communion and others not, and that some may have communion with all, let
us examine the most important kinds which are capable of admixture; and
in this way we may perhaps find out a sense in which not-being may be
affirmed to have being. Now the highest kinds are being, rest, motion;
and of these, rest and motion exclude each other, but both of them are
included in being; and again, they are the same with themselves and
the other of each other. What is the meaning of these words, 'same' and
'other'? Are there two more kinds to be added to the three others? For
sameness cannot be either rest or motion, because predicated both of
rest and motion; nor yet being; because if being were attributed to both
of them we should attribute sameness to both of them. Nor can other be
identified with being; for then other, which is relative, would have the
absoluteness of being. Therefore we must assume a fifth principle, which
is universal, and runs through all things, for each thing is other than
all other things. Thus there are five principles: (1) being, (2) motion,
which is not (3) rest, and because participating both in the same and
other, is and is not (4) the same with itself, and is and is not (5)
other than the other. And motion is not being, but partakes of being,
and therefore is and is not in the most absolute sense. Thus we have
discovered that not-being is the principle of the other which runs
through all things, being not excepted. And 'being' is one thing, and
'not-being' includes and is all other things. And not-being is not the
opposite of being, but only the other. Knowledge has many branches,
and the other or difference has as many, each of which is described by
prefixing the word 'not' to some kind of knowledge. The not-beautiful is
as real as the beautiful, the not-just as the just. And the essence of
the not-beautiful is to be separated from and opposed to a certain kind
of existence which is termed beautiful. And this opposition and negation
is the not-being of which we are in search, and is one kind of being.
Thus, in spite of Parmenides, we have not only discovered the existence,
but also the nature of not-being--that nature we have found to be
relation. In the communion of different kinds, being and other mutually
interpenetrate; other is, but is other than being, and other than each
and all of the remaining kinds, and therefore in an infinity of ways 'is
not.' And the argument has shown that the pursuit of contradictions is
childish and useless, and the very opposite of that higher spirit which
criticizes the words of another according to the natural meaning
of them. Nothing can be more unphilosophical than the denial of all
communion of kinds. And we are fortunate in having established such a
communion for another reason, because in continuing the hunt after the
Sophist we have to examine the nature of discourse, and there could be
no discourse if there were no communion. For the Sophist, although he
can no longer deny the existence of not-being, may still affirm that
not-being cannot enter into discourse, and as he was arguing before that
there could be no such thing as falsehood, because there was no such
thing as not-being, he may continue to argue that there is no such thing
as the art of image-making and phantastic, because not-being has no
place in language. Hence arises the necessity of examining speech,
opinion, and imagination.
And first concerning speech; let us ask the same question about words
which we have already answered about the kinds of being and the letters
of the alphabet: To what extent do they admit of combination? Some words
have a meaning when combined, and others have no meaning. One class of
words describes action, another class agents: 'walks,' 'runs,' 'sleeps'
are examples of the first; 'stag,' 'horse,' 'lion' of the second. But
no combination of words can be formed without a verb and a noun, e.g. 'A
man learns'; the simplest sentence is composed of two words, and one
of these must be a subject. For example, in the sentence, 'Theaetetus
sits,' which is not very long, 'Theaetetus' is the subject, and in the
sentence 'Theaetetus flies,' 'Theaetetus' is again the subject. But the
two sentences differ in quality, for the first says of you that which
is true, and the second says of you that which is not true, or, in other
words, attributes to you things which are not as though they were. Here
is false discourse in the shortest form. And thus not only speech,
but thought and opinion and imagination are proved to be both true and
false. For thought is only the process of silent speech, and opinion is
only the silent assent or denial which follows this, and imagination is
only the expression of this in some form of sense. All of them are akin
to speech, and therefore, like speech, admit of true and false. And
we have discovered false opinion, which is an encouraging sign of our
probable success in the rest of the enquiry.
Then now let us return to our old division of likeness-making and
phantastic. When we were going to place the Sophist in one of them,
a doubt arose whether there could be such a thing as an appearance,
because there was no such thing as falsehood. At length falsehood
has been discovered by us to exist, and we have acknowledged that the
Sophist is to be found in the class of imitators. All art was divided
originally by us into two branches--productive and acquisitive. And
now we may divide both on a different principle into the creations or
imitations which are of human, and those which are of divine, origin.
For we must admit that the world and ourselves and the animals did not
come into existence by chance, or the spontaneous working of nature, but
by divine reason and knowledge. And there are not only divine creations
but divine imitations, such as apparitions and shadows and reflections,
which are equally the work of a divine mind. And there are human
creations and human imitations too,--there is the actual house and the
drawing of it. Nor must we forget that image-making may be an imitation
of realities or an imitation of appearances, which last has been
called by us phantastic. And this phantastic may be again divided into
imitation by the help of instruments and impersonations. And the
latter may be either dissembling or unconscious, either with or without
knowledge. A man cannot imitate you, Theaetetus, without knowing you,
but he can imitate the form of justice or virtue if he have a sentiment
or opinion about them. Not being well provided with names, the former
I will venture to call the imitation of science, and the latter the
imitation of opinion.
The latter is our present concern, for the Sophist has no claims to
science or knowledge. Now the imitator, who has only opinion, may be
either the simple imitator, who thinks that he knows, or the dissembler,
who is conscious that he does not know, but disguises his ignorance. And
the last may be either a maker of long speeches, or of shorter speeches
which compel the person conversing to contradict himself. The maker of
longer speeches is the popular orator; the maker of the shorter is
the Sophist, whose art may be traced as being the
/ contradictious
/ dissembling
/ without knowledge
/ human and not divine
/ juggling with words
/ phantastic or unreal
/ art of image-making.
...
In commenting on the dialogue in which Plato most nearly approaches the
great modern master of metaphysics there are several points which
it will be useful to consider, such as the unity of opposites, the
conception of the ideas as causes, and the relation of the Platonic and
Hegelian dialectic.
The unity of opposites was the crux of ancient thinkers in the age of
Plato: How could one thing be or become another? That substances have
attributes was implied in common language; that heat and cold, day and
night, pass into one another was a matter of experience 'on a level with
the cobbler's understanding' (Theat.). But how could philosophy explain
the connexion of ideas, how justify the passing of them into one
another? The abstractions of one, other, being, not-being, rest, motion,
individual, universal, which successive generations of philosophers had
recently discovered, seemed to be beyond the reach of human thought,
like stars shining in a distant heaven. They were the symbols of
different schools of philosophy: but in what relation did they stand to
one another and to the world of sense? It was hardly conceivable
that one could be other, or the same different. Yet without some
reconciliation of these elementary ideas thought was impossible. There
was no distinction between truth and falsehood, between the Sophist
and the philosopher. Everything could be predicated of everything,
or nothing of anything. To these difficulties Plato finds what to us
appears to be the answer of common sense--that Not-being is the relative
or other of Being, the defining and distinguishing principle, and that
some ideas combine with others, but not all with all. It is remarkable
however that he offers this obvious reply only as the result of a long
and tedious enquiry; by a great effort he is able to look down as 'from
a height' on the 'friends of the ideas' as well as on the pre-Socratic
philosophies. Yet he is merely asserting principles which no one who
could be made to understand them would deny.
