SECTION I. MIND SUBJECTIVE.

Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind

By

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Translated From

The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences

With

Five Introductory Essays

By

William Wallace, M.A., LL.D.

Fellow of Merton College, and Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy in the

University of Oxford

Oxford

Clarendon Press

1894

CONTENTS

Preface.

Five Introductory Essays In Psychology And Ethics.

Essay I. On The Scope Of A Philosophy Of Mind.

Essay II. Aims And Methods Of Psychology.

Essay III. On Some Psychological Aspects Of Ethics.

Essay IV. Psycho-Genesis.

Essay V. Ethics And Politics.

Introduction.

Section I. Mind Subjective.

Sub-Section A. Anthropology. The Soul.

Sub-Section B. Phenomenology Of Mind. Consciousness.

Sub-Section C. Psychology. Mind.

Section II. Mind Objective.

Distribution.

Sub-Section A. Law.

Sub-Section B. The Morality Of Conscience.

Sub-Section C. The Moral Life, Or Social Ethics.

Section III. Absolute Mind.

Sub-Section A. Art.

Sub-Section B. Revealed Religion.

Sub-Section C. Philosophy.

Index.

Footnotes

PREFACE.

I here offer a translation of the third or last part of Hegel’s

encyclopaedic sketch of philosophy,—the _Philosophy of Mind_. The volume,

like its subject, stands complete in itself. But it may also be regarded

as a supplement or continuation of the work begun in my version of his

_Logic_. I have not ventured upon the _Philosophy of Nature_ which lies

between these two. That is a province, to penetrate into which would

require an equipment of learning I make no claim to,—a province, also, of

which the present-day interest would be largely historical, or at least

bound up with historical circumstances.

The translation is made from the German text given in the Second Part of

the Seventh Volume of Hegel’s Collected Works, occasionally corrected by

comparison with that found in the second and third editions (of 1827 and

1830) published by the author. I have reproduced only Hegel’s own

paragraphs, and entirely omitted the _Zusätze_ of the editors. These

addenda—which are in origin lecture-notes—to the paragraphs are, in the

text of the Collected Works, given for the first section only. The

psychological part which they accompany has been barely treated elsewhere

by Hegel: but a good popular exposition of it will be found in Erdmann’s

_Psychologische Briefe_. The second section was dealt with at greater

length by Hegel himself in his _Philosophy of Law_ (1820). The topics of

the third section are largely covered by his lectures on Art, Religion,

and History of Philosophy.

I do not conceal from myself that the text offers a hard nut to crack. Yet

here and there, even through the medium of the translation, I think some

light cannot fail to come to an earnest student. Occasionally, too, as,

for instance, in §§ 406, 459, 549, and still more in §§ 552, 573, at the

close of which might stand the words _Liberavi animam meam_, the writer

really “lets himself go,” and gives his mind freely on questions where

speculation comes closely in touch with life.

In the _Five Introductory Essays_ I have tried sometimes to put together,

and sometimes to provide with collateral elucidation, some points in the

Mental Philosophy. I shall not attempt to justify the selection of

subjects for special treatment further than to hope that they form a more

or less connected group, and to refer for a study of some general

questions of system and method to my _Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel’s

Philosophy_ which appear almost simultaneously with this volume.

OXFORD,

_December, 1893_.

FIVE INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS IN PSYCHOLOGY AND ETHICS.

Essay I. On The Scope Of A Philosophy Of Mind.

The art of finding titles, and of striking out headings which catch the

eye or ear, and lead the mind by easy paths of association to the subject

under exposition, was not one of Hegel’s gifts. A stirring phrase, a vivid

or picturesque turn of words, he often has. But his lists of contents,

when they cease to be commonplace, are apt to run into the bizarre and the

grotesque. Generally, indeed, his rubrics are the old and (as we may be

tempted to call them) insignificant terms of the text-books. But, in

Hegel’s use of them, these conventional designations are charged with a

highly individualised meaning. They may mean more—they may mean less—than

they habitually pass for: but they unquestionably specify their meaning

with a unique and almost personal flavour. And this can hardly fail to

create and to disappoint undue expectations.

(i.) Philosophy and its Parts.

Even the main divisions of his system show this conservatism in

terminology. The names of the three parts of the Encyclopaedia are, we may

say, non-significant of their peculiar contents. And that for a good

reason. What Hegel proposes to give is no novel or special doctrine, but

the universal philosophy which has passed on from age to age, here

narrowed and there widened, but still essentially the same. It is

conscious of its continuity and proud of its identity with the teachings

of Plato and Aristotle.

The earliest attempts of the Greek philosophers to present philosophy in a

complete and articulated order—attempts generally attributed to the

Stoics, the schoolmen of antiquity—made it a tripartite whole. These three

parts were Logic, Physics, and Ethics. In their entirety they were meant

to form a cycle of unified knowledge, satisfying the needs of theory as

well as practice. As time went on, however, the situation changed: and if

the old names remained, their scope and value suffered many changes. New

interests and curiosities, due to altered circumstances, brought other

departments of reality under the focus of investigation besides those

which had been primarily discussed under the old names. Inquiries became

more specialised, and each tended to segregate itself from the rest as an

independent field of science. The result was that in modern times the

territory still marked by the ancient titles had shrunk to a mere phantom

of its former bulk. Almost indeed things had come to such a pass that the

time-honoured figures had sunk into the misery of _rois fainéants_; while

the real business of knowledge was discharged by the younger and less

conventional lines of research which the needs and fashions of the time

had called up. Thus Logic, in the narrow formal sense, was turned into an

“art” of argumentation and a system of technical rules for the analysis

and synthesis of academical discussion. Physics or Natural Philosophy

restricted itself to the elaboration of some metaphysical postulates or

hypotheses regarding the general modes of physical operation. And Ethics

came to be a very unpractical discussion of subtleties regarding moral

faculty and moral standard. Meanwhile a theory of scientific method and of

the laws governing the growth of intelligence and formation of ideas grew

up, and left the older logic to perish of formality and inanition. The

successive departments of physical science, each in turn asserting its

independence, finally left Natural Philosophy no alternative between

clinging to its outworn hypotheses and abstract generalities, or

identifying itself (as Newton in his great book put it) with the

_Principia Mathematica_ of the physical sciences. Ethics, in its turn, saw

itself, on one hand, replaced by psychological inquiries into the

relations between the feelings and the will and the intelligence; while,

on the other hand, a host of social, historical, economical, and other

researches cut it off from the real facts of human life, and left it no

more than the endless debates on the logical and metaphysical issues

involved in free-will and conscience, duty and merit.

It has sometimes been said that Kant settled this controversy between the

old departments of philosophy and the new branches of science. And the

settlement, it is implied, consisted in assigning to the philosopher a

sort of police and patrol duty in the commonwealth of science. He was to

see that boundaries were duly respected, and that each science kept

strictly to its own business. For this purpose each branch of philosophy

was bound to convert itself into a department of criticism—an examination

of first principles in the several provinces of reality or experience—with

a view to get a distinct conception of what they were, and thus define

exactly the lines on which the structures of more detailed science could

be put up solidly and safely. This plan offered tempting lines to

research, and sounded well. But on further reflection there emerge one or

two difficulties, hard to get over. Paradoxical though it may seem, one

cannot rightly estimate the capacity and range of foundations, before one

has had some familiarity with the buildings erected upon them. Thus you

are involved in a circle: a circle which is probably inevitable, but which

for that reason it is well to recognise at once. Then—what is only another

way of saying the same thing—it is impossible to draw an inflexible line

between premises of principle and conclusions of detail. There is no spot

at which criticism can stop, and, having done its business well, hand on

the remaining task to dogmatic system. It was an instinctive feeling of

this implication of system in what professed only to be criticism which

led the aged Kant to ignore his own previous professions that he offered

as yet no system, and when Fichte maintained himself to be erecting the

fabric for which Kant had prepared the ground, to reply by the

counter-declaration that the criticism was the system—that “the curtain

was the picture.”

The Hegelian philosophy is an attempt to combine criticism with system,

and thus realise what Kant had at least foretold. It is a system which is

self-critical, and systematic only through the absoluteness of its

criticism. In Hegel’s own phrase, it is an immanent and an incessant

dialectic, which from first to last allows finality to no dogmatic rest,

but carries out Kant’s description of an Age of Criticism, in which

nothing, however majestic and sacred its authority, can plead for

exception from the all-testing _Elenchus_. Then, on the other hand, Hegel

refuses to restrict philosophy and its branches to anything short of the

totality. He takes in its full sense that often-used phrase—the Unity of

Knowledge. Logic becomes the all-embracing research of “first

principles,”—the principles which regulate physics and ethics. The old

divisions between logic and metaphysic, between induction and deduction,

between theory of reasoning and theory of knowledge,—divisions which those

who most employed them were never able to show the reason and purpose

of—because indeed they had grown up at various times and by “natural

selection” through a vast mass of incidents: these are superseded and

merged in one continuous theory of real knowledge considered under its

abstract or formal aspect,—of organised and known reality in its

underlying thought-system. But these first principles were only an

abstraction from complete reality—the reality which nature has when

unified by mind—and they presuppose the total from which they are derived.

The realm of pure thought is only the ghost of the Idea—of the unity and

reality of knowledge, and it must be reindued with its flesh and blood.

The logical world is (in Kantian phrase) only the _possibility_ of Nature

and Mind. It comes first—because it is a system of First Principles: but

these first principles could only be elicited by a philosophy which has

realised the meaning of a mental experience, gathered by interpreting the

facts of Nature.

Natural Philosophy is no longer—according to Hegel’s view of it—merely a

scheme of mathematical ground-work. That may be its first step. But its

scope is a complete unity (which is not a mere aggregate) of the branches

of natural knowledge, exploring both the inorganic and the organic world.

In dealing with this endless problem, philosophy seems to be baulked by an

impregnable obstacle to its progress. Every day the advance of

specialisation renders any comprehensive or synoptic view of the totality

of science more and more impossible. No doubt we talk readily enough of

Science. But here, if anywhere, we may say there is no Science, but only

sciences. The generality of science is a proud fiction or a gorgeous

dream, variously told and interpreted according to the varying interest

and proclivity of the scientist. The sciences, or those who specially

expound them, know of no unity, no philosophy of science. They are content

to remark that in these days the thing is impossible, and to pick out the

faults in any attempts in that direction that are made outside their pale.

Unfortunately for this contention, the thing is done by us all, and,

indeed, has to be done. If not as men of science, yet as men—as human

beings—we have to put together things and form some total estimate of the

drift of development, of the unity of nature. To get a notion, not merely

of the general methods and principles of the sciences, but of their

results and teachings, and to get this not as a mere lot of fragments, but

with a systematic unity, is indispensable in some degree for all rational

life. The life not founded on science is not the life of man. But he will

not find what he wants in the text-books of the specialist, who is obliged

to treat his subject, as Plato says, “under the pressure of necessity,”

and who dare not look on it in its quality “to draw the soul towards

truth, and to form the philosophic intellect so as to uplift what we now

unduly keep down(1).” If the philosopher in this province does his work

but badly, he may plead the novelty of the task to which he comes as a

pioneer or even an architect. He finds little that he can directly

utilise. The materials have been gathered and prepared for very special

aims; and the great aim of science—that human life may be made a higher,

an ampler, and happier thing,—has hardly been kept in view at all, except

in its more materialistic aspects. To the philosopher the supreme interest

of the physical sciences is that man also belongs to the physical

universe, or that Mind and Matter as we know them are (in Mr. Spencer’s

language) “at once antithetical and inseparable.” He wants to find the

place of Man,—but of Man as Mind—in Nature.

If the scope of Natural Philosophy be thus expanded to make it the unity

and more than the synthetic aggregate of the several physical sciences—to

make it the whole which surpasses the addition of all their fragments, the

purpose of Ethics has not less to be deepened and widened. Ethics, under

that title, Hegel knows not. And for those who cannot recognise anything

unless it be clearly labelled, it comes natural to record their censure of

Hegelianism for ignoring or disparaging ethical studies. But if we take

the word in that wide sense which common usage rather justifies than

adopts, we may say that the whole philosophy of Mind is a moral

philosophy. Its subject is the moral as opposed to the physical aspect of

reality: the inner and ideal life as opposed to the merely external and

real materials of it: the world of intelligence and of humanity. It

displays Man in the several stages of that process by which he expresses

the full meaning of nature, or discharges the burden of that task which is

implicit in him from the first. It traces the steps of that growth by

which what was no better than a fragment of nature—an intelligence located

(as it seemed) in one piece of matter—comes to realise the truth of it and

of himself. That truth is his ideal and his obligation: but it is

also—such is the mystery of his birthright—his idea and possession.

He—like the natural universe—is (as the _Logic_ has shown) a principle of

unification, organisation, idealisation: and his history (in its ideal

completeness) is the history of the process by which he, the typical man,

works the fragments of reality (and such mere reality must be always a

collection of fragments) into the perfect unity of a many-sided character.

Thus the philosophy of mind, beginning with man as a sentient organism,

the focus in which the universe gets its first dim confused expression

through mere feeling, shows how he “erects himself above himself” and

realises what ancient thinkers called his kindred with the divine.

In that total process of the mind’s liberation and self-realisation the

portion specially called Morals is but one, though a necessary, stage.

There are, said Porphyry and the later Platonists, four degrees in the

path of perfection and self-accomplishment. And first, there is the career

of honesty and worldly prudence, which makes the duty of the citizen.

Secondly, there is the progress in purity which casts earthly things

behind, and reaches the angelic height of passionless serenity. And the

third step is the divine life which by intellectual energy is turned to

behold the truth of things. Lastly, in the fourth grade, the mind, free

and sublime in self-sustaining wisdom, makes itself an “exemplar” of

virtue, and is even a “father of Gods.” Even so, it may be said, the human

mind is the subject of a complicated Teleology,—the field ruled by a

multifarious Ought, psychological, aesthetical, social and religious. To

adjust their several claims cannot be the object of any science, if

adjustment means to supply a guide in practice. But it is the purpose of

such a teleology to show that social requirements and moral duty as

ordinarily conceived do not exhaust the range of obligation,—of the

supreme ethical Ought. How that can best be done is however a question of

some difficulty. For the ends under examination do not fall completely

into a serial order, nor does one involve others in such a way as to

destroy their independence. You cannot absolve psychology as if it stood

independent of ethics or religion, nor can aesthetic considerations merely

supervene on moral. Still, it may be said, the order followed by Hegel

seems on the whole liable to fewer objections than others.

Mr. Herbert Spencer, the only English philosopher who has even attempted a

_System_ of Philosophy, may in this point be compared with Hegel. He also

begins with a _First Principles_,—a work which, like Hegel’s _Logic_,

starts by presenting Philosophy as the supreme arbiter between the

subordinate principles of Religion and Science, which are in it “necessary

correlatives.” The positive task of philosophy is (with some inconsistency

or vagueness) presented, in the next place, as a “unification of

knowledge.” Such a unification has to make explicit the implicit unity of

known reality: because “every thought involves a whole system of

thoughts.” And such a programme might again suggest the Logic. But

unfortunately Mr. Spencer does not (and he has Francis Bacon to justify

him here) think it worth his while to toil up the weary, but necessary,

mount of Purgatory which is known to us as Logic. With a naïve realism, he

builds on Cause and Power, and above all on Force, that “Ultimate of

Ultimates,” which seems to be, however marvellously, a denizen both of the

Known and the Unknowable world. In the known world this Ultimate appears

under two forms, matter and motion, and the problem of science and

philosophy is to lay down in detail and in general the law of their

continuous redistribution, of the segregation of motion from matter, and

the inclusion of motion into matter.

Of this process, which has no beginning and no end,—the rhythm of

generation and corruption, attraction and repulsion, it may be said that

it is properly not a first principle of all knowledge, but the general or

fundamental portion of Natural Philosophy to which Mr. Spencer next

proceeds. Such a philosophy, however, he gives only in part: viz. as a

Biology, dealing with organic (and at a further stage and under other

names, with supra-organic) life. And that the Philosophy of Nature should

take this form, and carry both the First Principles and the later portions

of the system with it, as parts of a philosophy of evolution, is what we

should have expected from the contemporaneous interests of science(2).

Even a one-sided attempt to give speculative unity to those researches,

which get—for reasons the scientific specialist seldom asks—the title of

biological, is however worth noting as a recognition of the necessity of a

_Natur-philosophie_,—a speculative science of Nature.

The third part of the Hegelian System corresponds to what in the

_Synthetic Philosophy_ is known as Psychology, Ethics, and Sociology. And

here Mr. Spencer recognises that something new has turned up. Psychology

is “unique” as a science: it is a “double science,” and as a whole quite

_sui generis_. Whether perhaps all these epithets would not, _mutatis

mutandis_, have to be applied also to Ethics and Sociology, if these are

to do their full work, he does not say. In what this doubleness consists

he even finds it somewhat difficult to show. For, as his fundamental

philosophy does not on this point go beyond noting some pairs of verbal

antitheses, and has no sense of unity except in the imperfect shape of a

“relation(3)” between two things which are “antithetical and inseparable,”

he is perplexed by phrases such as “in” and “out of” consciousness, and

stumbles over the equivocal use of “inner” to denote both mental (or

non-spatial) in general, and locally sub-cuticular in special. Still, he

gets so far as to see that the law of consciousness is that in it neither

feelings nor relations have independent subsistence, and that the unit of

mind does not begin till what he calls two feelings are made one. The

phraseology may be faulty, but it shows an inkling of the _a priori_.

Unfortunately it is apparently forgotten; and the language too often

reverts into the habit of what he calls the “objective,” i.e. purely

physical, sciences.

Mr. Spencer’s conception of Psychology restricts it to the more general

physics of the mind. For its more concrete life he refers us to Sociology.

But his Sociology is yet unfinished: and from the plan of its inception,

and the imperfect conception of the ends and means of its investigation,

hardly admits of completion in any systematic sense. To that incipiency is

no doubt due its excess in historical or anecdotal detail—detail, however,

too much segregated from its social context, and in general its tendency

to neglect normal and central theory for incidental and peripheral facts.

Here, too, there is a weakness in First Principles and a love of

catchwords, which goes along with the fallacy that illustration is proof.

Above all, it is evident that the great fact of religion overhangs Mr.

Spencer with the attraction of an unsolved and unacceptable problem. He

cannot get the religious ideas of men into co-ordination with their

scientific, aesthetic, and moral doctrines; and only betrays his sense of

the high importance of the former by placing them in the forefront of

inquiry, as due to the inexperience and limitations of the so-called

primitive man. That is hardly adequate recognition of the religious

principle: and the defect will make itself seriously felt, should he ever

come to carry out the further stage of his prospectus dealing with “the

growth and correlation of language, knowledge, morals, and aesthetics.”

(ii.) Mind and Morals.

A Mental Philosophy—if we so put what might also be rendered a Spiritual

Philosophy, or Philosophy of Spirit—may to an English reader suggest

something much narrower than it actually contains. A Philosophy of the

Human Mind—if we consult English specimens—would not imply much more than

a psychology, and probably what is called an inductive psychology. But as

Hegel understands it, it covers an unexpectedly wide range of topics, the

whole range from Nature to Spirit. Besides Subjective Mind, which would

seem on first thoughts to exhaust the topics of psychology, it goes on to

Mind as Objective, and finally to Absolute mind. And such combinations of

words may sound either self-contradictory or meaningless.

The first Section deals with the range of what is usually termed

Psychology. That term indeed is employed by Hegel, in a restricted sense,

to denote the last of the three sub-sections in the discussion of

Subjective Mind. The Mind, which is the topic of psychology proper, cannot

be assumed as a ready-made object, or datum. A Self, a self-consciousness,

an intelligent and volitional agent, if it be the birthright of man, is a

birthright which he has to realise for himself, to earn and to make his

own. To trace the steps by which mind in its stricter acceptation, as will

and intelligence, emerges from the general animal sensibility which is the

crowning phase of organic life, and the final problem of biology, is the

work of two preliminary sub-sections—the first entitled _Anthropology_,

the second the _Phenomenology of Mind_.

The subject of Anthropology, as Hegel understands it, is the Soul—the raw

material of consciousness, the basis of all higher mental life. This is a

borderland, where the ground is still debateable between Nature and Mind:

it is the region of feeling, where the sensibility has not yet been

differentiated to intelligence. Soul and body are here, as the phrase

goes, in communion: the inward life is still imperfectly disengaged from

its natural co-physical setting. Still one with nature, it submits to

natural influences and natural vicissitudes: is not as yet master of

itself, but the half-passive receptacle of a foreign life, of a general

vitality, of a common soul not yet fully differentiated into

individuality. But it is awaking to self-activity: it is emerging to

Consciousness,—to distinguish itself, as aware and conscious, from the

facts of life and sentiency of which it is aware.

From this region of psychical physiology or physiological psychology,

Hegel in the second sub-section of his first part takes us to the

“Phenomenology of Mind,”—to Consciousness. The sentient soul is also

conscious—but in a looser sense of that word(4): it has feelings, but can

scarcely be said _itself_ to know that it has them. As consciousness, the

Soul has come to separate what it is from what it feels. The distinction

emerges of a subject which is conscious, and an object _of_ which it is

conscious. And the main thing is obviously the relationship between the

two, or the Consciousness itself, as tending to distinguish itself alike

from its subject and its object. Hence, perhaps, may be gathered why it is

called Phenomenology of Mind. Mind as yet is not yet more than emergent or

apparent: nor yet self-possessed and self-certified. No longer, however,

one with the circumambient nature which it feels, it sees itself set

against it, but only as a passive recipient of it, a _tabula rasa_ on

which external nature is reflected, or to which phenomena are presented.

No longer, on the other hand, a mere passive instrument of suggestion from

without, its instinct of life, its _nisus_ of self-assertion is developed,

through antagonism to a like _nisus_, into the consciousness of self-hood,

of a Me and Mine as set against a Thee and Thine. But just in proportion

as it is so developed in opposition to and recognition of other equally

self-centred selves, it has passed beyond the narrower characteristic of

Consciousness proper. It is no longer mere intelligent perception or

reproduction of a world, but it is life, with perception (or apperception)

of that life. It has returned in a way to its original unity with nature,

but it is now the sense of its self-hood—the consciousness of itself as

the focus in which subjective and objective are at one. Or, to put it in

the language of the great champion of Realism(5), the standpoint of Reason

or full-grown Mind is this: “The world which appears to us is our percept,

therefore in us. The real world, out of which we explain the phenomenon,

is our thought: therefore in us.”

The third sub-section of the theory of Subjective Mind—the Psychology

proper—deals with Mind. This is the real, independent Psyché—hence the

special appropriation of the term Psychology. “The Soul,” says Herbart,

“no doubt dwells in a body: there are, moreover, corresponding states of

the one and the other: but nothing corporeal occurs in the Soul, nothing

purely mental, which we could reckon to our Ego, occurs in the body: the

affections of the body are no representations of the Ego, and our pleasant

and unpleasant feelings do not immediately lie in the organic life they

favour or hinder.” Such a Soul, so conceived, is an intelligent and

volitional self, a being of intellectual and “active” powers or phenomena:

it is a Mind. And “Mind,” adds Hegel(6), “is just this elevation above

Nature and physical modes and above the complication with an external

object.” Nothing is _external_ to it: it is rather the internalising of

all externality. In this psychology proper, we are out of any immediate

connexion with physiology. “Psychology as such,” remarks Herbart, “has its

questions common to it with Idealism”—with the doctrine that all reality

is mental reality. It traces, in Hegel’s exposition of it, the steps of

the way by which mind realises that independence which is its

characteristic stand-point. On the intellectual side that independence is

assured in language,—the system of signs by which the intelligence stamps

external objects as its own, made part of its inner world. A science, some

one has said, is after all only _une langue bien faite_. So, reversing the

saying, we may note that a language is an inwardised and mind-appropriated

world. On the active side, the independence of mind is seen in

self-enjoyment, in happiness, or self-content, where impulse and volition

have attained satisfaction in equilibrium, and the soul possesses itself

in fullness. Such a mind(7), which has made the world its certified

possession in language, and which enjoys itself in self-possession of

soul, called happiness, is a free Mind. And that is the highest which

Subjective Mind can reach.

At this point, perhaps, having rounded off by a liberal sweep the scope of

psychology, the ordinary mental philosophy would stop. Hegel, instead of

finishing, now goes on to the field of what he calls Objective Mind. For

as yet it has been only the story of a preparation, an inward adorning and

equipment, and we have yet to see what is to come of it in actuality. Or

rather, we have yet to consider the social forms on which this preparation

rests. The mind, self-possessed and sure of itself or free, is so only

through the objective shape which its main development runs parallel with.

An intelligent Will, or a practical reason, was the last word of the

psychological development. But a reason which is practical, or a volition

which is intelligent, is realised by action which takes regular shapes,

and by practice which transforms the world. The theory of Objective Mind

delineates the new form which nature assumes under the sway of

intelligence and will. That intellectual world realises itself by

transforming the physical into a social and political world, the given

natural conditions of existence into a freely-instituted system of life,

the primitive struggle of kinds for subsistence into the ordinances of the

social state. Given man as a being possessed of will and intelligence,

this inward faculty, whatever be its degree, will try to impress itself on

nature and to reproduce itself in a legal, a moral, and social world. The

kingdom of deed replaces, or rises on the foundation of, the kingdom of

word: and instead of the equilibrium of a well-adjusted soul comes the

harmonious life of a social organism. We are, in short, in the sphere of

Ethics and Politics, of Jurisprudence and Morals, of Law and Conscience.

Here,—as always in Hegel’s system—there is a triad of steps. First the

province of Law or Right. But if we call it Law, we must keep out of sight

the idea of a special law-giver, of a conscious imposition of laws, above

all by a political superior. And if we call it Right, we must remember

that it is neutral, inhuman, abstract right: the right whose principle is

impartial and impassive uniformity, equality, order;—not moral right, or

the equity which takes cognisance of circumstances, of personal claims,

and provides against its own hardness. The intelligent will of Man,

throwing itself upon the mere gifts of nature as their appointed master,

creates the world of Property—of things instrumental, and regarded as

adjectival, to the human personality. But the autonomy of Reason (which is

latent in the will) carries with it certain consequences. As it acts, it

also, by its inherent quality of uniformity or universality, enacts for

itself a law and laws, and creates the realm of formal equality or

order-giving law. But this is a _mere_ equality: which is not inconsistent

with what in other respects may be excess of inequality. What one does, if

it is really to be treated as done, others may or even must do: each act

creates an expectation of continuance and uniformity of behaviour. The

doer is bound by it, and others are entitled to do the like. The material

which the person appropriates creates a system of obligation. Thus is

constituted—in the natural give and take of rational Wills—in the

inevitable course of human action and reaction,—a system of rights and

duties. This law of equality—the basis of justice, and the seed of

benevolence—is the scaffolding or perhaps rather the rudimentary framework

of society and moral life. Or it is the bare skeleton which is to be

clothed upon by the softer and fuller outlines of the social tissues and

the ethical organs.

And thus the first range of Objective Mind postulates the second, which

Hegel calls “Morality.” The word is to be taken in its strict sense as a

protest against the quasi-physical order of law. It is the morality of

conscience and of the good will, of the inner rectitude of soul and

purpose, as all-sufficient and supreme. Here is brought out the

complementary factor in social life: the element of liberty, spontaneity,

self-consciousness. The motto of mere inward morality (as opposed to the

spirit of legality) is (in Kant’s words): “There is nothing without

qualification good, in heaven or earth, but only a good will.” The

essential condition of goodness is that the action be done with purpose

and intelligence, and in full persuasion of its goodness by the conscience

of the agent. The characteristic of Morality thus described is its

essential inwardness, and the sovereignty of the conscience over all

heteronomy. Its justification is that it protests against the authority of

a mere external or objective order, subsisting and ruling in separation

from the subjectivity. Its defect is the turn it gives to this assertion

of the rights of subjective conscience: briefly in the circumstance that

it tends to set up a mere individualism against a mere universalism,

instead of realising the unity and essential interdependence of the two.

The third sub-section of the theory of Objective Mind describes a state of

affairs in which this antithesis is explicitly overcome. This is the moral

life in a social community. Here law and usage prevail and provide the

fixed permanent scheme of life: but the law and the usage are, in their

true or ideal conception, only the unforced expression of the mind and

will of those who live under them. And, on the other hand, the mind and

will of the individual members of such a community are pervaded and

animated by its universal spirit. In such a community, and so constituting

it, the individual is at once free and equal, and that because of the

spirit of fraternity, which forms its spiritual link. In the world

supposed to be governed by mere legality the idea of right is exclusively

prominent; and when that is the case, it may often happen that _summum jus

summa injuria_. In mere morality, the stress falls exclusively on the idea

of inward freedom, or the necessity of the harmony of the judgment and the

will, or the dependence of conduct upon conscience. In the union of the

two, in the moral community as normally constituted, the mere idea of

right is replaced, or controlled and modified, by the idea of equity—a

balance as it were between the two preceding, inasmuch as motive and

purpose are employed to modify and interpret strict right. But this

effect—this harmonisation—is brought about by the predominance of a new

idea—the principle of benevolence,—a principle however which is itself

modified by the fundamental idea of right or law(8) into a wise or

regulated kindliness.

But what Hegel chiefly deals with under this head is the interdependence

of form and content, of social order and personal progress. In the picture

of an ethical organisation or harmoniously-alive moral community he shows

us partly the underlying idea which gave room for the antithesis between

law and conscience, and partly the outlines of the ideal in which that

conflict becomes only the instrument of progress. This organisation has

three grades or three typical aspects. These are the Family, Civil

Society, and the State. The first of these, the Family, must be taken to

include those primary unities of human life where the natural affinity of

sex and the natural ties of parentage are the preponderant influence in

forming and maintaining the social group. This, as it were, is the

soul-nucleus of social organisation: where the principle of unity is an

instinct, a feeling, an absorbing solidarity. Next comes what Hegel has

called Civil Society,—meaning however by civil the antithesis to

political, the society of those who may be styled _bourgeois_, not

_citoyens_:—and meaning by society the antithesis to community. There are

other natural influences binding men together besides those which form the

close unities of the family, gens, tribe, or clan. Economical needs

associate human beings within a much larger radius—in ways capable of

almost indefinite expansion—but also in a way much less intense and deep.

Civil Society is the more or less loosely organised aggregate of such

associations, which, if, on one hand, they keep human life from stagnating

in the mere family, on another, accentuate more sharply the tendency to

competition and the struggle for life. Lastly, in the Political State

comes the synthesis of family and society. Of the family; in so far as the

State tends to develope itself on the nature-given unit of the Nation (an

extended family, supplementing as need arises real descent by fictitious

incorporations), and has apparently never permanently maintained itself

except on the basis of a predominant common nationality. Of society; in so

far as the extension and dispersion of family ties have left free room for

the differentiation of many other sides of human interest and action, and

given ground for the full development of individuality. In consequence of

this, the State (and such a state as Hegel describes is essentially the

idea or ideal of the modern State)(9) has a certain artificial air about

it. It can only be maintained by the free action of intelligence: it must

make its laws public: it must bring to consciousness the principles of its

constitution, and create agencies for keeping up unity of organisation

through the several separate provinces or contending social interests,

each of which is inclined to insist on the right of home mis-rule.

The State—which in its actuality must always be a quasi-national state—is

thus the supreme unity of Nature and Mind. Its natural basis in land,

language, blood, and the many ties which spring therefrom, has to be

constantly raised into an intelligent unity through universal interests.

But the elements of race and of culture have no essential connexion, and

they perpetually incline to wrench themselves asunder. Blood and judgment

are for ever at war in the state as in the individual(10): the

cosmopolitan interest, to which the maxim is _Ubi bene, ibi patria_,

resists the national, which adopts the patriotic watchword of Hector(11).

The State however has another source of danger in the very principle that

gave it birth. It arose through antagonism: it was baptised on the

battlefield, and it only lives as it is able to assert itself against a

foreign foe. And this circumstance tends to intensify and even pervert its

natural basis of nationality:—tends to give the very conception of the

political a negative and superficial look. But, notwithstanding all these

drawbacks, the State in its Idea is entitled to the name Hobbes gave

it,—the Mortal God. Here in a way culminates the obviously objective,—we

may almost say, visible and tangible—development of Man and Mind. Here it

attains a certain completeness—a union of reality and of ideality: a

quasi-immortality, a quasi-universality. What the individual person could

not do unaided, he can do in the strength of his commonwealth. Much that

in the solitary was but implicit or potential, is in the State actualised.

But the God of the State is a mortal God. It is but a national and a

limited mind. To be actual, one must at least begin by restricting

oneself. Or, rather actuality is rational, but always with a conditioned

and a relative rationality(12): it is in the realm of action and

re-action,—in the realm of change and nature. It has warring forces

outside it,—warring forces inside it. Its unity is never perfect: because

it never produces a true identity of interests within, or maintains an

absolute independence without. Thus the true and real State—the State in

its Idea—the realisation of concrete humanity,—of Mind as the fullness and

unity of nature—is not reached in any single or historical State: but

floats away, when we try to seize it, into the endless progress of

history. Always indeed the State, the historical and objective, points

beyond itself. It does so first in the succession of times. _Die

Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht._(13) And in that doom of the world the

eternal blast sweeps along the successive generations of the temporal, one

expelling another from the stage of time—each because it is inadequate to

the Idea which it tried to express, and has succumbed to an enemy from

without because it was not a real and true unity within.

But if temporal flees away before another temporal, it abides in so far as

it has, however inadequately, given expression and visible reality—as it

points inward and upward—to the eternal. The earthly state is also the

city of God; and if the republic of Plato seems to find scant admission

into the reality of flesh and blood, it stands eternal as a witness in the

heaven of idea. Behind the fleeting succession of consulates and

dictatures, of aristocracy and empire, feuds of plebeian with patrician,

in that apparent anarchy of powers which the so-called Roman constitution

is to the superficial observer, there is the eternal Rome, one, strong,

victorious, _semper eadem_: the Rome of Virgil and Justinian, the ghost

whereof still haunts with memories the seven-hilled city, but which with

full spiritual presence lives in the law, the literature, the manners of

the modern world. To find fitter expression for this Absolute Mind than it

has in the Ethical community—to reach that reality of which the moral

world is but one-sidedly representative—is the work of Art, Religion, and

Philosophy. And to deal with these efforts to find the truth and the unity

of Mind and Nature is the subject of Hegel’s third Section.

(iii.) Religion and Philosophy.

It may be well at this point to guard against a misconception of this

serial order of exposition(14). As stage is seen to follow stage, the

historical imagination, which governs our ordinary current of ideas, turns

the logical dependence into a time-sequence. But it is of course not meant

that the later stage follows the earlier in history. The later is the more

real, and therefore the more fundamental. But we can only understand by

abstracting and then transcending our abstractions, or rather by showing

how the abstraction implies relations which force us to go further and

beyond our arbitrary arrest. Each stage therefore either stands to that

preceding it as an antithesis, which inevitably dogs its steps as an

accusing spirit, or it is the conjunction of the original thesis with the

antithesis, in a union which should not be called synthesis because it is

a closer fusion and true marriage of minds. A truth and reality, though

fundamental, is only appreciated at its true value and seen in all its

force where it appears as the reconciliation and reunion of partial and

opposing points of view. Thus, e.g., the full significance of the State

does not emerge so long as we view it in isolation as a supposed single

state, but only as it is seen in the conflict of history, in its actual

“energy” as a world-power among powers, always pointing beyond itself to a

something universal which it fain would be, and yet cannot be. Or, again,

there never was a civil or economic society which existed save under the

wing of a state, or in one-sided assumption of state powers to itself: and

a family is no isolated and independent unit belonging to a supposed

patriarchal age, but was always mixed up with, and in manifold dependence

upon, political and civil combinations. The true family, indeed, far from

preceding the state in time, presupposes the political power to give it

its precise sphere and its social stability: as is well illustrated by

that typical form of it presented in the Roman state.

So, again, religion does not supervene upon an already existing political

and moral system and invest it with an additional sanction. The true order

would be better described as the reverse. The real basis of social life,

and even of intelligence, is religion. As some thinkers quaintly put it,

the known rests and lives on the bosom of the Unknowable. But when we say

that, we must at once guard against a misconception. There are religions

of all sorts; and some of them which are most heard of in the modern world

only exist or survive in the shape of a traditional name and venerated

creed which has lost its power. Nor is a religion necessarily committed to

a definite conception of a supernatural—of a personal power outside the

order of Nature. But in all cases, religion is a faith and a theory which

gives unity to the facts of life, and gives it, not because the unity is

in detail proved or detected, but because life and experience in their

deepest reality inexorably demand and evince such a unity to the heart.

The religion of a time is not its nominal creed, but its dominant

conviction of the meaning of reality, the principle which animates all its

being and all its striving, the faith it has in the laws of nature and the

purpose of life. Dimly or clearly felt and perceived, religion has for its

principle (one cannot well say, its object) not the unknowable, but the

inner unity of life and knowledge, of act and consciousness, a unity which

is certified in its every knowledge, but is never fully demonstrable by

the summation of all its ascertained items. As such a felt and believed

synthesis of the world and life, religion is the unity which gives

stability and harmony to the social sphere; just as morality in its turn

gives a partial and practical realisation to the ideal of religion. But

religion does not merely establish and sanction morality; it also frees it

from a certain narrowness it always has, as of the earth. Or, otherwise

put, morality has to the keener inspection something in it which is more

than the mere moral injunction at first indicates. Beyond the moral, in

its stricter sense, as the obligatory duty and the obedience to law, rises

and expands the beautiful and the good: a beautiful which is

disinterestedly loved, and a goodness which has thrown off all utilitarian

relativity, and become a free self-enhancing joy. The true spirit of

religion sees in the divine judgment not a mere final sanction to human

morality which has failed of its earthly close, not the re-adjustment of

social and political judgments in accordance with our more conscientious

inner standards, but a certain, though, for our part-by-part vision,

incalculable proportion between what is done and suffered. And in this

liberation of the moral from its restrictions, Art renders no slight aid.

Thus in different ways, religion presupposes morality to fill up its

vacant form, and morality presupposes religion to give its laws an

ultimate sanction, which at the same time points beyond their limitations.

But art, religion, and philosophy still rest on the national culture and

on the individual mind. However much they rise in the heights of the ideal

world, they never leave the reality of life and circumstance behind, and

float in the free empyrean. Yet there are degrees of universality, degrees

in which they reach what they promised. As the various psychical _nuclei_

of an individual consciousness tend through the course of experience to

gather round a central idea and by fusion and assimilation form a complete

mental organisation; so, through the march of history, there grows up a

complication and a fusion of national ideas and aspirations, which, though

still retaining the individuality and restriction of a concrete national

life, ultimately present an organisation social, aesthetic, and religious

which is a type of humanity in its universality and completeness. Always

moving in the measure and on the lines of the real development of its

social organisation, the art and religion of a nation tend to give

expression to what social and political actuality at its best but

imperfectly sets in existence. They come more and more to be, not mere

competing fragments as set side by side with those of others, but

comparatively equal and complete representations of the many-sided and

many-voiced reality of man and the world. Yet always they live and

flourish in reciprocity with the fullness of practical institutions and

individual character. An abstractly universal art and religion is a

delusion—until all diversities of geography and climate, of language and

temperament, have been made to disappear. If these energies are in power

and reality and not merely in name, they cannot be applied like a panacea

or put on like a suit of ready-made clothes. If alive, they grow with

individualised type out of the social situation: and they can only attain

a vulgar and visible universality, so far as they attach themselves to

some simple and uniform aspects,—a part tolerably identical everywhere—in

human nature in all times and races.

