that _dolus latet in generalibus_, he
must generalize and be content to mention only a few leading names in
illustration of the tendencies of thought of which he speaks.
It is the instinct of each new generation to vindicate its freedom
by rebelling against the authority of its predecessors; and when a
new idea begins to influence human thought, it usually, on its first
appearance, shows that side which is most antagonistic to the spirit
of the past. Thus the peculiar nineteenth-century movement begins with
a reassertion of the _universal_ as against the _individual_, which
is so emphatic that it looks like a return to Spinozism. Schelling is
the most prominent philosophical representative of this tendency. In
the works which he wrote about the beginning of the century, he broke
away even from the universalized individualism of Fichte, and gave
emphatic prominence to the great philosophical commonplace—which had
been almost forgotten by the previous age—that there is an identity
which is below or above all distinction, and that the universe is one
through all its multiplicity, and permanent through all its changes.
His maxim—that there are none but _quantitative_ differences in
things, and that all these, even the difference of mind and matter,
disappear in the “indifference” of the Absolute—was like a declaration
of war against the “enlightenment.” It meant that philosophy was no
longer content to regard the whole as the sum of the parts, but could
look upon the distinction of the parts only as a differentiation of
the whole. With Schelling, indeed, this differentiation was in danger
of being reduced to a mere appearance and the unity of the Absolute
was on the point of vanishing in a bare or abstract identity. But his
strong assertion of the unity beneath all difference, of the priority
of the universal to all particulars, was perhaps necessary, ere the
true conception of the organic unity of the world could be arrived
at. And the correction soon came with Hegel, who maintained that the
absolute is “not substance, but subject.” For this meant that the
absolute is a self-differentiating principle, realizing itself in a
world of difference which is no mere appearance, but its own essential
manifestation; and again—what is the counterpart or complementary
truth to this—that in the world there are “degrees of reality,” and
that “mind is higher in degree than nature.” But these ideas could
hardly have been understood until the uncompromising assertion of the
absolute unity had been made, and until the subjectivity of the Kantian
and Fichtean points of view had once for all been set aside.
The philosophy of Hegel derives its power from the way in which
it strikes what, as I have already said, was the key-note of the
nineteenth-century philosophy. In the first place, it is a philosophy
of reconciliation, which attempts, through a criticism of the
oppositions of philosophical theory, to reach a point of view in
which they are all seen to be subordinated to the unity of one
principle. His attack upon the “law of contradiction,” as formulated
by scholastic logicians, meant simply that absolute distinctions are
unmeaning, and that the only real differences are differences within
a unity. On this principle he tried to show that all the oppositions
of thought and things which have found expression in philosophy are
relative oppositions, which find a solution or reconciliation in the
life and movement of the whole. Hence he maintained that in all the
great controversies that have divided the world, in metaphysics and
psychology, in ethics and theology, the combatants have really been
co-operators. Both sides, to use the expression of Leibnitz, have been
“right in what they affirmed and wrong only in what they denied.”
And their conflict has been the means of the evolution of a fuller
truth than that which was contained in the doctrine of either party.
In the second place, Hegel is guided throughout by the conception of
the universe—and, in a sense, of every even relatively independent
existence in it—as an organism, every element in which implies the
whole, every change in which is a phase of its self-evolution. For
his logical doctrine of the “_notion_” (as _Begriff_ is commonly
translated) means simply that we do not see anything truly until
we comprehend it as a whole, in which one principle manifests
itself through all the difference of the parts and—just through
their distinctions and their relations—binds itself into one
individual—reality. In this sense, everything just so far as it has
an independent individual existence at all is an organism. Lastly,
while thus conceiving the universe as organic, Hegel maintained that
it is not a natural but a spiritual organism. For the limited scope of
a natural organism and its process cannot be regarded as commensurate
with a universe, which comprehends all existence, whether classed as
organic or inorganic. Only the conscious and self-conscious unity
of mind can overreach and overcome such extreme antagonisms, and
reduce them all to elements in the realization of its own life. We
must, therefore, think of the universe as an organism which includes
nature, but manifests its ultimate principle only in the life of man.
We may add that in all this Hegel attempted to show that he was only
working out in the sphere of speculative thought what Christianity had
already expressed for the ordinary consciousness, according to its
half-pictorial methods of representation.
While this is the general meaning of Hegelianism, it must be added
that Hegel was more successful in formulating these ideas in their
logical or metaphysical form than in applying them to the results of
the special sciences of nature, which he only knew at second hand; or
even to the different provinces of the spiritual life and history of
man, which he had studied more thoroughly. In both cases his data were
very incomplete, and the scientific interpretation of them had not then
been carried far enough to prepare—as, according to Hegel himself, it
should prepare—for the final interpretation of philosophy. There is
another circumstance to be taken into account, a circumstance which
deeply affected Hegel and all the writers of his time. In the slow
process of human history the new wine is always at first poured into
old bottles, and only when the old bottles burst is an effort made
to find new ones that will contain it safely. Hence the development
of the new spirit in philosophy seemed often to go hand-in-hand with
a movement of restoration in politics and religion which was not
easily distinguishable from reaction. Just as the politicians of the
time could find for the newly awakened spirit of nationality no other
embodiment than the institutions of the ancient _régime_, and tried
to revive the old system destroyed by the Revolution, with only a
few repairs and additions, so the great philosophical writers sought
generally to reanimate the old scheme of life and thought by means of
the new ideas, rather than completely to recast it in accordance with
them. Hence, although Hegel’s _principle_ of evolution was as hostile
to reaction as to revolution, as hostile to an authoritative system
that denied the rights of the individual as to mere individualism, his
particular doctrines, both in politics and theology, took a strongly
conservative tinge. When we look more closely we see that it is only as
restoration is at the same time reformation, as it makes the old forms
the expression of a new life, that Hegel could logically defend them.
But the form which he gave to his ideas was perplexing; it tended in
many minds to identify the principle of development, which means that
the future can only spring _out_ of the past and the present, with the
defence of the _status quo_ in Church and State; and, on the other
hand, to confuse the forces of progress with those of revolution. Thus
the mediating, reconciling power of the new doctrine was for a time
obscured, and its effect in raising men’s minds above the old levels of
controversy was delayed.