The Platonic unity of differences or opposites is the beginning of the
modern view that all knowledge is of relations; it also anticipates the
doctrine of Spinoza that all determination is negation. Plato takes or
gives so much of either of these theories as was necessary or possible
in the age in which he lived. In the Sophist, as in the Cratylus, he is
opposed to the Heracleitean flux and equally to the Megarian and
Cynic denial of predication, because he regards both of them as making
knowledge impossible. He does not assert that everything is and is not,
or that the same thing can be affected in the same and in opposite ways
at the same time and in respect of the same part of itself. The law
of contradiction is as clearly laid down by him in the Republic, as by
Aristotle in his Organon. Yet he is aware that in the negative there is
also a positive element, and that oppositions may be only differences.
And in the Parmenides he deduces the many from the one and Not-being
from Being, and yet shows that the many are included in the one, and
that Not-being returns to Being.
In several of the later dialogues Plato is occupied with the connexion
of the sciences, which in the Philebus he divides into two classes of
pure and applied, adding to them there as elsewhere (Phaedr., Crat.,
Republic, States.) a superintending science of dialectic. This is the
origin of Aristotle's Architectonic, which seems, however, to have
passed into an imaginary science of essence, and no longer to retain
any relation to other branches of knowledge. Of such a science, whether
described as 'philosophia prima,' the science of ousia, logic or
metaphysics, philosophers have often dreamed. But even now the time has
not arrived when the anticipation of Plato can be realized. Though many
a thinker has framed a 'hierarchy of the sciences,' no one has as yet
found the higher science which arrays them in harmonious order,
giving to the organic and inorganic, to the physical and moral, their
respective limits, and showing how they all work together in the world
and in man.
Plato arranges in order the stages of knowledge and of existence. They
are the steps or grades by which he rises from sense and the shadows of
sense to the idea of beauty and good. Mind is in motion as well as
at rest (Soph.); and may be described as a dialectical progress which
passes from one limit or determination of thought to another and back
again to the first. This is the account of dialectic given by Plato in
the Sixth Book of the Republic, which regarded under another aspect
is the mysticism of the Symposium. He does not deny the existence of
objects of sense, but according to him they only receive their true
meaning when they are incorporated in a principle which is above them
(Republic). In modern language they might be said to come first in the
order of experience, last in the order of nature and reason. They are
assumed, as he is fond of repeating, upon the condition that they shall
give an account of themselves and that the truth of their existence
shall be hereafter proved. For philosophy must begin somewhere and may
begin anywhere,--with outward objects, with statements of opinion, with
abstract principles. But objects of sense must lead us onward to the
ideas or universals which are contained in them; the statements of
opinion must be verified; the abstract principles must be filled up and
connected with one another. In Plato we find, as we might expect, the
germs of many thoughts which have been further developed by the genius
of Spinoza and Hegel. But there is a difficulty in separating the germ
from the flower, or in drawing the line which divides ancient
from modern philosophy. Many coincidences which occur in them are
unconscious, seeming to show a natural tendency in the human mind
towards certain ideas and forms of thought. And there are many
speculations of Plato which would have passed away unheeded, and
their meaning, like that of some hieroglyphic, would have remained
undeciphered, unless two thousand years and more afterwards an
interpreter had arisen of a kindred spirit and of the same intellectual
family. For example, in the Sophist Plato begins with the abstract and
goes on to the concrete, not in the lower sense of returning to outward
objects, but to the Hegelian concrete or unity of abstractions. In the
intervening period hardly any importance would have been attached to the
question which is so full of meaning to Plato and Hegel.
They differ however in their manner of regarding the question. For Plato
is answering a difficulty; he is seeking to justify the use of common
language and of ordinary thought into which philosophy had introduced
a principle of doubt and dissolution. Whereas Hegel tries to go beyond
common thought, and to combine abstractions in a higher unity: the
ordinary mechanism of language and logic is carried by him into another
region in which all oppositions are absorbed and all contradictions
affirmed, only that they may be done away with. But Plato, unlike Hegel,
nowhere bases his system on the unity of opposites, although in the
Parmenides he shows an Hegelian subtlety in the analysis of one and
Being.
It is difficult within the compass of a few pages to give even a
faint outline of the Hegelian dialectic. No philosophy which is worth
understanding can be understood in a moment; common sense will not teach
us metaphysics any more than mathematics. If all sciences demand of us
protracted study and attention, the highest of all can hardly be matter
of immediate intuition. Neither can we appreciate a great system without
yielding a half assent to it--like flies we are caught in the spider's
web; and we can only judge of it truly when we place ourselves at a
distance from it. Of all philosophies Hegelianism is the most obscure:
and the difficulty inherent in the subject is increased by the use of
a technical language. The saying of Socrates respecting the writings of
Heracleitus--'Noble is that which I understand, and that which I do not
understand may be as noble; but the strength of a Delian diver is needed
to swim through it'--expresses the feeling with which the reader rises
from the perusal of Hegel. We may truly apply to him the words in which
Plato describes the Pre-Socratic philosophers: 'He went on his way
rather regardless of whether we understood him or not'; or, as he is
reported himself to have said of his own pupils: 'There is only one of
you who understands me, and he does NOT understand me.'
Nevertheless the consideration of a few general aspects of the Hegelian
philosophy may help to dispel some errors and to awaken an interest
about it. (i) It is an ideal philosophy which, in popular phraseology,
maintains not matter but mind to be the truth of things, and this not by
a mere crude substitution of one word for another, but by showing
either of them to be the complement of the other. Both are creations of
thought, and the difference in kind which seems to divide them may also
be regarded as a difference of degree. One is to the other as the real
to the ideal, and both may be conceived together under the higher form
of the notion. (ii) Under another aspect it views all the forms of sense
and knowledge as stages of thought which have always existed implicitly
and unconsciously, and to which the mind of the world, gradually
disengaged from sense, has become awakened. The present has been the
past. The succession in time of human ideas is also the eternal 'now';
it is historical and also a divine ideal. The history of philosophy
stripped of personality and of the other accidents of time and place
is gathered up into philosophy, and again philosophy clothed in
circumstance expands into history. (iii) Whether regarded as present or
past, under the form of time or of eternity, the spirit of dialectic
is always moving onwards from one determination of thought to another,
receiving each successive system of philosophy and subordinating it to
that which follows--impelled by an irresistible necessity from one idea
to another until the cycle of human thought and existence is complete.