Art, according to Hegel’s account, is the first of the three expressions

of Absolute Mind. But the key-note to the whole is to be found in

Religion(15): or Religion is the generic description of that phase of mind

which has found rest in the fullness of attainment and is no longer a

struggle and a warfare, but a fruition. “It is the conviction of all

nations,” he says(16), “that in the religious consciousness they hold

their truth; and they have always regarded religion as their dignity and

as the Sunday of their life. Whatever excites our doubts and alarms, all

grief and all anxiety, all that the petty fields of finitude can offer to

attract us, we leave behind on the shoals of time: and as the traveller on

the highest peak of a mountain range, removed from every distinct view of

the earth’s surface, quietly lets his vision neglect all the restrictions

of the landscape and the world; so in this pure region of faith man,

lifted above the hard and inflexible reality, sees it with his mind’s eye

reflected in the rays of the mental sun to an image where its discords,

its lights and shades, are softened to eternal calm. In this region of

mind flow the waters of forgetfulness, from which Psyche drinks, and in

which she drowns all her pain: and the darknesses of this life are here

softened to a dream-image, and transfigured into a mere setting for the

splendours of the Eternal.’”

If we take Religion, in this extended sense, we find it is the sense, the

vision, the faith, the certainty of the eternal in the changeable, of the

infinite in the finite, of the reality in appearance, of the truth in

error. It is freedom from the distractions and pre-occupations of the

particular details of life; it is the sense of permanence, repose,

certainty, rounding off, toning down and absorbing the vicissitude, the

restlessness, the doubts of actual life. Such a victory over palpable

reality has no doubt its origin—its embryology—in phases of mind which

have been already discussed in the first section. Religion will vary

enormously according to the grade of national mood of mind and social

development in which it emerges. But whatever be the peculiarities of its

original swaddling-clothes, its cardinal note will be a sense of

dependence on, and independence in, something more permanent, more august,

more of a surety and stay than visible and variable nature and

man,—something also which whether God or devil, or both in one, holds the

keys of life and death, of weal and woe, and holds them from some safe

vantage-ground above the lower realms of change. By this central being the

outward and the inward, past and present and to come, are made one. And as

already indicated, Religion, emerging, as it does, from social man, from

mind ethical, will retain traces of the two _foci_ in society: the

individual subjectivity and the objective community. Retain them however

only as traces, which still show in the actually envisaged reconciliation.

For that is what religion does to morality. It carries a step higher the

unity or rather combination gained in the State: it is the fuller harmony

of the individual and the collectivity. The moral conscience rests in

certainty and fixity on the religious.

But Religion (thus widely understood as the faith in sempiternal and

all-explaining reality) at first appears under a guise of Art. The poem

and the pyramid, the temple-image and the painting, the drama and the

fairy legend, these are religion: but they are, perhaps, religion as Art.

And that means that they present the eternal under sensible

representations, the work of an artist, and in a perishable material of

limited range. Yet even the carvers of a long-past day whose works have

been disinterred from the plateaux of Auvergne knew that they gave to the

perishable life around them a quasi-immortality: and the myth-teller of a

savage tribe elevated the incident of a season into a perennial power of

love and fear. The cynic may remind us that from the finest picture of the

artist, readily

“We turn

To yonder girl that fords the burn.”

And yet it may be said in reply to the cynic that, had it not been for the

deep-imprinted lesson of the artist, it would have been but a brutal

instinct that would have drawn our eyes. The artist, the poet, the

musician, reveal the meaning, the truth, the reality of the world: they

teach us, they help us, backward younger brothers, to see, to hear, to

feel what our rude senses had failed to detect. They enact the miracle of

the loaves and fishes, again and again: out of the common limited things

of every day they produce a bread of life in which the generations

continue to find nourishment.

But if Art embodies for us the unseen and the eternal, it embodies it in

the stone, the colour, the tone, and the word: and these are by themselves

only dead matter. To the untutored eye and taste the finest

picture-gallery is only a weariness: when the national life has drifted

away, the sacred book and the image are but idols and enigmas. “The

statues are now corpses from which the vivifying soul has fled, and the

hymns are words whence faith has departed: the tables of the Gods are

without spiritual meat and drink, and games and feasts no longer afford

the mind its joyful union with the being of being. The works of the Muse

lack that intellectual force which knew itself strong and real by crushing

gods and men in its winepress. They are now (in this iron age) what they

are for us,—fair fruits broken from the tree, and handed to us by a kindly

destiny. But the gift is like the fruits which the girl in the picture

presents: she does not give the real life of their existence, not the tree

which bore them, not the earth and the elements which entered into their

substance, nor the climate which formed their quality, nor the change of

seasons which governed the process of their growth. Like her, Destiny in

giving us the works of ancient art does not give us their world, not the

spring and summer of the ethical life in which they blossomed and ripened,

but solely a memory and a suggestion of this actuality. Our act in

enjoying them, therefore, is not a Divine service: were it so, our mind

would achieve its perfect and satisfying truth. All that we do is a mere

externalism, which from these fruits wipes off some rain-drop, some speck

of dust, and which, in place of the inward elements of moral actuality

that created and inspired them, tries from the dead elements of their

external reality, such as language and historical allusion, to set up a

tedious mass of scaffolding, not in order to live ourselves into them, but

only to form a picture of them in our minds. But as the girl who proffers

the plucked fruits is more and nobler than the natural element with all

its details of tree, air, light, &c. which first yielded them, because she

gathers all this together, in a nobler way, into the glance of the

conscious eye and the gesture which proffers them; so the spirit of

destiny which offers us those works of art is more than the ethical life

and actuality of the ancient people: for it is the inwardising of that

mind which in them was still self-estranged and self-dispossessed:—it is

the spirit of tragic destiny, the destiny which collects all those

individualised gods and attributes of substance into the one Pantheon. And

that temple of all the gods is Mind conscious of itself as mind(17).”

Religion enters into its more adequate form when it ceases to appear in

the guise of Art and realises that the kingdom of God is within, that the

truth must be _felt_, the eternal _inwardly_ revealed, the holy one

apprehended by _faith_(18), not by outward vision. Eye hath not seen, nor

ear heard, the things of God. They cannot be presented, or delineated:

they come only in the witness of the spirit. The human soul itself is the

only worthy temple of the Most High, whom heaven, and the heaven of

heavens, cannot contain. Here in truth God has come down to dwell with

men; and the Son of Man, caught up in the effusion of the Spirit, can in

all assurance and all humility claim that he is divinified. Here

apparently Absolute Mind is reached: the soul knows no limitation, no

struggle: in time it is already eternal. Yet, there is, according to

Hegel, a flaw,—not in the essence and the matter, but in the manner and

mode in which the ordinary religious consciousness represents to itself,

or pictures that unification which it feels and experiences.

“In religion then this unification of ultimate Being with the Self is

implicitly reached. But the religious consciousness, if it has this

symbolic idea of its reconciliation, still has it as a mere symbol or

representation. It attains the satisfaction by tacking on to its pure

negativity, and that externally, the positive signification of its unity

with the ultimate Being: its satisfaction remains therefore tainted by the

antithesis of another world. Its own reconciliation, therefore, is

presented to its consciousness as something far away, something far away

in the future: just as the reconciliation which the other Self

accomplished appears as a far-away thing in the past. The one Divine Man

had but an implicit father and only an actual mother; conversely the

universal divine man, the community, has its own deed and knowledge for

its father, but for its mother only the eternal Love, which it only

_feels_, but does not _behold_ in its consciousness as an actual immediate

object. Its reconciliation therefore is in its heart, but still at

variance with its consciousness, and its actuality still has a flaw. In

its field of consciousness the place of implicit reality or side of pure

mediation is taken by the reconciliation that lies far away behind: the

place of the actually present, or the side of immediacy and existence, is

filled by the world which has still to wait for its transfiguration to

glory. Implicitly no doubt the world is reconciled with the eternal Being;

and that Being, it is well known, no longer looks upon the object as alien

to it, but in its love sees it as like itself. But for self-consciousness

this immediate presence is not yet set in the full light of mind. In its

immediate consciousness accordingly the spirit of the community is parted

from its religious: for while the religious consciousness declares that

they are implicitly not parted, this implicitness is not raised to reality

and not yet grown to absolute self-certainty(19).”

Religion therefore, which as it first appeared in art-worship had yet to

realise its essential inwardness or spirituality, so has now to overcome

the antithesis in which its (the religious) consciousness stands to the

secular. For the peculiarly religious type of mind is distinguished by an

indifference and even hostility, more or less veiled, to art, to morality

and the civil state, to science and to nature. Strong in the certainty of

faith, or of its implicit rest in God, it resents too curious inquiry into

the central mystery of its union, and in its distincter consciousness sets

the foundation of faith on the evidence of a fact, which, however, it in

the same breath declares to be unique and miraculous, the central event of

the ages, pointing back in its reference to the first days of humanity,

and forward in the future to the winding-up of the business of terrestrial

life. Philosophy, according to Hegel’s conception of it, does but draw the

conclusion supplied by the premisses of religion: it supplements and

rounds off into coherence the religious implications. The unique events in

Judea nearly nineteen centuries ago are for it also the first step in a

new revelation of man’s relationship to God: but while it acknowledges the

transcendent interest of that age, it lays main stress on the permanent

truth then revealed, and it insists on the duty of carrying out the

principle there awakened to all the depth and breadth of its explication.

Its task—its supreme task—is to _explicate religion_. But to do so is to

show that religion is no exotic, and no _mere_ revelation from an external

source. It is to show that religion is the truth, the complete reality, of

the mind that lived in Art, that founded the state and sought to be

dutiful and upright: the truth, the crowning fruit of all scientific

knowledge, of all human affections, of all secular consciousness. Its

lesson ultimately is that there is nothing essentially common or unclean:

that the holy is not parted off from the true and the good and the

beautiful.

Religion thus expanded descends from its abstract or “intelligible” world,

to which it had retired from art and science, and the affairs of ordinary

life. Its God—as a true God—is not of the dead alone, but also of the

living: not a far-off supreme and ultimate Being, but also a man among

men. Philosophy thus has to break down the middle partition-wall of life,

the fence between secular and sacred. It is but religion come to its

maturity, made at home in the world, and no longer a stranger and a

wonder. Religion has pronounced in its inmost heart and faith of faith,

that the earth is the Lord’s, and that day unto day shows forth the divine

handiwork. But the heart of unbelief, of little faith, has hardly uttered

the word, than it forgets its assurance and leans to the conviction that

the prince of this world is the Spirit of Evil. The mood of Théodicée is

also—but with a difference—the mood of philosophy. It asserts the ways of

Providence: but its providence is not the God of the Moralist, or the

ideal of the Artist, or rather is not these only, but also the Law of

Nature, and more than that. Its aim is the Unity of History. The words

have sometimes been lightly used to mean that events run on in one

continuous flow, and that there are no abrupt, no ultimate beginnings,

parting age from age. But the Unity of History in its full sense is beyond

history: it is history “reduced” from the expanses of time to the eternal

present: its thousand years made one day,—made even the glance of a

moment. The theme of the Unity of History—in the full depth of unity and

the full expanse of history—is the theme of Hegelian philosophy. It traces

the process in which Mind has to be all-inclusive, self-upholding, one

with the Eternal reality.

“That process of the mind’s self-realisation” says Hegel in the close of

his _Phenomenology_, “exhibits a lingering movement and succession of

minds, a gallery of images, each of which, equipped with the complete

wealth of mind, only seems to linger because the Self has to penetrate and

to digest this wealth of its Substance. As its perfection consists in

coming completely to _know_ what it _is_ (its substance), this knowledge

is its self-involution in which it deserts its outward existence and

surrenders its shape to recollection. Thus self-involved, it is sunk in

the night of its self-consciousness: but in that night its vanished being

is preserved, and that being, thus in idea preserved,—old, but now

new-born of the spirit,—is the new sphere of being, a new world, a new

phase of mind. In this new phase it has again to begin afresh and from the

beginning, and again nurture itself to maturity from its own resources, as

if for it all that preceded were lost, and it had learned nothing from the

experience of the earlier minds. Yet is that recollection a preservation

of experience: it is the quintessence, and in fact a higher form, of the

substance. If therefore this new mind appears only to count on its own

resources, and to start quite fresh and blank, it is at the same time on a

higher grade that it starts. The intellectual and spiritual realm, which

is thus constructed in actuality, forms a succession in time, where one

mind relieved another of its watch, and each took over the kingdom of the

world from the preceding. The purpose of that succession is to reveal the

depth, and that depth is the absolute comprehension of mind: this

revelation is therefore to uplift its depth, to spread it out in breadth,

so negativing this self-involved Ego, wherein it is self-dispossessed or

reduced to substance. But it is also its time: the course of time shows

this dispossession itself dispossessed, and thus in its extension it is no

less in its depth, the self. The way to that goal,—absolute

self-certainty—or the mind knowing itself as mind—is the inwardising of

the minds, as they severally are in themselves, and as they accomplish the

organisation of their realm. Their conservation,—regarded on the side of

its free and apparently contingent succession of fact—is history: on the

side of their comprehended organisation, again, it is the science of

mental phenomenology: the two together, comprehended history, form at once

the recollection and the grave-yard of the absolute Mind, the actuality,

truth, and certitude of his throne, apart from which he were lifeless and

alone.”

Such in brief outline—lingering most on the points where Hegel has here

been briefest—is the range of the Philosophy of Mind. Its aim is to

comprehend, not to explain: to put together in intelligent unity, not to

analyse into a series of elements. For it psychology is not an analysis or

description of mental phenomena, of laws of association, of the growth of

certain powers and ideas, but a “comprehended history” of the formation of

subjective mind, of the intelligent, feeling, willing self or ego. For it

Ethics is part and only part of the great scheme or system of

self-development; but continuing into greater concreteness the normal

endowment of the individual mind, and but preparing the ground on which

religion may be most effectively cultivated. And finally Religion itself,

released from its isolation and other-world sacrosanctity, is shown to be

only the crown of life, the ripest growth of actuality, and shown to be so

by philosophy, whilst it is made clear that religion is the basis of

philosophy, or that a philosophy can only go as far as the religious

stand-point allows. The hierarchy, if so it be called, of the spiritual

forces is one where none can stand alone, or claim an abstract and

independent supremacy. The truth of egoism is the truth of altruism: the

truly moral is the truly religious: and each is not what it professes to

be unless it anticipate the later, or include the earlier.

(iv.) Mind or Spirit.

It may be said, however, that for such a range of subjects the term Mind

is wretchedly inadequate and common-place, and that the better rendering

of the title would be Philosophy of Spirit. It may be admitted that Mind

is not all that could be wished. But neither is Spirit blameless. And, it

may be added, Hegel’s own term _Geist_ has to be unduly strained to cover

so wide a region. It serves—and was no doubt meant to serve—as a sign of

the conformity of his system with the religion which sees in God no

other-world being, but our very self and mind, and which worships him in

spirit and in truth. And if the use of a word like this could allay the

“ancient variance” between the religious and the philosophic mood, it

would be but churlish perhaps to refuse the sign of compliance and

compromise. But whatever may be the case in German,—and even there the new

wine was dangerous to the old wine-skin—it is certain that to average

English ears the word Spiritual would carry us over the medium line into

the proper land of religiosity. And to do that, as we have seen, is to sin

against the central idea: the idea that religion is of one blood with the

whole mental family, though the most graciously complete of all the

sisters. Yet, however the word may be chosen, the philosophy of Hegel,

like the august lady who appeared in vision to the emprisoned Boëthius,

has on her garment a sign which “signifies the life which is on earth,” as

also a sign which signifies the “right law of heaven”; if her right-hand

holds the “book of the justice of the King omnipotent,” the sceptre in her

left is “corporal judgment against sin(20).”

There is indeed no sufficient reason for contemning the term Mind. If

Inductive Philosophy of the Human Mind has—perhaps to a dainty taste—made

the word unsavoury, that is no reason for refusing to give it all the

wealth of soul and heart, of intellect and will. The _mens aeterna_ which,

if we hear Tacitus, expressed the Hebrew conception of the spirituality of

God, and the Νοῦς which Aristotelianism set supreme in the Soul, are not

the mere or abstract intelligence, which late-acquired habits of

abstraction have made out of them. If the reader will adopt the term (in

want of a better) in its widest scope, we may shelter ourselves under the

example of Wordsworth. His theme is—as he describes it in the

_Recluse_—“the Mind and Man”: his

“voice proclaims

How exquisitely the individual Mind

(And the progressive powers perhaps no less

Of the whole species) to the external World

Is fitted;—and how exquisitely too

The external World is fitted to the Mind;

And the creation (by no lower name

Can it be called) which they with blended might

Accomplish.”

The verse which expounds that “high argument” speaks

“Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love and Hope

And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith.”

And the poet adds:

“As we look

Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man—

My haunt, and the main region of my song;

Beauty—a living Presence of the earth

Surpassing the most fair ideal forms

... waits upon my steps.”

The reality duly seen in the spiritual vision

“That inspires

The human Soul of universal earth

Dreaming of things to come”

will be a greater glory than the ideals of imaginative fiction ever

fancied:

“For the discerning intellect of Man,

When wedded to this goodly universe

In love and holy passion, shall find these

A simple produce of the common day.”

If Wordsworth, thus, as it were, echoing the great conception of Francis

Bacon,

“Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse

Of this great consummation,”

perhaps the poet and the essayist may help us with Hegel to rate the

Mind—the Mind of Man—at its highest value.

Essay II. Aims And Methods Of Psychology.

It is not going too far to say that in common estimation psychology has as

yet hardly reached what Kant has called the steady walk of science—_der

sichere Gang der Wissenschaft_. To assert this is not, of course, to throw

any doubts on the importance of the problems, or on the intrinsic value of

the results, in the studies which have been prosecuted under that name. It

is only to note the obvious fact that a number of inquiries of somewhat

discrepant tone, method, and tendency have all at different times covered

themselves under the common title of psychological, and that the work of

orientation is as yet incomplete. Such a destiny seems inevitable, when a

name is coined rather as the title of an unexplored territory, than fixed

on to describe an accomplished fact.

(i.) Psychology as a Science and as a Part of Philosophy.

The _De Anima_ of Aristotle, gathering up into one the work of Plato and

his predecessors, may be said to lay the foundation of psychology. But

even in it, we can already see that there are two elements or aspects

struggling for mastery: two elements not unrelated or independent, but

hard to keep fairly and fully in unity. On one hand there is the

conception of Soul as a part of Nature, as a grade of existence in the

physical or natural universe,—in the universe of things which suffer

growth and change, which are never entirely “without matter,” and are

always attached to or present in body. From this point of view Aristotle

urged that a sound and realistic psychology must, e.g. in its definition

of a passion, give the prominent place to its physical (or material)

expression, and not to its mental form or significance. It must remember,

he said, that the phenomena or “accidents” are what really throw light on

the nature or the “substance” of the Soul. On the other hand, there are

two points to be considered. There is, first of all, the counterpoising

remark that the conception of Soul as such, as a unity and common

characteristic, will be determinative of the phenomena or

“accidents,”—will settle, as it were, what we are to observe and look for,

and how we are to describe our observations. And by the _conception_ of

Soul, is meant not _a_ soul, as a thing or agent (subject) which has

properties attaching to it; but soul, as the generic feature, the

universal, which is set as a stamp on everything that claims to be

psychical. In other words, Soul is one, not as a single thing contrasted

with its attributes, activities, or exercises of force (such single thing

will be shown by logic to be a metaphysical fiction); but as the unity of

form and character, the comprehensive and identical feature, which is

present in all its manifestations and exercises. But there is a second

consideration. The question is asked by Aristotle whether it is completely

and strictly accurate to put Soul under the category of natural objects.

There is in it, or of it, perhaps, something, and something essential to

it, which belongs to the order of the eternal and self-active: something

which is “form” and “energy” quite unaffected by and separate from

“matter.” How this is related to the realm of the perishable and

changeable is a problem on which Aristotle has been often (and with some

reason) believed to be obscure, if not even inconsistent(21).

In these divergent elements which come to the fore in Aristotle’s

treatment we have the appearance of a radical difference of conception and

purpose as to psychology. He himself does a good deal to keep them both in

view. But it is evident that here already we have the contrast between a

purely physical or (in the narrower sense) “scientific” psychology,

empirical and realistic in treatment, and a more philosophical—what in

certain quarters would be called a speculative or metaphysical—conception

of the problem. There is also in Aristotle the antithesis of a popular or

superficial, and an accurate or analytic, psychology. The former is of a

certain use in dealing, say, with questions of practical ethics and

education: the latter is of more strictly scientific interest. Both of

these distinctions—that between a speculative and an empirical, and that

between a scientific and a popular treatment—affect the subsequent history

of the study. Psychology is sometimes understood to mean the results of

casual observation of our own minds by what is termed introspection, and

by the interpretation of what we may observe in others. Such observations

are in the first place carried on under the guidance of distinctions or

points of view supplied by the names in common use. We interrogate our own

consciousness as to what facts or relations of facts correspond to the

terms of our national language. Or we attempt—what is really an

inexhaustible quest—to get definite divisions between them, and clear-cut

definitions. Inquiries like these which start from popular distinctions

fall a long way short of science: and the inquirer will find that

accidental and essential properties are given in the same handful of

conclusions. Yet there is always much value in these attempts to get our

minds cleared: and it is indispensable for all inquiries that all alleged

or reported facts of mind should be realised and reproduced in our own

mental experience. And this is especially the case in psychology, just

because here we cannot get the object outside us, we cannot get or make a

diagram, and unless we give it reality by re-constructing it,—by

re-interrogating our own experience, our knowledge of it will be but

wooden and mechanical. And the term introspection need not be too

seriously taken: it means much more than watching passively an internal

drama; and is quite as well describable as mental projection, setting out

what was within, and so as it were hidden and involved, before ourselves

in the field of mental vision. Here, as always, the essential point is to

get ourselves well out of the way of the object observed, and to stand,

figuratively speaking, quite on one side.

But even at the best, such a popular or empirical psychology has no

special claim to be ranked as science. It may no doubt be said that at

least it collects, describes, or notes down facts. But even this is not so

certain as it seems. Its so-called facts are very largely fictions, or so

largely interpolated with error, that they cannot be safely used for

construction. If psychology is to accomplish anything valuable, it must go

more radically to work. It must—at least in a measure—discard from its

preliminary view the data of common and current distinctions, and try to

get at something more primary or ultimate as its starting-point. And this

it may do in two ways. It may, in the one case, follow the example of the

physical sciences. In these it is the universal practice to assume that

the explanation of complex and concrete facts is to be attained by (_a_)

postulating certain simple elements (which we may call atoms, molecules,

and perhaps units or monads), which are supposed to be clearly conceivable

and to justify themselves by intrinsic intelligibility, and by (_b_)

assuming that these elements are compounded and combined according to laws

which again are in the last resort self-evident, or such that they seem to

have an obvious and palpable lucidity. Further, such laws being always

axioms or plain postulates of mechanics (for these alone possess this

feature of self-evident intelligibility), they are subject to and invite

all the aids and refinements of the higher mathematical calculus. What the

primary and self-explicative bits of psychical reality may be, is a

further question on which there may be some dispute. They may be, so to

say, taken in a more physical or in a more metaphysical way: i.e. more as

units of nerve-function or more as elements of ideative-function. And

there may be differences as to how far and in what provinces the

mathematical calculus may be applicable. But, in any case, there will be a

strong tendency in psychology, worked on this plan, to follow, _mutatis

mutandis_, and at some distance perhaps, the analogy of material physics.

In both the justification of the postulated units and laws will be their

ability to describe and systematise the observed phenomena in a uniform

and consistent way.

The other way in which psychology gets a foundation and ulterior certainty

is different, and goes deeper. After all, the “scientific” method is only

a way in which the facts of a given sphere are presented in thoroughgoing

interconnexion, each reduced to an exact multiple or fraction of some

other, by an inimitably continued subtraction and addition of an assumed

homogeneous element, found or assumed to be perfectly imaginable

(conceivable). But we may also consider the province in relation to the

whole sphere of reality, may ask what is its place and meaning in the

whole, what reality is in the end driving at or coming to be, and how far

this special province contributes to that end. If we do this, we attach

psychology to philosophy, or, if we prefer so to call it, to metaphysics,

as in the former way we established it on the principles generally

received as governing the method of the physical sciences.

This—the relation of psychology to fundamental philosophy—is a question

which also turns up in dealing with Ethics. There is on the part of those

engaged in either of these inquiries a certain impatience against the

intermeddling (which is held to be only muddling) of metaphysics with

them. It is clear that in a very decided way both psychology and ethics

can, up to some extent at least, be treated as what is called empirical

(or, to use the more English phrase, inductive) sciences. On many hands

they are actually so treated: and not without result. Considering the

tendency of metaphysical inquiries, it may be urged that it is well to

avoid preliminary criticism of the current conceptions and beliefs about

reality which these sciences imply. Yet such beliefs are undoubtedly

present and effective. Schopenhauer has popularised the principle that the

pure empiricist is a fiction, that man is a radically metaphysical animal,

and that he inevitably turns what he receives into a part of a dogmatic

creed—a conviction how things ought to be. Almost without effort there

grows up in him, or flows in upon him, a belief and a system of beliefs as

to the order and values of things. Every judgment, even in logic, rests on

such an order of truth. He need not be able to formulate his creed: it

will influence him none the less: nay, his faith will probably seem more a

part of the solid earth and common reality, the less it has been reduced

to a determinate creed or to a code of principles. For such formulation

presupposes doubt and scepticism, which it beats back by mere assertion.

Each human being has such a background of convictions which govern his

actions and conceptions, and of which it so startles him to suggest the

possibility of a doubt, that he turns away in dogmatic horror. Such ruling

ideas vary, from man to man, and from man to woman—if we consider them in

all their minuteness. But above all they constitute themselves in a

differently organised system or aggregate according to the social and

educational stratum to which an individual belongs. Each group, engaged in

a common task, it may be in the study of a part of nature, is ideally

bound and obliged by a common language, and special standards of truth and

reality for its own. Such a group of ideas is what Bacon would have called

a scientific fetich or _idolum theatri_. A scientific _idolum_ is a

traditional belief or dogma as to principles, values, and methods, which

has so thoroughly pervaded the minds of those engaged in a branch of

inquiry, that they no longer recognise its hypothetical character,—its

relation of means to the main end of their function.

Such a collected and united theory of reality (it is what Hegel has

designated the Idea) is what is understood by a natural metaphysic. It has

nothing necessarily to do with a supersensible or a supernatural, if these

words mean a ghostly, materialised, but super-finely-materialised nature,

above and beyond the present. But that there is a persistent tendency to

conceive the unity and coherence, the theoretic idea of reality, in this

pseudo-sensuous (i.e. super-sensuous) form, is of course a well-known

fact. For the present, however, this aberration—this idol of the tribe—may

be left out of sight. By a metaphysic or fundamental philosophy, is, in

the present instance, meant a system of first principles—a secular and

cosmic creed: a belief in ends and values, a belief in truth—again

premising that the system in question is, for most, a rudely organised and

almost inarticulate mass of belief and hope, conviction and impression. It

is, in short, a _natural_ metaphysic: a metaphysic, that is, which has but

an imperfect coherence, which imperfectly realises both its nature and its

limits.

In certain parts, however, it is more and better than this crude

background of belief. Each science—or at least every group of sciences—has

a more definite system or aggregate of first principles, axioms, and

conceptions belonging to it. It has, that is,—and here in a much

distincter way—its special standard of reality, its peculiar forms of

conceiving things, its distinctions between the actual and the apparent,

&c. Here again it will probably be found that the scientific specialist is

hardly conscious that these are principles and concepts: on the contrary,

they will be supposed self-evident and ultimate facts, foundations of

being. Instead of being treated as modes of conception, more or less

justified by their use and their results, these categories will be

regarded as fundamental facts, essential conditions of all reality. Like

popular thought in its ingrained categories, the specialist cannot

understand the possibility of any limitation to his radical ideas of

reality. To him they are not hypotheses, but principles. The scientific

specialist may be as convinced of the universal application of his

peculiar categories, as the Chinese or the Eskimo that his standards are

natural and final.

Under such metaphysical or extra-empirical presuppositions all

investigation, whether it be crudely empirical or (in the physical sense)

scientific, is carried on. And when so carried on, it is said to be

prosecuted apart from any interference from metaphysic. Such a naïve or

natural metaphysic, not raised to explicit consciousness, not followed as

an imposed rule, but governing with the strength of an immanent faith,

does not count for those who live under it as a metaphysic at all. M.

Jourdain was amazed suddenly to learn he had been speaking prose for forty

years without knowing it. But in the present case there is something worse

than amazement sure to be excited by the news. For the critic who thus

reveals the secrets of the scientist’s heart is pretty sure to go on to

say that a good deal of this naïve unconscious metaphysic is incoherent,

contradictory, even bad: that it requires correction, revision, and

readjustment, and has by criticism to be made one and harmonious. That

readjustment or criticism which shall eliminate contradiction and produce

unity, is the aim of the _science_ of metaphysic—the science of the

meta-physical element in physical knowledge: what Hegel has chosen to call

the Science of Logic (in the wide sense of the term). This higher Logic,

this _science_ of metaphysic, is the process to revise and harmonise in

systematic completeness the imperfect or misleading and partial estimates

of reality which are to be found in popular and scientific thought.

In the case of the run of physical sciences this revision is less

necessary; and for no very recondite reason. Every science by its very

nature deals with a special, a limited topic. It is confined to a part or

aspect of reality. Its propositions are not complete truths; they apply to

an artificial world, to a part expressly cut off from the concrete

reality. Its principles are generally cut according to their

cloth,—according to the range in which they apply. The only danger that

can well arise is if these categories are transplanted without due

reservations, and made of universal application, i.e. if the scientist

elects on his speciality to pronounce _de omnibus rebus_. But in the case

of psychology and ethics the harmlessness of natural metaphysics will be

less certain. Here a general human or universal interest is almost an

inevitable coefficient: especially if they really rise to the full sweep

of the subject. For as such they both seem to deal not with a part of

reality, but with the very centre and purpose of all reality. In them we

are not dealing with topics of secondary interest, but with the very heart

of the human problem. Here the questions of reality and ideals, of unity

and diversity, and of the evaluation of existence, come distinctly to the

fore. If psychology is to answer the question, What am I? and ethics the

question, What ought I to do? they can hardly work without some formulated

creed of metaphysical character, without some preliminary criticisms of

current first principles.

(ii.) Herbart.

The German thinker, who has given perhaps the most fruitful stimulus to

the scientific study of psychology in modern times—Johann Friedrich

Herbart—is after all essentially a philosopher, and not a mere scientist,

even in his psychology. His psychological inquiry, that is, stands in

intimate connexion with the last questions of all intelligence, with

metaphysics and ethics. The business of philosophy, says Herbart, is to

touch up and finish off conceptions (_Bearbeitung der Begriffe_)(22). It

finds, as it supervenes upon the unphilosophical world, that mere and pure

facts (if there ever are or were such purisms) have been enveloped in a

cloud of theory, have been construed into some form of unity, but have

been imperfectly, inadequately construed: and that the existing concepts

in current use need to be corrected, supplemented and readjusted. It has,

accordingly, for its work to “reconcile experience with itself(23),” and

to elicit “the hidden pre-suppositions without which the fact of

experience is unthinkable.” Psychology, then, as a branch of this

philosophic enterprise, has to readjust the facts discovered in inner

experience. For mere uncritical experience or merely empirical knowledge

only offers _problems_; it suggests gaps, which indeed further reflection

serves at first only to deepen into contradictions. Such a psychology is

“speculative”: i.e. it is not content to accept the mere given, but goes

forward and backward to find something that will make the fact

intelligible. It employs totally different methods from the

“classification, induction, analogy” familiar to the logic of the

empirical sciences. Its “principles,” therefore, are not given facts: but

facts which have been manipulated and adjusted so as to lose their

self-contradictory quality: they are facts “reduced,” by introducing the

omitted relationships which they postulate if they are to be true and

self-consistent(24). While it is far from rejecting or ignoring

experience, therefore, psychology cannot strictly be said to build upon it

alone. It uses experimental fact as an unfinished datum,—or it sees in

experience a torso which betrays its imperfection, and suggests

completing.

The starting-point, it may be said, of Herbart’s psychology is a question

which to the ordinary psychologist (and to the so-called scientific

psychologist) has a secondary, if it have any interest. It was, he says,

the problem of Personality, the problem of the Self or Ego, which first

led to his characteristic conception of psychological method. “My first

discovery,” he tells us(25), “was that the Self was neither primitive nor

independent, but must be the most dependent and most conditioned thing one

can imagine. The second was that the elementary ideas of an intelligent

being, if they were ever to reach the pitch of self-consciousness, must be

either all, or at least in part, opposed to each other, and that they must

check or block one another in consequence of this opposition. Though held

in check, however, these ideas were not to be supposed lost: they subsist

as endeavours or tendencies to return into the position of actual idea, as

soon as the check became, for any reason, either in whole or in part

inoperative. This check could and must be calculated, and thus it was

clear that psychology required a mathematical as well as a metaphysical

foundation.”

The place of the conception of the Ego in Kant’s and Fichte’s theory of

knowledge is well known. Equally well known is Kant’s treatment of the

soul-reality or soul-substance in his examination of Rational Psychology.

Whereas the (logical) unity of consciousness, or “synthetic unity of

apperception,” is assumed as a fundamental starting-point in explanation

of our objective judgments, or of our knowledge of objective existence,

its real (as opposed to its formal) foundation in a “substantial” soul is

set aside as an illegitimate interpretation of, or inference from, the

facts of inner experience. The belief in the separate unity and

persistence of the soul, said Kant, is not a scientifically-warranted

conclusion. Its true place is as an ineffaceable postulate of the faith

which inspires human life and action. Herbart did not rest content with

either of these—as he believed—dogmatic assumptions of his master. He did

not fall in cheerfully with the idealism which seemed ready to dispense

with a soul, or which justified its acceptance of empirical reality by

referring to the fundamental unity of the function of judgment. With a

strong bent towards fully-differentiated and individualised experience

Herbart conjoined a conviction of the need of logical analysis to prevent

us being carried away by the first-come and inadequate generalities. The

Ego which, in its extremest abstraction, he found defined as the unity of

subject and object, did not seem to him to offer the proper guarantees of

reality: it was itself a problem, full of contradictions, waiting for

solution. On the other hand, the real Ego, or self of concrete experience,

is very much more than this logical abstract, and differs widely from

individual to individual, and apparently from time to time even in the

same individual. Our self, of which we talk so fluently, as one and the

self-same—how far does it really possess the continuity and identity with

which we credit it? Does it not rather seem to be an ideal which we

gradually form and set before ourselves as the standard for measuring our

attainments of the moment,—the perfect fulfilment of that oneness of being

and purpose and knowledge which we never reach? Sometimes even it seems no

better than a name which we move along the varying phenomena of our inner

life, at one time identifying it with the power which has gained the

victory in a moral struggle, at another with that which has been

defeated(26), according as the attitude of the moment makes us throw now

one, now another, aspect of mental activity in the foreground.

The other—or logical Ego—the mere identity of subject and object,—when

taken in its utter abstractness and simplicity, shrivels up to something

very small indeed—to a something which is little better than nothing. The

mere _I_ which is not contra-distinguished by a _Thou_ and a _He_—which is

without all definiteness of predication (the I=I of Fichte and

Schelling)—is only as it were a point of being cut off from all its

connexions in reality, and treated as if it were or could be entirely

independent. It is an identity in which subject and object have not yet

appeared: it is not a real I, though we may still retain the name. It

is—as Hegel’s _Logic_ will tell us—exactly definable as Being, which is as

yet Nothing: the impossible edge of abstraction on which we try—and in

vain—to steady ourselves at the initial point of thought. And to reach or

stand at that intangible, ungraspable point, which slips away as we

approach, and transmutes itself as we hold it, is not the natural

beginning, but the result of introspection and reflection on the concrete

self. But with this aspect of the question we are not now concerned.

That the unity of the Self as an intelligent and moral being, that the Ego

of self-consciousness was an ideal and a product of development, was what

Herbart soon became convinced of. The unity of Self is even as given in

mature experience an imperfect fact. It is a fact, that is, which does not

come up to what it promised, and which requires to be supplemented, or

philosophically justified. Here and everywhere the custom of life carries

us over gaps which yawn deep to the eye of philosophic reflection: even

though accident and illness force them not unfrequently even upon the

blindest. To trace the process of unification towards this unity—to trace,

if you like, even the formation of the concept of such unity, as a

governing and guiding principle in life and conduct, comes to be the

problem of the psychologist, in the largest sense of that problem. From

Soul (_Seele_) to Mind or Spirit (_Geist_) is for Herbart, as for Hegel,

the course of psychology(27). The growth and development of mind, the

formation of a self, the realisation of a personality, is for both the

theme which psychology has to expound. And Herbart, not less than Hegel,

had to bear the censure that such a conception of mental reality as a

growth would destroy personality(28).

But with so much common in the general plan, the two thinkers differ

profoundly in their special mode of carrying out the task. Or, rather,

they turn their strength on different departments of the whole. Herbart’s

great practical interest had been the theory of education: “paedagogic” is

the subject of his first important writings. The inner history of

ideas—the processes which are based on the interaction of elements in the

individual soul—are what he specially traces. Hegel’s interests, on the

contrary, are more towards the greater process, the unities of historical

life, and the correlations of the powers of art, religion, and philosophy

that work therein. He turns to the macrocosm, almost as naturally as

Herbart does to the microcosm. Thus, even in Ethics, while Herbart gives a

delicate analysis of the distinct aspects or elements in the Ethical

idea,—the diverse headings under which the disinterested spectator within

the breast measures with purely aesthetic eye his approach to unity and

strength of purpose, Hegel seems to hurry away from the field of moral

sense or conscience to throw himself on the social and political

organisation of the moral life. The General Paedagogic of Herbart has its

pendant in Hegel’s Philosophy of Law and of History.

At an early period Herbart had become impressed with the necessity of

applying mathematics to psychology(29). To the usual objection, that

psychical facts do not admit of measurement, he had a ready reply. We can

calculate even on hypothetical assumptions: indeed, could we measure, we

should scarcely take the trouble to calculate(30). To calculate (i.e. to

deduce mathematically) is to perform a general experiment, and to perform

it in the medium where there is least likelihood of error or disturbance.