It follows from this that all previous philosophies which are worthy of
the name are not mere opinions or speculations, but stages or moments of
thought which have a necessary place in the world of mind. They are
no longer the last word of philosophy, for another and another has
succeeded them, but they still live and are mighty; in the language of
the Greek poet, 'There is a great God in them, and he grows not old.'
(iv) This vast ideal system is supposed to be based upon experience. At
each step it professes to carry with it the 'witness of eyes and
ears' and of common sense, as well as the internal evidence of its
own consistency; it has a place for every science, and affirms that
no philosophy of a narrower type is capable of comprehending all true
facts.
The Hegelian dialectic may be also described as a movement from the
simple to the complex. Beginning with the generalizations of sense, (1)
passing through ideas of quality, quantity, measure, number, and the
like, (2) ascending from presentations, that is pictorial forms of
sense, to representations in which the picture vanishes and the essence
is detached in thought from the outward form, (3) combining the I and
the not-I, or the subject and object, the natural order of thought is at
last found to include the leading ideas of the sciences and to arrange
them in relation to one another. Abstractions grow together and
again become concrete in a new and higher sense. They also admit
of development from within their own spheres. Everywhere there is
a movement of attraction and repulsion going on--an attraction or
repulsion of ideas of which the physical phenomenon described under a
similar name is a figure. Freedom and necessity, mind and matter, the
continuous and the discrete, cause and effect, are perpetually being
severed from one another in thought, only to be perpetually reunited.
The finite and infinite, the absolute and relative are not really
opposed; the finite and the negation of the finite are alike lost in a
higher or positive infinity, and the absolute is the sum or correlation
of all relatives. When this reconciliation of opposites is finally
completed in all its stages, the mind may come back again and review the
things of sense, the opinions of philosophers, the strife of theology
and politics, without being disturbed by them. Whatever is, if not
the very best--and what is the best, who can tell?--is, at any rate,
historical and rational, suitable to its own age, unsuitable to any
other. Nor can any efforts of speculative thinkers or of soldiers and
statesmen materially quicken the 'process of the suns.'
Hegel was quite sensible how great would be the difficulty of presenting
philosophy to mankind under the form of opposites. Most of us live
in the one-sided truth which the understanding offers to us, and
if occasionally we come across difficulties like the time-honoured
controversy of necessity and free-will, or the Eleatic puzzle of
Achilles and the tortoise, we relegate some of them to the sphere of
mystery, others to the book of riddles, and go on our way rejoicing.
Most men (like Aristotle) have been accustomed to regard a contradiction
in terms as the end of strife; to be told that contradiction is the life
and mainspring of the intellectual world is indeed a paradox to them.
Every abstraction is at first the enemy of every other, yet they are
linked together, each with all, in the chain of Being. The struggle for
existence is not confined to the animals, but appears in the kingdom of
thought. The divisions which arise in thought between the physical and
moral and between the moral and intellectual, and the like, are deepened
and widened by the formal logic which elevates the defects of the human
faculties into Laws of Thought; they become a part of the mind which
makes them and is also made up of them. Such distinctions become so
familiar to us that we regard the thing signified by them as absolutely
fixed and defined. These are some of the illusions from which Hegel
delivers us by placing us above ourselves, by teaching us to analyze
the growth of 'what we are pleased to call our minds,' by reverting to
a time when our present distinctions of thought and language had no
existence.
Of the great dislike and childish impatience of his system which would
be aroused among his opponents, he was fully aware, and would often
anticipate the jests which the rest of the world, 'in the superfluity
of their wits,' were likely to make upon him. Men are annoyed at what
puzzles them; they think what they cannot easily understand to be full
of danger. Many a sceptic has stood, as he supposed, firmly rooted in
the categories of the understanding which Hegel resolves into their
original nothingness. For, like Plato, he 'leaves no stone unturned'
in the intellectual world. Nor can we deny that he is unnecessarily
difficult, or that his own mind, like that of all metaphysicians, was
too much under the dominion of his system and unable to see beyond:
or that the study of philosophy, if made a serious business (compare
Republic), involves grave results to the mind and life of the student.
For it may encumber him without enlightening his path; and it may weaken
his natural faculties of thought and expression without increasing
his philosophical power. The mind easily becomes entangled among
abstractions, and loses hold of facts. The glass which is adapted to
distant objects takes away the vision of what is near and present to us.
To Hegel, as to the ancient Greek thinkers, philosophy was a religion, a
principle of life as well as of knowledge, like the idea of good in the
Sixth Book of the Republic, a cause as well as an effect, the source of
growth as well as of light. In forms of thought which by most of us are
regarded as mere categories, he saw or thought that he saw a gradual
revelation of the Divine Being. He would have been said by his opponents
to have confused God with the history of philosophy, and to have been
incapable of distinguishing ideas from facts. And certainly we can
scarcely understand how a deep thinker like Hegel could have hoped
to revive or supplant the old traditional faith by an unintelligible
abstraction: or how he could have imagined that philosophy consisted
only or chiefly in the categories of logic. For abstractions, though
combined by him in the notion, seem to be never really concrete; they
are a metaphysical anatomy, not a living and thinking substance. Though
we are reminded by him again and again that we are gathering up the
world in ideas, we feel after all that we have not really spanned the
gulf which separates phainomena from onta.
Having in view some of these difficulties, he seeks--and we may follow
his example--to make the understanding of his system easier (a)
by illustrations, and (b) by pointing out the coincidence of the
speculative idea and the historical order of thought.
(a) If we ask how opposites can coexist, we are told that many different
qualities inhere in a flower or a tree or in any other concrete object,
and that any conception of space or matter or time involves the two
contradictory attributes of divisibility and continuousness. We may
ponder over the thought of number, reminding ourselves that every unit
both implies and denies the existence of every other, and that the one
is many--a sum of fractions, and the many one--a sum of units. We may be
reminded that in nature there is a centripetal as well as a centrifugal
force, a regulator as well as a spring, a law of attraction as well as
of repulsion. The way to the West is the way also to the East; the north
pole of the magnet cannot be divided from the south pole; two minus
signs make a plus in Arithmetic and Algebra. Again, we may liken the
successive layers of thought to the deposits of geological strata which
were once fluid and are now solid, which were at one time uppermost in
the series and are now hidden in the earth; or to the successive rinds
or barks of trees which year by year pass inward; or to the ripple of
water which appears and reappears in an ever-widening circle. Or our
attention may be drawn to ideas which the moment we analyze them involve
a contradiction, such as 'beginning' or 'becoming,' or to the opposite
poles, as they are sometimes termed, of necessity and freedom, of idea
and fact. We may be told to observe that every negative is a positive,
that differences of kind are resolvable into differences of degree, and
that differences of degree may be heightened into differences of kind.
We may remember the common remark that there is much to be said on both
sides of a question. We may be recommended to look within and to explain
how opposite ideas can coexist in our own minds; and we may be told to
imagine the minds of all mankind as one mind in which the true ideas of
all ages and countries inhere. In our conception of God in his relation
to man or of any union of the divine and human nature, a contradiction
appears to be unavoidable. Is not the reconciliation of mind and body
a necessity, not only of speculation but of practical life? Reflections
such as these will furnish the best preparation and give the right
attitude of mind for understanding the Hegelian philosophy.
(b) Hegel's treatment of the early Greek thinkers affords the readiest
illustration of his meaning in conceiving all philosophy under the form
of opposites. The first abstraction is to him the beginning of thought.
Hitherto there had only existed a tumultuous chaos of mythological
fancy, but when Thales said 'All is water' a new era began to dawn upon
the world. Man was seeking to grasp the universe under a single form
which was at first simply a material element, the most equable and
colourless and universal which could be found. But soon the human mind
became dissatisfied with the emblem, and after ringing the changes
on one element after another, demanded a more abstract and perfect
conception, such as one or Being, which was absolutely at rest. But the
positive had its negative, the conception of Being involved Not-being,
the conception of one, many, the conception of a whole, parts. Then the
pendulum swung to the other side, from rest to motion, from Xenophanes
to Heracleitus. The opposition of Being and Not-being projected into
space became the atoms and void of Leucippus and Democritus. Until
the Atomists, the abstraction of the individual did not exist; in the
philosophy of Anaxagoras the idea of mind, whether human or divine,
was beginning to be realized. The pendulum gave another swing, from the
individual to the universal, from the object to the subject. The
Sophist first uttered the word 'Man is the measure of all things,' which
Socrates presented in a new form as the study of ethics. Once more we
return from mind to the object of mind, which is knowledge, and out
of knowledge the various degrees or kinds of knowledge more or less
abstract were gradually developed. The threefold division of logic,
physic, and ethics, foreshadowed in Plato, was finally established by
Aristotle and the Stoics. Thus, according to Hegel, in the course of
about two centuries by a process of antagonism and negation the leading
thoughts of philosophy were evolved.
There is nothing like this progress of opposites in Plato, who in the
Symposium denies the possibility of reconciliation until the opposition
has passed away. In his own words, there is an absurdity in supposing
that 'harmony is discord; for in reality harmony consists of notes of a
higher and lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by
the art of music' (Symp.). He does indeed describe objects of sense
as regarded by us sometimes from one point of view and sometimes from
another. As he says at the end of the Fifth Book of the Republic, 'There
is nothing light which is not heavy, or great which is not small.' And
he extends this relativity to the conceptions of just and good, as well
as to great and small. In like manner he acknowledges that the same
number may be more or less in relation to other numbers without any
increase or diminution (Theat.). But the perplexity only arises out of
the confusion of the human faculties; the art of measuring shows us what
is truly great and truly small. Though the just and good in particular
instances may vary, the IDEA of good is eternal and unchangeable. And
the IDEA of good is the source of knowledge and also of Being, in which
all the stages of sense and knowledge are gathered up and from being
hypotheses become realities.
Leaving the comparison with Plato we may now consider the value of
this invention of Hegel. There can be no question of the importance of
showing that two contraries or contradictories may in certain cases be
both true. The silliness of the so-called laws of thought ('All A = A,'
or, in the negative form, 'Nothing can at the same time be both A, and
not A') has been well exposed by Hegel himself (Wallace's Hegel), who
remarks that 'the form of the maxim is virtually self-contradictory,
for a proposition implies a distinction between subject and predicate,
whereas the maxim of identity, as it is called, A = A, does not fulfil
what its form requires. Nor does any mind ever think or form conceptions
in accordance with this law, nor does any existence conform to it.'
Wisdom of this sort is well parodied in Shakespeare (Twelfth Night,
'Clown: For as the old hermit of Prague, that never saw pen and ink,
very wittily said to a niece of King Gorboduc, "That that is is"...for
what is "that" but "that," and "is" but "is"?'). Unless we are willing
to admit that two contradictories may be true, many questions which lie
at the threshold of mathematics and of morals will be insoluble puzzles
to us.
The influence of opposites is felt in practical life. The understanding
sees one side of a question only--the common sense of mankind joins
one of two parties in politics, in religion, in philosophy. Yet, as
everybody knows, truth is not wholly the possession of either. But the
characters of men are one-sided and accept this or that aspect of the
truth. The understanding is strong in a single abstract principle and
with this lever moves mankind. Few attain to a balance of principles
or recognize truly how in all human things there is a thesis and
antithesis, a law of action and of reaction. In politics we require
order as well as liberty, and have to consider the proportions in which
under given circumstances they may be safely combined. In religion there
is a tendency to lose sight of morality, to separate goodness from
the love of truth, to worship God without attempting to know him.
In philosophy again there are two opposite principles, of immediate
experience and of those general or a priori truths which are supposed to
transcend experience. But the common sense or common opinion of mankind
is incapable of apprehending these opposite sides or views--men are
determined by their natural bent to one or other of them; they go
straight on for a time in a single line, and may be many things by turns
but not at once.
Hence the importance of familiarizing the mind with forms which will
assist us in conceiving or expressing the complex or contrary aspects
of life and nature. The danger is that they may be too much for us, and
obscure our appreciation of facts. As the complexity of mechanics cannot
be understood without mathematics, so neither can the many-sidedness of
the mental and moral world be truly apprehended without the assistance
of new forms of thought. One of these forms is the unity of opposites.
Abstractions have a great power over us, but they are apt to be partial
and one-sided, and only when modified by other abstractions do they make
an approach to the truth. Many a man has become a fatalist because he
has fallen under the dominion of a single idea. He says to himself, for
example, that he must be either free or necessary--he cannot be both.