There may be anomalies enough apparent in the mental life: there may be

the great anomalies of Genius and of Freedom of Will; but the Newton and

the Kepler of psychology will show by calculation on assumed conditions of

psychic nature that these aberrations can be explained by mechanical laws.

“The human Soul is no puppet-theatre: our wishes and resolutions are no

marionettes: no juggler stands behind; but our true and proper life lies

in our volition, and this life has its rule not outside, but in itself: it

has its own purely mental rule, by no means borrowed from the material

world. But this rule is in it sure and fixed; and on account of this its

fixed quality it has more similarity to (what is otherwise heterogeneous)

the laws of impact and pressure than to the marvels of an alleged

inexplicable freedom(31).”

Psychology then deals with a real, which exhibits phenomena analogous in

several respects to those discussed by statics and mechanics. Its

foundation is a statics and mechanics of the Soul,—as this real is called.

We begin by presupposing as the ultimate reality, underlying the

factitious and generally imperfect unity of self-consciousness and mind,

an essential and primary unity—the unity of an absolutely simple or

individual point of being—a real point which amongst other points asserts

itself, maintains itself. It has a character of its own, but that

character it only shows in and through a development conditioned by

external influences. The specific nature of the soul-reality is to be

representative, to produce, or manifest itself in, ideas

(_Vorstellungen_). But the character only emerges into actuality in the

conflict of the soul-atom with other ultimate realities in the

congregation of things. A soul _per se_ or isolated is not possessed of

ideas. It is merely blank, undeveloped, formal unity, of which nothing can

be said. But like other realities it defines and characterises itself by

antithesis, by resistance: it shows what it is by its behaviour in the

struggle for existence. It acts in self-defence: and its peculiar style or

weapon of self-defence is an idea or representation. The way the Soul

maintains itself is by turning the assailant into an idea(32): and each

idea is therefore a _Selbsterhaltung_ of the Soul. The Soul is thus

enriched—to appearance or incidentally: and the assailant is annexed. In

this way the one Soul may develop or evolve or express an innumerable

variety of ideas: for in response to whatever it meets, the living and

active Soul ideates, or gives rise to a representation. Thus, while the

soul is one, its ideas or representations are many. Taken separately, they

each express the psychic self-conservation. But brought in relation with

each other, as so many acts or self-affirmations of the one soul, they

behave as forces, and tend to thwart or check each other. It is as forces,

as reciprocally arresting or fostering each other, that ideas are objects

of science. When a representation is thus held in check, it is reduced to

a mere endeavour or active tendency to represent. Thus there arises a

distinction between representations proper, and those imperfect states or

acts which are partly or wholly held in abeyance. But the latent phase of

an idea is as essential to a thorough understanding of it as what appears.

It is the great blunder of empirical psychology to ignore what is sunk

below the surface of consciousness. And to Herbart consciousness is not

the condition but rather the product of ideas, which are primarily forces.

But representations are not merely in opposition,—impinging and resisting.

The same reason which makes them resist, viz. that they are or would fain

be acts of the one soul, but are more or less incompatible, leads them in

other circumstances to form combinations with each other. These

combinations are of two sorts. They are, first, complications, or

“complexions”: a number of ideas combine by quasi-addition and

juxtaposition to form a total. Second, there is fusion: ideas presenting

certain degrees of contrast enter into a union where the parts are no

longer separately perceptible. It is easy to see how the problems of

psychology now assume the form of a statics and mechanics of the mind.

Quantitative data are to be sought in the strength of each separate single

idea, and the degree in which two or more ideas block each other: in the

degree of combination between ideas, and the number of ideas in a

combination: and in the terms of relation between the members of a series

of ideas. A statical theory has to show the conditions required for what

we may call the ideal state of equilibrium of the “idea-forces”: to

determine, that is, the ultimate degree of obscuration suffered by any two

ideas of different strength, and the conditions of their permanent

combination or fusion. A mechanics of the mind will, on the contrary, deal

with the rate at which these processes are brought about, the velocity

with which in the movement of mind ideas are obscured or reawakened, &c.

It is fortunately unnecessary, here, to go further into details. What

Herbart proposes is not a method for the mathematical measurement of

psychic facts: it is a theory of mechanics and statics specially adapted

to the peculiarities of psychical phenomena, where the forces are given

with no sine or cosine, where instead of gravitation we have the constant

effort (as it were elasticity) of each idea to revert to its unchecked

state. He claims—in short—practically to be a Kepler and Newton of the

mind, and in so doing to justify the vague professions of more than one

writer on mind—above all, perhaps of David Hume, who goes beyond mere

professions—to make mental science follow the example of physics. And a

main argument in favour of his enterprise is the declaration of Kant that

no body of knowledge can claim to be a science except in such proportion

as it is mathematical. And the peculiarity of this enterprise is that

self-consciousness, the Ego, is not allowed to interfere with the free

play of psychic forces. The Ego is—psychologically—the result, the

product, and the varying product of that play. The play of forces is no

doubt a unity: but its unity lies not in the synthesis of consciousness,

but in the essential unity of Soul. And Soul is in its essence neither

consciousness, nor self-consciousness, nor mind: but something on the

basis of whose unity these are built up and developed(33). The mere

“representation” does not include the further supervenience of

consciousness: it represents, but it is not as yet necessary that we

should also be conscious that there is representation. It is, in the

phrase of Leibniz, perception: but not apperception. It is mere

straight-out, not as yet reflected, representation. Gradually there

emerges through the operation of mechanical psychics a nucleus, a floating

unity, a fixed or definite central aggregate.

The suggestion of mathematical method has been taken up by subsequent

inquirers (as it was pursued even before Herbart’s time), but not in the

sense he meant. Experimentation has now taken a prominent place in

psychology. But in proportion as it has done so, psychology has lost its

native character, and thrown itself into the arms of physiology. What

Herbart calculated were actions and reactions of idea-forces: what the

modern experimental school proposes to measure are to a large extent the

velocities of certain physiological processes, the numerical specification

of certain facts. Such ascertainments are unquestionably useful; as

numerical precision is in other departments. But, taken in themselves,

they do not carry us one bit further on the way to science. As

experiments, further,—to note a point discussed elsewhere(34)—their value

depends on the point of view, on the theory which has led to them, on the

value of the general scheme for which they are intended to provide a

special new determination. In many cases they serve to give a vivid

reality to what was veiled under a general phrase. The truth looks so much

more real when it is put in figures: as the size of a huge tree when set

against a rock; or as when Milton bodies out his fallen angel by setting

forth the ratio between his spear and the tallest Norway pine. But until

the general relationship between soul and body is more clearly formulated,

such statistics will have but a value of curiosity.

(iii.) The Faculty-Psychology and its Critics.

What Herbart (as well as Hegel) finds perpetual ground for objecting to is

the talk about mental faculties. This objection is part of a general

characteristic of all the higher philosophy; and the recurrence of it

gives an illustration of how hard it is for any class of men to see

themselves as others see them. If there be anything the vulgar believe to

be true of philosophy, it is that it deals in distant and abstruse

generalities, that it neglects the shades of individuality and reality,

and launches out into unsubstantial general ideas. But it would be easy to

gather from the great thinkers an anthology of passages in which they hold

it forth as the great work of philosophy to rescue our conceptions from

the indefiniteness and generality of popular conception, and to give them

real, as opposed to a merely nominal, individuality.

The Wolffian school, which Herbart (not less than Kant) found in

possession of the field, and which in Germany may be taken to represent

only a slight variant of the half-and-half attitude of vulgar thought, was

entrenched in the psychology of faculties. Empirical psychology, said

Wolff(35), tells the number and character of the soul’s faculties:

rational psychology will tell what they “properly” are, and how they

subsist in soul. It is assumed that there are general receptacles or

tendencies of mental operation which in course of time get filled or

qualified in a certain way: and that when this question is disposed of, it

still remains to fix on the metaphysical bases of these facts.

That a doctrine of faculties should fix itself in psychology is not so

wonderful. In the non-psychical world objects are easily discriminated in

space, and the individual thing lasts through a time. But a phase of mind

is as such fleeting and indeterminate: its individual features which come

from its “object” tend soon to vanish in memory: all freshness of definite

characters wears off, and there is left behind only a vague “recept” of

the one and same in many, a sort of hypostatised representative, faint but

persistent, of what in experience was an ever-varying succession. We

generalise here as elsewhere: but elsewhere the many singulars remain to

confront us more effectually. But in Mind the immense variety of real

imagination, memory, judgment is forgotten, and the name in each case

reduced to a meagre abstract. Thus the identity in character and

operation, having been cut off from the changing elements in its real

action, is transmuted into a substantial somewhat, a subsistent faculty.

The relationship of one to another of the powers thus by abstraction and

fancy created becomes a problem of considerable moment, their causal

relations in particular: till in the end they stand outside and

independent of each other, engaged, as Herbart says, in a veritable

_bellum omnium contra omnes_.

But this hypostatising of faculties becomes a source of still further

difficulties when it is taken in connexion with the hypostasis of the Soul

or Self or Ego. To Aristotle the Soul in its general aspect is Energy or

Essence; and its individual phases are energies. But in the hands of the

untrained these conceptions came to be considerably displaced. Essence or

Substance came to be understood (as may be seen in Locke, and still more

in loose talk) as a something,—a substratum,—or peculiar nature—(of which

_in itself_ nothing further could be said(36) but which notwithstanding

was permanent and perhaps imperishable): this something subsistent

exhibited certain properties or activities. There thus arose, on one hand,

the Soul-thing,—a substance misunderstood and sensualised with a

supernatural sensuousness,—a denizen of the transcendental or even of the

transcendent world: and, on the other hand, stood the actual

manifestations, the several exhibitions of this force, the assignable and

describable psychic facts. We are accordingly brought before the problem

of how this one substance or essence stands to the several entities or

hypostases known as faculties. And we still have in the rear the further

problem of how these abstract entities stand to the real and concrete

single acts and states of soul and mind.

This hypostatising of faculties, and this distinction of the “Substantial”

soul from its “accidentia” or phenomena, had grown—through the

materialistic proclivities of popular conception—from the indications

found in Aristotle. It attained its climax, perhaps in the Wolffian school

in Germany, but it has been the resort of superficial psychology in all

ages. For while it, on one hand, seemed to save the substantial Soul on

whose incorruptibility great issues were believed to hinge, it held out,

on the other, an open hand to the experimental inquirer, whom it bade

freely to search amongst the phenomena. But if it was the refuge of

pusillanimity, it was also the perpetual object of censure from all the

greater and bolder spirits. Thus, the psychology of Hobbes may be hasty

and crude, but it is at least animated by a belief that the mental life is

continuous, and not cut off by abrupt divisions severing the mental

faculties. The “image” (according to his materialistically coloured

psychology) which, when it is a strong motion, is called sense, passes, as

it becomes weaker or decays, into imagination, and gives rise, by its

various complications and associations with others, to reminiscence,

experience, expectation. Similarly, the voluntary motion which is an

effect or a phase of imagination, beginning at first in small

motions—called by themselves “endeavours,” and in relation to their cause

“appetites” or “desires(37)”—leads on cumulatively to Will, which is the

“last appetite in deliberating.” Spinoza, his contemporary, speaks in the

same strain(38). “Faculties of intellect, desire, love, &c., are either

utterly fictitious, or nothing but metaphysical entities, or universals

which we are in the habit of forming from particulars. Will and intellect

are thus supposed to stand to this or that idea, this or that volition, in

the same way as stoniness to this or that stone, or as man to Peter or

Paul.” They are supposed to be a general something which gets defined and

detached. But, in the mind, or in the cogitant soul, there are no such

things. There are only ideas: and by an “idea” we are to understand not an

image on the retina or in the brain, not a “dumb something, like a

painting on a panel(39),” but a mode of thinking, or even the act of

intellection itself. The ideas _are_ the mind: mind does not _have_ ideas.

Further, every “idea,” as such, “involves affirmation or negation,”—is not

an image, but an act of judgment—contains, as we should say, an implicit

reference to actuality,—a reference which in volition is made explicit.

Thus (concludes the corollary of Eth. ii. 49) “Will and Intellect are one

and the same.” But in any case the “faculties” as such are no better than

_entia rationis_ (i.e. auxiliary modes of representing facts).

Leibniz speaks no less distinctly and sanely in this direction. “True

powers are never mere possibilities: they are always tendency and action.”

The “Monad”—that is the quasi-intelligent unit of existence,—is

essentially activity, and its actions are perceptions and appetitions,

i.e. tendencies to pass from one perceptive state or act to another. It is

out of the variety, the complication, and relations of these miniature or

little perceptions and appetitions, that the conspicuous phenomena of

consciousness are to be explained, and not by supposing them due to one or

other faculty. The soul is a unity, a self-developing unity, a unity which

at each stage of its existence shows itself in a perception or idea,—each

such perception however being, to repeat the oft quoted phrase, _plein de

l’avenir et chargé du passé_:—each, in other words, is not stationary, but

active and urgent, a progressive force, as well as a representative

element. Above all, Leibniz has the view that the soul gives rise to all

its ideas from itself: that its life is its own production, not a mere

inheritance of ideas which it has from birth and nature, nor a mere

importation into an empty room from without, but a necessary result of its

own constitution acting in necessary (predetermined) reciprocity and

harmony with the rest of the universe.

But Hobbes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, were most attentively heard in the

passages where they favoured or combatted the dominant social and

theological prepossessions. Their glimpses of truer insight and even their

palpable contributions in the line of a true psychology were ignored or

forgotten. More attention, perhaps, was attracted by an attempt of a very

different style. This was the system of Condillac, who, as Hegel says (p.

61), made an unmistakable attempt to show the necessary interconnexion of

the several modes of mental activity. In his _Traité des Sensations_

(1754), following on his _Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines_

(1746), he tried to carry out systematically the deduction or derivation

of all our ideas from sense, or to trace the filiation of all our

faculties from sensation. Given a mind with no other power than

sensibility, the problem is to show how it acquires all its other

faculties. Let us then suppose a sentient animal to which is offered a

single sensation, or one sensation standing out above the others. In such

circumstances the sensation “becomes” (_devient_) attention: or a

sensation “is” (_est_) attention, either because it is alone, or because

it is more lively than all the rest. Again: before such a being, let us

set two sensations: to perceive or feel (_apercevoir ou sentir_) the two

sensations is the same thing (_c’est la même chose_). If one of the

sensations is not present, but a sensation made already, then to perceive

it is memory. Memory, then, is only “transformed sensation” (_sensation

transformée_). Further, suppose we attend to both ideas, this is “the same

thing” as to compare them. And to compare them we must see difference or

resemblance. This is judgment. “Thus sensation becomes successively

attention, comparison, judgment.” And—by further steps of the equating

process—it appears that sensation again “becomes” an act of reflection.

And the same may be said of imagination and reasoning: all are transformed

sensations.

If this is so with the intelligence, it is equally the case with the Will.

To feel and not feel well or ill is impossible. Coupling then this feeling

of pleasure or pain with the sensation and its transformations, we get the

series of phases ranging from desire, to passion, hope, will. “Desire is

only the action of the same faculties as are attributed to the

understanding.” A lively desire is a passion: a desire, accompanied with a

belief that nothing stands in its way, is a volition. But combine these

affective with the intellectual processes already noticed, and you have

thinking (_penser_)(40). Thus thought in its entirety is, only and always,

transformed sensation.

Something not unlike this, though scarcely so simply and directly

doctrinaire, is familiar to us in some English psychology, notably James

Mill’s(41). Taken in their literal baldness, these identifications may

sound strained,—or trifling. But if we look beyond the words, we can

detect a genuine instinct for maintaining and displaying the unity and

continuity of mental life through all its modifications,—coupled

unfortunately with a bias sometimes in favour of reducing higher or more

complex states of mind to a mere prolongation of lower and beggarly

rudiments. But otherwise such analyses are useful as aids against the

tendency of inert thought to take every name in this department as a

distinguishable reality: the tendency to part will from thought—ideas from

emotion—and even imagination from reason, as if either could be what it

professed without the other.

(iv.) Methods and Problems of Psychology.

The difficulties of modern psychology perhaps lie in other directions, but

they are not less worth guarding against. They proceed mainly from failure

or inability to grasp the central problem of psychology, and a disposition

to let the pen (if it be a book on the subject) wander freely through the

almost illimitable range of instance, illustration, and application.

Though it is true that the proper study of mankind is man, it is hardly

possible to say what might not be brought under this head. _Homo sum,

nihil a me alienum puto_, it might be urged. Placed in a sort of middle

ground between physiology (summing up all the results of physical science)

and general history (including the contributions of all the branches of

sociology), the psychologist need not want for material. He can wander

into ethics, aesthetic, and logic, into epistemology and metaphysics. And

it cannot be said with any conviction that he is actually trespassing, so

long as the ground remains so ill-fenced and vaguely enclosed. A desultory

collection of observations on traits of character, anecdotes of mental

events, mixed up with hypothetical descriptions of how a normal human

being may be supposed to develop his so-called faculties, and including

some dictionary-like verbal distinctions, may make a not uninteresting and

possibly bulky work entitled Psychology.

It is partly a desire of keeping up to date which is responsible for the

copious extracts or abstracts from treatises on the anatomy and functions

of the nerve-system, which, accompanied perhaps by a diagram of the brain,

often form the opening chapter of a work on psychology. Even if these

researches had achieved a larger number of authenticated results than they

as yet have, they would only form an appendix and an illustration to the

proper subject(42). As they stand, and so long as they remain largely

hypothetical, the use of them in psychology only fosters the common

delusion that, when we can picture out in material outlines a theory

otherwise unsupported, it has gained some further witness in its favour.

It is quite arguable indeed that it may be useful to cut out a section

from general human biology which should include the parts of it that were

specially interesting in connexion with the expression or generation of

thought, emotion, and desire. But in that case, there is a blunder in

singling out the brain alone, and especially the organs of sense and

voluntary motion,—except for the reason that this province of

psycho-physics alone has been fairly mapped out. The preponderant half of

the soul’s life is linked to other parts of the physical system. Emotion

and volition, and the general tone of the train of ideas, if they are to

be connected with their expression and physical accompaniment (or aspect),

would require a sketch of the heart and lungs, as well as the digestive

system in general. Nor these alone. Nerve analysis (especially confined to

the larger system), though most modern, is not alone important, as Plato

and Aristotle well saw. So that if biology is to be adapted for

psychological use (and if psychology deals with more than cognitive

processes), a liberal amount of physiological information seems required.

Experimental psychology is a term used with a considerable laxity of

content; and so too is that of physiological psychology, or

psycho-physics. And the laxity mainly arises because there is an

uncertainty as to what is principal and what secondary in the inquiry.

Experiment is obviously a help to observation: and so far as the latter is

practicable, the former would seem to have a chance of introduction. But

in any case, experiment is only a means to an end and only practicable

under the guidance of hypothesis and theory. Its main value would be in

case the sphere of psychology were completely paralleled with one province

of physiology. It was long ago maintained by Spinoza and (in a way by)

Leibniz, that there is no mental phenomenon without its bodily equivalent,

pendant, or correspondent. The _ordo rerum_ (the molecular system of

movements) is, he held, the same as the order of ideas. But it is only at

intervals, under special conditions, or when they reach a certain

magnitude, that ideas emerge into full consciousness. As consciousness

presents them, they are often discontinuous, and abrupt: and they do not

always carry with them their own explanation. Hence if we are confined to

the larger phenomena of consciousness alone, our science is imperfect:

many things seem anomalous; above all, perhaps, will, attention, and the

like. We have seen how Herbart (partly following the hints of Leibniz),

attempted to get over this difficulty by the hypothesis of idea-forces

which generate the forms and matter of consciousness by their mutual

impact and resistance. Physiological psychology substitutes for Herbart’s

reals and his idea-forces a more materialistic sort of reality; perhaps

functions of nerve-cells, or other analogous entities. There, it hopes one

day to discover the underlying continuity of event which in the upper

range of consciousness is often obscured, and then the process would be,

as the phrase goes, explained: we should be able to picture it out without

a gap.

These large hopes may have a certain fulfilment. They may lead to the

withdrawal of some of the fictitious mental processes which are still

described in works of psychology. But on the whole they can only have a

negative and auxiliary value. The value, that is, of helping to confute

feigned connexions and to suggest truer. They will be valid against the

mode of thought which, when Psyché fails us for an explanation, turns to

body, and interpolates soul between the states of body: the mode which, in

an older phraseology, jumps from final causes to physical, and from

physical (or efficient) to final. Here, as elsewhere, the physical has its

place: and here, more than in many places, the physical has been unfairly

treated. But the whole subject requires a discussion of the so-called

“relations” of soul and body: a subject on which popular conceptions and

so-called science are radically obscure.

“But the danger which threatens experimental psychology,” says

Münsterberg, “is that, in investigating details, the connexion with

questions of principle may be so lost sight of that the investigation

finally lands at objects scientifically quite worthless(43). Psychology

forgets only too easily that all those numerical statistics which

experiment allows us to form are only means for psychological analysis and

interpretation, not ends in themselves. It piles up numbers and numbers,

and fails to ask whether the results so formed have any theoretical value

whatever: it seeks answers before a question has been clearly and

distinctly framed; whereas the value of experimental answers always

depends on the exactitude with which the question is put. Let me remind

the reader, how one inquirer after another made many thousand experiments

on the estimation of small intervals of time, without a single one of them

raising the question what the precise point was which these experiments

sought to measure, what was the psychological occurrence in the case, or

what psychological phenomena were employed as the standard of

time-intervals. And so each had his own arbitrary standard of measurement,

each of them piled up mountains of numbers, each demonstrated that his

predecessor was wrong; but neither Estel nor Mehner have carried the

problem of the time-sense a single step further.

“This must be all changed, if we are not to drift into the barrenest

scholastic.... Everywhere out of the correct perception that problems of

principle demand the investigation of detailed phenomena, and that the

latter investigation must proceed in comparative independence of the

question of principles, there has grown the false belief that the

description of detail phenomena is the ultimate aim of science. And so,

side by side with details which are of importance to principles, we have

others, utterly indifferent and theoretically worthless, treated with the

same zeal. To the solution of their barren problems the old Schoolmen

applied a certain acuteness; but in order to turn out masses of numbers

from barren experiments, all that is needed is a certain insensibility to

fits of ennui. Let numbers be less collected for their own sake: and

instead, let the problems be so brought to a point that the answers may

possess the character of principles. Let each experiment be founded on far

more theoretical considerations, then the number of the experiments may be

largely diminished(44).”

What is thus said of a special group of inquiries by one of the foremost

of the younger psychologists, is not without its bearings on all the

departments in which psychology can learn. For physiological, or what is

technically called psychological, experiment, is co-ordinate with many

other sources of information. Much, for instance, is to be learnt by a

careful study of language by those who combine sound linguistic knowledge

with psychological training. It is in language, spoken and written, that

we find at once the great instrument and the great document of the

distinctively human progress from a mere _Psyche_ to a mature _Nous_, from

Soul to Mind. Whether we look at the varieties of its structure under

different ethnological influences, or at the stages of its growth in a

nation and an individual, we get light from language on the

differentiation and consolidation of ideas. But here again it is easy to

lose oneself in the world of etymology, or to be carried away into the

enticing questions of real and ideal philology.

“The human being of the psychologist,” says Herbart(45), “is the social

and civilised human being who stands on the apex of the whole history

through which his race has passed. In him is found visibly together all

the multiplicity of elements, which, under the name of mental faculties,

are regarded as a universal inheritance of humanity. Whether they are

originally in conjunction, whether they are originally a multiplicity, is

a point on which the facts are silent. The savage and the new-born child

give us far less occasion to admire the range of their mind than do the

nobler animals. But the psychologists get out of this difficulty by the

unwarranted assumption that all the higher mental activities exist

potentially in children and savages—though not in the animals—as a

rudimentary predisposition or psychical endowment. Of such a nascent

intellect, a nascent reason, and nascent moral sense, they find

recognisable traces in the scanty similarities which the behaviour of

child or savage offers to those of civilised man. We cannot fail to note

that in their descriptions they have before them a special state of man,

and one which, far from accurately defined, merely follows the general

impression made upon us by those beings we name civilised. An extremely

fluctuating character inevitably marks this total impression. For there

are no general facts:—the genuine psychological documents lie in the

momentary states of individuals: and there is an immeasurably long way

from these to the height of the universal concept of man in general.”

And yet Man in general,—Man as man and therefore as mind—the concept of

Man—normal and ideal man—the complete and adequate Idea of man—is the true

terminus of the psychological process; and whatever be the difficulties in

the way, it is the only proper goal of the science. Only it has to be

built up, constructed, evolved, developed,—and not assumed as a datum of

popular imagination. We want a concept, concrete and real, of Man and of

Mind, which shall give its proper place to each of the elements that, in

the several examples open to detailed observation, are presented with

unfair or exaggerated prominence. The savage and the child are not to be

left out as free from contributing to form the ideal: virtues here are not

more important than vices, and are certainly not likely to be so

informing: even the insane and the idiot show us what human intelligence

is and requires: and the animals are also within the sweep of psychology.

Man is not its theatre to the exclusion of woman; if it records the

results of introspection of the Me, it will find vast and copious quarries

in the various modes in which an individual identifies himself with others

as We. And even the social and civilised man gets his designation, as

usual, _a potiori_. He is more civilised and social than others: perhaps

rather more civilised than not. But always, in some measure, he is at the

same time unsocial or anti-social, and uncivilised. Each unit in the

society of civilisation has to the outside observer—and sometimes even to

his own self-detached and impartial survey—a certain oddity or fixity, a

gleam of irrationality, which shows him to fall short of complete sanity

or limpid and mobile intelligence. He has not wholly put off the

savage,—least of all, says the cynic, in his relations with the other sex.

He carries with him even to the grave some grains of the recklessness and

petulance of childhood. And rarely, if ever, can it be said of him that he

has completely let the ape and tiger die.

But that is only one way of looking at the matter—and one which, perhaps,

is more becoming to the pathologist and the cynic, than to the

psychologist. Each of these stages of psychical development, even if that

development be obviously describable as degeneration, has something which,

duly adjusted, has its place and function in the theory of the

normally-complete human mind. The animal, the savage, and the child,—each

has its part there. It is a mutilated, one-sided and superficial advance

in socialisation which cuts off the civilised creature from the natural

stem of his ancestry, from the large freedom, the immense _insouciance_,

the childlikeness of his first estate. There is something, again, wanting

in the man who utterly lacks the individualising realism and tenderness of

the woman, as in the woman who can show no comprehension of view or

bravery of enterprise. Even pathological states of mind are not mere

anomalies and mere degenerations. Nature perhaps knows no proper

degenerations, but only by-ways and intricacies in the course of

development. Still less is the vast enormity or irregularity of genius to

be ignored. It is all—to the philosophic mind—a question of degree and

proportion,—though often the proportion seems to exceed the scale of our

customary denominators. If an element is latent or quiescent (in arrest),

that is no index to its absolute amount: “we know not what’s resisted.”

Let us by all means keep proudly to our happy mediocrity of faculty, and

step clear of insanity or idiotcy on one hand, and from genius or heroism

on the other. But the careful observer will notwithstanding note how

delicately graded and how intricately combined are the steps which connect

extremes so terribly disparate. It is only vulgar ignorance which turns

away in hostility or contempt from the imbecile and the deranged, and only

a worse than vulgar sciolism which sees in genius and the hero nothing but

an aberration from its much-prized average. Criminalistic anthropology, or

the psychology of the criminal, may have indulged in much frantic

exaggeration as to the doom which nature and heredity have pronounced over

the fruit of the womb even before it entered the shores of light: yet they

have at least served to discredit the free and easy assumption of the

abstract averagist, and shown how little the penalties of an unbending law

meet the requirements of social well-being.

Yet, if psychology be willing to learn in all these and other provinces of

the estate of man, it must remember that, once it goes beyond the narrow

range in which the interpretations of symbol and expression have become

familiar, it is constantly liable to blunder in the inevitable effort to

translate observation into theory. The happy mean between making too much

of palpable differences and hurrying on to a similar rendering of similar

signs is the rarest of gifts. Or, perhaps, it were truer to say it is the

latest and most hardly won of acquirements. To learn to observe—observe

with mind—is not a small thing. There are rules for it—both rules of

general scope and, above all, rules in each special department. But like

all “major premisses” in practice, everything depends on the power of

judgment, the tact, the skill, the “gift” of applying them. They work not

as mere rules to be conned by rote, but as principles assimilated into

constituents of the mental life-blood: rules which serve only as condensed

reminders and hints of habits of thought and methods of research which

have grown up in action and reflection. To observe we must comprehend: yet

we can only comprehend by observing. We all know how unintelligible—save

for epochs of ampler reciprocity, and it may be even of acquired unity of

interest—the two sexes are for each other. Parents can remember how

mysteriously minded they found their own elders; and in most cases they

have to experience the depth of the gulf which in certain directions parts

them from their children’s hearts. Even in civilised Europe, the ordinary

member of each nation has an underlying conviction (which at moments of

passion or surprise will rise and find harsh utterance) that the foreigner

is queer, irrational, and absurd. If the foreigner, further, be so far

removed as a Chinaman (or an Australian “black”), there is hardly anything

too vile, meaningless, or inhuman which the European will not readily

believe in the case of one who, it may be, in turn describes him as a

“foreign devil.” It can only be in a fit of noble chivalry that the

British rank and file can so far temporise with its insular prejudice as

to admit of “Fuzzy-wuzzy” that

“He’s a poor benighted ’eathen—but a first-class fightin’ man.”

Not every one is an observer who chooses to dub himself so, nor is it in a

short lapse of time and with condescension for foreign habits, that any

observer whatever can become a trustworthy reporter of the ideas some

barbarian tribe holds concerning the things of earth and air, and the

hidden things of spirits and gods. The “interviewer” no doubt is a useful

being when it is necessary to find “copy,” or when sharp-drawn characters

and picturesque incidents are needed to stimulate an inert public, ever

open to be interested in some new thing. But he is a poor contributor to

the stored materials of science.

It is of other stuff that true science is made. And if even years of

nominal intercourse and spatial juxtaposition sometimes leave human

beings, as regards their inner selves, in the position of strangers still,

what shall be said of the attempt to discern the psychic life of animals?

Will the touch of curiosity which prompts us to watch the proceedings of

the strange creatures,—will a course of experimentation on their behaviour

under artificial conditions,—justify us in drawing liberal conclusions as

to why they so behaved, and what they thought and felt about it? It is

necessary in the first place to know what to observe, and how, and above

all what for. But that presumed, we must further live with the animals not

only as their masters and their examiners, but as their friends and

fellow-creatures; we must be able—and so lightly that no effort is

discernable—to lay aside the burden and garb of civilisation; we must

possess that stamp of sympathy and similarity which invites confidence,

and breaks down the reserve which our poor relations, whether human or

others, offer to the first approaches of a strange superior. It is

probable that in that case we should have less occasion to wonder at their

oddities or to admire their sagacity. But a higher and more philosophical

wonder might, as in other cases when we get inside the heart of our

subject, take the place of the cheap and childish love of marvels, or of

the vulgar straining after comic traits.

Of all this mass of materials the psychologist proper can directly make

only a sparing use. Even as illustrations, his data must not be presented

too often in all their crude and undigested individuality, or he runs the

risk of leaving one-sided impressions. Every single instance,

individualised and historical,—unless it be exhibited by that true art of

genius which we cannot expect in the average psychologist—narrows, even

though it be but slightly, the complete and all-sided truth. Anecdotes are

good, and to the wise they convey a world of meaning, but to lesser minds

they sometimes suggest anything but the points they should accentuate.

Without the detail of individual realistic study there is no psychology

worth the name. History, story, we must have: but at the same time, with

the philosopher, we must say, I don’t give much weight to stories. And

this is what will always—except in rare instances where something like

genius is conjoined with it—make esoteric science hard and unpopular. It

dare not—if it is true to its idea—rest on any amount of mere instances,

as isolated, unreduced facts. Yet it can only have real power so far as it

concentrates into itself the life-blood of many instances, and indeed

extracts the pith and unity of all instances.

Nor, on the other hand, can it turn itself too directly and intently

towards practical applications. All this theory of mental progress from

the animate soul to the fullness of religion and science deals solely with

the universal process of education: “the education of humanity” we may

call it: the way in which mind is made true and real(46). It is therefore

a question of intricacy and of time how to carry over this general theory

into the arena of education as artificially directed and planned. To try

to do so at a single step would be to repeat the mistake of Plato, if

Plato may be taken to suppose (which seems incredible) that a theoretical

study of the dialectics of truth and goodness would enable his rulers,

without the training of special experience, to undertake the supreme tasks

of legislation or administration. All politics, like all education, rests

on these principles of the means and conditions of mental growth: but the

schooling of concrete life, though it may not develop the faculty of

formulating general laws, will often train better for the management of

the relative than a mere logical Scholastic in first or absolute

principles.

In conclusion, there are one or two points which seem of cardinal

importance for the progress of psychology. (1) Its difference from the

physical sciences has to be set out: in other words, the peculiarity of

psychical fact. It will not do merely to say that experience marks out

these boundaries with sufficient clearness. On the contrary, the terms

consciousness, feeling, mind, &c., are evidently to many psychologists

mere names. In particular, the habits of physical research when introduced

into mental study lead to a good deal of what can only be called

mythology. (2) There should be a clearer recognition of the problem of the

relations of mental unity to mental elements. But to get that, a more

thorough logical and metaphysical preparation is needed than is usually

supposed necessary. The doctrine of identity and necessity, of universal

and individual, has to be faced, however tedious. (3) The distinction

between first-grade and second-grade elements and factors in the mental

life has to be realised. The mere idea as presentative or immediate has to

be kept clear of the more logico-reflective, or normative ideas, which

belong to judgment and reasoning. And the number of these grades in mental

development seems endless. (4) But, also, a separation is required—were it

but temporary—between what may be called principles, and what is detail.

At present, in psychology, “principles” is a word almost without meaning.

A complete all-explaining system is of course impossible at present and

may always be so. Yet if an effort of thought could be concentrated on

cardinal issues, and less padding of conventional and traditional detail

were foisted in, much might thereby be done to make detailed research

fruitful. (5) And finally, perhaps, if psychology be a philosophical

study, some hint as to its purpose and problem would be desirable. If it

is only an abstract branch of science, of course, no such hint is in

place.

Essay III. On Some Psychological Aspects Of Ethics.

Allusion has already been made to the question of the boundaries between

logic and psychology, between logic and ethics, ethics and psychology, and

psychology and epistemology. Each of these occasionally comes to cover

ground that seems more appropriate to the others. Logic is sometimes

restricted to denote the study of the conditions of derivative knowledge,

of the canons of inference and the modes of proof. If taken more widely as

the science of thought-form, it is supposed to imply a world of fixed or

stereotyped relations between ideas, a system of stable thoughts governed

by inflexible laws in an absolute order of immemorial or eternal truth. As

against such fixity, psychology is supposed to deal with these same ideas

as products—as growing out of a living process of thought—having a history

behind them and perhaps a prospect of further change. The genesis so given

may be either a mere chronicle-history, or it may be a philosophical

development. In the former case, it would note the occasions of incident

and circumstance, the reactions of mind and environment, under which the

ideas were formed. Such a psychological genesis of several ideas is found

in the Second Book of Locke’s Essay. In the latter case, the account would

be more concerned with the inner movement, the action and reaction in

ideas themselves, considered not as due to casual occurrences, but as

self-developing by an organic growth. But in either case, ideas would be

shown not to be ready-made and independently existing kinds in a world of

idea-things, and not to form an unchanging diagram or framework, but to be

a growth, to have a history, and a development. Psychology in this sense

would be a dynamical, as opposed to the supposed statical, treatment of

ideas and concepts in logic. But it may be doubted how far it is well to

call this psychology: unless psychology deals with the contents of the

mental life, in their meaning and purpose, instead of, as seems proper,

merely in their character of psychic events. Such psychology is rather an

evolutionist logic,—a dialectic process more than an analytic of a datum.

In the same way, ethics may be brought into one kind of contact with

psychology. Ethics, like logic, may be supposed to presuppose and to deal

with a certain inflexible scheme of requirements, a world of moral order

governed by invariable or universal law; an eternal kingdom of right,

existing independently of human wills, but to be learned and followed out

in uncompromising obedience. As against this supposed absolute order,

psychology may be said to show the genesis of the idea of obligation and

duty, the growth of the authority of conscience, the formation of ideals,

the relativity of moral ideas. Here also it may reach this conclusion, by

a more external or a more internal mode of argument. It may try to show,

in other words, that circumstances give rise to these forms of estimating

conduct, or it may argue that they are a necessary development in the

human being, constituted as he is. It may again be doubted whether this is

properly called psychology. Yet its purport seems ultimately to be that

the objective order is misconceived when it is regarded as an external or

quasi-physical order: as a law written up and sanctioned with an external

authority—as, in Kant’s words, a heteronomy. If that order is objective,

it is so because it is also in a sense subjective: if it is above the mere

individuality of the individual, it is still in a way identical with his

true or universal self-hood. Thus “psychological” here means the

recognition that the logical and the moral law is an autonomy: that it is

not given, but though necessary, necessary by the inward movement of the

mind. The metaphor of law is, in brief, misleading. For, according to a

common, though probably an erroneous, analysis of that term, the essence

of a law in the political sphere is to be a species of command. And that

is rather a one-sidedly practical or aesthetic way of looking at it. The

essence of law in general, and the precondition of every law in special,

is rather uniformity and universality, self-consistency and absence of

contradiction: or, in other words, rationality. Its essential opposite—or

its contradiction in essence—is a privilege, an attempt at isolating a

case from others. It need not indeed always require bare

uniformity—require i.e. the same act to be done by different people: but

it must always require that every thing within its operation shall be

treated on principles of utter and thorough harmony and consistency. It

requires each thing to be treated on public principles and with publicity:

nothing apart and mere singular, as a mere incident or as a world by

itself. Differently it may be treated, but always on grounds of common

well-being, as part of an embracing system.

There is probably another sense, however, in which psychology comes into

close relation with ethics. If we look on man as a microcosm, his inner

system will more or less reproduce the system of the larger world. The

older psychology used to distinguish an upper or superior order of

faculties from a lower or inferior. Thus in the intellectual sphere, the

intellect, judgment, and reason were set above the senses, imagination,

and memory. Among the active powers, reasonable will, practical reason and

conscience were ranked as paramount over the appetites and desires and

emotions. And this use of the word “faculty” is as old as Plato, who

regards science as a superior faculty to opinion or imagination. But this

application—which seems a perfectly legitimate one—does not, in the first

instance, belong to psychology at all. No doubt it is psychically

presented: but it has an other source. It springs from an appreciation, a

judgment of the comparative truth or reality of what the so-called

psychical act means or expresses. Such faculties are powers in a hierarchy

of means and ends and presuppose a normative or critical function which

has classified reality. Psychically, the elements which enter into

knowledge are not other than those which belong to opinion: but they are

nearer an adequate rendering of reality, they are truer, or nearer the

Idea. And in the main we may say, that is truer or more real which

succeeds in more completely organising and unifying elements—which rises

more and more above the selfish or isolated part into the thorough unity

of all parts.

The superior faculty is therefore the more thorough organisation of that

which is elsewhere less harmoniously systematised. Opinion is fragmentary

and partial: it begins abruptly and casually from the unknown, and runs

off no less abruptly into the unknown. Knowledge, on the contrary, is

unified: and its unity gives it its strength and superiority. The powers

which thus exist are the subjective counterparts of objectively valuable

products. Thus, reason is the subjective counterpart of a world in which

all the constituents are harmonised and fall into due relationship. It is

a product or result, which is not psychologically, but logically or

morally important. It is a faculty, because it means that actually its

possessor has ordered and systematised his life or his ideas of things.

Psychologically, it, like unreason, is a compound of elements: but in the

case of reason the composition is unendingly and infinitely consistent; it

is knowledge completely unified. The distinction then is not in the

strictest sense psychological: for it has an aesthetic or normative

character; it is logical or ethical: it denotes that the idea or the act

is an approach to truth or goodness. And so, when Butler or Plato

distinguishes reason or reflection from appetites and affections, and even

from self-love or from the heart which loves and hates, this is not

exactly a psychological division in the narrower sense. That is to say:

these are, in Plato’s words, not merely “parts,” but quite as much “kinds”

and “forms” of soul. They denote degrees in that harmonisation of mind and

soul which reproduces the permanent and complete truth of things. For

example, self-love, as Butler describes it, has but a partial and narrowed

view of the worth of acts: it is engrossing and self-involved: it cannot

take in the full dependence of the narrower interest on the larger and

eternal self. So, in Plato, the man of heart is but a nature which by fits

and starts, or with steady but limited vision, realises the larger life.

These parts or kinds are not separate and co-existent faculties: but

grades in the co-ordination and unification of the same one human nature.

(i.) Psychology and Epistemology.

Psychology however in the strict sense is extremely difficult to define.

Those who describe it as the “science of mind,” the “phenomenology of

consciousness,” seem to give it a wider scope than they really mean. The

psychologist of the straiter sect tends, on the other hand, to carry us

beyond mind and consciousness altogether. His, it has been said, is a

psychology without a Psyché. For him Mind, Soul, and Consciousness are

only current and convenient names to designate the field, the ground on

which the phenomena he observes are supposed to transact themselves. But

they must not on any account interfere with the operations; any more than

Nature in general may interfere with strictly physical inquiries, or Life

and vital force with the theories of biology. The so-called Mind is only

to be regarded as a stage on which certain events represent themselves. In

this field, or on this stage, there are certain relatively ultimate

elements, variously called ideas, presentations, feelings, or states of

consciousness. But these elements, though called ideas, must not be

supposed more than mechanical or dynamical elements; consciousness is

rather their product, a product which presupposes certain operations and

relations between them. If we are to be strictly scientific, we must, it

is urged, treat the factors of consciousness as not themselves conscious:

we must regard them as quasi-objective, or in abstraction from the

consciousness which surveys them. The Ego must sink into a mere receptacle

or arena of psychic event; its independent meaning or purport is to be

ignored, as beside the question.

When this line is once fixed upon, it seems inevitable to go farther.

Comte was inclined to treat psychology as falling between two stools: it

must, he thought, draw all its content either from physiology on the one

hand, or from social factors on the other. The dominant or experimental

psychology of the present day seems inclined, without however formulating

any very definite statement, to pronounce for the former alternative. It

does not indeed adopt the materialistic view that mind is only a function

of matter. Its standpoint rather is that the psychical presents itself

even to unskilled observation as dependent on (i.e. not independent of) or

as concomitant with certain physical or corporeal facts. It adds that the

more accurately trained the observer becomes, the more he comes to

discover a corporeal aspect even where originally he had not surmised its

existence, and to conclude that the two cycles of psychical and physical

event never interfere with each other: that soul does not intervene in

bodily process, nor body take up and carry on psychical. If it is said

that the will moves the limbs, he replies that the will which moves is

really certain formerly unnoticed movements of nerve and muscle which are

felt or interpreted as a discharge of power. If the ocular impression is

said to cause an impression on the mind, he replies that any fact hidden

under that phrase refers to a change in the molecules of the brain. He

will therefore conclude that for the study of psychical phenomena the

physical basis, as it may be called, is all important. Only so can

observation really deal with fact capable of description and measurement.

Thus psychology, it may be said, tends to become a department of

physiology. From another standpoint, biology may be said to receive its

completion in psychology. How much either phrase means, however, will

depend on the estimate we form of biology. If biology is only the study of

mechanical and chemical phenomena on the peculiar field known as an

organism, and if that organism is only treated as an environment which may

be ignored, then psychology, put on the same level, is not the full

science of mind, any more than the other is the full study of life. They

both have narrowed their subject to suit the abstract scheme of the

laboratory, where the victim of experiment is either altered by mutilation

and artificial restrictions, or is dead. If, on the contrary, biology has

a substantial unity of its own to which mechanical and chemical

considerations are subordinate and instrumental, psychology may even take

part with physiology without losing its essential rank. But in that case,

we must, as Spinoza said(47), think less mechanically of the animal frame,

and recognise (after the example of Schelling) something truly inward

(i.e. not merely locally inside the skin) as the supreme phase or

characteristic of life. We must, in short, recognise sensibility as the

culmination of the physiological and the beginning of the psychological.

To the strictly scientific psychologist, as has been noted—or to the

psychology which imitates optical and electrical science—ideas are only

psychical events: they are not ideas _of_ anything, relative, i.e. to

something else; they have no meaning, and no reference to a reality beyond

themselves. They are presentations;—not representations of something

outside consciousness. They are appearances: but not appearances of

something: they do not reveal anything beyond themselves. They are, we may

almost say, a unique kind of physical phenomena. If we say they are

presentations of something, we only mean that in the presented something,

in the felt something, the wished something, we separate the quality or

form or aspect of presentativeness, of feltness, of wishedness, and

consider this aspect by itself. There are grades, relations,

complications, of such presentations or in such presentedness: and with

the description and explanation of these, psychology is concerned. They

are fainter or stronger, more or less correlated and antithetical.

Presentation (or ideation), in short, is the name of a train of event,

which has its peculiarities, its laws, its systems, its history.

All reality, it may be said, subsists in such presentation; it is for a

consciousness, or in a consciousness. All _esse_, in its widest sense, is

_percipi_. And yet, it seems but the commonest of experiences to say that

all that is presented is not reality. It _is_, it has a sort of being,—is

somehow presumed to exist: but it is not reality. And this reference and

antithesis to _what_ is presented is implied in all such terms as “ideas,”

“feelings,” “states of consciousness”: they are distinguished from and

related to objects of sense or external facts, to something, as it is

called, outside consciousness. Thoughts and ideas are set against things

and realities. In their primitive stage both the child and the savage seem

to recognise no such difference. What they imagine is, as we might say, on

the same plane with what they touch and feel. They do not, as we

reproachfully remark, recognise the difference between fact and fiction.

All of us indeed are liable to lapses into the same condition. A strong

passion, a keen hope or fear, as we say, invests its objects with reality:

even a sanguine moment presents as fact what calmer reflection disallows

as fancy. With natural and sane intelligences, however, the recrudescence

of barbarous imagination is soon dispelled, and the difference between

hallucinations and realities is established. With the utterly wrecked in

mind, the reality of hallucinations becomes a permanent or habitual state.

With the child and the untrained it is a recurrent and a disturbing

influence: and it need hardly be added that the circle of these _decepti

deceptores_—people with the “lie in the Soul”—is a large one. There thus

emerges a distinction of vast importance, that of truth and falsehood, of

reality and unreality, or between representation and reality. There arise

two worlds, the world of ideas, and the world of reality which it is

supposed to represent, and, in many cases, to represent badly.

With this distinction we are brought across the problem sometimes called

Epistemological. Strictly speaking, it is really part of a larger problem:

the problem of what—if Greek compounds must be used—may be styled

Aletheiology—the theory of truth and reality: what Hegel called Logic, and

what many others have called Metaphysics. As it is ordinarily taken up,

“ideas” are believed to be something _in us_ which is representative or

symbolical of something truly real _outside us_. This inward something is

said to be the first and immediate object of knowledge(48), and gives

us—in a mysterious way we need not here discuss—the mediate knowledge of

the reality, which is sometimes said to cause it. Ideas in the Mind, or in

the Subject, or in us, bear witness to something outside the

mind,—trans-subjective—beyond us. The Mind, Subject, or Ego, in this

parallelism is evidently in some way identified with our corporeal

organism: perhaps even located, and provided with a “seat,” in some

defined space of that organism. It is, however, the starting-point of the

whole distinction that ideas _do not_, no less than they do, conform or

correspond to this supra-conscious or extra-conscious world of real

things. Truth or falsehood arises, according to these assumptions,

according as psychical image or idea corresponds or not to physical fact.

But how, unless by some miraculous second-sight, where the supreme

consciousness, directly contemplating by intuition the true and

independent reality, turns to compare with this immediate vision the

results of the mediate processes conducted along the organs of sense,—how

this agreement or disagreement of copy and original, of idea and reality,

can be detected, it is impossible to say.

As has been already noted, the mischief lies in the hypostatisation of

ideas as something existing in abstraction from things—and, of things, in

abstraction from ideas. They are two abstractions, the first by the

realist, the second by the idealist called subjective and psychological.

To the realist, things exist by themselves, and they manage to produce a

copy of themselves (more or less exact, or symbolical) in _our_ mind, i.e.

in a materialistically-spiritual or a spiritualistically-material locus

which holds “images” and ideas. To the psychological idealist, ideas have

a substantive and primary right to existence, them alone do we really

know, and from them we more or less legitimately are said (but probably no

one takes this seriously) to infer or postulate a world of permanent

things. Now ideas have no substantive existence as a sort of things, or

even images of things anywhere. All this is pure mythology. It is said by

comparative mythologists that in some cases the epithet or quality of some

deity has been substantialised (hypostatised) into a separate god, who,

however (so still to keep up the unity), is regarded as a relative, a son,

or daughter, of the original. So the phrase “ideas of things” has been

taken literally as if it was double. But to have an idea of a thing merely

means that we know it, or think it. An idea is not given: it is a thing

which is given in the idea. An idea is not an additional and intervening

object of our knowledge or supposed knowledge. That a thing is our object

of thought is another word for its being our idea, and that means we know

it.

The distinction between truth and falsehood, between reality and

appearance, is not arrived at by comparing what we have before us in our

mind with some inaccessible reality beyond. It is a distinction that grows

up with the growth and organisation of our presentations—with their

gradual systematisation and unification in one consciousness. But this

consciousness which thinks, i.e. judges and reasons, is something superior

to the contrast of physical and psychical: superior, i.e. in so far as it

includes and surveys the antithesis, without superseding it. It is the

“transcendental unity of consciousness” of Kant—his synthetic unity of

apperception. It means that all ideas ultimately derive their reality from

their coherence with each other in an all-embracing or infinite idea. Real

in a sense ideas always are, but with an imperfect reality. Thus the

education to truth is not—such a thing would be meaningless—ended by a

rough and ready recommendation to compare our ideas with facts: it must

teach the art which discovers facts. And the teaching may have to go

through many grades or provinces: in each of which it is possible to

acquire a certain virtuosoship without being necessarily an adept in

another. It is through what is called the development of intellect,

judgment, and reasoning that the faculty of truth-detecting or

truth-selecting comes. And the common feature of all of these is, so to

say, their superiority to the psychological mechanism, not in the sense of

working without it and directly, but of being the organising unity or

unifier and controller and judge of that mechanism. The certainty and

necessity of truth and knowledge do not come from a constraint from the

external thing which forces the inner idea into submission; they come from

the inner necessity of conformity and coherence in the organism of

experience. We in fact had better speak of ideas as experience—as felt

reality: a reality however which has its degrees and perhaps even its

provinces. All truth comes with the reasoned judgment, i.e. the

syllogism—i.e. with the institution or discovery of relations of fact or

element to fact or element, immediate or derivative, partial and less

partial, up to its ideal coherence in one Idea. It is because this

coherence is so imperfectly established in many human beings that their

knowledge is so indistinguishable from opinion, and that they separate so

loosely truth from error. They have not worked their way into a definitely

articulated system, where there are no gaps, no abrupt transitions: their

mental order is so loosely put together that divergences and

contradictions which vex another drop off ineffectual from them.

(ii.) Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.

This was the idealism which Kant taught and Fichte promoted. Of the other

idealism there are no doubt abundant traces in the language of Kant: and

they were greedily fastened on by Schopenhauer. To him the doctrine, that

the world is my idea, is adequately represented when it is translated into

the phrase that the world is a phantasmagoria of my brain; and escape from

the subjective idealism thus initiated is found by him only through a

supposed revelation of immediate being communicated in the experience of

will. But according to the more consistently interpreted Kant, the problem

of philosophy consists in laying bare the supreme law or conditions of

consciousness on which depend the validity of our knowledge, our estimates

of conduct, and our aesthetic standards. And these roots of reality are

for Kant in the mind—or, should we rather say—in mind—in “Consciousness in

General.” In the _Criticism of Pure Reason_ the general drift of his

examination is to show that the great things or final realities which are

popularly supposed to stand in self-subsistent being, as ultimate and

all-comprehensive objects set up for knowledge, are not “things” as

popularly supposed, but imperative and inevitable ideas. They are not

objects to be known—(these are always finite): but rather the unification,

the basis, or condition, and the completion of all knowledge. To know

them—in the ordinary petty sense of knowledge—is as absurd and impossible

as it would be, in the Platonic scheme of reality, to know the idea of

good which is “on the further side of knowledge and being.” God and the

Soul—and the same would be true of the World (though modern speculators

sometimes talk as if they had it at least within their grasp)—are not mere

_objects_ of knowledge. It would be truer to say they are that by which we

know, and they are what in us knows: they make knowledge possible, and

actual. Kant has sometimes spoken of them as the objects of a faith of

reason. What he means is that reason only issues in knowledge because of

and through this inevitable law of reason bidding us go on for ever in our

search, because there can be nothing isolated and nowhere any _ne plus

ultra_ in science, which is infinite and yet only justified as it

postulates or commands unity.

Kant’s central idea is that truth, beauty, goodness, are not dependent on

some qualities of the object, but on the universal nature or law of

consciousness. Beauty is not an attribute of things in their abstractness:

but of things as ideas of a subject, and depends on the proportion and

symmetry in the play of human faculty. Goodness is not conformity to an

outward law, but is obligatory on us through that higher nature which is

our truer being. Truth is not conformity of ideas with supposed

trans-subjective things, but coherence and stability in the system of

ideas. The really infinite world is not out there, but in here—in

consciousness in general, which is the denial of all limitation, of all

finality, of all isolation. God is the essential and inherent unity and

unifier of spirit and nature—the surety that the world in all its

differentiations is one. The Soul is not an essential entity, but the

infinite fruitfulness and freshness of mental life, which forbids us

stopping at anything short of complete continuity and unity. The Kingdom

of God—the Soul—the moral law—is within us: within us, as supreme,

supra-personal and infinite intelligences, even amid all our littleness

and finitude. Even happiness which we stretch our arms after is not really

beyond us, but is the essential self which indeed we can only reach in

detail. It is so both in knowledge and in action. Each knowledge and

enjoyment in reality is limited and partial, but it is made stable, and it

gets a touch of infinitude, by the larger idea which it helps to realise.

Only indeed in that antithesis between the finite and the infinite does

the real live. Every piece of knowledge is real, only because it assumes

_pro tempore_ certain premisses which are given: every actual beauty is

set in some defect of aesthetic completeness: every actually good deed has

to get its foil in surrounding badness. The real is always partial and

incomplete. But it has the basis or condition of its reality in an idea—in

a transcendental unity of consciousness, which is so to say a law, or a

system and an order, which imposes upon it the condition of conformity and

coherence; but a conformity which is essential and implicit in it.

Fichte has called his system a _Wissenschaftslehre_—a theory of knowledge.

Modern German used the word _Wissenschaft_, as modern English uses the

word Science, to denote the certified knowledge of piecemeal fact, the

partial unification of elements still kept asunder. But by _Wissen_, as

opposed to _Erkennen_, is meant the I know, am aware and sure, am in

contact with reality, as opposed to the derivative and conditional

reference of something to something else which explains it. The former is

a wider term: it denotes all consciousness of objective truth, the

certainty which claims to be necessary and universal, which pledges its

whole self for its assertion. Fichte thus unifies and accentuates the

common element in the Kantian criticisms. In the first of these Kant had

begun by explaining the nature and limitation of empirical science. It was

essentially conditioned by the given sensation—dependent i.e. on an

unexplained and preliminary element. This is what makes it science in the

strict or narrow sense of the term: its being set, as it were, in the

unknown, the felt, the sense-datum. The side of reality is thus the side

of limitation and of presupposition. But what makes it truth and knowledge

in general, on the other hand,—as distinct from _a_ truth (i.e. partial

truth) and a knowledge,—is the ideal element—the mathematical, the

logical, the rational law,—or in one word, the universal and formal

character. So too every real action is on one hand the product of an

impulse, a dark, merely given, immediate tendency to be, and without that

would be nothing: but on the other hand it is only an intelligent and

moral action in so far as it has its constitution from an intelligence, a

formal system, which determine its place and function.

It is on the latter or ideal element that Kant makes the emphasis

increasingly turn. Not truths, duties, beauties, but truth, duty, beauty,

form his theme. The formal element—the logical or epistemological

condition of knowledge and morality and of beauty—is what he (and still

more Fichte) considers the prime question of fundamental philosophy. His

philosophy is an attempt to get at the organism of our fundamental

belief—the construction, from the very base, of our conception of reality,

of our primary certainty. In technical language, he describes our

essential nature as a Subject-object. It is the unity of an I am which is

also I know that I am: an I will which is also I am conscious of my

will(49). Here there is a radical disunion and a supersession of that

disunion. Action and contemplation are continually outrunning each other.

The I will rests upon one I know, and works up to another: the I know

reflects upon an I will, and includes it as an element in its idea.

Kant had brought into use the term Deduction, and Fichte follows him. The

term leads to some confusion: for in English, by its modern antithesis to

induction, it suggests _a priori_ methods in all their iniquity. It means

a kind of jugglery which brings an endless series out of one small term.

Kant has explained that he uses it in the lawyer’s sense in which a claim

is justified by being traced step by step back to some acknowledged and

accepted right(50). It is a regressive method which shows us that if the

original datum is to be accepted it carries along with it the legitimation

of the consequence. This method Fichte applies to psychology. Begin, he

says like Condillac, with the barest nucleus of soul-life; the mere

sentiency, or feeling: the contact, as it were, with being, at a single

point. But such a mere point is unthinkable. You find, as Mr. Spencer

says, that “Thought” (or Consciousness) “cannot be framed out of one term

only.” “Every sensation to be known as one must be perceived.” Such is the

nature of the Ego—a subject which insists on each part being qualified by

the whole and so transformed. As Mr. Spencer, again, puts it, the mind not

merely tends to revive, to associate, to assimilate, to represent its own

presentations, but it carries on this process infinitely and in ever

higher multiples. Ideas as it were are growing in complexity by

re-presenting: i.e. by embracing and enveloping elements which cannot be

found existing in separation. In the mind there is no mere presentation,

no bare sensation. Such a unit is a fiction or hypothesis we employ, like

the atom, for purposes of explanation. The pure sensation therefore—which

you admit because you must have something to begin with, not a mere

nothing, but something so simple that it seems to stand out clear and

indisputable—this pure sensation, when you think of it, forces you to go a

good deal further. Even to be itself, it must be more than itself. It is

like the pure or mere being of the logicians. Admit the simple

sensation—and you have admitted everything which is required to make

sensation a possible reality. But you do not—in the sense of vulgar

logic—deduce what follows out of the beginning. From that, taken by

itself, you will get only itself: mere being will give you only nothing,

to the end of the chapter. But, as the phrase is, sensation is an element

in a consciousness: it is, when you think of it, always more than you

called it: there is a curious “continuity” about the phenomena, which

makes real isolation impossible.

Of course this “deduction” is not history: it is logic. It says, if you

posit sensation, then in doing so, you posit a good deal more. You have

imagination, reason, and many more, all involved in your original

assumption. And there is a further point to be noted. You cannot really

stop even at reason, at intelligence and will, if you take these in the

full sense. You must realise that these only exist as part and parcel of a

reasonable world. An individual intelligence presupposes a society of

intelligences. The successive steps in this argument are presented by

Fichte in the chief works of his earlier period (1794-98). The works of

that period form a kind of trilogy of philosophy, by which the faint

outlines of the absolute selfhood is shown acquiring definite consistency

in the moral organisation of society. First comes the “Foundation for the

collective philosophy.” It shows how our conception of reality and our

psychical organisation are inevitably presupposed in the barest function

of intelligence, in the abstractest forms of logical law. Begin where you

like, with the most abstract and formal point of consciousness, you are

forced, as you dwell upon it (you identifying yourself with the thought

you realise), to go step by step on till you accept as a self-consistent

and self-explanatory unity all that your cognitive and volitional nature

claims to own as its birthright. Only in such an intelligent will is

perception and sensation possible. Next came the “Foundation of Natural

Law, on the principles of the general theory.” Here the process of

deduction is carried a step further. If man is to realise himself as an

intelligence with an inherent bent to action, then he must be conceived as

a person among persons, as possessed of rights, as incapable of acting

without at the same moment claiming for his acts recognition, generality,

and logical consecution. The reference, which in the conception of a

practical intelligence was implicit,—the reference to fellow-agents, to a

world in which law rules—is thus, by the explicit recognition of these

references, made a fact patent and positive—_gesetzt_,—expressly

instituted in the way that the nature and condition of things postulates.

But this is not all: we step from the formal and absolute into the

material and relative. If man is to be a real intelligence, he must be an

intelligence served by organs. “The rational being cannot realise its

efficient individuality, unless it ascribes to itself a material body”: a

body, moreover, in which Fichte believes he can show that the details of

structure and organs are equally with the general corporeity predetermined

by reason(51). In the same way it is shown that the social and political

organisation is required for the realisation—the making positive and yet

coherent—of the rights of all individuals. You deduce society by showing

it is required to make a genuine individual man. Thirdly came the “System

of Ethics.” Here it is further argued that, at least in a certain

respect(52), in spite of my absolute reason and my absolute freedom, I can

only be fully real as a part of Nature: that my reason is realised in a

creature of appetite and impulse. From first to last this deduction is one

process which may be said to have for its object to determine “the

conditions of self-hood or egoity.” It is the deduction of the concrete

and empirical moral agent—the actual ego of actual life—from the abstract,

unconditioned ego, which in order to be actual must condescend to be at

once determining and determined.

In all of this Fichte makes—especially formally—a decided advance upon

Kant. In Ethics Kant in particular, (—especially for readers who never got

beyond the beginning of his moral treatise and were overpowered by the

categorical imperative of duty) had found the moral initiative or dynamic

apparently in the other world. The voice of duty seemed to speak from a

region outside and beyond the individual conscience. In a sense it must do

so: but it comes from a consciousness which is, and yet is more than, the

individual. It is indeed true that appearances here are deceptive: and

that the idea of autonomy, the self-legislation of reason, is trying to

become the central conception of Kant’s Ethics. Still it is Fichte’s merit

to have seen this clearly, to have held it in view unfalteringly, and to

have carried it out in undeviating system or deduction. Man, intelligent,

social, ethical, is a being all of one piece and to be explained entirely

immanently, or from himself. Law and ethics are no accident either to

sense or to intelligence—nothing imposed by mere external or supernal

authority(53). Society is not a brand-new order of things supervening upon

and superseding a state of nature, where the individual was entirely

self-supporting. Morals, law, society, are all necessary steps (necessary

i.e. in logic, and hence in the long run also inevitable in course of

time) to complete the full evolution or realisation of a human being. The

same conditions as make man intelligent make him social and moral. He does

not proceed so far as to become intelligent and practical, under terms of

natural and logical development, then to fall into the hands of a foreign

influence, an accident _ab extra_, which causes him to become social and

moral. Rather he is intelligent, because he is a social agent.

Hence, in Fichte, the absence of the ascetic element so often stamping its

character on ethics, and representing the moral life as the enemy of the

natural, or as mainly a struggle to subdue the sensibility and the flesh.

With Kant,—as becomes his position of mere inquirer—the sensibility has

the place of a predominant and permanent foreground. Reason, to his way of

talking, is always something of an intruder, a stranger from a far-off

world, to be feared even when obeyed: sublime, rather than beautiful. From

the land of sense which we habitually occupy, the land of reason is a

country we can only behold from afar: or if we can be said to have a

standpoint in it, that is only a figurative way of saying that though it

is really over the border, we can act—it would sometimes seem by a sort of

make-believe—as if we were already there. But these moments of high

enthusiasm are rare; and Kant commends sobriety and warns against

high-minded _Schwärmerei_, or over-strained Mysticism. For us it is

reserved to struggle with a recalcitrant selfhood, a grovelling

sensibility: it were only fantastic extravagance, fit for “fair souls” who

unfortunately often lapse into “fair sinners,” should we fancy ourselves

already anchored in the haven of untempted rest and peace.

When we come to Fichte, we find another spirit breathing. We have passed

from the age of Frederick the Great to the age of the French Revolution;

and the breeze that burst in the War of Liberation is already beginning to

freshen the air. Boldly he pronounces the primacy of that faith of reason

whereby not merely the just but all shall live. Your will shall show you

what you really are. You are essentially a rational will, or a

will-reason. Your sensuous nature, of impulse and appetite, far from being

the given and found obstacle to the realisation of reason,—which Kant

strictly interpreted might sometimes seem to imply—(and in this point

Schopenhauer carries out the implications of Kant)—is really the condition

or mode of being which reason assumes, or rises up to, in order to be a

practical or moral being. Far from the body and the sensible needs being a

stumbling-block to hamper the free fullness of rationality and morality,

the truth rather is that it is only by body and sense, by flesh and blood,

that the full moral and rational life can be realised(54). Or, to put it

otherwise, if human reason (intelligence and will) is to be more than a

mere and empty inner possibility, if man is to be a real and concrete

cognitive and volitional being, he must be a member of an ethical and

actual society, which lives by bread, and which marries and has children.

(iii.) Psychology in Ethics.

In this way, for Fichte, and through Fichte still more decidedly for

Hegel, both psychology and ethics breathe an opener and ampler air than

they often enjoy. Psychology ceases to be a mere description of psychic

events, and becomes the history of the self-organising process of human

reason. Ethics loses its cloistered, negative, unnatural aspect, and

becomes a name for some further conditions of the same development,

essentially postulated to complete or supplement its shortcomings.

Psychology—taken in this high philosophical acceptation—thus leads on to

Ethics; and Ethics is parted by no impassable line from Psychology. That,

at least, is what must happen if they are still to retain a place in

philosophy: for, as Kant says(55), “under the government of reason our

cognitions cannot form a rhapsody, but must constitute a system, in which

alone can they support and further its essential aims.” As parts of such a

system, they carry out their special work in subordination to, and in the

realisation of, a single Idea—and therefore in essential interconnexion.

From that interconnecting band we may however in detail-enquiry dispense

ourselves; and then we have the empirical or inductive sciences of

psychology and ethics. But even with these, the necessity of the situation

is such that it is only a question of degree how far we lose sight of the

philosophical horizon, and entrench ourselves in special enquiry.

Something of the philosophic largeness must always guide us; even when, to

further the interests of the whole, it is necessary for the special

enquirer to bury himself entirely in his part. So long as each part is

sincerely and thoroughly pursued, and no part is neglected, there is an

indwelling reason in the parts which will in the long run tend to

constitute the total.

A philosophical psychology will show us how the sane intelligence and the

rational will are, at least approximately, built up out of elements, and

through stages and processes, which modify and complement, as they may

also arrest and perplex, each other. The unity, coherence, and

completeness of the intelligent self is not, as vulgar irreflectiveness

supposes and somewhat angrily maintains, a full-grown thing or agent, of

whose actions and modes of behaviour the psychologist has to narrate the

history,—a history which is too apt to degenerate into the anecdotal and

the merely interesting. This unity of self has to be “deduced,” as Fichte

would say: it has to be shown as the necessary result which certain

elements in a certain order will lead to(56). A normal mind,

self-possessed, developed and articulated, yet thoroughly one, a real

microcosm, or true and full monad, which under the mode of its

individuality still represents the universe: that is, what psychology has

to show as the product of factors and processes. And it is clearly

something great and good, something valuable, and already possessing, by

implication we may say, an ethical character.

In philosophy, at least, it is difficult, or rather impossible to draw a

hard and fast line which shall demarcate ethical from non-ethical

characters,—to separate them from other intellectual and reasonable

motives. Kant, as we know, attempted to do so: but with the result that he

was forced to add a doubt whether a purely moral act could ever be said to

exist(57); or rather to express the certainty that if it did it was for

ever inaccessible to observation. All such designations of the several

“factors” or “moments” in reality, as has been hinted, are only _a

potiori_. But they are misused when it is supposed that they connote

abrupt and total discontinuity. And Kant, after all, only repeated in his

own terminology an old and inveterate habit of thought:—the habit which in

Stoicism seemed to see sage and foolish utterly separated, and which in

the straiter sects of Christendom fenced off saint absolutely from sinner.

It is a habit to which Hegel, and even his immediate predecessors, are

radically opposed. With Herder, he might say, “Ethics is only a higher

physics of the mind(58).” This—the truth in Spinozism—no doubt demands

some emphasis on the word “higher”: and it requires us to read ethics (or

something like it) into physics; but it is a step on the right road,—the

step which Utilitarianism and Evolutionism had (however awkwardly) got

their foot upon, and which “transcendent” ethics seems unduly afraid of

committing itself to. Let us say, if we like, that the mind is more than

mere nature, and that it is no proper object of a merely natural science.

But let us remember that a merely natural science is only a fragment of

science: let us add that the _merely_ natural is an abstraction which in

part denaturalises and mutilates the larger nature—a nature which includes

the natural mind, and cannot altogether exclude the ethical.

What have been called “formal duties(59)” seem to fall under this

range—the province of a philosophical psychology which unveils the

conditions of personality. Under that heading may be put self-control,

consistency, resolution, energy, forethought, prudence, and the like. The

due proportion of faculty, the correspondence of head and heart, the

vivacity and quickness of sympathy, the ease and simplicity of mental

tone, the due vigour of memory and the grace of imagination, sweetness of

temper, and the like, are parts of the same group(60). They are lovely,

and of good report: they are praise and virtue. If it be urged that they

are only natural gifts and graces, that objection cuts two ways. The

objector may of course be reminded that religion tones down the

self-complacency of morality. Yet, first, even apart from that, it may be

said that of virtues, which stand independent of natural conditions—of

external supply of means (as Aristotle would say)—nothing can be known and

nothing need be said. And secondly, none of these qualities are mere

gifts;—all require exercise, habituation, energising, to get and keep

them. How much and how little in each case is nature’s and how much ours

is a problem which has some personal interest—due perhaps to a rather

selfish and envious curiosity. But on the broad field of experience and

history we may perhaps accept the—apparently one-sided—proverb that “Each

man is the architect of his own fortune.” Be this as it may, it will not

do to deny the ethical character of these “formal duties” on the ground

e.g. that self-control, prudence, and even sweetness of temper may be used

for evil ends,—that one may smile and smile, and yet be a villain.

That—let us reply,—on one hand, is a fault (if fault it be) incidental to

all virtues in detail (for every single quality has its defect): nay it

may be a limitation attaching to the whole ethical sphere: and, secondly,

its inevitable limitation does not render the virtue in any case one whit

less genuine so far as it goes. And yet of such virtues it may be said, as

Hume(61) would say (who calls them “natural,” as opposed to the more

artificial merits of justice and its kin), that they please in themselves,

or in the mere contemplation, and without any regard to their social

effects. But they please as entering into our idea of complete human

nature, of mind and spirit as will and intellect.

The moralists of last century sometimes divided the field of ethics by

assigning to man three grades or kinds of duty: duties to himself, duties

to society, and duties to God. For the distinction there is a good deal to

be said: there are also faults to be found with it. It may be said,

amongst other things, that to speak of duties to self is a metaphorical

way of talking, and that God lies out of the range of human duty

altogether, except in so far as religious service forms a part of social

obligation. It may be urged that man is essentially a social being, and

that it is only in his relations to other such beings that his morality

can find a sphere. The sphere of morality, according to Dr. Bain, embraces

whatever “society has seen fit to enforce with all the rigour of positive

inflictions. Positive good deeds and self-sacrifice ... transcend the

region of morality proper and occupy a sphere of their own(62).” And there

is little doubt that this restriction is in accordance with a main current

of usage. It may even be said that there are tendencies towards a narrower

usage still, which would restrict the term to questions affecting the

relations of the sexes. But, without going so far, we may accept the

standpoint which finds in the phrase “popular or social” sanction, as

equivalent to the moral sanction, a description of the average level of

common opinion on the topic. The morality of an age or country thus

denotes, first, the average requirement in act and behaviour imposed by

general consent on the members of a community, and secondly, the average

performance of the members in response to these requirements. Generally

speaking the two will be pretty much the same. If the society is in a

state of equilibrium, there will be a palpable agreement between what all

severally expect and what all severally perform. On the other hand, as no

society is ever in complete equilibrium, this harmony will never be

perfect and may often be widely departed from. In what is called a single

community, if it reach a considerable bulk, there are (in other words)

often a number of minor societies, more or less thwarting and modifying

each other; and different observers, who belong in the main to one or

other of these subordinate groups, may elicit from the facts before them a

somewhat different social code, and a different grade of social

observance. Still, with whatever diversity of detail, the important

feature of such social ethics is that the stress is laid on the

performance of certain acts, in accordance with the organisation of

society. So long as the required compliance is given, public opinion is

satisfied, and morality has got its due.

But in two directions this conception of morality needs to be

supplementing. There is, on one hand, what is called duty to God. The

phrase is not altogether appropriate: for it follows too closely the

analogy of social requirement, and treats Deity as an additional and

social authority,—a lord paramount over merely human sovereigns. But

though there may be some use in the analogy, to press the conception is

seriously to narrow the divine character and the scope of religion. As in

similar cases, we cannot change one term without altering its correlative.

And therefore to describe our relation to God under the name of duty is to

narrow and falsify that relation. The word is no longer applicable in this

connexion without a strain, and where it exists it indicates the survival

of a conception of theocracy: of God regarded as a glorification of the

magistrate, as king of kings and lord of lords. It is the social world—and

indeed we may say the outside of the social world—that is the sphere of

duties. Duty is still with these reductions a great august name: but in

literal strictness it only rules over the medial sphere of life, the

sphere which lies between the individual as such and his universal

humanity(63). Beyond duty, lies the sphere of conscience and of religion.

And that is not the mere insistence by the individual to have a voice and

a vote in determining the social order. It is the sense that the social

order, however omnipotent it may seem, is limited and finite, and that man

has in him a kindred with the Eternal.

It is not very satisfactory, either, as Aristotle and others have pointed

out, to speak of man’s duties to himself. The phrase is analogical, like

the other. But it has the merit, like that of duty to God, of reminding us

that the ordinary latitude occupied by morality is not all that comes

under the larger scope of ethics. The “ethics of individual life” is a

subject which Mr. Spencer has touched upon: and by this title, he means

that, besides his general relationship to others, a human being has to

mind his own health, food, and amusement, and has duties as husband and

parent. But, after all, these are not matters of peculiarly individual

interest. They rather refer to points which society at certain epochs

leaves to the common sense of the agent,—apparently on an assumption that

he is the person chiefly interested. And these points—as the Greeks taught

long ago—are of fundamental importance: they are the very bases of life.

Yet the comparative neglect in which so-called civilised societies(64)

hold the precepts of wisdom in relation to bodily health and vigour, in

regard to marriage and progeny, serve to illustrate the doctrine of the

ancient Stoics that πάντα ὑπόληψις, or the modern idealist utterance that

the World is my idea. More and more as civilisation succeeds in its

disruption of man from nature, it shows him governed not by bare facts and

isolated experiences, but by the systematic idea under which all things

are subsumed. He loses the naïveté of the natural man, which takes each

fact as it came, all alike good: he becomes sentimental, and artificial,

sees things under a conventional point of view, and would rather die than

not be in the fashion. And this tendency is apparently irresistible. Yet

the mistake lies in the one-sidedness of sentiment and convention. Not the

domination of the idea is evil; but the domination of a partial and

fragmentary idea: and this is what constitutes the evil of artificiality.

And the correction must lie not in a return to nature, but in the

reconstruction of a wider and more comprehensive idea: an idea which shall

be the unity and system of all nature; not a fantastic idealism, but an

attempt to do justice to the more realist as well as the idealist sides of

life.

There is however another side of individualist ethics which needs even

more especial enforcement. It is the formation of

“The reason firm, the temperate will,

Endurance, foresight, strength and skill:”

the healthy mind in a healthy body. Ethics is only too apt to suppose that

will and intelligence are assumptions which need no special justification.

But the truth is that they vary from individual to individual in degree

and structure. It is the business of ethical psychology to give to these

vague attributions the definiteness of a normal standard: to show what

proportions are required to justify the proper title of reason and will—to

show what reason and will really are if they do what they are encouraged

or expected to do. It talks of the diseases of will and personality: it

must also set forth their educational ideal. The first problem of Ethics,

it may be said, is the question of the will and its freedom. But to say

this is of course not to say that, unless freedom of will be understood in

some special sense, ethics becomes impossible. If the moral law is the

_ratio cognoscendi_ of freedom, then must our conception of morality and

of freedom hang together. And it will clearly be indispensable to begin by

some attempt to discover in what sense man may be in the most general way

described as a moral agent—as an intelligent will, or (more briefly, yet

synonymously) as a will. “The soil of law and morality,” says Hegel(65),

“is the intelligent life: and its more precise place and starting-point

the will, which is free, in the sense that freedom is its substance and

characteristic, and the system of law the realm of freedom realised, the

world of intelligence produced out of itself as a second nature.” Such a

freedom is a freedom made and acquired, the work of the mind’s

self-realisation, not to be taken as a given fact of consciousness which

must be believed(66). To have a will—in other words, to have freedom, is

the consummation—and let us add, only the formal or ideal consummation—of

a process by which man raises himself out of his absorption in sensation

and impulse, establishes within himself a mental realm, an organism of

ideas, a self-consciousness, and a self.

The vulgar apprehension of these things seems to assume that we have by

nature, or are born with, a general faculty or set of general faculties,

which we subsequently fill up and embody by the aid of experience. We

possess—they seem to imply—so many “forms” and “categories” latent in our

minds ready to hold and contain the raw materials supplied from without.