Thus in the ancient world whole schools of philosophy passed away in the
vain attempt to solve the problem of the continuity or divisibility of
matter. And in comparatively modern times, though in the spirit of an
ancient philosopher, Bishop Berkeley, feeling a similar perplexity,
is inclined to deny the truth of infinitesimals in mathematics. Many
difficulties arise in practical religion from the impossibility of
conceiving body and mind at once and in adjusting their movements to one
another. There is a border ground between them which seems to belong to
both; and there is as much difficulty in conceiving the body without the
soul as the soul without the body. To the 'either' and 'or' philosophy
('Everything is either A or not A') should at least be added the clause
'or neither,' 'or both.' The double form makes reflection easier and
more conformable to experience, and also more comprehensive. But
in order to avoid paradox and the danger of giving offence to the
unmetaphysical part of mankind, we may speak of it as due to the
imperfection of language or the limitation of human faculties. It is
nevertheless a discovery which, in Platonic language, may be termed a
'most gracious aid to thought.'
The doctrine of opposite moments of thought or of progression by
antagonism, further assists us in framing a scheme or system of the
sciences. The negation of one gives birth to another of them. The double
notions are the joints which hold them together. The simple is developed
into the complex, the complex returns again into the simple. Beginning
with the highest notion of mind or thought, we may descend by a series
of negations to the first generalizations of sense. Or again we may
begin with the simplest elements of sense and proceed upwards to the
highest being or thought. Metaphysic is the negation or absorption of
physiology--physiology of chemistry--chemistry of mechanical philosophy.
Similarly in mechanics, when we can no further go we arrive at
chemistry--when chemistry becomes organic we arrive at physiology:
when we pass from the outward and animal to the inward nature of man we
arrive at moral and metaphysical philosophy. These sciences have each of
them their own methods and are pursued independently of one another.
But to the mind of the thinker they are all one--latent in one
another--developed out of one another.
This method of opposites has supplied new instruments of thought for the
solution of metaphysical problems, and has thrown down many of the walls
within which the human mind was confined. Formerly when philosophers
arrived at the infinite and absolute, they seemed to be lost in a region
beyond human comprehension. But Hegel has shown that the absolute and
infinite are no more true than the relative and finite, and that they
must alike be negatived before we arrive at a true absolute or a true
infinite. The conceptions of the infinite and absolute as ordinarily
understood are tiresome because they are unmeaning, but there is
no peculiar sanctity or mystery in them. We might as well make an
infinitesimal series of fractions or a perpetually recurring decimal
the object of our worship. They are the widest and also the thinnest of
human ideas, or, in the language of logicians, they have the greatest
extension and the least comprehension. Of all words they may be truly
said to be the most inflated with a false meaning. They have been
handed down from one philosopher to another until they have acquired a
religious character. They seem also to derive a sacredness from their
association with the Divine Being. Yet they are the poorest of the
predicates under which we describe him--signifying no more than this,
that he is not finite, that he is not relative, and tending to obscure
his higher attributes of wisdom, goodness, truth.
The system of Hegel frees the mind from the dominion of abstract ideas.
We acknowledge his originality, and some of us delight to wander in the
mazes of thought which he has opened to us. For Hegel has found admirers
in England and Scotland when his popularity in Germany has departed, and
he, like the philosophers whom he criticizes, is of the past. No other
thinker has ever dissected the human mind with equal patience and
minuteness. He has lightened the burden of thought because he has shown
us that the chains which we wear are of our own forging. To be able to
place ourselves not only above the opinions of men but above their
modes of thinking, is a great height of philosophy. This dearly obtained
freedom, however, we are not disposed to part with, or to allow him to
build up in a new form the 'beggarly elements' of scholastic logic
which he has thrown down. So far as they are aids to reflection and
expression, forms of thought are useful, but no further:--we may easily
have too many of them.
And when we are asked to believe the Hegelian to be the sole or
universal logic, we naturally reply that there are other ways in which
our ideas may be connected. The triplets of Hegel, the division into
being, essence, and notion, are not the only or necessary modes in which
the world of thought can be conceived. There may be an evolution by
degrees as well as by opposites. The word 'continuity' suggests the
possibility of resolving all differences into differences of quantity.
Again, the opposites themselves may vary from the least degree of
diversity up to contradictory opposition. They are not like numbers
and figures, always and everywhere of the same value. And therefore
the edifice which is constructed out of them has merely an imaginary
symmetry, and is really irregular and out of proportion. The spirit of
Hegelian criticism should be applied to his own system, and the terms
Being, Not-being, existence, essence, notion, and the like challenged
and defined. For if Hegel introduces a great many distinctions, he
obliterates a great many others by the help of the universal solvent 'is
not,' which appears to be the simplest of negations, and yet admits
of several meanings. Neither are we able to follow him in the play of
metaphysical fancy which conducts him from one determination of thought
to another. But we begin to suspect that this vast system is not God
within us, or God immanent in the world, and may be only the invention
of an individual brain. The 'beyond' is always coming back upon us
however often we expel it. We do not easily believe that we have within
the compass of the mind the form of universal knowledge. We rather
incline to think that the method of knowledge is inseparable from actual
knowledge, and wait to see what new forms may be developed out of
our increasing experience and observation of man and nature. We are
conscious of a Being who is without us as well as within us. Even
if inclined to Pantheism we are unwilling to imagine that the meagre
categories of the understanding, however ingeniously arranged or
displayed, are the image of God;--that what all religions were seeking
after from the beginning was the Hegelian philosophy which has been
revealed in the latter days. The great metaphysician, like a prophet of
old, was naturally inclined to believe that his own thoughts were divine
realities. We may almost say that whatever came into his head seemed
to him to be a necessary truth. He never appears to have criticized
himself, or to have subjected his own ideas to the process of analysis
which he applies to every other philosopher.
Hegel would have insisted that his philosophy should be accepted as a
whole or not at all. He would have urged that the parts derived their
meaning from one another and from the whole. He thought that he had
supplied an outline large enough to contain all future knowledge, and a
method to which all future philosophies must conform. His metaphysical
genius is especially shown in the construction of the categories--a work
which was only begun by Kant, and elaborated to the utmost by himself.
But is it really true that the part has no meaning when separated from
the whole, or that knowledge to be knowledge at all must be universal?
Do all abstractions shine only by the reflected light of other
abstractions? May they not also find a nearer explanation in their
relation to phenomena? If many of them are correlatives they are not
all so, and the relations which subsist between them vary from a mere
association up to a necessary connexion. Nor is it easy to determine
how far the unknown element affects the known, whether, for example, new
discoveries may not one day supersede our most elementary notions about
nature. To a certain extent all our knowledge is conditional upon
what may be known in future ages of the world. We must admit this
hypothetical element, which we cannot get rid of by an assumption that
we have already discovered the method to which all philosophy must
conform. Hegel is right in preferring the concrete to the abstract,
in setting actuality before possibility, in excluding from the
philosopher's vocabulary the word 'inconceivable.' But he is too well
satisfied with his own system ever to consider the effect of what is
unknown on the element which is known. To the Hegelian all things are
plain and clear, while he who is outside the charmed circle is in
the mire of ignorance and 'logical impurity': he who is within is
omniscient, or at least has all the elements of knowledge under his
hand.
Hegelianism may be said to be a transcendental defence of the world
as it is. There is no room for aspiration and no need of any: 'What is
actual is rational, what is rational is actual.' But a good man will not
readily acquiesce in this aphorism. He knows of course that all things
proceed according to law whether for good or evil. But when he sees
the misery and ignorance of mankind he is convinced that without any
interruption of the uniformity of nature the condition of the world may
be indefinitely improved by human effort. There is also an adaptation
of persons to times and countries, but this is very far from being the
fulfilment of their higher natures. The man of the seventeenth century
is unfitted for the eighteenth, and the man of the eighteenth for the
nineteenth, and most of us would be out of place in the world of a
hundred years hence. But all higher minds are much more akin than
they are different: genius is of all ages, and there is perhaps more
uniformity in excellence than in mediocrity. The sublimer intelligences
of mankind--Plato, Dante, Sir Thomas More--meet in a higher sphere
above the ordinary ways of men; they understand one another from
afar, notwithstanding the interval which separates them. They are 'the
spectators of all time and of all existence;' their works live for
ever; and there is nothing to prevent the force of their individuality
breaking through the uniformity which surrounds them. But such
disturbers of the order of thought Hegel is reluctant to acknowledge.
The doctrine of Hegel will to many seem the expression of an indolent
conservatism, and will at any rate be made an excuse for it. The mind of
the patriot rebels when he is told that the worst tyranny and oppression
has a natural fitness: he cannot be persuaded, for example, that the
conquest of Prussia by Napoleon I. was either natural or necessary,
or that any similar calamity befalling a nation should be a matter of
indifference to the poet or philosopher. We may need such a philosophy
or religion to console us under evils which are irremediable, but we see
that it is fatal to the higher life of man. It seems to say to us, 'The
world is a vast system or machine which can be conceived under the forms
of logic, but in which no single man can do any great good or any great
harm. Even if it were a thousand times worse than it is, it could be
arranged in categories and explained by philosophers. And what more do
we want?'
The philosophy of Hegel appeals to an historical criterion: the ideas
of men have a succession in time as well as an order of thought. But
the assumption that there is a correspondence between the succession of
ideas in history and the natural order of philosophy is hardly true even
of the beginnings of thought. And in later systems forms of thought
are too numerous and complex to admit of our tracing in them a regular
succession. They seem also to be in part reflections of the past, and it
is difficult to separate in them what is original and what is borrowed.
Doubtless they have a relation to one another--the transition from
Descartes to Spinoza or from Locke to Berkeley is not a matter of
chance, but it can hardly be described as an alternation of opposites or
figured to the mind by the vibrations of a pendulum. Even in Aristotle
and Plato, rightly understood, we cannot trace this law of action and
reaction. They are both idealists, although to the one the idea is
actual and immanent,--to the other only potential and transcendent, as
Hegel himself has pointed out (Wallace's Hegel). The true meaning of
Aristotle has been disguised from us by his own appeal to fact and the
opinions of mankind in his more popular works, and by the use made of
his writings in the Middle Ages. No book, except the Scriptures,
has been so much read, and so little understood. The Pre-Socratic
philosophies are simpler, and we may observe a progress in them; but is
there any regular succession? The ideas of Being, change, number, seem
to have sprung up contemporaneously in different parts of Greece and we
have no difficulty in constructing them out of one another--we can see
that the union of Being and Not-being gave birth to the idea of change
or Becoming and that one might be another aspect of Being. Again,
the Eleatics may be regarded as developing in one direction into
the Megarian school, in the other into the Atomists, but there is no
necessary connexion between them. Nor is there any indication that the
deficiency which was felt in one school was supplemented or compensated
by another. They were all efforts to supply the want which the Greeks
began to feel at the beginning of the sixth century before Christ,--the
want of abstract ideas. Nor must we forget the uncertainty of
chronology;--if, as Aristotle says, there were Atomists before
Leucippus, Eleatics before Xenophanes, and perhaps 'patrons of the
flux' before Heracleitus, Hegel's order of thought in the history
of philosophy would be as much disarranged as his order of religious
thought by recent discoveries in the history of religion.
Hegel is fond of repeating that all philosophies still live and that the
earlier are preserved in the later; they are refuted, and they are not
refuted, by those who succeed them. Once they reigned supreme, now they
are subordinated to a power or idea greater or more comprehensive
than their own. The thoughts of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle have
certainly sunk deep into the mind of the world, and have exercised an
influence which will never pass away; but can we say that they have
the same meaning in modern and ancient philosophy? Some of them, as
for example the words 'Being,' 'essence,' 'matter,' 'form,' either
have become obsolete, or are used in new senses, whereas 'individual,'
'cause,' 'motive,' have acquired an exaggerated importance. Is the
manner in which the logical determinations of thought, or 'categories'
as they may be termed, have been handed down to us, really different
from that in which other words have come down to us? Have they not
been equally subject to accident, and are they not often used by Hegel
himself in senses which would have been quite unintelligible to their
original inventors--as for example, when he speaks of the 'ground' of
Leibnitz ('Everything has a sufficient ground') as identical with
his own doctrine of the 'notion' (Wallace's Hegel), or the 'Being and
Not-being' of Heracleitus as the same with his own 'Becoming'?
As the historical order of thought has been adapted to the logical, so
we have reason for suspecting that the Hegelian logic has been in
some degree adapted to the order of thought in history. There is
unfortunately no criterion to which either of them can be subjected, and
not much forcing was required to bring either into near relations with
the other. We may fairly doubt whether the division of the first and
second parts of logic in the Hegelian system has not really arisen from
a desire to make them accord with the first and second stages of the
early Greek philosophy. Is there any reason why the conception of
measure in the first part, which is formed by the union of quality and
quantity, should not have been equally placed in the second division of
mediate or reflected ideas? The more we analyze them the less exact does
the coincidence of philosophy and the history of philosophy appear. Many
terms which were used absolutely in the beginning of philosophy, such
as 'Being,' 'matter,' 'cause,' and the like, became relative in
the subsequent history of thought. But Hegel employs some of them
absolutely, some relatively, seemingly without any principle and without
any regard to their original significance.