According to this view we have all a will and an intelligence: the

difference only is that some put more into them, and some put less. But

such a separation of the general form from its contents is a piece of pure

mythology. It is perhaps true and safe to say that the human being is of

such a character that will and intelligence are in the ordinary course

inevitably produced. But the forms which grow up are the more and more

definite and systematic organisation of a graded experience, of series of

ideas, working themselves up again and again in representative and

re-representative degree, till they constitute a mental or inner world of

their own. The will is thus the title appropriate to the final stage of a

process, by which sensation and impulse have polished and perfected

themselves by union and opposition, by differentiation and accompanying

redintegration, till they assume characters quite unsurmised in their

earliest aspects, and yet only the consolidation or self-realisation of

implications. Thus the mental faculties are essentially acquired

powers,—acquired not from without, but by action which generates the

faculties it seems to imply. The process of mind is a process which

creates individual centres, raises them to completer independence;—which

produces an inner life more and more self-centered and also more and more

equal to the universe which it has embodied. And will and intelligence are

an important stage in that process.

Herbart (as was briefly hinted at in the first essay) has analysed ethical

appreciation (which may or may not be accompanied by approbation) into

five distinct standard ideas. These are the ideas of inward liberty, of

perfection, of right, benevolence, and equity. Like Hume, he regards the

moral judgment as in its purity a kind of aesthetic pronouncement on the

agreement or proportion of certain activities in relations to each other.

Two of these standard ideas,—that of inward liberty and of perfection—seem

to belong to the sphere at present under review. They emerge as conditions

determining the normal development of human nature to an intelligent and

matured personality. By inward freedom Herbart means the harmony between

the will and the intellect: what Aristotle has named “practical truth or

reality,” and what he describes in his conception of wisdom or moral

intelligence,—the power of discerning the right path and of pursuing it

with will and temper: the unity, clear but indissoluble, of will and

discernment. By the idea of perfection Herbart means the sense of

proportion and of propriety which is awakened by comparing a progress in

development or an increase in strength with its earlier stages of promise

and imperfection. The pleasure such perception affords works in two ways:

it is a satisfaction in achievement past, and a stimulus to achievement

yet to come.

Such ideas of inward liberty and of growth in ability or in performance

govern (at least in part) our judgment of the individual, and have an

ethical significance. Indeed, if the cardinal feature of the ethical

sentiment be the inwardness and independence of its approbation and

obligation, these ideas lie at the root of all true morality. Inward

harmony and inward progress, lucidity of conscience and the resolution

which knows no finality of effort, are the very essence of moral life.

Yet, if ethics is to include in the first instance social relationships

and external utilities and sanctions, these conditions of true life must

rather be described as pre-ethical. The truth seems to be that here we get

to a range of ethics which is far wider than what is ordinarily called

practice and conduct. At this stage logic, aesthetic, and ethic, are yet

one: the true, the good, and the beautiful are still held in their

fundamental unity. An ethics of wide principle precedes its narrower

social application; and whereas in ordinary usage the social provinciality

is allowed to prevail, here the higher ethics emerge clear and imperial

above the limitations of local and temporal duty.

And though it is easy to step into exaggeration, it is still well to

emphasise this larger conception of ethics. The moral principle of the

“maximising of life,” as it has been called(67), may be open to

misconception (—so, unfortunately are all moral principles when stated in

the effrontery of isolation): but it has its truth in the conviction that

all moral evil is marked by a tendency to lower or lessen the total

vitality. So too Friedrich Nietzsche’s maxim, _Sei vornehm_(68), ensue

distinction, and above all things be not common or vulgar (_gemein_), will

easily lend itself to distortion. But it is good advice for all that, even

though it may be difficult to define in a general formula wherein

distinction consists, to mark the boundary between self-respect and vanity

or obstinacy, or to say wherein lies the beauty and dignity of human

nature. Kant has laid it down as the principle of duty to ask ourselves if

in our act we are prepared to universalise the maxim implied by our

conduct. And that this—which essentially bids us look at an act in the

whole of its relations and context—is a safeguard against some forms of

moral evil, is certain. But there is an opposite—or rather an apparently

opposite—principle which bids us be individual, be true to our own selves,

and never allow ourselves to be dismayed from our own unique

responsibility. Perhaps the two principles are not so far apart as they

seem. In any case true individuality is the last word and the first word

in ethics; though, it may be added, there is a good deal to be said

between the two termini.

(iv.) An Excursus on Greek Ethics.

It is in these regions that Greek ethics loves to linger; on the duty of

the individual to himself, to be perfectly lucid and true, and to rise to

ever higher heights of achievement. _Ceteris paribus_, there is felt to be

something meritorious in superiority, something good:—even were it that

you are master, and another is slave. Thus naïvely speaks Aristotle(69).

To a modern, set amid so many conflicting ideals, perhaps, the immense

possibilities of yet further growth might suggest themselves with

overpowering force. To him the idea of perfection takes the form of an

idea of perfectibility: and sometimes it smites down his conceit in what

he has actually done, and impresses a sense of humility in comparison with

what yet remains unaccomplished. An ancient Greek apparently was little

haunted by these vistas of possibilities of progress through worlds beyond

worlds. A comparatively simple environment, a fixed and definite mental

horizon, had its plain and definite standards, or at least seemed to have

such. There were fewer cases of the man, unattached or faintly attached to

any definite profession—moving about in worlds half realised—who has grown

so common in a more developed civilisation. The ideals of the Greek were

clearly descried: each man had his definite function or work to perform:

and to do it better than the average, or than he himself habitually had

done, that was perfection, excellence, virtue. For virtue to the Greek is

essentially ability and respectability: promise of excellent performance:

capacity to do better than others. Virtue is praiseworthy or meritorious

character and quality: it is achievement at a higher rate, as set against

one’s past and against others’ average.

The Greek moralists sometimes distinguish and sometimes combine moral

virtue and wisdom, ἀρετή and φρόνησις: capacity to perform, and wisdom to

guide that capacity. To the ordinary Greek perhaps the emphasis fell on

the former, on the attainment of all recognised good quality which became

a man, all that was beautiful and honourable, all that was appropriate,

glorious, and fame-giving; and that not for any special reference to its

utilitarian qualities. Useful, of course, such qualities were: but that

was not in question at the time. In the more liberal commonwealths of

ancient Greece there was little or no anxious care to control the

education of its citizens, so as to get direct service, overt contribution

to the public good. A suspicious Spartan legislation might claim to do

that. But in the free air of Athens all that was required was loyalty,

good-will—εὔνοια—to the common weal; it might be even a sentiment of human

kindliness, of fraternity of spirit and purpose. Everything beyond and

upon that basis was left to free development. Let each carry out to the

full the development of his powers in the line which national estimation

points out. He is—nature and history alike emphasise that fact beyond the

reach of doubt, for all except the outlaw and the casual stranger—a member

of a community, and as such has a governing instinct and ideal which

animates him. But he is also a self-centered individual, with special

endowments of nature, in his own person and in the material objects which

are his. A purely individualist or selfish use of them is not—to the

normal Greek—even dreamed of. He is too deeply rooted in the substance of

his community for that: or it is on the ground and in the atmosphere of an

assured community that his individuality is to be made to flourish. Nature

has secured that his individuality shall rest securely in the

presupposition of his citizenship. It seems, therefore, as if he were left

free and independent in his personal search for perfection, for

distinction. His place is fixed for him: _Spartam nactus es; hanc orna_:

his duty is his virtue. That duty, as Plato expresses it, is to do his own

deeds—and not meddle with others. Nature and history have arranged that

others, in other posts, shall do theirs: that all severally shall energise

their function. The very word “duty” seems out of place; if, at least,

duty suggests external obligation, an order imposed and a debt to be

discharged. If there be a task-master and a creditor, it is the inflexible

order of nature and history:—or, to be more accurate, of nature, the

indwelling and permanent reality of things. But the obligation to follow

nature is scarcely felt as a yoke of constraint. A man’s virtue is to

perform his work and to perform it well: to do what he is specially

capable of doing, and therefore specially charged to do.

Nowhere has this character of Greek ethics received more classical

expression than in the Republic of Plato. In the prelude to his

subject—which is the nature of Right and Morality—Plato has touched

briefly on certain popular and inadequate views. There is the view that

Right has its province in performance of certain single and external

acts—in business honesty and commercial straightforwardness. There is the

view that it is rendering to each what is due to him; that it consists in

the proper reciprocity of services, in the balance of social give and

take. There is the critical or hyper-critical view which, from seeing so

much that is called justice to be in harmony with the interest of the

predominant social order, bluntly identifies mere force or strength as the

ground of right. And there are views which regard it as due to social

conventions and artifices, to the influence of education, to political

arrangements and the operation of irrational prejudices. To all these

views Plato objects: not because they are false—for they are all in part,

often in large part, true—but because they are inadequate and do not go to

the root of the matter. The foundations of right lie, he says, not in

external act, but in the inner man: not in convention, but in nature: not

in relation to others, but in the constitution of the soul itself. That

ethical idea—the idea of right—which seems most obviously to have its

centre outside the individual, to live and grow only in the relations

between individuals, Plato selects in order to show the independent

royalty of the single human soul. The world, as Hume afterwards, called

justice artificial: Plato will prove it natural. In a way he joins company

with those who bid us drive out the spectre of duty, of obligation coming

upon the soul from social authority, from traditional idea, from religious

sanctions. He preaches—or he is about to preach—the autonomy of the will.

The four cardinal virtues of Plato’s list are the qualities which go to

make a healthy, normal, natural human soul, fit for all activity, equipped

with all arms for the battle of life. They tell us what such a soul is,

not what it does. They are the qualities which unless a soul has, and has

them each perfect, yet all co-operant, its mere outward and single acts

have no virtue or merit, but are only lucky accidents at the best. On the

other hand, if a man has these constitutive qualities, he will act in the

social world, and act well. Plato has said scornful things of mere outward

and verbal truthfulness, and has set at the very lowest pitch of

degradation the “lie in the soul.” His “temperance” or “self-restraint,”

if it be far from breathing any suggestion of self-suppression or

self-assertion, is still farther from any suspicion of asceticism, or war

against the flesh. It is the noble harmony of the ruling and the ruled,

which makes the latter a partner of the sovereign, and takes from the

dictates of the ruler any touch of coercion. It is literally sanity of

soul, integrity and purity of spirit; it is what has been sometimes called

the beautiful soul—the indiscerptible unity of reason and impulse. Plato’s

bravery, again, is fortitude and consistency of soul, the full-blooded

heart which is fixed in reason, the zeal which is according to knowledge,

unflinching loyalty to the idea, the spirit which burns in the martyrs to

truth and humanity: yet withal with gentleness and courtesy and noble

urbanity in its immediate train. And his truthfulness is that inner

lucidity which cannot be self-deceived, the spirit which is a safeguard

against fanaticism and hypocrisy, the sunlike warmth of intelligence

without which the heart is a darkness full of unclean things.

The full development and crowning grace of such a manly nature Aristotle

has tried to present in the character of the Great-souled man—him whom

Plato has called the true king by divine right, or the autocrat by the

patent of nature. Like all such attempts to delineate a type in the terms

necessarily single and successive of abstract analysis, it tends

occasionally to run into caricature, and to give partial aspects an absurd

prominency. Only the greatest of artists could cope with such a task,

though that artist may be found perhaps classed among the historians. Yet

it is possible to form some conception of the ideal which Aristotle would

set before us. The Great-souled man _is_ great, and he dare not deny the

witness of his spirit. He is one who does not quail before the anger and

seek the applause of popular opinion: he holds his head as his own, and as

high as his undimmed self-consciousness shows it is worth. There has been

said to him by the reason within him the word that Virgil erewhile

addressed to Dante:

“Libero, dritto, e sano è il tuo arbitrio

E fallo fora non fare a suo cenno;

Per ch’ io te sopra te corono e mitrio.”

He is his own Emperor and his own Pope. He is the perfected man, in whom

is no darkness, whose soul is utter clearness, and complete harmony. Calm

in self-possessed majesty, he stands, if need be, _contra mundum_: but

rather, with the world beneath his feet. The chatter of personality has no

interest for him. Bent upon the best, lesser competitions for distinction

have no attraction for him. To the vulgar he will seem cold,

self-confined: in his apartness and distinction they will see the signs of

a “prig.” His look will be that of one who pities men—rather than loves

them: and should he speak ill of a foe, it is rather out of pride of heart

and unbroken spirit than because these things touch him. Such an one, in

many ways, was the Florentine poet himself.

If the Greek world in general thus conceived ἀρετή as the full bloom of

manly excellence (we all know how slightly—witness the remarks in the

Periclean oration—Greeks, in their public and official utterances, rated

womanliness), the philosophers had a further point to emphasise. That was

what they variously called knowledge, prudence, reason, insight,

intelligence, wisdom, truth. From Socrates to Aristotle, from Aristotle to

the Stoics and Epicureans, and from the Stoics to the Neo-Platonists, this

is the common theme: the supremacy of knowledge, its central and essential

relation to virtue. They may differ—perhaps not so widely as current

prejudice would suppose—as to how this knowledge is to be defined, what

kind of knowledge it is, how acquired and maintained, and so on. But in

essentials they are at one. None of them, of course, mean that in order to

right conduct nothing more is needed than to learn and remember what is

right, the precepts and commandments of ordinary morality. Memory is not

knowledge, especially when it is out of mind. Even an ancient philosopher

was not wholly devoid of common sense. They held—what they supposed was a

fact of observation and reflection—that all action was prompted by

feelings of the values of things, by a desire of something good or

pleasing to self, and aimed at self-satisfaction and self-realisation, but

that there was great mistake in what thus afforded satisfaction. People

chose to act wrongly or erroneously, because they were, first, mistaken

about themselves and what they wanted, and, secondly, mistaken in the

means which would give them satisfaction. But this second point was

secondary. The main thing was to know yourself, what you really were; in

Plato’s words, to “see the soul as it is, and know whether it have one

form only or many, or what its nature is; to look upon it with the eye of

reason in its original purity.” Self-deception, confusion, that worst

ignorance which is unaware of itself, false estimation—these are the

radical evils of the natural man. To these critics the testimony of

consciousness was worthless, unless corroborated. To cure this mental

confusion, this blindness of will and judgment, is the task set for

philosophy: to give inward light, to teach true self-measurement. In one

passage, much misunderstood, Plato has called this philosophic art the due

measurement of pleasures and pains. It should scarcely have been possible

to mistake the meaning. But, with the catchwords of Utilitarianism ringing

in their ears, the commentators ran straight contrary to the true teaching

of the _Protagoras_, consentient as it is with that of the _Phaedo_ and

the _Philebus_. To measure, one must have a standard: and if Plato has one

lesson always for us, it is that a sure standard the multitude have not,

but only confusion. The so-called pleasures and pains of the world’s

experiences are so entitled for different reasons, for contrary aims, and

with no unity or harmony of judgment. They are—not a fact to be accepted,

but—a problem for investigation: their reality is in question, their

genuineness, solidity and purity: and till you have settled that, you

cannot measure, for you may be measuring vacuity under the idea that there

is substance. You have still to get at the unit—i.e. the reality of

pleasure. It was not Plato’s view that pleasure was a separate and

independent entity: that it was exactly as it was felt. Each pleasure is

dependent for its pleasurable quality on the consciousness it belongs to,

and has only a relative truth and reality. Bentham has written about

computing the value of a “lot” of pleasures and pains. But Plato had his

mind on an earlier and more fundamental problem, what is the truth and

reality of pleasure; and his fullest but not his only essay towards

determining the value or estimating the meaning of pleasure in the scale

of being is that given in the _Philebus_.

This then is the knowledge which Greek philosophy meant: not mere

intellect—though, of course, there is always a danger of theoretical

inquiry degenerating into abstract and formal dogma. But of the meaning

there can be no serious doubt. It is a knowledge, says Plato, to which the

method of mathematical science—the most perfect he can find

acknowledged—is only an _ouverture_, or perhaps, only the preliminary

tuning of the strings. It is a knowledge not eternally hypothetical—a

system of sequences which have no sure foundation. It is a knowledge which

rests upon the conviction and belief of the “idea of good”: a kind of

knowledge which does not come by direct teaching, which is not mere

theory, but implies a lively conviction, a personal apprehension, a crisis

which is a kind of “conversion,” or “inspiration.” It is as it were the

prize of a great contest, in which the sword that conquers is the sword of

dialectic: a sword whereof the property is, like that of Ithuriel’s spear,

to lay bare all deceptions and illusions of life. Or, to vary the

metaphor: the son of man is like the prince in the fairy tale who goes

forth to win the true queen; but there are many false pretenders decked

out to deceive his unwary eyes and foolish heart. Yet in himself there is

a power of discernment: there is something kindred with the truth:—the

witness of the Spirit—and all that education and discipline can do is to

remove obstacles, especially the obstacles within the self which perturb

the sight and mislead the judgment. Were not the soul originally possessed

of and dominated by the idea of good, it could never discern it elsewhere.

On this original kindred depends all the process of education; the

influence of which therefore is primarily negative or auxiliary. Thus the

process of history and experience,—which the work of education only

reproduces in an accelerated _tempo_—serves but to bring out the implicit

reason within into explicit conformity with the rationality of the world.

Knowledge, then, in this ethical sphere means the harmony of will,

emotion, intellect: it means the clear light which has no illusions and no

deceptions. And to those who feel that much of their life and of the

common life is founded on prejudice and illusion, such white light will

occasionally seem hard and steely. At its approach they fear the loss of

the charm of that twilight hour ere the day has yet begun, or before the

darkness has fully settled down. Thus the heart and feelings look upon the

intellect as an enemy of sentiment. And Plato himself is not without

anticipations of such an issue. Yet perhaps we may add that the danger is

in part an imaginary one, and only arises because intelligence takes its

task too lightly, and encroaches beyond its proper ground. Philosophy, in

other words, mistakes its place when it sets itself up as a dogmatic

system of life. Its function is to comprehend, and from comprehension to

criticise, and through criticising to unify. It has no positive and

additional teaching of its own: no addition to the burden of life and

experience. And experience it must respect. Its work is to maintain the

organic or super-organic interconnexion between all the spheres of life

and all the forms of reality. It has to prevent stagnation and absorption

of departments—to keep each in its proper place, but not more than its

place, and yet to show how each is not independent of the others. And this

is what the philosopher or ancient sage would be. If he is passionless, it

is not that he has no passions, but that they no longer perturb and

mislead. If his controlling spirit be reason, it is not the reason of the

so-called “rationalist,” but the reason which seeks in patience to

comprehend, and to be at home in, a world it at first finds strange. And

if he is critical of others, he is still more critical of himself:

critical however not for criticism’s sake (which is but a poor thing), but

because through criticism the faith of reason may be more fully justified.

To the last, if he is true to his mission and faithful to his loyalty to

reality, he will have the simplicity of the child.

Whether therefore we agree or not with Plato’s reduction of Right and Duty

to self-actualisation, we may at least admit that in the idea of

perfection or excellence, combined with the idea of knowledge or inward

lucidity, he has got the fundamental ideas on which further ethical

development must build. Self-control, self-knowledge, internal harmony,

are good: and so are the development of our several faculties and of the

totality of them to the fullest pitch of excellence. But their value does

not lie entirely in themselves, or rather there is implicit in them a

reference to something beyond themselves. They take for granted something

which, because it is so taken, may also be ignored and neglected, just

because it seems so obvious. And that implication is the social humanity

in which they are the spirits of light and leading.

To lay the stress on ἀρετή or excellence tends to leave out of sight the

force of duty; and to emphasise knowledge is allowed to disparage the

heart and feelings. The mind—even of a philosopher—finds a difficulty in

holding very different points of view in one, and where it is forced from

one to another, tends to forget the earlier altogether. Thus when the

ethical philosopher, presupposing as an absolute or unquestionable fact

that man the individual was rooted in the community, proceeded to discuss

the problem of the best and completest individual estate, he was easily

led to lose sight of the fundamental and governing condition altogether.

From the moment that Aristotle lays down the thesis that man is naturally

social, to the moment when he asks how the bare ideal of excellence in

character and life can become an actuality, the community in which man

lives has retired out of sight away into the background. And it only comes

in, as it first appears, as the paedagogue to bring us to morality. And

Plato, though professedly he is speaking of the community, and is well

aware that the individual can only be saved by the salvation of the

community, is constantly falling back into another problem—the development

of an individual soul. He feels the strength of the egoistic effort after

perfection, and his essay in the end tends to lose sight altogether of its

second theme. Instead of a man he gives us a mere philosopher, a man, that

is, not living with his country’s life, instinct with the heart and

feeling of humanity, inspired by art and religion, but a being set apart

and exalted above his fellows,—charged no doubt in theory with the duty of

saving them, of acting vicariously as the mediator between them and the

absolute truth—but really tending more and more to seclude himself on the

_edita templa_ of the world, on the high-towers of speculation.

And what Plato and Aristotle did, so to speak, against their express

purpose and effort, yet did, because the force of contemporary tendency

was irresistible—that the Stoa and Epicurus did more openly and

professedly. With a difference in theory, it is true, owing to the

difference in the surroundings. Virtue in the older day of the free and

glorious commonwealth had meant physical and intellectual achievement,

acts done in the public eye, and of course for the public good—a good with

which the agent was identified at least in heart and soul, if not in his

explicit consciousness. In later and worse days, when the political world,

with the world divine, had withdrawn from actual identity with the central

heart of the individual, and stood over-against him as a strange power and

little better than a nuisance, virtue came to be counted as endurance,

indifference, negative independence against a cold and a perplexing world.

But even still, virtue is excellence: it is to rise above the ignoble

level: to assert self-liberty against accident and circumstance—to attain

self-controlled, self-satisfying independence—and to become God-like in

its seclusion. Yet in two directions even it had to acknowledge something

beyond the individual. The Epicurean—following out a suggestion of

Aristotle—recognised the help which the free society of friends gave to

the full development of the single seeker after a self-satisfying and

complete life. The Stoic, not altogether refusing such help, tended rather

to rest his single self on a fellowship of ideal sort, on the great city

of gods and men, the _civitas Dei_. Thus, in separate halves, the two

schools, into which Greek ethics was divided, gave expression to the sense

that a new and higher community was needed—to the sense that the visible

actual community no longer realised its latent idea. The Stoic emphasised

the all-embracing necessity, the absolute comprehensiveness of the moral

kingdom. The Epicurean saw more clearly that, if the everlasting city came

from heaven, it could only visibly arise by initiation upon the earth.

Christianity—in its best work—was a conjunction of the liberty with the

necessity, of the human with the divine.

More interesting, perhaps, it is to note the misconception of reason and

knowledge which grew up. Knowledge came more and more to be identified

with the reflective and critical consciousness, which is outside reality

and life, and judges it from a standpoint of its own. It came to be

esteemed only in its formal and abstract shape, and at the expense of the

heart and feelings. The antithesis of philosophy (or knowledge strictly so

called) according to Plato was mere opinion, accidental and imperfect

knowledge. The knowledge which is truly valuable is a knowledge which

presupposes the full reality of life, and is the more and more completely

articulated theory of it as a whole. It is—abstractly taken—a mere form of

unity which has no value except in uniting: it is—taken concretely—the

matter, we may say, in complete unity. It is ideal and perfect harmony of

thought, appetite, and emotion: or putting it otherwise, the philosopher

is one who is not merely a creature of appetite and production, not merely

a creature of feeling and practical energy, but a creature, who to both of

these superadds an intelligence which sets eyes in the blind forehead of

these other powers, and thus, far from superseding them altogether, only

raises them into completeness, and realises all that is worthy in their

implicit natures. Always these two impulsive tendencies of our nature are

guided by some sort of ideas and intelligence, by beliefs and opinions.

But they, like their guides, are sporadically emergent, unconnected, and

therefore apt to be contradictory. It is to such erratic and occasional

ideas, half-truths and deceptions, that philosophy is opposed.

Unfortunately for all parties, the antithesis is carried farther.

Philosophy and the philosopher are further set in opposition to the faith

of the heart, the intimacy and intensity of feeling, the depth of love and

trust, which in practice often go along with imperfect ideas. The

philosopher is made one who has emancipated himself from the heart and

feelings,—a pure intelligence, who is set above all creeds, contemplating

all, and holding none. Consistency and clearness become his idol, to be

worshipped at any cost, save one sacrifice: and that one sacrifice is the

sacrifice of his own self-conceit. For consistency generally means that

all is made to harmonise with one assumed standpoint, and that whatever

presents discrepancies with this alleged standard is ruthlessly thrown

away. Such a philosophy mistakes its function, which is not, as Heine

scoffs, to make an intelligible system by rejecting the discordant

fragments of life, but to follow reverently, if slowly, in the wake of

experience. Such a “perfect sage,” with his parade of reasonableness, may

often assume the post of a dictator.

And, above all, intelligence is only half itself when it is not also will.

And both are more than mere consciousness. Plato—whom we refer to, because

he is the coryphaeus of all the diverse host of Greek philosophy—seems to

overestimate or rather to misconceive the place of knowledge. That it is

the supreme and crowning grace of the soul, he sees. But he tends to

identify it with the supreme or higher soul:—as Aristotle did after him,

to be followed by the Stoics and Neo-Platonists. For them the supreme, or

almost supreme reality is the intelligence or reason: the soul is only on

a second grade of reality, on the borders of the natural or physical

world. When Plato takes that line, he turns towards the path of

asceticism, and treats the philosophic life as a preparation for that

truer life when intelligence shall be all in all, for that better land

where “divine dialogues” shall form the staple and substance of spiritual

existence. Aristotle,—who less often treads these solitudes,—still extols

the theoretic life, when the body and its needs trouble no more, when the

activity of reason—the theory of theory—is attained at least as entirely

as mortal conditions allow man to be deified. Of the “apathy” and the

reasonable conformity of the Stoics, or of the purely negative character

of Epicurean happiness (the excision of all that pained) we need not here

speak. And in Plotinus and Proclus the deification of mere reason is at

any rate the dominant note; whatever protests the larger Greek nature in

the former may from time to time offer. The truth which philosophy should

have taught was that Mind or intelligence was the element where the inner

life culminated and expanded and flourished: the error which it often

tended to spread was that intelligence was the higher life of which all

other was a degenerate shortcoming, and something valuable on its own

account.

It may be that thus to interpret Plato is to do him an injustice. It has

been sometimes said that his division of parts or kinds of soul—or his

distinction between its fighting horses—tends to destroy the unity of

mental life. But perhaps this was exactly what he wanted to convey. There

are—we may paraphrase his meaning—three kinds of human being, three types

of human life. There is the man or the life of appetite and the flesh:

there is the man of noble emotion and energetic depth of soul: there is

the life of reasonable pursuits and organised principle. Or, we may take

his meaning to be that there are three elements or provinces of mental

life, which in all except a few are but imperfectly coherent and do not

reach a true or complete unity. Some unity there always is: but in the

life of mere appetite and impulse, even when these impulses are our nobler

sentiments of love and hatred, the unity falls very far short. Or, as he

puts the theme elsewhere, the soul has a passion for self-completion, a

love of beauty, which in most is but a misleading lust. It is the business

of the philosophic life to re-create or to foster this unity: or

philosophy is the persistent search of the soul for its lost unity, the

search to see that unity which is always its animating principle, its

inner faith. When the soul has reached this ideal—if it can be supposed to

attain it (and of this the strong-souled ancient philosophers feel no

doubt),—then a change must take place. The love of beauty is not

suppressed; it is only made self-assured and its object freed from all

imperfection. It is not that passion has ceased; but its nature is so

transfigured, that it seems worthy of a nobler name, which yet we cannot

give. To such a life, where battle and conflict are as such unknown, we

cannot longer give the title of life: and we say that philosophy is in

life a rehearsal of death(70). And yet if there be no battle, there is not

for that reason mere inaction. Hence, as the Republic concludes, the true

philosopher is the complete man. He is the truth and reality which the

appetitive and emotional man were seeking after and failed to realise. It

is true they at first will not see this. But the whole long process of

philosophy is the means to induce this conviction. And for Plato it

remains clear that through experience, through wisdom, and through

abstract deduction, the philosopher will justify his claim to him who hath

ears to hear and heart to understand. If that be so, the asceticism of

Plato is not a mere war upon flesh and sense as such, but upon flesh and

sense as imperfect truth, fragmentary reality, which suppose themselves

complete, though they are again and again confuted by experience, by

wisdom, and by mere calculation,—a war against their blindness and

shortsightedness.

Essay IV. Psycho-Genesis.

“The key,” says Carus, “for the ascertainment of the nature of the

conscious psychical life lies in the region of the unconscious(71).” The

view which these words take is at least as old as the days of Leibniz. It

means that the mental world does not abruptly emerge a full-grown

intelligence, but has a genesis, and follows a law of development: that

its life may be described as the differentiation (with integration) of a

simple or indifferentiated mass. The terms conscious and unconscious,

indeed, with their lax popular uses, leave the door wide open for

misconception. But they may serve to mark that the mind is to be

understood only in a certain relation (partly of antithesis) to nature,

and the soul only in reference to the body. The so-called “superior

faculties”—specially characteristic of humanity—are founded upon, and do

not abruptly supersede, the lower powers which are supposed to be

specially obvious in the animals(72). The individual and specific

phenomena of consciousness, which the psychologist is generally supposed

to study, rest upon a deeper, less explicated, more indefinite, life of

sensibility, which in its turn fades away by immeasurable gradations into

something irresponsive to the ordinary tests for sensation and life.

And yet the moment we attempt to leave the daylight of consciousness for

the darker sides of sub-conscious life, the risks of misinterpretation

multiply. The problem is to some extent the same as confronts the student

of the ideas and principles of primitive races. There, the temptation of

seeing things through the “spectacles of civilisation” is almost

irresistible. So in psychology we are apt to import into the life of

sensation and feeling the distinctions and relations of subsequent

intellection. Nor is the difficulty lessened by Hegel’s method which deals

with soul, sentiency, and consciousness as grades or general

characteristics in a developmental advance. He borrows his illustrations

from many quarters, from morbid and anomalous states of

consciousness,—less from the cases of savages, children and animals. These

illustrations may be called a loose induction. But it requires a much more

powerful instrument than mere induction to build up a scientific system; a

framework of general principle or theory is the only basis on which to

build theory by the allegation of facts, however numerous. Yet in

philosophic science, which is systematised knowledge, all facts strictly

so described will find their place and be estimated at their proper value.

(i.) Primitive Sensibility.

Psychology (with Hegel) takes up the work of science from biology. The

mind comes before it as the supreme product of the natural world, the

finest flower of organic life, the “truth” of the physical process. As

such it is called by the time-honoured name of Soul. If we further go on

to say that the soul is the principle of life, we must not understand this

vital principle to be something over and above the life of which it is the

principle. Such a locally-separable principle is an addition which is due

to the analogy of mechanical movement, where a detached agent sets in

motion and directs the machinery. But in the organism the principle is not

thus detachable as a thing or agent. By calling Soul the principle of life

we rather mean that in the vital organism, so far as it _lives_, all the

real variety, separation, and discontinuity of parts must be reduced to

unity and identity, or as Hegel would say, to _ideality_. To live is thus

to keep all differences fluid and permeable in the fire of the

life-process. Or to use a familiar term of logic, the Soul is the concept

or intelligible unity of the organic body. But to call it a concept might

suggest that it is only the conception through which _we_ represent to

ourselves the variety in unity of the organism. The soul, however, is more

than a mere concept: and life is more than a mere mode of description for

a group of movements forming an objective unity. It is a unity, subjective

and objective. The organism is one life, controlling difference: and it is

also one by our effort to comprehend it. The Soul therefore is in Hegelian

language described as the Idea rather than the concept of the organic

body. Life is the generic title for this subject-object: but the life may

be merely physical, or it may be intellectual and practical, or it may be

absolute, i.e. will and know all that it is, and be all that it knows and

wills.

Up to this point the world is what is called an external, which is here

taken to mean (not a world external to the individual, but) a

self-externalised world. That is to say, it is the observer who has

hitherto by his interpretation of his perceptions supplied the “Spirit in

Nature.” In itself the external world has no inside, no centre: it is we

who read into it the conception of a life-history. We are led to believe

that a principle of unity is always at work throughout the physical

world—even in the mathematical laws of natural operation. It is only

intelligible and credible to us as a system, a continuous and regular

development. But that system is only a hypothetical idea, though it is

held to be a conclusion to which all the evidence seems unequivocally to

point. And, even in organic life, the unity, though more perfect and

palpable than in the mechanical and inorganic world, is only a perception,

a vision,—a necessary mode of realising the unity of the facts. The

phenomenon of life reveals as in a picture and an ocular demonstration the

conformity of inward and outward, the identity of whole and parts, of

power and utterance. But it is still outside the observer. In the function

of sensibility and sentiency, however, we stand as it were on the

border-line between biology and psychology. At one step we have been

brought within the harmony, and are no longer mere observers and

reflecters. The sentient not merely is, but is aware that it is. Hitherto

as life, it only is the unity in diversity, and diversity in unity, for

the outsider, i.e. only implicitly: now it is so for itself, or

consciously. And in the first stage it does not know, but feels or is

sentient. Here, for the first time, is created the distinction of inward

and outward. Loosely indeed we may, like Mr. Spencer, speak of outward and

inward in physiology: but strictly speaking, what Goethe says is true,

_Natur hat weder Kern noch Schaale_(73). Nature in the narrower sense

knows no distinction of the inward and outward in its phenomena: it is a

purely superficial order and succession of appearance and event. The Idea

which has been visible to an intelligent percipient in the types and laws

of the natural world, now _is_, actually is—is in and for itself—but at

first in a minimum of content, a mere point of light, or rather the dawn

which has yet to expand into the full day.

Spinoza has asserted that “all individual bodies are animate, though in

different degrees(74).” Now it is to a great extent this diversity of

degree on which the main interest turns. Yet it is well to remember that

the abrupt and trenchant separations which popular practice loves are

overridden to a deeper view by an essential unity of idea, reducing them

to indifference. If, that is, we take seriously the Spinozist unity of

Substance, and the continual correlation (to call it no more) of extension

and consciousness therein, we cannot avoid the conclusion which even Bacon

would admit of something describable as attraction and perception,

something subduing diversity to unity. But whether it be well to name this

soul or life is a different matter. It may indeed only be taken to mean

that all true being must be looked on as a real unity and individuality,

must, that is, be conceived as manifesting itself in organisation, must be

referred to a self-centred and self-developing activity. But this—which is

the fundamental thesis of idealism—is hardly all that is meant. Rather

Spinoza would imply that all things which form a real unity must have

life—must have inner principle and unifying reality: and what he teaches

is closely akin to the Leibnitian doctrine that every substantial

existence reposes upon a monad, a unity which is at once both a force and

a cognition, a “representation” and an appetite or _nisus_ to act. When

Fechner in a series of works(75) expounds and defends the hypothesis that

plants and planets are not destitute of soul, any more than man and

animals, he only gives a more pronounced expression to this idealisation

or spiritualisation of the natural world. But for the moment the point to

be noted is that all of this idealistic doctrine is an inference, or a

development which finds its _point d’appui_ in the fact of sensation. And

the problem of the Philosophy of Mind is just to trace the process whereby

a mere shock of sensation has grown into a conception and a faith in the

goodness, beauty and intelligence of the world.

Schopenhauer has put the point with his usual picturesqueness. Outward

nature presents nothing but a play of forces. At first, however, this

force shows merely the mechanical phenomena of pressure and impact, and

its theory is sufficiently described by mathematical physics. But in the

process of nature force assumes higher types, types where it loses a

certain amount of its externality(76), till in the organic world it

acquires a peculiar phase which Schopenhauer calls _Will_, meaning by

that, however, an organising and controlling power, a tendency or _nisus_

to be and live, which is persistent and potent, but without consciousness.

This blind force, which however has a certain coherence and purposiveness,

is in the animal organism endowed with a new character, in consequence of

the emergence of a new organ. This organ, the brain and nervous system,

causes the evolution into clear day of an element which has been growing

more and more urgent. The gathering tendency of force to return into

itself is now complete: the cycle of operation is formed: and the junction

of the two currents issues in the spark of sensation. The blind force now

becomes seeing.

But at first—and this is the point we have to emphasise—its powers of

vision are limited. Sensibility is either a local and restricted

phenomenon: or, in so far as it is not local, it is vague and indefinite,

and hardly entitled to the name of sensibility. Either it is a dim, but

far-reaching, sympathy with environing existence, and in that case only

so-called blind will or feeling: or if it is clear, is locally confined,

and at first within very narrow limits. Neither of these points must be

lost sight of. On the one hand feeling has to be regarded as the dull and

confused stirring of an almost infinite sympathy with the world—a pulse

which has come from the far-distant movements of the universe, and bears

with it, if but as a possibility, the wealth of an infinite message. On

the other hand, feeling at first only becomes real, in this boundless

ideality to which its possibilities extend, by restricting itself to one

little point and from several points organising itself to a unity of

bodily feeling, till it can go on from thence to embrace the universe in

distinct and articulate comprehension.

Soul, says Hegel, is not a separate and additional something over and

above the rest of nature: it is rather nature’s “’universal immaterialism,

and simple ideal life(77).” There were ancient philosophers who spoke of

the soul as a self-adjusting number,—as a harmony, or equilibrium(78)—and

the moderns have added considerably to the list of these analogical

definitions. As definitions they obviously fall short. Yet these things

give, as it were, by anticipation, an image of soul, as the “ideality,”

which reduces the manifold to unity. The adhesions and cohesions of

matter, its gravitating attractions, its chemical affinities and

electrical polarities, the intricate out-and-in of organic structure, are

all preludes to the true incorporating unity which is the ever-immanent

supersession of the endless self-externalism and successionalism of

physical reality. But in sentiency, feeling, or sensibility, the unity

which all of these imply without reaching, is explicitly present. It is

implicitly an all-embracing unity: an infinite,—which has no doors and no

windows, for the good reason that it needs none, because it has nothing

outside it, because it “expresses” and “envelopes” (however confusedly at

first) the whole universe. Thus, even if, with localising phraseology, we

may describe mind, where it _appears_ emerging in the natural world, as a

mere feeble and incidental outburst,—a rebellion breaking out as in some

petty province or isolated region against the great law of the physical

realm—we are in so speaking taking only an external standpoint. But with

the rise of mind in nature the bond of externalism is implicitly overcome.

To it, and where it really is, there is nothing outside, nothing

transcendent. Everything which is said to be outside mind is only outside

a localised and limited mind—outside a mind which is imperfectly and

abstractly realised—not outside mind absolutely. Mind is the absolute

negation of externality: not a mere relative negative, as the organism may

be biologically described as inner in respect of the environment. To

accomplish this negation in actuality, to bring the multiplicity and

externality of things into the unity and identity of one Idea, is the

process of development of mind from animal sensibility to philosophic

knowledge, from appetite to art,—the process of culture through the social

state under the influence of religion.

Sentiency or psychic matter (mind-stuff), to begin with, is in some

respects like the _tabula rasa_ of the empiricists. It is the

possibility—but the real possibility—of intelligence rather than

intelligence itself. It is the monotonous undifferentiated inwardness—a

faint self-awareness and self-realisation of the material world, but at

first a mere vague _psychical protoplasm_ and without defined nucleus,

without perceptible organisation or separation of structures. If there is

self-awareness, it is not yet discriminated into a distinct and unified

self, not yet differentiated and integrated,—soul in the condition of a

mere “Is,” which, however, is nothing determinate. It is very much in the

situation of Condillac’s statue-man—_une statue organisée intérieurement

comme nous, et animée d’un esprit privé de toute espèce d’idées_: alike at

least so far that the rigid uniformity of the latter’s envelope prevents

all articulated organisation of its faculties. The foundation under all

the diversity and individuality in the concrete intelligent and volitional

life is a common feeling,—a _sensus communis_—a general and indeterminate

susceptibility to influence, a sympathy responsive, but responsive vaguely

and equivocally, to all the stimuli of the physical environment. There was

once a time, according to primitive legend, when man understood the

language of beast and bird, and even surprised the secret converse of

trees and flowers. Such fancies are but the exaggeration of a solidarity

of conscious life which seems to spread far in the sub-conscious realm,

and to narrow the individual’s soul into limited channels as it rises into

clear self-perception,

“As thro’ the frame that binds him in

His isolation grows defined.”

It may be a mere dream that, as Goethe feigns of Makaria in his

romance(79), there are men and women in sympathy with the vicissitudes of

the starry regions: and hypotheses of lunar influence, or dogmas of

astrological destiny, may count to the present guardians of the sciences

as visionary superstitions. Yet science in these regions has no reason to

be dogmatic; her function hitherto can only be critical; and even for

that, her data are scanty and her principles extremely general. The

influences on the mental mood and faculty, produced by climate and

seasons, by local environment and national type, by individual

peculiarities, by the differences of age and sex, and by the alternation

of night and day, of sleep and waking, are less questionable. It is easy

no doubt to ignore or forget them: easy to remark how indefinable and

incalculable they are. But that does not lessen their radical and

inevitable impress in the determination of the whole character. “The sum

of our existence, divided by reason, never comes out exact, but always

leaves a marvellous remainder(80).” Irrational this residue is, in the

sense that it is inexplicable, and incommensurable with the well-known

quantities of conscious and voluntarily organised life. But a scientific

psychology, which is adequate to the real and concrete mind, should never

lose sight of the fact that every one of its propositions in regard to the

more advanced phases of intellectual development is thoroughly and in

indefinable ways modified by these preconditions. When that is remembered,

it will be obvious how complicated is the problem of adapting psychology

for the application to education, and how dependent the solution of that

problem is upon an experiential familiarity with the data of individual

and national temperament and character.

The first stage in mental development is the establishment of regular and

uniform relations between soul and body: it is the differentiation of

organs and the integration of function: the balance between sensation and

movement, between the afferent and efferent processes of sensitivity.

Given a potential soul, the problem is to make it actual in an individual

body. It is the business of a physical psychology to describe in detail

the steps by which the body we are attached to is made inward as our idea

through the several organs and their nervous appurtenances: whereas a

psychical physiology would conversely explain the corresponding processes

for the expression of the emotions and for the objectification of the

volitions. Thus soul inwardises (_erinnert_) or envelops body: which body

“expresses” or develops soul. The actual soul is the unity of both, is the

percipient individual. The solidarity or “communion” of body and soul is

here the dominant fact: the soul sentient of changes in its peripheral

organs, and transmitting emotion and volition into physical effect. It is

on this psychical unity,—the unity which is the soul of the diversity of

body—that all the subsequent developments of mind rest. Sensation is thus

the _prius_—or basis—of all mental life: the organisation of soul in body

and of body in soul. It is the process which historically has been

prepared in the evolution of animal life from those undifferentiated forms

where specialised organs are yet unknown, and which each individual has

further to realise and complete for himself, by learning to see and hear,

and use his limbs. At first, moreover, it begins from many separate

centres and only through much collision and mutual compliance arrives at

comparative uniformity and centralisation. The common basis of united

sensibility supplied by the one organism has to be made real and

effective, and it is so at first by sporadic and comparatively independent

developments. If self-hood means reference to self of what is prima facie

not self, and projection of self therein, there is in primitive

sensibility only the germ or possibility of self-hood. In the early phases

of psychic development the centre is fluctuating and ill-defined, and it

takes time and trouble to co-ordinate or unify the various starting-points

of sensibility(81).

This consolidation of inward life may be looked at either formally or

concretely. Under the first head, it means the growth of a central unity

of apperception. In the second case, it means a peculiar aggregate of

ideas and sentiments. There is growing up within him what we may call the

individuality of the individual,—an irrational, i.e. not consciously

intelligent, nether-self or inner soul, a firm aggregation of hopes and

wishes, of views and feelings, or rather of tendencies and temperament, of

character hereditary and acquired. It is the law of the natural will or

character which from an inaccessible background dominates our

action,—which, because it is not realised and formulated in consciousness,

behaves like a guardian spirit, or genius, or destiny within us. This

genius is the sub-conscious unity of the sensitive life—the manner of man

which unknown to ourselves we are,—and which influences us against our

nominal or formal purposes. So far as this predominates, our ends, rough

hew them how we will, are given by a force which is not really, i.e. with

full consciousness, ours: by a mass of ingrained prejudice and unreasoned

sympathies, of instincts and passions, of fancies and feelings, which have

condensed and organised themselves into a natural power. As the child in

the mother’s womb is responsive to her psychic influences, so the

development of a man’s psychic life is guided by feelings centred in

objects and agents external to him, who form the genius presiding over his

development. His soul, to that extent, is really in another: he himself is

selfless, and when his stay is removed the principle of his life is

gone(82). He is but a bundle of impressions, held together by influences

and ties which in years before consciousness proper began made him what he

is. Such is the involuntary adaptation to example and environment, which

establishes in the depths below personality a self which becomes hereafter

the determinant of action. Early years, in which the human being is

naturally susceptible, build up by imitation, by pliant obedience, an

image, a system, reproducing the immediate surroundings. The soul, as yet

selfless, and ready to accept any imprint, readily moulds itself into the

likeness of an authoritative influence.

The step by which the universality or unity of the self is realised in the

variety of its sensation is Habit. Habit gives us a definite

standing-ground in the flux of single impressions: it is the

identification of ourselves with what is most customary and familiar: an

identification which takes place by practice and repetition. If it

circumscribes us to one little province of being, it on the other frees us

from the vague indeterminateness where we are at the mercy of every

passing mood. It makes thus much of our potential selves our very own, our

acquisition and permanent possession. It, above all, makes us free and at

one with our bodily part, so that henceforth we start as a subjective unit

of body and soul. We have now as the result of the anthropological process

a self or ego, an individual consciousness able to reflect and compare,

setting itself on one side (a soul in bodily organisation), and on the

other setting an object of consciousness, or external world, a world of

other things. All this presupposes that the soul has actualised itself by

appropriating and acquiring as its expression and organ the physical

sensibility which is its body. By restricting and establishing itself, it

has gained a fixed standpoint. No doubt it has localised and confined

itself, but it is no longer at the disposal of externals and accident: it

has laid the foundation for higher developments.

(ii.) Anomalies of Psychical Life.

Psychology, as we have seen, goes for information regarding the earlier

stages of mental growth to the child and the animal,—perhaps also to the

savage. So too sociology founds certain conclusions upon the observations

of savage customs and institutions, or on the earlier records of the race.

In both cases with a limitation caused by the externality and

fragmentariness of the facts and the need of interpreting them through our

own conscious experiences. There is however another direction in which

corresponding inquiries may be pursued; and where the danger of the

conclusions arrived at, though not perhaps less real, is certainly of a

different kind. In sociology we can observe—and almost experiment upon—the

phenomena of the lapsed, degenerate and criminal classes. The advantage of

such observation is that the object of study can be made to throw greater

light on his own inner states. He is a little of the child and a little of

the savage, but these aspects co-exist with other features which put him

more on a level with the intelligent observer. Similar pathological

regions are open to us in the case of psychology. There the anomalous and

morbid conditions of mind co-exist with a certain amount of mature

consciousness. So presented, they are thrown out into relief. They form

the negative instances which serve to corroborate our positive inductions.

The regularly concatenated and solid structure of normal mind is under

abnormal and deranged conditions thrown into disorder, and its

constituents are presented in their several isolation. Such phenomena are

relapses into more rudimentary grades: but with the difference that they

are set in the midst of a more advanced phase of intellectual life.

Even amongst candid and honest-minded students of psychology there is a

certain reluctance to dabble in researches into the night-side of the

mental range. Herbart is an instance of this shrinking. The region of the

Unconscious seemed—and to many still seems—a region in which the charlatan

and the dupe can and must play into each other’s hands. Once in the whirl

of spiritualist and crypto-psychical inquiry you could not tell how far

you might be carried. The facts moreover were of a peculiar type.

Dependent as they seemed to be on the frame of mind of observers and

observed, they defied the ordinary criteria of detached and abstract

observation. You can only observe them, it is urged, when you believe;

scepticism destroys them. Now there is a widespread natural impatience

against what Bacon has called “monodical” phenomena, phenomena i.e. which

claim to come under a special law of their own, or to have a private and

privileged sphere. And this impatience cuts the Gordian knot by a

determination to treat all instances which oppose its hitherto ascertained

laws as due to deception and fraud, or, at the best, to incompetent

observation, confusions of memory, and superstitions of ignorance. Above

all, great interests of religion and personality seemed to connect

themselves with these revelations—interests, at any rate, to which our

common humanity thrills; it seemed as if, in this region beyond the

customary range of the conscious and the seen, one might learn something

of the deeper realities which lie in the unseen. But to feel that so much

was at stake was naturally unfavourable to purely dispassionate

observation.

The philosophers were found—as might have been expected—amongst those most

strongly attracted by these problems. Even Kant had been fascinated by the

spiritualism of Swedenborg, though he finally turned away sceptical. At

least as early as 1806 Schelling had been interested by Ritter’s

researches into the question of telepathy, or the power of the human will

to produce without mechanical means of conveyance an effect at a distance.

He was looking forward to the rise of a _Physica coelestis_, or New

Celestial Physics, which should justify the old magic. About the same date

his brother Karl published an essay on Animal Magnetism. The novel

phenomena of galvanism and its congeners suggested vast possibilities in

the range of the physical powers, especially of the physical powers of the

human psyche as a natural agent. The divining-rod was revived.

Clairvoyance and somnambulism were carefully studied, and the curative

powers of animal magnetism found many advocates(83).

Interest in these questions went naturally with the new conception of the

place of Man in Nature, and of Nature as the matrix of mind(84). But it

had been acutely stimulated by the performances and professions of Mesmer

at Vienna and Paris in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

These—though by no means really novel—had forced the artificial world of

science and fashion to discuss the claim advanced for a new force which,

amongst other things, could cure ailments that baffled the ordinary

practitioner. This new force—mainly because of the recent interest in the

remarkable advances of magnetic and electrical research—was conceived as a

fluid, and called Animal Magnetism. At one time indeed Mesmer actually

employed a magnet in the manipulation by which he induced the peculiar

condition in his patients. The accompaniments of his procedure were in

many respects those of the quack-doctor; and with the quack indeed he was

often classed. A French commission of inquiry appointed to examine into

his performances reported in 1784 that, while there was no doubt as to the

reality of many of the phenomena, and even of the cures, there was no

evidence for the alleged new physical force, and declared the effects to

be mainly attributable to the influence of imagination. And with the

mention of this familiar phrase, further explanation was supposed to be

rendered superfluous.

In France political excitement allowed the mesmeric theory and practice to

drop out of notice till the fall of the first Empire. But in Germany there

was a considerable amount of investigations and hypotheses into these

mystical phenomena, though rarely by the ordinary routine workers in the

scientific field. The phenomena where they were discussed were studied and

interpreted in two directions. Some theorists, like Jung-Stilling,

Eschenmayer, Schubert, and Kerner, took the more metaphysicist and

spiritualistic view: they saw in them the witness to a higher truth, to

the presence and operation in this lower world of a higher and spiritual

matter, a so-called ether. Thus Animal Magnetism supplied a sort of

physical theory of the other world and the other life. Jung-Stilling, e.g.

in his “Theory of Spirit-lore.” (1808), regarded the spiritualistic

phenomena as a justification of—what he believed to be—the Kantian

doctrine that in the truly real and persistent world space and time are no

more. The other direction of inquiry kept more to the physical field.

Ritter (whose researches interested both Schelling and Hegel) supposed he

had detected the new force underlying mesmerism and the like, and gave to

it the name of Siderism (1808); while Amoretti of Milan named the object

of his experiments Animal Electrometry (1816). Kieser(85), again (1826)

spoke of Tellurism, and connected animal magnetism with the play of

general terrestrial forces in the human being.

At a later date (1857) Schindler, in his “Magical Spirit-life,” expounded

a theory of mental polarity. The psychical life has two poles or

centres,—its day-pole, around which revolves our ordinary and superficial

current of ideas, and its night-pole, round which gathers the

sub-conscious and deeper group of beliefs and sentiments. Either life has

a memory, a consciousness, a world of its own: and they flourish to a

large extent inversely to each other. The day-world has for its organs of

receiving information the ordinary senses. But the magical or night-world

of the soul has its feelers also, which set men directly in telepathic

rapport with influences, however distant, exerted by the whole world: and

through this “inner sense” which serves to concentrate in itself all the

telluric forces (—a sense which in its various aspects we name instinct,

presentiment, conscience) is constructed the fabric of our sub-conscious

system. Through it man is a sort of résumé of all the cosmic life, in

secret affinity and sympathy with all natural processes; and by the will

which stands in response therewith he can exercise a directly creative

action on external nature. In normal and healthy conditions the two

currents of psychic life run on harmonious but independent. But in the

phenomena of somnambulism, clairvoyance, and delirium, the magic region

becomes preponderant, and comes into collision with the other. The

dark-world emerges into the realm of day as a portentous power: and there

is the feeling of a double personality, or of an indwelling genius,

familiar spirit, or demon.

To the ordinary physicist the so-called _Actio in distans_ was a hopeless

stumbling-block. If he did not comprehend the transmission (as it is

called) of force where there was immediate contact, he was at least

perfectly familiar with the outer aspect of it as a condition of his

limited experience. It needed one beyond the mere hodman of science to say

with Laplace: “We are so far from knowing all the agents of nature, that

it would be very unphilosophical to deny the existence of phenomena solely

because they are inexplicable in the present state of our knowledge.”

Accordingly mesmerism and its allied manifestations were generally

abandoned to the bohemians of science, and to investigators with dogmatic

bias. It was still employed as a treatment for certain ailments: and

philosophers, as different as Fichte and Schopenhauer(86), watched its

fate with attention. But the herd of professional scientists fought shy of

it. The experiments of Braid at Manchester in 1841 gradually helped to

give research into the subject a new character. Under the name of

Hypnotism (or, rather at first Neuro-hypnotism) he described the phenomena

of the magnetic sleep (induced through prolonged staring at a bright

object), such as abnormal rigidity of body, perverted sensibility, and the

remarkable obedience of the subject to the command or suggestions of the

operator. Thirty years afterwards, the matter became an object of

considerable experimental and theoretic work in France, at the rival

schools of Paris and Nancy; and the question, mainly under the title of

hypnotism, though the older name is still occasionally heard, has been for

several years brought prominently under public notice.

It cannot be said that the net results of these observations and

hypotheses are of a very definitive character. While a large amount of

controversy has been waged on the comparative importance of the several

methods and instruments by which the hypnotic or mesmeric trance may be

induced, and a scarcely less wide range of divergence prevails with regard

to the physiological and pathological conditions in connexion with which

it has been most conspicuously manifested, there has been less anxiety

shown to determine its precise psychical nature, or its significance in

mental development. And yet the better understanding of these aspects may

throw light on several points connected with primitive religion and the

history of early civilisation, indeed over the whole range of what is

called _Völkerpsychologie_. Indeed this is one of the points which may be

said to emerge out of the confusion of dispute. Phenomena at least

analogous to those styled hypnotic have a wide range in the

anthropological sphere(87): and the proper characters which belong to them

will only be caught by an observer who examines them in the widest variety

of examples. Another feature which has been put in prominence is what has

been called “psychological automatism.” And in this name two points seem

to deserve note. The first is the spontaneous and as it were mechanical

consecution of mental states in the soul whence the interfering effect of

voluntary consciousness has been removed. And the second is the unfailing

or accurate regularity, so contrary to the hesitating and uncertain

procedure of our conscious and reasoned action, which so often is seen in

the unreflecting and unreasoned movements. To this invariable sequence of

psychical movement the superior control and direction by the intelligent

self has to adapt itself, just as it respects the order of physical laws.

But, perhaps, the chief conclusion to be derived from hypnotic experience

is the value of suggestion or suggestibility. Even cool thinkers like Kant

have recognised how much mere mental control has to do with bodily

state,—how each of us, in this way, is often for good or for ill his own

physician. An idea is a force, and is only inactive in so far as it is

held in check by other ideas. “There is no such thing as hypnotism,” says

one: “there are only different degrees of suggestibility.” This may be to

exaggerate: yet it serves to impress the comparatively secondary character

of many of the circumstances on which the specially mesmeric or hypnotic

experimentalist is apt to lay exclusive stress. The methods may probably

vary according to circumstances. But the essence of them all is to get the

patient out of the general frame and system of ideas and perceptions in

which his ordinary individuality is encased. Considering how for all of us

the reality of concrete life is bound up with our visual perceptions, how

largely our sanity depends upon the spatial idea, and how that depends on

free ocular range, we can understand that darkness and temporary loss of

vision are powerful auxiliaries in the hypnotic process, as in magical and

superstitious rites. But a great deal short of this may serve to establish

influence. The mind of the majority of human beings, but especially of the

young, may be compared to a vacant seat waiting for some one to fill it.

In Hegel’s view hypnotic phenomena produce a kind of temporary and

artificial atavism. Mechanical or chemical means, or morbid conditions of

body, may cause even for the intelligent adult a relapse into states of

mind closely resembling those exhibited by the primitive or the infantile

sensibility. The intelligent personality, where powers are bound up with

limitations and operate through a chain of means and ends, is reduced to

its primitively undifferentiated condition. Not that it is restored to its

infantile simplicity; but that all subsequent acquirements operate only as

a concentrated individuality, or mass of will and character, released from

the control of the self-possessed mind, and invested (by the latter’s

withdrawal) with a new quasi-personality of their own. With the loss of

the world of outward things, there may go, it is supposed, a clearer

perception of the inward and particularly of the organic life. The Soul

contains the form of unity which other experiences had impressed upon it:

but this form avails in its subterranean existence where it creates a sort

of inner self. And this inner self is no longer, like the embodied self of

ordinary consciousness, an intelligence served by organs, and proceeding

by induction and inference. Its knowledge is not mediated or carried along

specific channels: it does not build up, piecemeal, by successive steps of

synthesis and analysis, by gradual idealisation, the organised totality of

its intellectual world. The somnambulist and the clairvoyant see without

eyes, and carry their vision directly into regions where the waking

consciousness of orderly intelligence cannot enter. But that region is not

the world of our higher ideas,—of art, religion, and philosophy. It is

still the sensitivity—that realm of sensitivity which is ordinarily

covered by unconsciousness. Such sensitive clairvoyants may, as it were,

hear themselves growing; they may discern the hidden quivers and pulses of

blood and tissue, the seats of secret pain and all the unrevealed workings

in the dark chambers of the flesh. But always their vision seems confined

to that region, and will fall short of the world of light and ideal truth.

It is towards the nature-bond of sensitive solidarity with earth, and

flowers, and trees, the life that “rolls through all things,” not towards

the spiritual unity which broods over the world and “impels all thinking

things,” that these immersions in the selfless universe lead us.

What Hegel chiefly sees in these phenomena is their indication, even on

the natural side of man, of that ideality of the material, which it is the

work of intelligence to produce in the more spiritual life, in the

fully-developed mind. The latter is the supreme over-soul, that Absolute

Mind which in our highest moods, aesthetic and religious, we approximate

to. But mind, as it tends towards the higher end to “merge itself in

light,” to identify itself yet not wholly lost, but retained, in the

fullness of undivided intellectual being, so at the lower end it springs

from a natural and underlying unity, the immense solidarity of

nether-soul, the great Soul of Nature—the “Substance” which is to be

raised into the “Subject” which is true divinity. Between these two

unities, the nature-given nether-soul and the spirit-won over-soul, lies

the conscious life of man: a process of differentiation which narrows and

of redintegration which enlarges,—which alternately builds up an isolated

personality and dissolves it in a common intelligence and sympathy. It is

because mental or tacit “suggestion”(88) (i.e. will-influence exercised

without word or sign, or other sensible mode of connexion),

thought-transference, or thought-reading (which is more than dexterous

apprehension of delicate muscular signs), exteriorisation or transposition

of sensibility into objects primarily non-sensitive, clairvoyance (i.e.

the power of describing, as if from direct perception, objects or events

removed in space beyond the recognised limits of sensation), and

somnambulism, so far as it implies lucid vision with sealed eyes,—it is

because these things seem to show the essential ideality of matter, that

Hegel is interested in them. The ordinary conditions of consciousness and

even of practical life in society are a derivative and secondary state; a

product of processes of individualism, which however are never completed,

and leave a large margin for idealising intelligence to fulfil. From a

state which is not yet personality to a state which is more than can be

described as personality—lies the mental movement. So Fichte, too, had

regarded the power of the somnambulist as laying open a world underlying

the development of egoity and self-consciousness(89): “the merely sensuous

man is still in somnambulism,” only a somnambulism of waking hours: “the

true waking is the life in God, to be free in him, all else is sleep and

dream.” “Egoity,” he adds, “is a merely _formal_ principle, utterly, and

never qualitative (i.e. the essence and universal force).” For

Schopenhauer, too, the experiences of animal magnetism had seemed to prove

the absolute supernatural power of the radical will in its superiority to

the intellectual categories of space, time, and causal sequence: to prove

the reality of the metaphysical which is at the basis of all conscious

divisions.

(iii.) The Development of Inner Freedom.

The result of the first range in the process of psycho-genesis was to make

the body a sign and utterance of the Soul, with a fixed and determinate

type. The “anthropological process” has defined and settled the mere

general sentiency of soul into an individualised shape, a localised and

limited self, a bundle of habits. It has made the soul an Ego or self: a

power which looks out upon the world as a spectator, lifted above

immanence in the general tide of being, but only so lifted because it has

made itself one in the world of objects, a thing among things. The Mind

has reached the point of view of reflection. Instead of a general

identifiability with all nature, it has encased itself in a limited range,

from which it looks forth on what is now other than itself. If previously

it was mere inward sensibility, it is now sense, perceptive of an object

here and now, of an external world. The step has involved some price: and

that price is, that it has attained independence and self-hood at the cost

of surrendering the content it had hitherto held in one with itself. It is

now a blank receptivity, open to the impressions of an outside world: and

the changes which take place in its process of apprehension seem to it to

be given from outside. The world it perceives is a world of isolated and

independent objects: and it takes them as they are given. But a closer

insistance on the perception develops the implicit intelligence, which

makes it possible. The percipient mind is no mere recipiency or

susceptibility with its forms of time and space: it is spontaneously

active, it is the source of categories, or is an apperceptive power,—an

understanding. Consciousness, thus discovered to be a creative or

constructive faculty, is strictly speaking self-consciousness(90).

Self-consciousness appears at first in the selfish or narrowly egoistic

form of appetite and impulse. The intelligence which claims to mould and

construe the world of objects—which, in Kant’s phrase, professes to give

us nature—is implicitly the lord of that world. And that supremacy it

carries out as appetite—as destruction. The self is but a bundle of

wants—its supremacy over things is really subjection to them: the

satisfaction of appetite is baffled by a new desire which leaves it as it

was before. The development of self-consciousness to a more adequate shape

is represented by Hegel as taking place through the social struggle for

existence. Human beings, too, are in the first instance to the

uninstructed appetite or the primitive self-consciousness (which is simply

a succession of individual desires for satisfaction of natural want) only

things,—adjectival to that self’s individual existence. To them, too, his

primary relation is to appropriate and master them. Might precedes right.

But the social struggle for existence forces him to recognise something

other which is kindred to himself,—a limiting principle, another self

which has to form an element in his calculations, not to be neglected. And

gradually, we may suppose, the result is the division of humanity into two

levels, a ruling lordly class, and a class of slaves,—a state of

inequality in which each knows that his appetite is in some measure

checked by a more or less permanent other. Lastly, perhaps soonest in the

inferior order, there is fashioned the perception that its self-seeking in

its isolated appetites is subject to an abiding authority, a continuing

consciousness. There grows up a social self—a sense of general humanity

and solidarity with other beings—a larger self with which each identifies

himself, a common ground. Understanding was selfish intelligence:

practical in the egoistic sense. In the altruistic or universal sense

practical, a principle social and unifying character, intelligence is

Reason.

Thus, Man, beginning as a percipient consciousness, apprehending single

objects in space and time, and as an appetitive self bent upon single

gratifications, has ended as a rational being,—a consciousness purged of

its selfishness and isolation, looking forward openly and impartially on

the universe of things and beings. He has ceased to be a mere animal,

swallowed up in the moment and the individual, using his intelligence only

in selfish satisfactions. He is no longer bound down by the struggle for

existence, looking on everything as a mere thing, a mere means. He has

erected himself above himself and above his environment, but that because

he occupies a point of view at which he and his environment are no longer

purely antithetical and exclusive(91). He has reached what is really the

moral standpoint: the point i.e. at which he is inspired by a universal

self-consciousness, and lives in that peaceful world where the antitheses

of individualities and of outward and inward have ceased to trouble. “The

natural man,” says Hegel(92), “sees in the woman flesh of his flesh: the

moral and spiritual man sees spirit of his spirit in the moral and

spiritual being and by its means.” Hitherto we have been dealing with

something falling below the full truth of mind: the region of immediate

sensibility with its thorough immersion of mind in body, first of all, and

secondly its gradual progress to a general standpoint. It is only in the

third part of Subjective mind that we are dealing with the psychology of a

being who in the human sense knows and wills, i.e. apprehends general

truth, and carries out ideal purposes.

Thus, for the third time, but now on a higher plane, that of intelligence

and rationality, is traced the process of development or realisation by

which reason becomes reasoned knowledge and rational will, a free or

autonomous intelligence. And, as before, the starting-point, alike in

theoretical and practical mind, is feeling—or immediate knowledge and

immediate sense of Ought. The basis of thought is an immediate

perception—a sensuous affection or given something, and the basis of the

idea of a general satisfaction is the natural claim to determine the

outward existence conformably to individual feeling. In intelligent

perception or intuition the important factor is attention, which raises it

above mere passive acceptance and awareness of a given fact. Attention

thus involves on one hand the externality of its object, and on the other

affirms its dependence on the act of the subject: it sets the objects

before and out of itself, in space and time, but yet in so doing it shows

itself master of the objects. If perception presuppose attention, in

short, they cease to be wholly outward: we make them ours, and the space

and time they fill are projected by us. So attended to, they are

appropriated, inwardised and recollected: they take their place in a

mental place and mental time: they receive a general or de-individualised

character in the memory-image. These are retained as mental property, but

retained actually only in so far they are revivable and revived. Such

revival is the work of imagination working by the so-called laws of

association. But the possession of its ideas thus inwardised and

recollected by the mind is largely a matter of chance. The mind is not

really fully master of them until it has been able to give them a certain

objectivity, by replacing the mental image by a vocal, i.e. a sensible

sign. By means of words, intelligence turns its ideas or representations

into quasi-realities: it creates a sort of superior sense-world, the world

of language, where ideas live a potential, which is also an actual, life.

Words are sensibles, but they are sensibles which completely lose

themselves in their meaning. As sensibles, they render possible that

verbal memory which is the handmaid of thought: but which also as merely

mechanical can leave thought altogether out of account. It is through

words that thought is made possible: for it alone permits the movement

through ideas without being distracted through a multitude of

associations. In them thought has an instrument completely at its own

level, but still only a machine, and in memory the working of that

machine. We think in names, not in general images, but in terms which only

serve as vehicles for mental synthesis and analysis.

It is as such a thinking being—a being who can use language, and

manipulate general concepts or take comprehensive views, that man is a

rational will. A concept of something to be done—a feeling even of some

end more or less comprehensive in its quality, is the implication of what

can be called will. At first indeed its material may be found as

immediately given and all its volitionality may lie in the circumstance

that the intelligent being sets this forward as a governing and

controlling Ought. Its vehicle, in short, may be mere impulse, or

inclination, and even passion: but it is the choice and the purposive

adoption of means to the given end. Gradually it attains to the idea of a

general satisfaction, or of happiness. And this end seems positive and

definite. It soon turns out however to be little but a prudent and

self-denying superiority to particular passions and inclinations in the

interest of a comprehensive ideal. The free will or intelligence has so

far only a negative and formal value: it is the perfection of an

autonomous and freely self-developing mind. Such a mind, which in language

has acquired the means of realising an intellectual system of things

superior to the restrictions of sense, and which has emancipated reason

from the position of slave to inclination, is endued with the formal

conditions of moral conduct. Such a mind will transform its own primarily

physical dependence into an image of the law of reason and create the

ethical life: and in the strength of that establishment will go forth to

conquer the world into a more and more adequate realisation of the eternal

Idea.

Essay V. Ethics And Politics.

“In dealing,” says Hegel, “with the Idea of the State, we must not have

before our eyes a particular state, or a particular institution: we must

rather study the Idea, this actual God, on his own account. Every State,

however bad we may find it according to our principles, however defective

we may discover this or that feature to be, still contains, particularly

if it belongs to the mature states of our time, all the essential factors

of its existence. But as it is easier to discover faults than to

comprehend the affirmative, people easily fall into the mistake of letting

individual aspects obscure the intrinsic organism of the State itself. The

State is no ideal work of art: it stands in the everyday world, in the

sphere, that is, of arbitrary act, accident, and error, and a variety of

faults may mar the regularity of its traits. But the ugliest man, the

criminal, a sick man and a cripple, is after all a living man; the

affirmative, Life, subsists in spite of the defect: and this affirmative

is here the theme(93).” “It is the theme of philosophy,” he adds, “to

ascertain the substance which is immanent in the show of the temporal and

transient, and the eternal which is present.”

(i.) Hegel as a Political Critic.

But if this is true, it is also to be remembered that the philosopher is,

like other men, the son of his age, and estimates the value of reality

from preconceptions and aspirations due to his generation. The historical

circumstances of his nation as well as the personal experiences of his

life help to determine his horizon, even in the effort to discover the

hidden pulse and movement of the social organism. This is specially

obvious in political philosophy. The conception of ethics and politics

which is presented in the _Encyclopaedia_ was in 1820 produced with more

detail as the _Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts_. Appearing, as it

did, two years after his appointment to a professorship at Berlin, and in

the midst of a political struggle between the various revolutionary and

conservative powers and parties of Germany, the book became, and long

remained, a target for embittered criticism. The so-called War of

Liberation or national movement to shake off the French yoke was due to a

coalition of parties, and had naturally been in part supported by

tendencies and aims which went far beyond the ostensive purpose either of

leaders or of combatants. Aspirations after a freer state were entwined

with radical and socialistic designs to reform the political hierarchy of

the Fatherland: high ideals and low vulgarities were closely intermixed:

and the noble enthusiasm of youth was occasionally played on by criminal

and anarchic intriguers. In a strong and wise and united Germany some of

these schemes might have been tolerated. But strength, wisdom, and unity

were absent. In the existing tension between Austria and Prussia for the

leadership, in the ill-adapted and effete constitutions of the several

principalities which were yet expected to realise the advance which had

taken place in society and ideas during the last thirty years, the outlook

on every hand seemed darker and more threatening than it might have

otherwise done. Governments, which had lost touch with their peoples,

suspected conspiracy and treason: and a party in the nation credited their

rulers with gratuitous designs against private liberty and rights. There

was a vast but ill-defined enthusiasm in the breasts of the younger world,

and it was shared by many of their teachers. It seemed to their immense

aspirations that the war of liberation had failed of its true object and

left things much as they were. The volunteers had not fought for the

political systems of Austria or Prussia, or for the three-and-thirty

princes of Germany: but for ideas, vague, beautiful, stimulating. To such

a mood the continuance of the old system was felt as a cruel deception and

a reaction. The governments on their part had not realised the full

importance of the spirit that had been aroused, and could not at a

moment’s notice set their house in order, even had there been a clearer

outlook for reform than was offered. They too had suffered, and had

realised their insecurity: and were hardly in a mood to open their gates

to the enemy.

Coming on such a situation of affairs, Hegel’s book would have been likely

in any case to provoke criticism. For it took up a line of political

theory which was little in accord with the temper of the age. The

conception of the state which it expounded is not far removed in

essentials from the conception which now dominates the political life of

the chief European nations. But in his own time it came upon ears which

were naturally disposed to misconceive it. It was unacceptable to the

adherents of the _ancien régime_, as much as to the liberals. It was

declared by one party to be a glorification of the Prussian state: by

another to rationalise the sanctities of authority. It was pointed out

that the new professor was a favourite of the leading minister, that his

influence was dominant in scholastic appointments, and that occasional

gratuities from the crown proved his acceptability. A contemporary

professor, Fries, remarked that Hegel’s theory of the state had grown “not

in the gardens of science but on the dung-hill of servility.” Hegel

himself was aware that he had planted a blow in the face of a “shallow and

pretentious sect,” and that his book had “given great offence to the

demagogic folk.” Alike in religious and political life he was impatient of

sentimentalism, of rhetorical feeling, of wordy enthusiasm. A positive

storm of scorn burst from him at much-promising and little-containing

declamation that appealed to the pathos of ideas, without sense of the

complex work of construction and the system of principles which were

needed to give them reality. His impatience of demagogic gush led him (in

the preface) into a tactless attack on Fries, who was at the moment in

disgrace for his participation in the demonstration at the Wartburg. It

led him to an attack on the bumptiousness of those who held that

conscientious conviction was ample justification for any proceeding:—an

attack which opponents were not unwilling to represent as directed against

the principle of conscience itself.

Yet Hegel’s views on the nature of political unity were not new. Their

nucleus had been formed nearly twenty years before. In the years that

immediately followed the French revolution he had gone through the usual

anarchic stage of intelligent youth. He had wondered whether humanity

might not have had a nobler destiny, had fate given supremacy to some

heresy rather than the orthodox creed of Christendom. He had seen religion

in the past “teaching what despotism wished,—contempt of the human race,

its incapacity for anything good(94).” But his earliest reflections on

political power belong to a later date, and are inspired, not so much by

the vague ideals of humanitarianism, as by the spirit of national

patriotism. They are found in a “Criticism of the German Constitution”

apparently dating from the year 1802(95). It is written after the peace of

Lunéville had sealed for Germany the loss of her provinces west of the

Rhine, and subsequent to the disasters of the German arms at Hohenlinden

and Marengo. It is almost contemporaneous with the measures of 1803 and

1804, which affirmed the dissolution of the “Holy Roman Empire” of German

name. The writer of this unpublished pamphlet sees his country in a

situation almost identical with that which Macchiavelli saw around him in

Italy. It is abused by petty despots, distracted by mean particularist

ambitions, at the mercy of every foreign power. It was such a scene which,

as Hegel recalls, had prompted and justified the drastic measures proposed

in the _Prince_,—measures which have been ill-judged by the closet

moralist, but evince the high statesmanship of the Florentine. In the

_Prince_, an intelligent reader can see “the enthusiasm of patriotism

underlying the cold and dispassionate doctrines.” Macchiavelli dared to

declare that Italy must become a state, and to assert that “there is no

higher duty for a state than to maintain itself, and to punish

relentlessly every author of anarchy,—the supreme, and perhaps sole

political crime.” And like teaching, Hegel adds, is needed for Germany.

Only, he concludes, no mere demonstration of the insanity of utter

separation of the particular from his kin will ever succeed in converting

the particularists from their conviction of the absoluteness of personal

and private rights. “Insight and intelligence always excite so much

distrust that force alone avails to justify them; then man yields them

obedience(96).”

“The German political edifice,” says the writer, “is nothing else but the

sum of the rights which the single parts have withdrawn from the whole;

and this justice, which is ever on the watch to prevent the state having

any power left, is the essence of the constitution.” The Peace of

Westphalia had but served to constitute or stereotype anarchy: the German

empire had by that instrument divested itself of all rights of political

unity, and thrown itself on the goodwill of its members. What then, it may

be asked, is, in Hegel’s view, the indispensable minimum essential to a

state? And the answer will be, organised strength,—a central and united

force. “The strength of a country lies neither in the multitude of its

inhabitants and fighting men, nor in its fertility, nor in its size, but

solely in the way its parts are by reasonable combination made a single

political force enabling everything to be used for the common defence.”

Hegel speaks scornfully of “the philanthropists and moralists who decry

politics as an endeavour and an art to seek private utility at the cost of

right”: he tells them that “it is foolish to oppose the interest or (as it

is expressed by the more morally-obnoxious word) the utility of the state

to its right”: that the “rights of a state are the utility of the state as

established and recognised by compacts”: and that “war” (which they would

fain abolish or moralise) “has to decide not which of the rights asserted

by either party is the true right (—for both parties have a true right),

but which right has to give way to the other.”

It is evident from these propositions that Hegel takes that view of

political supremacy which has been associated with the name of Hobbes. But

his views also reproduce the Platonic king of men, “who can rule and dare

not lie.” “All states,” he declares, “are founded by the sublime force of

great men, not by physical strength. The great man has something in his

features which others would gladly call their lord. They obey him against

their will. Their immediate will is his will, but their conscious will is

otherwise.... This is the prerogative of the great man to ascertain and to

express the absolute will. All gather round his banner. He is their God.”

“The state,” he says again, “is the self-certain absolute mind which

recognises no definite authority but its own: which acknowledges no

abstract rules of good and bad, shameful and mean, craft and deception.”

So also Hobbes describes the prerogatives of the sovereign Leviathan. But

the Hegelian God immanent in the state is a higher power than Hobbes

knows: he is no mortal, but in his truth an immortal God. He speaks by

(what in this early essay is called) the Absolute Government(97): the

government of the Law—the true impersonal sovereign,—distinct alike from

the single ruler and the multitude of the ruled. “It is absolutely only

universality as against particular. As this absolute, ideal, universal,

compared to which everything else is a particular, it is the phenomenon of

God. Its words are his decision, and it can appear and exist under no

other form.... The Absolute government is divine, self-sanctioned and not

made(98).” The real strength—the real connecting-mean which gives life to

sovereign and to subject—is intelligence free and entire, independent both

of what individuals feel and believe and of the quality of the ruler. “The

spiritual bond,” he says in a lower form of speech, “is public opinion: it

is the true legislative body, national assembly, declaration of the

universal will which lives in the execution of all commands.” This still

small voice of public opinion is the true and real parliament: not

literally making laws, but revealing them. If we ask, where does this

public opinion appear and how does it disengage itself from the masses of

partisan judgment? Hegel answers,—and to the surprise of those who have

not entered into the spirit of his age(99)—it is embodied in the Aged and

the Priests. Both of these have ceased to live in the real world: they are

by nature and function disengaged from the struggles of particular

existence, have risen above the divergencies of social classes. They

breathe the ether of pure contemplation. “The sunset of life gives them

mystical lore,” or at least removes from old age the distraction of

selfishness: while the priest is by function set apart from the divisions

of human interest. Understood in a large sense, Hegel’s view is that the

real voice of experience is elicited through those who have attained

indifference to the distorting influence of human parties, and who see

life steadily and whole.