The divisions of the Hegelian logic bear a superficial resemblance to
the divisions of the scholastic logic. The first part answers to the
term, the second to the proposition, the third to the syllogism. These
are the grades of thought under which we conceive the world, first, in
the general terms of quality, quantity, measure; secondly, under the
relative forms of 'ground' and existence, substance and accidents, and
the like; thirdly in syllogistic forms of the individual mediated with
the universal by the help of the particular. Of syllogisms there are
various kinds,--qualitative, quantitative, inductive, mechanical,
teleological,--which are developed out of one another. But is there any
meaning in reintroducing the forms of the old logic? Who ever thinks
of the world as a syllogism? What connexion is there between the
proposition and our ideas of reciprocity, cause and effect, and similar
relations? It is difficult enough to conceive all the powers of nature
and mind gathered up in one. The difficulty is greatly increased
when the new is confused with the old, and the common logic is the
Procrustes' bed into which they are forced.
The Hegelian philosophy claims, as we have seen, to be based upon
experience: it abrogates the distinction of a priori and a posteriori
truth. It also acknowledges that many differences of kind are resolvable
into differences of degree. It is familiar with the terms 'evolution,'
'development,' and the like. Yet it can hardly be said to have
considered the forms of thought which are best adapted for the
expression of facts. It has never applied the categories to experience;
it has not defined the differences in our ideas of opposition, or
development, or cause and effect, in the different sciences which make
use of these terms. It rests on a knowledge which is not the result of
exact or serious enquiry, but is floating in the air; the mind has been
imperceptibly informed of some of the methods required in the sciences.
Hegel boasts that the movement of dialectic is at once necessary and
spontaneous: in reality it goes beyond experience and is unverified
by it. Further, the Hegelian philosophy, while giving us the power of
thinking a great deal more than we are able to fill up, seems to be
wanting in some determinations of thought which we require. We cannot
say that physical science, which at present occupies so large a share
of popular attention, has been made easier or more intelligible by the
distinctions of Hegel. Nor can we deny that he has sometimes interpreted
physics by metaphysics, and confused his own philosophical fancies with
the laws of nature. The very freedom of the movement is not without
suspicion, seeming to imply a state of the human mind which has entirely
lost sight of facts. Nor can the necessity which is attributed to it be
very stringent, seeing that the successive categories or determinations
of thought in different parts of his writings are arranged by the
philosopher in different ways. What is termed necessary evolution seems
to be only the order in which a succession of ideas presented themselves
to the mind of Hegel at a particular time.
The nomenclature of Hegel has been made by himself out of the language
of common life. He uses a few words only which are borrowed from his
predecessors, or from the Greek philosophy, and these generally in a
sense peculiar to himself. The first stage of his philosophy answers to
the word 'is,' the second to the word 'has been,' the third to the
words 'has been' and 'is' combined. In other words, the first sphere
is immediate, the second mediated by reflection, the third or highest
returns into the first, and is both mediate and immediate. As Luther's
Bible was written in the language of the common people, so Hegel seems
to have thought that he gave his philosophy a truly German character
by the use of idiomatic German words. But it may be doubted whether the
attempt has been successful. First because such words as 'in sich seyn,'
'an sich seyn,' 'an und fur sich seyn,' though the simplest combinations
of nouns and verbs, require a difficult and elaborate explanation. The
simplicity of the words contrasts with the hardness of their meaning.
Secondly, the use of technical phraseology necessarily separates
philosophy from general literature; the student has to learn a new
language of uncertain meaning which he with difficulty remembers. No
former philosopher had ever carried the use of technical terms to the
same extent as Hegel. The language of Plato or even of Aristotle is but
slightly removed from that of common life, and was introduced naturally
by a series of thinkers: the language of the scholastic logic has become
technical to us, but in the Middle Ages was the vernacular Latin of
priests and students. The higher spirit of philosophy, the spirit of
Plato and Socrates, rebels against the Hegelian use of language as
mechanical and technical.
Hegel is fond of etymologies and often seems to trifle with words. He
gives etymologies which are bad, and never considers that the meaning of
a word may have nothing to do with its derivation. He lived before the
days of Comparative Philology or of Comparative Mythology and Religion,
which would have opened a new world to him. He makes no allowance for
the element of chance either in language or thought; and perhaps there
is no greater defect in his system than the want of a sound theory
of language. He speaks as if thought, instead of being identical with
language, was wholly independent of it. It is not the actual growth
of the mind, but the imaginary growth of the Hegelian system, which is
attractive to him.
Neither are we able to say why of the common forms of thought some are
rejected by him, while others have an undue prominence given to them.
Some of them, such as 'ground' and 'existence,' have hardly any basis
either in language or philosophy, while others, such as 'cause' and
'effect,' are but slightly considered. All abstractions are supposed by
Hegel to derive their meaning from one another. This is true of some,
but not of all, and in different degrees. There is an explanation of
abstractions by the phenomena which they represent, as well as by their
relation to other abstractions. If the knowledge of all were necessary
to the knowledge of any one of them, the mind would sink under the load
of thought. Again, in every process of reflection we seem to require
a standing ground, and in the attempt to obtain a complete analysis we
lose all fixedness. If, for example, the mind is viewed as the complex
of ideas, or the difference between things and persons denied, such an
analysis may be justified from the point of view of Hegel: but we shall
find that in the attempt to criticize thought we have lost the power of
thinking, and, like the Heracliteans of old, have no words in which
our meaning can be expressed. Such an analysis may be of value as a
corrective of popular language or thought, but should still allow us to
retain the fundamental distinctions of philosophy.
In the Hegelian system ideas supersede persons. The world of thought,
though sometimes described as Spirit or 'Geist,' is really impersonal.
The minds of men are to be regarded as one mind, or more correctly as
a succession of ideas. Any comprehensive view of the world must
necessarily be general, and there may be a use with a view to
comprehensiveness in dropping individuals and their lives and actions.
In all things, if we leave out details, a certain degree of order
begins to appear; at any rate we can make an order which, with a little
exaggeration or disproportion in some of the parts, will cover the whole
field of philosophy. But are we therefore justified in saying that
ideas are the causes of the great movement of the world rather than the
personalities which conceived them? The great man is the expression of
his time, and there may be peculiar difficulties in his age which he
cannot overcome. He may be out of harmony with his circumstances, too
early or too late, and then all his thoughts perish; his genius passes
away unknown. But not therefore is he to be regarded as a mere waif
or stray in human history, any more than he is the mere creature or
expression of the age in which he lives. His ideas are inseparable from
himself, and would have been nothing without him. Through a thousand
personal influences they have been brought home to the minds of
others. He starts from antecedents, but he is great in proportion as he
disengages himself from them or absorbs himself in them. Moreover
the types of greatness differ; while one man is the expression of the
influences of his age, another is in antagonism to them. One man is
borne on the surface of the water; another is carried forward by the
current which flows beneath. The character of an individual, whether he
be independent of circumstances or not, inspires others quite as much
as his words. What is the teaching of Socrates apart from his personal
history, or the doctrines of Christ apart from the Divine life in which
they are embodied? Has not Hegel himself delineated the greatness of
the life of Christ as consisting in his 'Schicksalslosigkeit' or
independence of the destiny of his race? Do not persons become ideas,
and is there any distinction between them? Take away the five greatest
legislators, the five greatest warriors, the five greatest poets, the
five greatest founders or teachers of a religion, the five greatest
philosophers, the five greatest inventors,--where would have been all
that we most value in knowledge or in life? And can that be a true
theory of the history of philosophy which, in Hegel's own language,
'does not allow the individual to have his right'?