If this utterance shows the little belief Hegel had in the ordinary

methods of legislation through “representative” bodies, and hints that the

real _substance_ of political life is deeper than the overt machinery of

political operation, it is evident that this theory of “divine right” is

of a different stamp from what used to go under that name. And, again,

though the power of the central state is indispensable, he is far from

agreeing with the so-called bureaucratic view that “a state is a machine

with a single spring which sets in motion all the rest of the machinery.”

“Everything,” he says, “which is not directly required to organise and

maintain the force for giving security without and within must be left by

the central government to the freedom of the citizens. Nothing ought to be

so sacred in the eyes of a government as to leave alone and to protect,

without regard to utilities, the free action of the citizens in such

matters as do not affect its fundamental aim: for this freedom is itself

sacred(100).” He is no friend of paternal bureaucracy. “The pedantic

craving to settle every detail, the mean jealousy against estates and

corporations administrating and directing their own affairs, the base

fault-finding with all independent action on the part of the citizens,

even when it has no immediate bearing on the main political interest, has

been decked out with reasons to show that no penny of public expenditure,

made for a country of twenty or thirty millions’ population, can be laid

out, without first being, not permitted, but commanded, controlled and

revised by the supreme government.” You can see, he remarks, in the first

village after you enter Prussian territory the lifeless and wooden routine

which prevails. The whole country suffers also from the way religion has

been mixed up with political rights, and a particular creed pronounced by

law indispensable both for sovereign and full-privileged subject. In a

word, the unity and vigour of the state is quite compatible with

considerable latitude and divergence in laws and judicature, in the

imposition and levying of taxes, in language, manners, civilisation and

religion. Equality in all these points is desirable for social unity: but

it is not indispensable for political strength.

This decided preference for the unity of the state against the system of

checks and counterchecks, which sometimes goes by the name of a

constitution, came out clearly in Hegel’s attitude in discussing the

dispute between the Würtembergers and their sovereign in 1815-16.

Würtemberg, with its complicated aggregation of local laws, had always

been a paradise of lawyers, and the feudal rights or privileges of the

local oligarchies—the so-called “good old law”—were the boast of the

country. All this had however been aggravated by the increase of territory

received in 1805: and the king, following the examples set by France and

even by Bavaria, promulgated of his own grace a “constitution” remodelling

the electoral system of the country. Immediately an outcry burst out

against the attempt to destroy the ancient liberties. Uhland tuned his

lyre to the popular cry: Rückert sang on the king’s side. To Hegel the

contest presented itself as a struggle between the attachment to

traditional rights, merely because they are old, and the resolution to

carry out reasonable reform whether it be agreeable to the reformed or

not: or rather he saw in it resistance of particularism, of separation,

clinging to use and wont, and basing itself on formal pettifogging

objections, against the spirit of organisation. Anything more he declined

to see. And probably he was right in ascribing a large part of the

opposition to inertia, to vanity and self-interest, combined with the want

of political perception of the needs of Würtemberg and Germany. But on the

other hand, he failed to remember the insecurity and danger of such “gifts

of the Danai”: he forgot the sense of free-born men that a constitution is

not something to be granted (_octroyé_) as a grace, but something that

must come by the spontaneous act of the innermost self of the community.

He dealt rather with the formal arguments which were used to refuse

progress, than with the underlying spirit which prompted the

opposition(101).

The philosopher lives (as Plato has well reminded us) too exclusively

within the ideal. Bent on the essential nucleus of institutions, he

attaches but slight importance to the variety of externals, and fails to

realise the practice of the law-courts. He forgets that what weighs

lightly in logic, may turn the scale in real life and experience. For

feeling and sentiment he has but scant respect: he is brusque and

uncompromising: and cannot realise all the difficulties and dangers that

beset the Idea in the mazes of the world, and may ultimately quite alter a

plan which at first seemed independent of petty details. Better than other

men perhaps he recognises in theory how the mere universal only exists

complete in an individual shape: but more than other men he forgets these

truths of insight, when the business of life calls for action or for

judgment. He cannot at a moment’s notice remember that he is, if not, as

Cicero says, _in faece Romuli_, the member of a degenerate commonwealth,

at least living in a world where good and evil are not, as logic

presupposes, sharply divided but intricately intertwined.

(ii.) The Ethics and Religion of the State.

This idealism of political theory is illustrated by the sketch of the

Ethical Life which he drew up about 1802. Under the name of “Ethical

System” it presents in concentrated or undeveloped shape the doctrine

which subsequently swelled into the “Philosophy of Mind.” At a later date

he worked out more carefully as introduction the psychological genesis of

moral and intelligent man, and he separated out more distinctly as a

sequel the universal powers which give to social life its higher

characters. In the earlier sketch the Ethical Part stands by itself, with

the consequence that Ethics bears a meaning far exceeding all that had

been lately called moral. The word “moral” itself he avoids(102). It

savours of excessive subjectivity, of struggle, of duty and conscience. It

has an ascetic ring about it—an aspect of negation, which seeks for

abstract holiness, and turns its back on human nature. Kant’s words

opposing duty to inclination, and implying that moral goodness involves a

struggle, an antagonism, a victory, seem to him (and to his time)

one-sided. That aspect of negation accordingly which Kant certainly began

with, and which Schopenhauer magnified until it became the all-in-all of

Ethics, Hegel entirely subordinates. Equally little does he like the

emphasis on the supremacy of insight, intention, conscience: they lead, he

thinks, to a view which holds the mere fact of conviction to be

all-important, as if it mattered not what we thought and believed and did,

so long as we were sincere in our belief. All this emphasis on the

good-will, on the imperative of duty, on the rights of conscience, has, he

admits, its justification in certain circumstances, as against mere

legality, or mere natural instinctive goodness; but it has been overdone.

Above all, it errs by an excess of individualism. It springs from an

attitude of reflection,—in which the individual, isolated in his conscious

and superficial individuality, yet tries—but probably tries in vain—to get

somewhat in touch with a universal which he has allowed to slip outside

him, forgetting that it is the heart and substance of his life. Kant,

indeed, hardly falls under this condemnation. For he aims at showing that

the rational will inevitably creates as rational a law or universal; that

the individual act becomes self-regulative, and takes its part in

constituting a system or realm of duty.

Still, on the whole, “morality” in this narrower sense belongs to an age

of reflection, and is formal or nominal goodness rather than the genuine

and full reality. It is the protest against mere instinctive or customary

virtue, which is but compliance with traditional authority, and compliance

with it as if it were a sort of quasi-natural law. Moralising reflection

is the awakening of subjectivity and of a deeper personality. The age

which thus precedes morality is not an age in which kindness, or love, or

generosity is unknown. And if Hegel says that “Morality,” strictly so

called, began with Socrates, he does not thereby accuse the pre-Socratic

Greeks of inhumanity. But what he does say is that such ethical life as

existed was in the main a thing of custom and law: of law, moreover, which

was not set objectively forward, but left still in the stage of

uncontradicted usage, a custom which was a second nature, part of the

essential and quasi-physical ordinance of life. The individual had not yet

learned to set his self-consciousness against these usages and ask for

their justification. These are like the so-called law of the Medes and

Persians which alters not: customs of immemorial antiquity and

unquestionable sway. They are part of a system of things with which for

good or evil the individual is utterly identified, bound as it were hand

and foot. These are, as a traveller says(103), “oral and unwritten

traditions which teach that certain rules of conduct are to be observed

under certain penalties; and without the aid of fixed records, or the

intervention of a succession of authorised depositaries and expounders,

these laws have been transmitted to father and son, through unknown

generations, and are fixed in the minds of the people as sacred and

unalterable.”

The antithesis then in Hegel, as in Kant, is between Law and Morality, or

rather Legality and Morality,—two abstractions to which human development

is alternately prone to attach supreme importance. The first stage in the

objectivation of intelligence or in the evolution of personality is the

constitution of mere, abstract, or strict right. It is the creation of

institutions and uniformities, i.e. of laws, or rights, which express

definite and stereotyped modes of behaviour. Or, if we look at it from the

individual’s standpoint, we may say his consciousness awakes to find the

world parcelled out under certain rules and divisions, which have

objective validity, and govern him with the same absolute authority as do

the circumstances of physical nature. Under their influence every rank and

individual is alike forced to bow: to each his place and function is

assigned by an order or system which claims an inviolable and eternal

supremacy. It is not the same place and function for each: but for each

the position and duties are predetermined in this metaphysically-physical

order. The situation and its duties have been created by super-human and

natural ordinance. As the Platonic myth puts it, each order in the social

hierarchy has been framed underground by powers that turned out men of

gold, and silver, and baser metal: or as the Norse legend tells, they are

the successive offspring of the white God, Heimdal, in his dealings with

womankind.

The central idea of the earlier social world is the supremacy of

rights—but not of right. The sum (for it cannot be properly called a

system) of rights is a self-subsistent world, to which man is but a

servant; and a second peculiarity of it is its inequality. If all are

equal before the laws, this only means here that the laws, with their

absolute and thorough inequality, are indifferent to the real and personal

diversities of individuals. Even the so-called equality of primitive law

is of the “Eye-for-eye, Tooth-for-tooth” kind; it takes no note of special

circumstances; it looks abstractly and rudely at facts, and maintains a

hard and fast uniformity, which seems the height of unfairness. Rule

stands by rule, usage beside usage,—a mere aggregate or multitude of petty

tyrants, reduced to no unity or system, and each pressing with all the

weight of an absolute mandate. The pettiest bit of ceremonial law is here

of equal dignity with the most far-reaching principle of political

obligation.

In the essay already referred to, Hegel has designated something analogous

to this as Natural or Physical Ethics, or as Ethics in its relative or

comparative stage. Here Man first shows his superiority to nature, or

enters on his properly ethical function, by transforming the physical

world into his possession. He makes himself the lord of natural

objects—stamping them as his, and not their own, making them his permanent

property, his tools, his instruments of exchange and production. The

fundamental ethical act is appropriation by labour, and the first ethical

world is the creation of an economic system, the institution of property.

For property, or at least possession and appropriation, is the dominant

idea, with its collateral and sequent principles. And at first, even human

beings are treated on the same method as other things: as objects in a

world of objects or aggregate of things: as things to be used and

acquired, as means and instruments,—not in any sense as ends in

themselves. It is a world in which the relation of master and slave is

dominant,—where owner and employer is set in antithesis against his tools

and chattels. But the Nemesis of his act issues in making the individual

the servant of his so-called property. He has become an objective power by

submitting himself to objectivity: he has literally put himself into the

object he has wrought, and is now a thing among things: for what he owns,

what he has appropriated, determines what he is. The real powers in the

world thus established are the laws of possession-holding: the laws

dominate man: and he is only freed from dependence on casual externals, by

making himself thoroughly the servant of his possessions.

The only salvation, and it is but imperfect, that can be reached on this

stage is by the family union. The sexual tie, is at first entirely on a

level with the other arrangements of the sphere. The man or woman is but a

chattel and a tool; a casual appropriation which gradually is transformed

into a permanent possession and a permanent bond(104). But, as the family

constituted itself, it helped to afford a promise of better things. An

ideal interest—the religion of the household—extending beyond the

individual, and beyond the moment,—binding past and present, and parents

to offspring, gave a new character to the relation of property. Parents

and children form a unity, which overrides and essentially permeates their

“difference” from each other: there is no exchange, no contract, nor, in

the stricter sense, property between the members. In the property-idea

they are lifted out of their isolation, and in the continuity of family

life there is a certain analogue of immortality. But, says Hegel, “though

the family be the highest totality of which Nature is capable, the

absolute identity is in it still inward, and is not instituted in absolute

form; and hence, too, the reproduction of the totality is an appearance,

the appearance of the children(105).” “The power and the intelligence, the

‘difference’ of the parents, stands in inverse proportion to the youth and

vigour of the child: and these two sides of life flee from and are sequent

on each other, and are reciprocally external(106).” Or, as we may put it,

the god of the family is a departed ancestor, a ghost in the land of the

dead: it has not really a continuous and unified life. In such a state of

society—a state of nature—and in its supreme form, the family, there is no

adequate principle which though real shall still give ideality and unity

to the self-isolating aspects of life. There is wanted something which

shall give expression to its “indifference,” which shall control the

tendency of this partial moralisation to sink at every moment into

individuality, and lift it from its immersion in nature. Family life and

economic groups (—for these two, which Hegel subsequently separates, are

here kept close together) need an ampler and wider life to keep them from

stagnating in their several selfishnesses.

This freshening and corrective influence they get in the first instance

from deeds of violence and crime. Here is the “negative unsettling” of the

narrow fixities, of the determinate conditions or relationships into which

the preceding processes of labour and acquisition have tended to

stereotype life. The harsh restriction brings about its own undoing. Man

may subject natural objects to his formative power, but the wild rage of

senseless devastation again and again bursts forth to restore the original

formlessness. He may build up his own pile of wealth, store up his private

goods, but the thief and the robber with the instincts of barbarian

socialism tread on his steps: and every stage of appropriation has for its

sequel a crop of acts of dispossession. He may secure by accumulation his

future life; but the murderer for gain’s sake cuts it short. And out of

all this as a necessary consequence stands avenging justice. And in the

natural world of ethics—where true moral life has not yet arisen—this is

mere retaliation or the _lex talionis_;—the beginning of an endless series

of vengeance and counter-vengeance, the blood-feud. Punishment, in the

stricter sense of the term,—which looks both to antecedents and effects in

character—cannot yet come into existence; for to punish there must be

something superior to individualities, an ethical idea embodied in an

institution, to which the injurer and the injured alike belong. But as yet

punishment is only vengeance, the personal and natural equivalent, the

physical reaction against injury, perhaps regulated and formulated by

custom and usage, but not essentially altered from its purely retaliatory

character. These crimes—or transgressions—are thus by Hegel quaintly

conceived as storms which clear the air—which shake the individualist out

of his slumber. The scene in which transgression thus acts is that of the

so-called state of nature, where particularism was rampant: where moral

right was not, but only the right of nature, of pre-occupation, of the

stronger, of the first maker and discoverer. Crime is thus the “dialectic”

which shakes the fixity of practical arrangements, and calls for something

in which the idea of a higher unity, a permanent substance of life, shall

find realisation.

The “positive supersession(107)” of individualism and naturalism in ethics

is by Hegel called “Absolute Ethics.” Under this title he describes the

ethics and religion of the state—a religion which is immanent in the

community, and an ethics which rises superior to particularity. The

picture he draws is a romance fashioned upon the model of the Greek

commonwealth as that had been idealised by Greek literature and by the

longings of later ages for a freer life. It is but one of the many modes

in which Helena—to quote Goethe—has fascinated the German Faust. He dreams

himself away from the prosaic worldliness of a German municipality to the

unfading splendour of the Greek city with its imagined coincidence of

individual will with universal purpose. There is in such a commonwealth no

pain of surrender and of sacrifice, and no subsequent compensation: for,

at the very moment of resigning self-will to common aims, he enjoys it

retained with the added zest of self-expansion. He is not so left to

himself as to feel from beyond the restraint of a law which controls—even

if it wisely and well controls—individual effort. There is for his happy

circumstances no possibility of doing otherwise. Or, it may be, Hegel has

reminiscences from the ideals of other nations than the Greek. He recalls

the Israelite depicted by the Law-adoring psalmist, whose delight is to do

the will of the Lord, whom the zeal of God’s house has consumed, whose

whole being runs on in one pellucid stream with the universal and eternal

stream of divine commandment. Such a frame of spirit, where the empirical

consciousness with all its soul and strength and mind identifies its

mission into conformity with the absolute order, is the mood of absolute

Ethics. It is what some have spoken of as the True life, as the Eternal

life; in it, says Hegel, the individual exists _auf ewige Weise_(108), as

it were _sub specie aeternitatis_: his life is hid with his fellows in the

common life of his people. His every act, and thought, and will, get their

being and significance from a reality which is established in him as a

permanent spirit. It is there that he, in the fuller sense, attains

αὐτάρκεια, or finds himself no longer a mere part, but an ideal totality.

This totality is realised under the particular form of a Nation (_Volk_),

which in the visible sphere represents (or rather is, as a particular) the

absolute and infinite. Such a unity is neither the mere sum of isolated

individuals, nor a mere majority ruling by numbers: but the fraternal and

organic commonwealth which brings all classes and all rights from their

particularistic independence into an ideal identity and indifference(109).

Here all are not merely equal before the laws: but the law itself is a

living and organic unity, self-correcting, subordinating and organising,

and no longer merely defining individual privileges and so-called

liberties. “In such conjunction of the universal with the particularity

lies the divinity of a nation: or, if we give this universal a separate

place in our ideas, it is the God of the nation.” But in this complete

accordance between concept and intuition, between visible and invisible,

where symbol and significate are one, religion and ethics are

indistinguishable. It is the old conception (and in its highest sense) of

Theocracy(110). God is the national head and the national life: and in him

all individuals have their “difference” rendered “indifferent.” “Such an

ethical life is absolute truth, for untruth is only in the fixture of a

single mode: but in the everlasting being of the nation all singleness is

superseded. It is absolute culture; for in the eternal is the real and

empirical annihilation and prescription of all limited modality. It is

absolute disinterestedness: for in the eternal there is nothing private

and personal. It, and each of its movements, is the highest beauty: for

beauty is but the eternal made actual and given concrete shape. It is

without pain, and blessed: for in it all difference and all pain is

superseded. It is the divine, absolute, real, existing and being, under no

veil; nor need one first raise it up into the ideality of divinity, and

extract it from the appearance and empirical intuition; but it is, and

immediately, absolute intuition(111).”

If we compare this language with the statement of the Encyclopaedia we can

see how for the moment Hegel’s eye is engrossed with the glory of the

ideal nation. In it, the moral life embraces and is co-extensive with

religion, art and science: practice and theory are at one: life in the

idea knows none of those differences which, in the un-ideal world, make

art and morality often antithetical, and set religion at variance with

science. It is, as we have said, a memory of Greek and perhaps Hebrew

ideals. Or rather it is by the help of such memories the affirmation of

the essential unity of life—the true, complete, many-sided life—which is

the presupposition and idea that culture and morals rest upon and from

which they get their supreme sanction, i.e. their constitutive principle

and unity. Even in the Encyclopaedia(112) Hegel endeavours to guard

against the severance of morality and art and philosophy which may be

rashly inferred in consequence of his serial order of treatment.

“Religion,” he remarks, “is the very substance of the moral life itself

and of the state.... The ethical life is the divine spirit indwelling in

consciousness, as it is actually present in a nation and its individual

members.” Yet, as we see, there is a distinction. The process of history

carries out a judgment on nation after nation, and reveals the divine as

not only immanent in the ethical life but as ever expanding the limited

national spirit till it become a spirit of universal humanity. Still—and

this is perhaps for each time always the more important—the national

unity—not indeed as a multitude, nor as a majority—is the supreme real

appearance of the Eternal and Absolute.

Having thus described the nation as an organic totality, he goes on to

point out that the political constitution shows this character by forming

a triplicity of political orders. In one of these there is but a silent,

practical identity, in faith and trust, with the totality: in the second

there is a thorough disruption of interest into particularity: and in the

third, there is a living and intellectual identity or indifference, which

combines the widest range of individual development with the completest

unity of political loyalty. This last order is that which lives in

conscious identification of private with public duty: all that it does has

a universal and public function. Such a body is the ideal Nobility—the

nobility which is the _servus servorum Dei_, the supreme servant of

humanity. Its function is to maintain general interests, to give the other

orders (peasantry and industrials) security,—receiving in return from

these others the means of subsistence. _Noblesse oblige_ gives the

death-blow to particular interests, and imposes the duty of exhibiting, in

the clearest form, the supreme reality of absolute morality, and of being

to the rest an unperturbed ideal of aesthetic, ethical, religious, and

philosophical completeness.

It is here alone, in this estate which is absolutely disinterested, that

the virtues appear in their true light. To the ordinary moralising

standpoint they seem severally to be, in their separation, charged with

independent value. But from the higher point of view the existence, and

still more the accentuation of single virtues, is a mark of

incompleteness. Even quality, it has been said, involves its defects: it

can only shine by eclipsing or reflecting something else. The completely

moral is not the sum of the several virtues, but the reduction of them to

indifference. It is thus that when Plato tries to get at the unity of

virtue, their aspect of difference tends to be subordinated. “The movement

of absolute morality runs through all the virtues, but settles fixedly in

none.” It is more than love _to_ fatherland, and nation, and laws:—that

still implies a relation to something and involves a difference. For

love—the mortal passion, where “self is not annulled”—is the process of

approximation, while unity is not yet attained, but wished and aimed at:

and when it is complete—and become “such love as spirits know(113)”—it

gives place to a calmer rest and an active immanence. The absolute

morality is _life in_ the fatherland and for the nation. In the individual

however it is the process upward and inward that we see, not the

consummation. Then the identity appears as an ideal, as a tendency not yet

accomplished to its end, a possibility not yet made fully actual. At

bottom—in the divine substance in which the individual inheres—the

identity is present: but in the appearance, we have only the passage from

possible to actual, a passage which has the aspect of a struggle. Hence

the moral act appears as a virtue, with merit or desert. It is accordingly

the very characteristic of virtue to signalise its own incompleteness: it

emerges into actuality only through antagonism, and with a taint of

imperfection clinging to it. Thus, in the field of absolute morality, if

the virtues appear, it is only in their transiency. If they were

undisputedly real in morality, they would not separately show. To feel

that you have done well implies that you have not done wholly well:

self-gratulation in meritorious deed is the re-action from the shudder at

feeling that the self was not wholly good.

The essential unity of virtue—its negative character as regards all the

empirical variety of virtues—is seen in the excellences required by the

needs of war. These military requirements demonstrate the mere relativity

and therefore non-virtuousness of the special virtues. They equally

protest against the common beliefs in the supreme dignity of labour and

its utilities. But if bravery or soldierlike virtue be essentially a

virtue of virtues, it is only a negative virtue after all. It is the blast

of the universal sweeping away all the habitations and fixed structures of

particularist life. If it is a unity of virtue, it is only a negative

unity—an indifference. If it avoid the parcelling of virtue into a number

of imperfect and sometimes contradictory parts, it does so only to present

a bare negation. The soldier, therefore, if in potentiality the unity of

all the virtues, may tend in practice to represent the ability to do

without any of them(114).

The home of these “relative” virtues—of morality in the ordinary sense—is

the life of the second order in the commonwealth: the order of industry

and commerce. In this sphere the idea of the universal is gradually lost

to view: it becomes, says Hegel, only a thought or a creature of the mind,

which does not affect practice. The materialistic worker of civilisation

does not see further than the empirical existence of individuals: his

horizon is limited by the family, and his final ideal is a competency of

comfort in possessions and revenues. The supreme universal to which he

attains as the climax of his evolution is only money. But it is only with

the vaster development of commerce that this terrible consequence ensues.

At first as a mere individual, he has higher aims, though not the highest.

He has a limited ideal determined by his special sphere of work. To win

respect—the character for a limited truthfulness and honesty and skilful

work—is his ambition. He lives in a conceit of his performance—his

utility—the esteem of his special circle. To his commercial soul the

military order is a scarecrow and a nuisance: military honour is but

trash. Yet if his range of idea is narrow and engrossing in details, his

aim is to get worship, to be recognised as the best in his little sphere.

But with the growth of the trading spirit his character changes: he

becomes the mere capitalist, is denationalised, has no definite work and

can claim no individualised function. Money now measures all things: it is

the sole ultimate reality. It transforms everything into a relation of

contract: even vengeance is equated in terms of money. Its motto is, The

Exchanges must be honoured, though honour and morality may go to the dogs.

So far as it is concerned, there is no nation, but a federation of

shopkeepers. Such an one is the _bourgeois_ (the _Bürger_, as distinct

from the peasant or _Bauer_ and the _Adel_). As an artisan—i.e. a mere

industrial, he knows no country, but at best the reputation and interest

of his own guild-union with its partial object. He is narrow, but honest

and respectable. As a mere commercial agent, he knows no country: his

field is the world, but the world not in its concreteness and variety, but

in the abstract aspect of a money-bag and an exchange. The larger totality

is indeed not altogether out of sight. But if he contribute to the needy,

either his sacrifice is lifeless in proportion as it becomes general, or

loses generality as it becomes lively. As regards his general services to

the great life of his national state(115), they are unintelligently and

perhaps grudgingly rendered.

Of the peasant order Hegel has less to say. On one side the “country” as

opposed to the “town” has a closer natural sympathy with the common and

general interest: and the peasantry is the undifferentiated, solid and

sound, basis of the national life. It forms the submerged mass, out of

which the best soldiers are made, and which out of the depths of earth

brings forward nourishment as well as all the materials of elementary

necessity. Faithfulness and loyalty are its virtues: but it is personal

allegiance to a commanding superior,—not to a law or a general view—for

the peasant is weak in comprehensive intelligence, though shrewd in

detailed observation.

Of the purely political function of the state Hegel in this sketch says

almost nothing. But under the head of the general government of the state

he deals with its social functions. For a moment he refers to the

well-known distinction of the legislative, judicial and executive powers.

But it is only to remark that “in every governmental act all three are

conjoined. They are abstractions, none of which can get a reality of its

own,—which, in other words, cannot be constituted and organised as powers.

Legislation, judicature, and executive are something completely formal,

empty, and contentless.... Whether the others are or are not bare

abstractions, empty activities, depends entirely on the executive power;

and this is absolutely the government(116).” Treating government as the

organic movement by which the universal and the particular in the

commonwealth come into relations, he finds that it presents three forms,

or gives rise to three systems. The highest and last of these is the

“educational” system. By this he understands all that activity by which

the intelligence of the state tries directly to mould and guide the

character and fortunes of its members: all the means of culture and

discipline, whether in general or for individuals, all training to public

function, to truthfulness, to good manners. Under the same head come

conquest and colonisation as state agencies. The second system is the

judicial, which instead of, like the former, aiming at the formation or

reformation of its members is satisfied by subjecting individual

transgression to a process of rectification by the general principle. With

regard to the system of judicature, Hegel argues for a variety of

procedure to suit different ranks, and for a corresponding modification of

penalties. “Formal rigid equality is just what does not spare the

character. The same penalty which in one estate brings no infamy causes in

another a deep and irremediable hurt.” And with regard to the after life

of the transgressor who has borne his penalty: “Punishment is the

reconciliation of the law with itself. No further reproach for his crime

can be addressed to the person who has undergone his punishment. He is

restored to membership of his estate(117).”

In the first of the three systems, the economic system, or “System of

wants,” the state seems at first hardly to appear in its universal and

controlling function at all. Here the individual depends for the

satisfaction of his physical needs on a blind, unconscious destiny, on the

obscure and incalculable properties of supply and demand in the whole

interconnexion of commodities. But even this is not all. With the

accumulation of wealth in inequality, and the growth of vast capitals,

there is substituted for the dependence of the individual on the general

resultant of a vast number of agencies a dependence on one enormously rich

individual, who can control the physical destinies of a nation. But a

nation, truly speaking, is there no more. The industrial order has parted

into a mere abstract workman on one hand, and the _grande richesse_ on the

other. “It has lost its capacity of an organic absolute intuition and of

respect for the divine—external though its divinity be: and there sets in

the bestiality of contempt for all that is noble. The mere wisdomless

universal, the mass of wealth, is the essential: and the ethical

principle, the absolute bond of the nation, is vanished; and the nation is

dissolved(118).”

It would be a long and complicated task to sift, in these ill-digested but

profound suggestions, the real meaning from the formal statement. They

are, like Utopia, beyond the range of practical politics. The modern

reader, whose political conceptions are limited by contemporary

circumstance, may find them archaic, medieval, quixotic. But for those who

behind the words and forms can see the substance and the idea, they will

perhaps come nearer the conception of ideal commonwealth than many

reforming programmes. Compared with the maturer statements of the

_Philosophy of Law_, they have the faults of the Romantic age to which

their inception belongs. Yet even in that later exposition there is upheld

the doctrine of the supremacy of the eternal State against everything

particular, class-like, and temporary; a doctrine which has made Hegel—as

it made Fichte—a voice in that “professorial socialism” which is at least

as old as Plato.

INTRODUCTION.

§ 377. The knowledge of Mind is the highest and hardest, just because it

is the most “concrete” of sciences. The significance of that “absolute”

commandment, _Know thyself_—whether we look at it in itself or under the

historical circumstances of its first utterance—is not to promote mere

self-knowledge in respect of the _particular_ capacities, character,

propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commands

means that of man’s genuine reality—of what is essentially and ultimately

true and real—of mind as the true and essential being. Equally little is

it the purport of mental philosophy to teach what is called _knowledge of

men_—the knowledge whose aim is to detect the _peculiarities_, passions,

and foibles of other men, and lay bare what are called the recesses of the

human heart. Information of this kind is, for one thing, meaningless,

unless on the assumption that we know the _universal_—man as man, and,

that always must be, as mind. And for another, being only engaged with

casual, insignificant and _untrue_ aspects of mental life, it fails to

reach the underlying essence of them all—the mind itself.

§ 378. Pneumatology, or, as it was also called, Rational Psychology, has

been already alluded to in the Introduction to the Logic as an _abstract_

and generalising metaphysic of the subject. _Empirical_ (or inductive)

psychology, on the other hand, deals with the “concrete” mind: and, after

the revival of the sciences, when observation and experience had been made

the distinctive methods for the study of concrete reality, such psychology

was worked on the same lines as other sciences. In this way it came about

that the metaphysical theory was kept outside the inductive science, and

so prevented from getting any concrete embodiment or detail: whilst at the

same time the inductive science clung to the conventional common-sense

metaphysic, with its analysis into forces, various activities, &c., and

rejected any attempt at a “speculative” treatment.

The books of Aristotle on the Soul, along with his discussions on its

special aspects and states, are for this reason still by far the most

admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this

topic. The main aim of a philosophy of mind can only be to re-introduce

unity of idea and principle into the theory of mind, and so re-interpret

the lesson of those Aristotelian books.

§ 379. Even our own sense of the mind’s _living_ unity naturally protests

against any attempt to break it up into different faculties, forces, or,

what comes to the same thing, activities, conceived as independent of each

other. But the craving for a _comprehension_ of the unity is still further

stimulated, as we soon come across distinctions between mental freedom and

mental determinism, antitheses between free _psychic_ agency and the

corporeity that lies external to it, whilst we equally note the intimate

interdependence of the one upon the other. In modern times especially the

phenomena of _animal magnetism_ have given, even in experience, a lively

and visible confirmation of the underlying unity of soul, and of the power

of its “ideality.” Before these facts, the rigid distinctions of practical

common sense were struck with confusion; and the necessity of a

“speculative” examination with a view to the removal of difficulties was

more directly forced upon the student.

§ 380. The “concrete” nature of mind involves for the observer the

peculiar difficulty that the several grades and special types which

develop its intelligible unity in detail are not left standing as so many

separate existences confronting its more advanced aspects. It is otherwise

in external nature. There, matter and movement, for example, have a

manifestation all their own—it is the solar system; and similarly the

_differentiae_ of sense-perception have a sort of earlier existence in the

properties of _bodies_, and still more independently in the four elements.

The species and grades of mental evolution, on the contrary, lose their

separate existence and become factors, states and features in the higher

grades of development. As a consequence of this, a lower and more abstract

aspect of mind betrays the presence in it, even to experience, of a higher

grade. Under the guise of sensation, e.g., we may find the very highest

mental life as its modification or its embodiment. And so sensation, which

is but a mere form and vehicle, may to the superficial glance seem to be

the proper seat and, as it were, the source of those moral and religious

principles with which it is charged; and the moral and religious

principles thus modified may seem to call for treatment as species of

sensation. But at the same time, when lower grades of mental life are

under examination, it becomes necessary, if we desire to point to actual

cases of them in experience, to direct attention to more advanced grades

for which they are mere forms. In this way subjects will be treated of by

anticipation which properly belong to later stages of development (e.g. in

dealing with natural awaking from sleep we speak by anticipation of

consciousness, or in dealing with mental derangement we must speak of

intellect).

What Mind (or Spirit) is.

§ 381. From our point of view Mind has for its _presupposition_ Nature, of

which it is the truth, and for that reason its _absolute prius_. In this

its truth Nature is vanished, and mind has resulted as the “Idea” entered

on possession of itself. Here the subject and object of the Idea are

one—either is the intelligent unity, the notion. This identity is

_absolute negativity_—for whereas in Nature the intelligent unity has its

objectivity perfect but externalised, this self-externalisation has been

nullified and the unity in that way been made one and the same with

itself. Thus at the same time it is this identity only so far as it is a

return out of nature.

§ 382. For this reason the essential, but formally essential, feature of

mind is Liberty: i.e. it is the notion’s absolute negativity or

self-identity. Considered as this formal aspect, it _may_ withdraw itself

from everything external and from its own externality, its very existence;

it can thus submit to infinite _pain_, the negation of its individual

immediacy: in other words, it can keep itself affirmative in this

negativity and possess its own identity. All this is possible so long as

it is considered in its abstract self-contained universality.

§ 383. This universality is also its determinate sphere of being. Having a

being of its own, the universal is self-particularising, whilst it still

remains self-identical. Hence the special mode of mental being is

“_manifestation_.” The spirit is not some one mode or meaning which finds

utterance or externality only in a form distinct from itself: it does not

manifest or reveal _something_, but its very mode and meaning is this

revelation. And thus in its mere possibility Mind is at the same moment an

infinite, “absolute,” _actuality_.

§ 384. _Revelation_, taken to mean the revelation of the _abstract_ Idea,

is an unmediated transition to Nature which _comes_ to be. As Mind is

free, its manifestation is to _set forth_ Nature as _its_ world; but

because it is reflection, it, in thus setting forth its world, at the same

time _presupposes_ the world as a nature independently existing. In the

intellectual sphere to reveal is thus to create a world as its being—a

being in which the mind procures the _affirmation_ and _truth_ of its

freedom.

_The Absolute is Mind_ (Spirit)—this is the supreme definition of the

Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burthen

was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy:

it was the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science:

and it is this impulse that must explain the history of the world. The

word “Mind” (Spirit)—and some glimpse of its meaning—was found at an early

period: and the spirituality of God is the lesson of Christianity. It

remains for philosophy in its own element of intelligible unity to get

hold of what was thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the

ultimate reality: and that problem is not genuinely, and by rational

methods, solved so long as liberty and intelligible unity is not the theme

and the soul of philosophy.

Subdivision.

§ 385. The development of Mind (Spirit) is in three stages:—

(1) In the form of self-relation: within it it has the _ideal_ totality of

the Idea—i.e. it has before it all that its notion contains: its being is

to be self-contained and free. This is _Mind Subjective_.

(2) In the form of _reality_: realised, i.e. in a _world_ produced and to

be produced by it: in this world freedom presents itself under the shape

of necessity. This is _Mind Objective_.

(3) In that unity of mind as objectivity and, of mind as ideality and

concept, which essentially and actually is and for ever produces itself,

mind in its absolute truth. This is _Mind Absolute_.

§ 386. The two first parts of the doctrine of Mind embrace the finite

mind. Mind is the infinite Idea; thus finitude here means the

disproportion between the concept and the reality—but with the

qualification that it is a shadow cast by the mind’s own light—a show or

illusion which the mind implicitly imposes as a barrier to itself, in

order, by its removal, actually to realise and become conscious of freedom

as _its_ very being, i.e. to be fully _manifested_. The several steps of

this activity, on each of which, with their semblance of being, it is the

function of the finite mind to linger, and through which it has to pass,

are steps in its liberation. In the full truth of that liberation is given

the identification of the three stages—finding a world presupposed before

us, generating a world as our own creation, and gaining freedom from it

and in it. To the infinite form of this truth the show purifies itself

till it becomes a consciousness of it.

A rigid application of the category of finitude by the abstract logician

is chiefly seen in dealing with Mind and reason: it is held not a mere

matter of strict logic, but treated also as a moral and religious concern,

to adhere to the point of view of finitude, and the wish to go further is

reckoned a mark of audacity, if not of insanity, of thought. Whereas in

fact such a _modesty_ of thought, as treats the finite as something

altogether fixed and _absolute_, is the worst of virtues; and to stick to

a post which has no sound ground in itself is the most unsound sort of

theory. The category of finitude was at a much earlier period elucidated

and explained at its place in the Logic: an elucidation which, as in logic

for the more specific though still simple thought-forms of finitude, so in

the rest of philosophy for the concrete forms, has merely to show that the

finite _is not_, i.e. is not the truth, but merely a transition and an

emergence to something higher. This finitude of the spheres so far

examined is the dialectic that makes a thing have its cessation by another

and in another: but Spirit, the intelligent unity and the _implicit_

Eternal, is itself just the consummation of that internal act by which

nullity is nullified and vanity is made vain. And so, the modesty alluded

to is a retention of this vanity—the finite—in opposition to the true: it

is itself therefore vanity. In the course of the mind’s development we

shall see this vanity appear as _wickedness_ at that turning-point at

which mind has reached its extreme immersion in its subjectivity and its

most central contradiction.

SECTION I. MIND SUBJECTIVE.

§ 387. Mind, on the ideal stage of its development, is mind as

_cognitive_: Cognition, however, being taken here not as a merely logical

category of the Idea (§ 223), but in the sense appropriate to the

_concrete_ mind.

Subjective mind is:—

(A) Immediate or implicit: a soul—the Spirit in _Nature_—the object

treated by _Anthropology_.

(B) Mediate or explicit: still as identical reflection into itself and

into other things: mind in correlation or particularisation:

consciousness—the object treated by the _Phenomenology of Mind_.

(C) Mind defining itself in itself, as an independent subject—the object

treated by _Psychology_.

In the Soul is the _awaking of Consciousness_: Consciousness sets itself

up as Reason, awaking at one bound to the sense of its rationality: and

this Reason by its activity emancipates itself to objectivity and the

consciousness of its intelligent unity.