Once more, while we readily admit that the world is relative to the
mind, and the mind to the world, and that we must suppose a common or
correlative growth in them, we shrink from saying that this complex
nature can contain, even in outline, all the endless forms of Being and
knowledge. Are we not 'seeking the living among the dead' and dignifying
a mere logical skeleton with the name of philosophy and almost of God?
When we look far away into the primeval sources of thought and belief,
do we suppose that the mere accident of our being the heirs of the Greek
philosophers can give us a right to set ourselves up as having the true
and only standard of reason in the world? Or when we contemplate the
infinite worlds in the expanse of heaven can we imagine that a few
meagre categories derived from language and invented by the genius of
one or two great thinkers contain the secret of the universe? Or, having
regard to the ages during which the human race may yet endure, do we
suppose that we can anticipate the proportions human knowledge may
attain even within the short space of one or two thousand years?
Again, we have a difficulty in understanding how ideas can be causes,
which to us seems to be as much a figure of speech as the old notion
of a creator artist, 'who makes the world by the help of the demigods'
(Plato, Tim.), or with 'a golden pair of compasses' measures out the
circumference of the universe (Milton, P.L.). We can understand how
the idea in the mind of an inventor is the cause of the work which is
produced by it; and we can dimly imagine how this universal frame may
be animated by a divine intelligence. But we cannot conceive how all the
thoughts of men that ever were, which are themselves subject to so many
external conditions of climate, country, and the like, even if regarded
as the single thought of a Divine Being, can be supposed to have
made the world. We appear to be only wrapping up ourselves in our own
conceits--to be confusing cause and effect--to be losing the distinction
between reflection and action, between the human and divine.
These are some of the doubts and suspicions which arise in the mind of
a student of Hegel, when, after living for a time within the charmed
circle, he removes to a little distance and looks back upon what he
has learnt, from the vantage-ground of history and experience. The
enthusiasm of his youth has passed away, the authority of the master no
longer retains a hold upon him. But he does not regret the time spent
in the study of him. He finds that he has received from him a real
enlargement of mind, and much of the true spirit of philosophy, even
when he has ceased to believe in him. He returns again and again to his
writings as to the recollections of a first love, not undeserving of
his admiration still. Perhaps if he were asked how he can admire
without believing, or what value he can attribute to what he knows to be
erroneous, he might answer in some such manner as the following:--
1. That in Hegel he finds glimpses of the genius of the poet and of the
common sense of the man of the world. His system is not cast in a poetic
form, but neither has all this load of logic extinguished in him the
feeling of poetry. He is the true countryman of his contemporaries
Goethe and Schiller. Many fine expressions are scattered up and down
in his writings, as when he tells us that 'the Crusaders went to the
Sepulchre but found it empty.' He delights to find vestiges of his own
philosophy in the older German mystics. And though he can be scarcely
said to have mixed much in the affairs of men, for, as his biographer
tells us, 'he lived for thirty years in a single room,' yet he is far
from being ignorant of the world. No one can read his writings without
acquiring an insight into life. He loves to touch with the spear of
logic the follies and self-deceptions of mankind, and make them appear
in their natural form, stripped of the disguises of language and custom.
He will not allow men to defend themselves by an appeal to one-sided or
abstract principles. In this age of reason any one can too easily find
a reason for doing what he likes (Wallace). He is suspicious of a
distinction which is often made between a person's character and his
conduct. His spirit is the opposite of that of Jesuitism or casuistry
(Wallace). He affords an example of a remark which has been often made,
that in order to know the world it is not necessary to have had a great
experience of it.
2. Hegel, if not the greatest philosopher, is certainly the greatest
critic of philosophy who ever lived. No one else has equally mastered
the opinions of his predecessors or traced the connexion of them in
the same manner. No one has equally raised the human mind above the
trivialities of the common logic and the unmeaningness of 'mere'
abstractions, and above imaginary possibilities, which, as he truly
says, have no place in philosophy. No one has won so much for the
kingdom of ideas. Whatever may be thought of his own system it will
hardly be denied that he has overthrown Locke, Kant, Hume, and the
so-called philosophy of common sense. He shows us that only by the study
of metaphysics can we get rid of metaphysics, and that those who are
in theory most opposed to them are in fact most entirely and hopelessly
enslaved by them: 'Die reinen Physiker sind nur die Thiere.'
The disciple of Hegel will hardly become the slave of any other
system-maker. What Bacon seems to promise him he will find realized
in the great German thinker, an emancipation nearly complete from the
influences of the scholastic logic.
3. Many of those who are least disposed to become the votaries of
Hegelianism nevertheless recognize in his system a new logic supplying
a variety of instruments and methods hitherto unemployed. We may not
be able to agree with him in assimilating the natural order of human
thought with the history of philosophy, and still less in identifying
both with the divine idea or nature. But we may acknowledge that the
great thinker has thrown a light on many parts of human knowledge,
and has solved many difficulties. We cannot receive his doctrine of
opposites as the last word of philosophy, but still we may regard it as
a very important contribution to logic. We cannot affirm that words have
no meaning when taken out of their connexion in the history of thought.
But we recognize that their meaning is to a great extent due to
association, and to their correlation with one another. We see the
advantage of viewing in the concrete what mankind regard only in the
abstract. There is much to be said for his faith or conviction, that God
is immanent in the world,--within the sphere of the human mind, and not
beyond it. It was natural that he himself, like a prophet of old, should
regard the philosophy which he had invented as the voice of God in man.
But this by no means implies that he conceived himself as creating God
in thought. He was the servant of his own ideas and not the master of
them. The philosophy of history and the history of philosophy may be
almost said to have been discovered by him. He has done more to explain
Greek thought than all other writers put together. Many ideas of
development, evolution, reciprocity, which have become the symbols of
another school of thinkers may be traced to his speculations. In the
theology and philosophy of England as well as of Germany, and also in
the lighter literature of both countries, there are always appearing
'fragments of the great banquet' of Hegel.