For an intelligible unity or principle of comprehension each modification

it presents is an advance of _development_: and so in mind every character

under which it appears is a stage in a process of specification and

development, a step forward towards its goal, in order to make itself

into, and to realise in itself, what it implicitly is. Each step, again,

is itself such a process, and its product is that what the mind was

implicitly at the beginning (and so for the observer) it is _for

itself_—for the special form, viz. which the mind has in that step. The

ordinary method of psychology is to narrate what the mind or soul is, what

happens to it, what it does. The soul is presupposed as a ready-made

agent, which displays such features as its acts and utterances, from which

we can learn what it is, what sort of faculties and powers it

possesses—all without being aware that the act and utterance of what the

soul is really invests it with that character in our conception and makes

it reach a higher stage of being than it explicitly had before.

We must, however, distinguish and keep apart from the progress here

studied what we call education and instruction. The sphere of education is

the individual’s only: and its aim is to bring the universal mind to exist

in them. But in the philosophic theory of mind, mind is studied as

self-instruction and self-education in very essence; and its acts and

utterances are stages in the process which brings it forward to itself,

links it in unity with itself, and so makes it actual mind.

Sub-Section A. Anthropology. The Soul.

§ 388. Spirit (Mind) _came into_ being as the truth of Nature. But not

merely is it, as such a result, to be held the true and real first of what

went before: this becoming or transition bears in the sphere of the notion

the special meaning of “_free judgment_.” Mind, thus come into being,

means therefore that Nature in its own self realises its untruth and sets

itself aside: it means that Mind presupposes itself no longer as the

universality which in corporal individuality is always self-externalised,

but as a universality which in its concretion and totality is one and

simple. At such a stage it is not yet mind, but _soul_.

§ 389. The soul is no separate immaterial entity. Wherever there is

Nature, the soul is its universal immaterialism, its simple “ideal” life.

Soul is the _substance_ or “absolute” basis of all the particularising and

individualising of mind: it is in the soul that mind finds the material on

which its character is wrought, and the soul remains the pervading,

identical ideality of it all. But as it is still conceived thus

abstractly, the soul is only the _sleep_ of mind—the passive νοῦς of

Aristotle, which is potentially all things.

The question of the immateriality of the soul has no interest, except

where, on the one hand, matter is regarded as something _true_, and mind

conceived as a _thing_, on the other. But in modern times even the

physicists have found matters grow thinner in their hands: they have come

upon _imponderable_ matters, like heat, light, &c., to which they might

perhaps add space and time. These “imponderables,” which have lost the

property (peculiar to matter) of gravity and, in a sense, even the

capacity of offering resistance, have still, however, a sensible existence

and outness of part to part; whereas the “vital”_ matter_, which may also

be found enumerated among them, not merely lacks gravity, but even every

other aspect of existence which might lead us to treat it as material. The

fact is that in the Idea of Life the self-externalism of nature is

_implicitly_ at an end: subjectivity is the very substance and conception

of life—with this proviso, however, that its existence or objectivity is

still at the same time forfeited to the sway of self-externalism. It is

otherwise with Mind. There, in the intelligible unity which exists as

freedom, as absolute negativity, and not as the immediate or natural

individual, the object or the reality of the intelligible unity is the

unity itself; and so the self-externalism, which is the fundamental

feature of matter, has been completely dissipated and transmuted into

universality, or the subjective ideality of the conceptual unity. Mind is

the existent truth of matter—the truth that matter itself has no truth.

A cognate question is that of the _community of soul and body_. This

community (interdependence) was assumed as a _fact_, and the only problem

was how to _comprehend_ it. The usual answer, perhaps, was to call it an

_incomprehensible_ mystery; and, indeed, if we take them to be absolutely

antithetical and absolutely independent, they are as impenetrable to each

other as one piece of matter to another, each being supposed to be found

only in the pores of the other, i.e. where the other is not: whence

Epicurus, when attributing to the gods a residence in the pores, was

consistent in not imposing on them any connexion with the world. A

somewhat different answer has been given by all philosophers since this

relation came to be expressly discussed. Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza,

and Leibnitz have all indicated God as this _nexus_. They meant that the

finitude of soul and matter were only ideal and unreal distinctions; and,

so holding, these philosophers took God, not, as so often is done, merely

as another word for the incomprehensible, but rather as the sole true

identity of finite mind and matter. But either this identity, as in the

case of Spinoza, is too abstract, or, as in the case of Leibnitz, though

his Monad of monads brings things into being, it does so only by an act of

judgment or choice. Hence, with Leibnitz, the result is a distinction

between soul and the corporeal (or material), and the identity is only

like the _copula_ of a judgment, and does not rise or develop into system,

into the absolute syllogism.

§ 390. The Soul is at first—

(_a_) In its immediate natural mode—the natural soul, which only _is_.

(_b_) Secondly, it is a soul which _feels_, as individualised, enters into

correlation with its immediate being, and, in the modes of that being,

retains an abstract independence.

(_c_) Thirdly, its immediate being—or corporeity—is moulded into it, and

with that corporeity it exists as _actual_ soul.

(a) The Physical Soul(119).

§ 391. The soul universal, described, it may be, as an _anima mundi_, a

world-soul, must not be fixed on that account as a single subject; it is

rather the universal _substance_ which has its actual truth only in

individuals and single subjects. Thus, when it presents itself as a single

soul, it is a single soul which _is_ merely: its only modes are modes of

natural life. These have, so to speak, behind its ideality a free

existence: i.e. they are natural objects for consciousness, but objects to

which the soul as such does not behave as to something external. These

features rather are _physical qualities_ of which it finds itself

possessed.

(α) Physical Qualities(120).

§ 392. While still a “substance” (i.e. a physical soul) the mind (1) takes

part in the general planetary life, feels the difference of climates, the

changes of the seasons and the periods of the day, &c. This life of nature

for the main shows itself only in occasional strain or disturbance of

mental tone.

In recent times a good deal has been said of the cosmical, sidereal, and

telluric life of man. In such a sympathy with nature the animals

essentially live: their specific characters and their particular phases of

growth depend, in many cases completely, and always more or less, upon it.

In the case of man these points of dependence lose importance, just in

proportion to his civilisation, and the more his whole frame of soul is

based upon a substructure of mental freedom. The history of the world is

not bound up with revolutions in the solar system, any more than the

destinies of individuals with the positions of the planets.

The difference of climate has a more solid and vigorous influence. But the

response to the changes of the seasons and hours of the day is found only

in faint changes of mood, which come expressly to the fore only in morbid

states (including insanity) and at periods when the self-conscious life

suffers depression.

In nations less intellectually emancipated, which therefore live more in

harmony with nature, we find amid their superstitions and aberrations of

imbecility _a few_ real cases of such sympathy, and on that foundation

what seems to be marvellous prophetic vision of coming conditions and of

events arising therefrom. But as mental freedom gets a deeper hold, even

these few and slight susceptibilities, based upon participation in the

common life of nature, disappear. Animals and plants, on the contrary,

remain for ever subject to such influences.

§ 393. (2) According to the concrete differences of the terrestrial globe,

the general planetary life of the nature-governed mind specialises itself

and breaks up into the several nature-governed minds which, on the whole,

give expression to the nature of the geographical continents and

constitute the diversities of _race_.

The contrast between the earth’s poles, the land towards the north pole

being more aggregated and preponderant over sea, whereas in the southern

hemisphere it runs out in sharp points, widely distant from each other,

introduces into the differences of continents a further modification which

Treviranus (_Biology_, Part II) has exhibited in the case of the flora and

fauna.

§ 394. This diversity descends into specialities, that may be termed

_local_ minds—shown in the outward modes of life and occupation, bodily

structure and disposition, but still more in the inner tendency and

capacity of the intellectual and moral character of the several peoples.

Back to the very beginnings of national history we see the several nations

each possessing a persistent type of its own.

§ 395. (3) The soul is further de-universalised into the individualised

subject. But this subjectivity is here only considered as a

differentiation and singling out of the modes which nature gives; we find

it as the special temperament, talent, character, physiognomy, or other

disposition and idiosyncrasy, of families or single individuals.

(β) Physical Alterations.

§ 396. Taking the soul as an individual, we find its diversities, as

alterations in it, the one permanent subject, and as stages in its

development. As they are at once physical and mental diversities, a more

concrete definition or description of them would require us to anticipate

an acquaintance with the formed and matured mind.

The (1) first of these is the natural lapse of the ages in man’s life. He

begins with _Childhood_—mind wrapt up in itself. His next step is the

fully-developed antithesis, the strain and struggle of a universality

which is still subjective (as seen in ideals, fancies, hopes, ambitions)

against his immediate individuality. And that individuality marks both the

world which, as it exists, fails to meet his ideal requirements, and the

position of the individual himself, who is still short of independence and

not fully equipped for the part he has to play (_Youth_). Thirdly, we see

man in his true relation to his environment, recognising the objective

necessity and reasonableness of the world as he finds it,—a world no

longer incomplete, but able in the work which it collectively achieves to

afford the individual a place and a security for his performance. By his

share in this collective work he first is really _somebody_, gaining an

effective existence and an objective value (_Manhood_). Last of all comes

the finishing touch to this unity with objectivity: a unity which, while

on its realist side it passes into the _inertia_ of deadening habit, on

its idealist side gains freedom from the limited interests and

entanglements of the outward present (_Old Age_).

§ 397. (2) Next we find the individual subject to a _real_ antithesis,

leading it to seek and find _itself_ in _another_ individual. This—the

_sexual relation_—on a physical basis, shows, on its one side,

subjectivity remaining in an instinctive and emotional harmony of moral

life and love, and not pushing these tendencies to an extreme _universal_

phase, in purposes political, scientific or artistic; and on the other,

shows an active half, where the individual is the vehicle of a struggle of

universal and objective interests with the given conditions (both of his

own existence and of that of the external world), carrying out these

universal principles into a unity with the world which is his own work.

The sexual tie acquires its moral and spiritual significance and function

in the _family_.

§ 398. (3) When the individuality, or self-centralised being,

distinguishes itself from its _mere_ being, this immediate judgment is the

_waking_ of the soul, which confronts its self-absorbed natural life, in

the first instance, as one natural quality and state confronts another

state, viz. _sleep_.—The waking is not merely for the observer, or

externally distinct from the sleep: it is itself the _judgment_ (primary

partition) of the individual soul—which is self-existing only as it

relates its self-existence to its mere existence, distinguishing itself

from its still undifferentiated universality. The waking state includes

generally all self-conscious and rational activity in which the mind

realises its own distinct self.—Sleep is an invigoration of this

activity—not as a merely negative rest from it, but as a return back from

the world of specialisation, from dispersion into phases where it has

grown hard and stiff,—a return into the general nature of subjectivity,

which is the substance of those specialised energies and their absolute

master.

The distinction between sleep and waking is one of those _posers_, as they

may be called, which are often addressed to philosophy:—Napoleon, e.g., on

a visit to the University of Pavia, put this question to the class of

ideology. The characterisation given in the section is abstract; it

primarily treats waking merely as a natural fact, containing the mental

element _implicite_ but not yet as invested with a special being of its

own. If we are to speak more concretely of this distinction (in

fundamentals it remains the same), we must take the self-existence of the

individual soul in its higher aspects as the Ego of consciousness and as

intelligent mind. The difficulty raised anent the distinction of the two

states properly arises, only when we also take into account the dreams in

sleep and describe these dreams, as well as the mental representations in

the sober waking consciousness, under one and the same title of mental

representations. Thus superficially classified as states of mental

representation the two coincide, because we have lost sight of the

difference; and in the case of any assignable distinction of waking

consciousness, we can always return to the trivial remark that all this is

nothing more than mental idea. But the concrete theory of the waking soul

in its realised being views it as _consciousness_ and _intellect_: and the

world of intelligent consciousness is something quite different from a

picture of mere ideas and images. The latter are in the main only

externally conjoined, in an unintelligent way, by the laws of the

so-called _Association of Ideas_; though here and there of course logical

principles may also be operative. But in the waking state man behaves

essentially as a concrete ego, an intelligence: and because of this

intelligence his sense-perception stands before him as a concrete totality

of features in which each member, each point, takes up its place as at the

same time determined through and with all the rest. Thus the facts

embodied in his sensation are authenticated, not by his mere subjective

representation and distinction of the facts as something external from the

person, but by virtue of the concrete interconnexion in which each part

stands with all parts of this complex. The waking state is the concrete

consciousness of this mutual corroboration of each single factor of its

content by all the others in the picture as perceived. The consciousness

of this interdependence need not be explicit and distinct. Still this

general setting to all sensations is implicitly present in the concrete

feeling of self.—In order to see the difference of dreaming and waking we

need only keep in view the Kantian distinction between subjectivity and

objectivity of mental representation (the latter depending upon

determination through categories): remembering, as already noted, that

what is actually present in mind need not be therefore explicitly realised

in consciousness, just as little as the exaltation of the intellectual

sense to God need stand before consciousness in the shape of proofs of

God’s existence, although, as before explained, these proofs only serve to

express the net worth and content of that feeling.

(γ) Sensibility(121).

§ 399. Sleep and waking are, primarily, it is true, not mere alterations,

but _alternating_ conditions (a progression _in infinitum_). This is their

formal and negative relationship: but in it the _affirmative_ relationship

is also involved. In the self-certified existence of waking soul its mere

existence is implicit as an “ideal” factor: the features which make up its

sleeping nature, where they are implicitly as in their substance, are

_found_ by the waking soul, in its own self, and, be it noted, for itself.

The fact that these particulars, though as a mode of mind they are

distinguished from the self-identity of our self-centred being, are yet

simply contained in its simplicity, is what we call sensibility.

§ 400. Sensibility (feeling) is the form of the dull stirring, the

inarticulate breathing, of the spirit through its unconscious and

unintelligent individuality, where every definite feature is still

“immediate,”—neither specially developed in its content nor set in

distinction as objective to subject, but treated as belonging to its most

special, its natural peculiarity. The content of sensation is thus limited

and transient, belonging as it does to natural, immediate being,—to what

is therefore qualitative and finite.

_Everything is in sensation_ (feeling): if you will, everything that

emerges in conscious intelligence and in reason has its source and origin

in sensation; for source and origin just means the first immediate manner

in which a thing appears. Let it not be enough to have principles and

religion only in the head: they must also be in the heart, in the feeling.

What we merely have in the head is in consciousness, in a general way: the

facts of it are objective—set over against consciousness, so that as it is

put in me (my abstract ego) it can also be kept away and apart from me

(from my concrete subjectivity). But if put in the feeling, the fact is a

mode of my individuality, however crude that individuality be in such a

form: it is thus treated as my _very own_. My own is something inseparate

from the actual concrete self: and this immediate unity of the soul with

its underlying self in all its definite content is just this

inseparability; which however yet falls short of the ego of developed

consciousness, and still more of the freedom of rational mind-life. It is

with a quite different intensity and permanency that the will, the

conscience, and the character, are our very own, than can ever be true of

feeling and of the group of feelings (the heart): and this we need no

philosophy to tell us. No doubt it is correct to say that above everything

the _heart_ must be good. But feeling and heart is not the form by which

anything is legitimated as religious, moral, true, just, &c., and an

appeal to heart and feeling either means nothing or means something bad.

This should hardly need enforcing. Can any experience be more trite than

that feelings and hearts are also bad, evil, godless, mean, &c.? That the

heart is the source only of such feelings is stated in the words: “From

the heart proceed evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, blasphemy,

&c.” In such times when “scientific” theology and philosophy make the

heart and feeling the criterion of what is good, moral, and religious, it

is necessary to remind them of these trite experiences; just as it is

nowadays necessary to repeat that thinking is the characteristic property

by which man is distinguished from the beasts, and that he has feeling in

common with them.

§ 401. What the sentient soul finds within it is, on one hand, the

naturally immediate, as “ideally” in it and made its own. On the other

hand and conversely, what originally belongs to the central individuality

(which as further deepened and enlarged is the conscious ego and free

mind) get the features of the natural corporeity, and is so felt. In this

way we have two spheres of feeling. One, where what at first is a

corporeal affection (e.g. of the eye or of any bodily part whatever) is

made feeling (sensation) by being driven inward, memorised in the soul’s

self-centred part. Another, where affections originating in the mind and

belonging to it, are in order to be felt, and to be as if found, invested

with corporeity. Thus the mode or affection gets a place in the subject:

it is felt in the soul. The detailed specification of the former branch of

sensibility is seen in the system of the senses. But the other or inwardly

originated modes of feeling no less necessarily systematise themselves;

and their corporisation, as put in the living and concretely developed

natural being, works itself out, following the special character of the

mental mode, in a special system of bodily organs.

Sensibility in general is the healthy fellowship of the individual mind in

the life of its bodily part. The senses form the simple system of

corporeity specified. (_a_) The “ideal” side of physical things breaks up

into two—because in it, as immediate and not yet subjective ideality,

distinction appears as mere variety—the senses of definite _light_, §

287—and of _sound_, § 300. The “real” aspect similarly is with its

difference double: (_b_) the senses of smell and taste, §§ 321, 322; (_c_)

the sense of solid reality, of heavy matter, of heat and shape. Around the

centre of the sentient individuality these specifications arrange

themselves more simply than when they are developed in the natural

corporeity.

The system by which the internal sensation comes to give itself specific

bodily forms would deserve to be treated in detail in a peculiar science—a

_psychical physiology_. Somewhat pointing to such a system is implied in

the feeling of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of an immediate

sensation to the persistent tone of internal sensibility (the pleasant and

unpleasant): as also in the distinct parallelism which underlies the

symbolical employment of sensations, e.g. of colours, tones, smells. But

the most interesting side of a psychical physiology would lie in studying

not the mere sympathy, but more definitely the bodily form adopted by

certain mental modifications, especially the passions or emotions. We

should have, e.g., to explain the line of connexion by which anger and

courage are felt in the breast, the blood, the “irritable” system, just as

thinking and mental occupation are felt in the head, the centre of the

’sensible’ system. We should want a more satisfactory explanation than

hitherto of the most familiar connexions by which tears, and voice in

general, with its varieties of language, laughter, sighs, with many other

specialisations lying in the line of pathognomy and physiognomy, are

formed from their mental source. In physiology the viscera and the organs

are treated merely as parts subservient to the animal organism; but they

form at the same time a physical system for the expression of mental

states, and in this way they get quite another interpretation.

§ 402. Sensations, just because they are immediate and are found existing,

are single and transient aspects of psychic life,—alterations in the

substantiality of the soul, set in its self-centred life, with which that

substance is one. But this self-centred being is not merely a formal

factor of sensation: the soul is virtually a reflected totality of

sensations—it feels _in itself_ the total substantiality which it

_virtually_ is—it is a soul which feels.

In the usage of ordinary language, sensation and feeling are not clearly

distinguished: still we do not speak of the sensation,—but of the feeling

(sense) of right, of self; sentimentality (sensibility) is connected with

sensation: we may therefore say sensation emphasises rather the side of

passivity—the fact that we find ourselves feeling, i.e. the immediacy of

mode in feeling—whereas feeling at the same time rather notes the fact

that it is _we ourselves_ who feel.

(b) The Feeling Soul.—(Soul as Sentiency.)(122)

§ 403. The feeling or sentient individual is the simple “ideality” or

subjective side of sensation. What it has to do, therefore, is to raise

its substantiality, its merely virtual filling-up, to the character of

subjectivity, to take possession of it, to realise its mastery over its

own. As sentient, the soul is no longer a mere natural, but an inward,

individuality: the individuality which in the merely substantial totality

was only formal to it has to be liberated and made independent.

Nowhere so much as in the case of the soul (and still more of the mind) if

we are to understand it, must that feature of “ideality” be kept in view,

which represents it as the _negation_ of the real, but a negation, where

the real is put past, virtually retained, although it does not _exist_.

The feature is one with which we are familiar in regard to our mental

ideas or to memory. Every individual is an infinite treasury of

sensations, ideas, acquired lore, thoughts, &c.; and yet the ego is one

and uncompounded, a deep featureless characterless mine, in which all this

is stored up, without existing. It is only when _I_ call to mind _an_

idea, that I bring it out of that interior to existence before

consciousness. Sometimes, in sickness, ideas and information, supposed to

have been forgotten years ago, because for so long they had not been

brought into consciousness, once more come to light. They were not in our

possession, nor by such reproduction as occurs in sickness do they for the

future come into our possession; and yet they were in us and continue to

be in us still. Thus a person can never know how much of things he once

learned he really has in him, should he have once forgotten them: they

belong not to his actuality or subjectivity as such, but only to his

implicit self. And under all the superstructure of specialised and

instrumental consciousness that may subsequently be added to it, the

individuality always remains this single-souled inner life. At the present

stage this singleness is, primarily, to be defined as one of feeling—as

embracing the corporeal in itself: thus denying the view that this body is

something material, with parts outside parts and outside the soul. Just as

the number and variety of mental representations is no argument for an

extended and real multeity in the ego; so the “real” outness of parts in

the body has no truth for the sentient soul. As sentient, the soul is

characterised as immediate, and so as natural and corporeal: but the

outness of parts and sensible multiplicity of this corporeal counts for

the soul (as it counts for the intelligible unity) not as anything real,

and therefore not as a barrier: the soul is this intelligible unity _in

existence_,—the existent speculative principle. Thus in the body it is one

simple, omnipresent unity. As to the representative faculty the body is

but _one_ representation, and the infinite variety of its material

structure and organisation is reduced to the _simplicity_ of one definite

conception: so in the sentient soul, the corporeity, and all that outness

of parts to parts which belongs to it, is reduced to _ideality_ (the

_truth_ of the natural multiplicity). The soul is virtually the totality

of nature: as an individual soul it is a monad: it is itself the

explicitly put totality of its particular world,—that world being included

in it and filling it up; and to that world it stands but as to itself.

§ 404. As _individual_, the soul is exclusive and always exclusive: any

difference there is, it brings within itself. What is differentiated from

it is as yet no external object (as in consciousness), but only the

aspects of its own sentient totality, &c. In this partition (judgment) of

itself it is always subject: its object is its substance, which is at the

same time its predicate. This _substance_ is still the content of its

natural life, but turned into the content of the individual

sensation-laden soul; yet as the soul is in that content still particular,

the content is its particular world, so far as that is, in an implicit

mode, included in the ideality of the subject.

By itself, this stage of mind is the stage of its darkness: its features

are not developed to conscious and intelligent content: so far it is

formal and only formal. It acquires a peculiar interest in cases where it

is as a _form_ and appears as a special _state_ of mind (§ 350), to which

the soul, which has already advanced to consciousness and intelligence,

may again sink down. But when a truer phase of mind thus exists in a more

subordinate and abstract one, it implies a want of adaptation, which is

_disease_. In the present stage we must treat, first, of the abstract

psychical modifications by themselves, secondly, as morbid states of mind:

the latter being only explicable by means of the former.

(α) The Feeling Soul in its Immediacy.

§ 405. (αα) Though the sensitive individuality is undoubtedly a monadic

individual, it is because immediate, not yet as _its self_ not a true

subject reflected into itself, and is therefore passive. Hence the

individuality of its true self is a different subject from it—a subject

which may even exist as another individual. By the self-hood of the latter

it—a substance, which is only a non-independent predicate—is then set in

vibration and controlled without the least resistance on its part. This

other subject by which it is so controlled may be called its _genius_.

In the ordinary course of nature this is the condition of the child in its

mother’s womb:—a condition neither merely bodily nor merely mental, but

psychical—a correlation of soul to soul. Here are two individuals, yet in

undivided psychic unity: the one as yet no _self_, as yet nothing

impenetrable, incapable of resistance: the other is its actuating subject,

the _single_ self of the two. The mother is the _genius_ of the child; for

by genius we commonly mean the total mental self-hood, as it has existence

of its own, and constitutes the subjective substantiality of some one else

who is only externally treated as an individual and has only a nominal

independence. The underlying essence of the genius is the sum total of

existence, of life, and of character, not as a mere possibility, or

capacity, or virtuality, but as efficiency and realised activity, as

concrete subjectivity.

If we look only to the spatial and material aspects of the child’s

existence as an embryo in its special integuments, and as connected with

the mother by means of umbilical cord, placenta, &c., all that is

presented to the senses and reflection are certain anatomical and

physiological facts—externalities and instrumentalities in the sensible

and material which are insignificant as regards the main point, the

psychical relationship. What ought to be noted as regards this psychical

tie are not merely the striking effects communicated to and stamped upon

the child by violent emotions, injuries, &c. of the mother, but the whole

psychical _judgment_ (partition) of the underlying nature, by which the

female (like the monocotyledons among vegetables) can suffer disruption in

twain, so that the child has not merely got _communicated_ to it, but has

originally received morbid dispositions as well as other pre-dispositions

of shape, temper, character, talent, idiosyncrasies, &c.

Sporadic examples and traces of this _magic_ tie appear elsewhere in the

range of self-possessed conscious life, say between friends, especially

female friends with delicate nerves (a tie which may go so far as to show

“magnetic” phenomena), between husband and wife and between members of the

same family.

The total sensitivity has its self here in a separate subjectivity, which,

in the case cited of this sentient life in the ordinary course of nature,

is visibly present as another and a different individual. But this

sensitive totality is meant to elevate its self-hood out of itself to

subjectivity in one and the same individual: which is then its indwelling

consciousness, self-possessed, intelligent, and reasonable. For such a

consciousness the merely sentient life serves as an underlying and only

implicitly existent material; and the self-possessed subjectivity is the

rational, self-conscious, controlling genius thereof. But this sensitive

nucleus includes not merely the purely unconscious, congenital disposition

and temperament, but within its enveloping simplicity it acquires and

retains also (in habit, as to which see later) all further ties and

essential relationships, fortunes, principles—everything in short

belonging to the character, and in whose elaboration self-conscious

activity has most effectively participated. The sensitivity is thus a soul

in which the whole mental life is condensed. The total individual under

this concentrated aspect is distinct from the existing and actual play of

his consciousness, his secular ideas, developed interests, inclinations,

&c. As contrasted with this looser aggregate of means and methods the more

intensive form of individuality is termed the genius, whose decision is

ultimate whatever may be the show of reasons, intentions, means, of which

the more public consciousness is so liberal. This concentrated

individuality also reveals itself under the aspect of what is called the

heart and soul of feeling. A man is said to be heartless and unfeeling

when he looks at things with self-possession and acts according to his

permanent purposes, be they great substantial aims or petty and unjust

interests: a good-hearted man, on the other hand, means rather one who is

at the mercy of his individual sentiment, even when it is of narrow range

and is wholly made up of particularities. Of such good nature or goodness

of heart it may be said that it is less the genius itself than the

_indulgere genio_.

§ 406. (ββ) The sensitive life, when it becomes a _form_ or _state_ of the

self-conscious, educated, self-possessed human being is a disease. The

individual in such a morbid state stands in direct contact with the

concrete contents of his own self, whilst he keeps his self-possessed

consciousness of self and of the causal order of things apart as a

distinct state of mind. This morbid condition is seen in _magnetic

somnambulism_ and cognate states.

In this summary encyclopaedic account it is impossible to supply a

demonstration of what the paragraph states as the nature of the remarkable

condition produced chiefly by animal magnetism—to show, in other words,

that it is in harmony with the facts. To that end the phenomena, so

complex in their nature and so very different one from another, would have

first of all to be brought under their general points of view. The facts,

it might seem, first of all call for verification. But such a verification

would, it must be added, be superfluous for those on whose account it was

called for: for they facilitate the inquiry for themselves by declaring

the narratives—infinitely numerous though they be and accredited by the

education and character of the witnesses—to be mere deception and

imposture. The _a priori_ conceptions of these inquirers are so rooted

that no testimony can avail against them, and they have even denied what

they had seen with their own eyes. In order to believe in this department

even what one sees with these eyes, and still more to understand it, the

first requisite is not to be in bondage to the hard and fast categories of

the practical intellect. The chief points on which the discussion turns

may here be given:

(α) To the _concrete_ existence of the individual belongs the aggregate of

his fundamental _interests_, both the essential and the particular

empirical ties which connect him with other men and the world at large.

This totality forms _his_ actuality, in the sense that it lies in fact

immanent in him; it has already been called his _genius_. This genius is

not the free mind which wills and thinks: the form of sensitivity, in

which the individual here appears immersed, is, on the contrary, a

surrender of his self-possessed intelligent existence. The first

conclusion to which these considerations lead, with reference to the

contents of consciousness in the somnambulist stage, is that it is only

the range of his individually moulded world (of his private interests and

narrow relationships) which appear there. Scientific theories and

philosophic conceptions or general truths require a different

soil,—require an intelligence which has risen out of the inarticulate mass

of mere sensitivity to free consciousness. It is foolish therefore to

expect revelations about the higher ideas from the somnambulist state.

(β) Where a human being’s senses and intellect are sound, he is fully and

intelligently alive to that reality of his which gives concrete filling to

his individuality: but he is awake to it in the form of interconnexion

between himself and the features of that reality conceived as an external

and a separate world, and he is aware that this world is in itself also a

complex of interconnexions of a practically intelligible kind. In his

subjective ideas and plans he has also before him this causally connected

scheme of things he calls his world and the series of means which bring

his ideas and his purposes into adjustment with the objective existences,

which are also means and ends to each other. At the same time, this world

which is outside him has its threads in him to such a degree that it is

these threads which make him what he really is: he too would become

extinct if these externalities were to disappear, unless by the aid of

religion, subjective reason, and character, he is in a remarkable degree

self-supporting and independent of them. But, then, in the latter case he

is less susceptible of the psychical state here spoken of.—As an

illustration of that identity with the surroundings may be noted the

effect produced by the death of beloved relatives, friends, &c. on those

left behind, so that the one dies or pines away with the loss of the

other. (Thus Cato, after the downfall of the Roman republic, could live no

longer: his inner reality was neither wider than higher than it.) Compare

home-sickness, and the like.

(γ) But when all that occupies the waking consciousness, the world outside

it and its relationship to that world is under a veil, and the soul is

thus sunk in sleep (in magnetic sleep, in catalepsy, and other diseases,

e.g. those connected with female development, or at the approach of death,

&c.), then that _immanent actuality_ of the individual remains the same

substantial total as before, but now as a purely sensitive life with an

inward vision and an inward consciousness. And because it is the adult,

formed, and developed consciousness which is degraded into this state of

sensitivity, it retains along with its content a certain nominal

self-hood, a formal vision and awareness, which however does not go so far

as the conscious judgment or discernment by which its contents, when it is

healthy and awake, exist for it as an outward objectivity. The individual

is thus a monad which is inwardly aware of its actuality—a genius which

beholds itself. The characteristic point in such knowledge is that the

very same facts (which for the healthy consciousness are an objective

practical reality, and to know which, in its sober moods, it needs the

intelligent chain of means and conditions in all their real expansion) are

now immediately known and perceived in this immanence. This perception is

a sort of _clairvoyance_; for it is a consciousness living in the

undivided substantiality of the genius, and finding itself in the very

heart of the interconnexion, and so can dispense with the series of

conditions, external one to another, which lead up to the

result,—conditions which cool reflection has in succession to traverse and

in so doing feels the limits of its own individual externality. But such

clairvoyance—just because its dim and turbid vision does not present the

facts in a rational interconnexion—is for that very reason at the mercy of

every private contingency of feeling and fancy, &c.—not to mention that

foreign _suggestions_ (see later) intrude into its vision. It is thus

impossible to make out whether what the clairvoyants really see

preponderates over what they deceive themselves in.—But it is absurd to

treat this visionary state as a sublime mental phase and as a truer state,

capable of conveying general truths(123).

(δ) An essential feature of this sensitivity, with its absence of

intelligent and volitional personality, is this, that it is a state of

passivity, like that of the child in the womb. The patient in this

condition is accordingly made, and continues to be, subject to the power

of another person, the magnetiser; so that when the two are thus in

psychical _rapport_, the selfless individual, not really a “person,” has

for his subjective consciousness the consciousness of the other. This

latter self-possessed individual is thus the effective subjective soul of

the former, and the genius which may even supply him with a train of

ideas. That the somnambulist perceives in himself tastes and smells which

are present in the person with whom he stands _en rapport_, and that he is

aware of the other inner ideas and present perceptions of the latter as if

they were his own, shows the substantial identity which the soul (which

even in its concreteness is also truly immaterial) is capable of holding

with another. When the substance of both is thus made one, there is only

one subjectivity of consciousness: the patient has a sort of

individuality, but it is empty, not on the spot, not actual: and this

nominal self accordingly derives its whole stock of ideas from the

sensations and ideas of the other, in whom it sees, smells, tastes, reads,

and hears. It is further to be noted on this point that the somnambulist

is thus brought into _rapport_ with two genii and a twofold set of ideas,

his own and that of the magnetiser. But it is impossible to say precisely

which sensations and which visions he, in this nominal perception,

receives, beholds and brings to knowledge from his own inward self, and

which from the suggestions of the person with whom he stands in relation.

This uncertainty may be the source of many deceptions, and accounts among

other things for the diversity that inevitably shows itself among

somnambulists from different countries and under _rapport_ with persons of

different education, as regards their views on morbid states and the

methods of cure, or medicines for them, as well as on scientific and

intellectual topics.

(ε) As in this sensitive substantiality there is no contrast to external

objectivity, so within itself the subject is so entirely one that all

varieties of sensation have disappeared, and hence, when the activity of

the sense-organs is asleep, the “common sense,” or “general feeling”

specifies itself to several functions; one sees and hears with the

fingers, and especially with the pit of the stomach, &c.

To comprehend a thing means in the language of practical intelligence to

be able to trace the series of means intervening between a phenomenon and

some other existence on which it depends,—to discover what is called the

ordinary course of nature, in compliance with the laws and relations of

the intellect, e.g. causality, reasons, &c. The purely sensitive life, on

the contrary, even when it retains that mere nominal consciousness, as in

the morbid state alluded to, is just this form of immediacy, without any

distinctions between subjective and objective, between intelligent

personality and objective world, and without the aforementioned finite

ties between them. Hence to understand this intimate conjunction, which,

though all-embracing, is without any definite points of attachment, is

impossible, so long as we assume independent personalities, independent

one of another and of the objective world which is their content—so long

as we assume the absolute spatial and material externality of one part of

being to another.

(β) Self-feeling (Sense of Self)(124).

§ 407. (αα) The sensitive totality is, in its capacity of individual,

essentially the tendency to distinguish itself in itself, and to wake up

to the _judgment in itself_, in virtue of which it has _particular_

feelings and stands as a _subject_ in respect of these aspects of itself.

The subject as such gives these feelings a place as _its own_ in itself.

In these private and personal sensations it is immersed, and at the same

time, because of the “ideality” of the particulars, it combines itself in

them with itself as a subjective unit. In this way it is _self-feeling_,

and is so at the same time only in the _particular feeling_.

§ 408. (ββ) In consequence of the immediacy, which still marks the

self-feeling, i.e. in consequence of the element of corporeality which is

still undetached from the mental life, and as the feeling too is itself

particular and bound up with a special corporeal form, it follows that

although the subject has been brought to acquire intelligent

consciousness, it is still susceptible of disease, so far as to remain

fast in a _special_ phase of its self-feeling, unable to refine it to

“ideality” and get the better of it. The fully-furnished self of

intelligent consciousness is a conscious subject, which is consistent in

itself according to an order and behaviour which follows from its

individual position and its connexion with the external world, which is no

less a world of law. But when it is engrossed with a single phase of

feeling, it fails to assign that phase its proper place and due

subordination in the individual system of the world which a conscious

subject is. In this way the subject finds itself in contradiction between

the totality systematised in its consciousness, and the single phase or

fixed idea which is not reduced to its proper place and rank. This is

Insanity or mental Derangement.

In considering insanity we must, as in other cases, anticipate the

full-grown and intelligent conscious subject, which is at the same time

the _natural_ self of _self-feeling_. In such a phase the self can be

liable to the contradiction between its own free subjectivity and a

particularity which, instead of being “idealised” in the former, remains

as a fixed element in self-feeling. Mind as such is free, and therefore

not susceptible of this malady. But in older metaphysics mind was treated

as a soul, as a thing; and it is only as a thing, i.e. as something

natural and existent, that it is liable to insanity—the settled fixture of

some finite element in it. Insanity is therefore a psychical disease, i.e.

a disease of body and mind alike: the commencement may appear to start

from one more than other, and so also may the cure.

The self-possessed and healthy subject has an active and present

consciousness of the ordered whole of his individual world, into the

system of which he subsumes each special content of sensation, idea,

desire, inclination, &c., as it arises, so as to insert them in their

proper place. He is the _dominant genius_ over these particularities.

Between this and insanity the difference is like that between waking and

dreaming: only that in insanity the dream falls within the waking limits,

and so makes part of the actual self-feeling. Error and that sort of thing

is a proposition consistently admitted to a place in the objective

interconnexion of things. In the concrete, however, it is often difficult

to say where it begins to become derangement. A violent, but groundless

and senseless outburst of hatred, &c., may, in contrast to a presupposed

higher self-possession and stability of character, make its victim seem to

be beside himself with frenzy. But the main point in derangement is the

contradiction which a feeling with a fixed corporeal embodiment sets up

against the whole mass of adjustments forming the concrete consciousness.

The mind which is in a condition of mere _being_, and where such being is

not rendered fluid in its consciousness, is diseased. The contents which

are set free in this reversion to mere nature are the self-seeking

affections of the heart, such as vanity, pride, and the rest of the

passions—fancies and hopes—merely personal love and hatred. When the

influence of self-possession and of general principles, moral and

theoretical, is relaxed, and ceases to keep the natural temper under lock

and key, the earthly elements are set free—that evil which is always

latent in the heart, because the heart as immediate is natural and

selfish. It is the evil genius of man which gains the upper hand in

insanity, but in distinction from and contrast to the better and more

intelligent part, which is there also. Hence this state is mental

derangement and distress. The right psychical treatment therefore keeps in

view the truth that insanity is not an abstract _loss_ of reason (neither

in the point of intelligence nor of will and its responsibility), but only

derangement, only a contradiction in a still subsisting reason;—just as

physical disease is not an abstract, i.e. mere and total, loss of health

(if it were that, it would be death), but a contradiction in it. This

humane treatment, no less benevolent than reasonable (the services of

Pinel towards which deserve the highest acknowledgment), presupposes the

patient’s rationality, and in that assumption has the sound basis for

dealing with him on this side—just as in the case of bodily disease the

physician bases his treatment on the vitality which as such still contains

health.

(γ) Habit(125).

§ 409. Self-feeling, immersed in the detail of the feelings (in simple

sensations, and also desires, instincts, passions, and their

gratification), is undistinguished from them. But in the self there is

latent a simple self-relation of ideality, a nominal universality (which

is the truth of these details): and as so universal, the self is to be

stamped upon, and made appear in, this life of feeling, yet so as to

distinguish itself from the particular details, and be a realised

universality. But this universality is not the full and sterling truth of

the specific feelings and desires; what they specifically contain is as

yet left out of account. And so too the particularity is, as now regarded,

equally formal; it counts only as the _particular being_ or immediacy of

the soul in opposition to its equally formal and abstract realisation.

This particular being of the soul is the factor of its corporeity; here we

have it breaking with this corporeity, distinguishing it from

itself,—itself a _simple_ being,—and becoming the “ideal,” subjective

substantiality of it,—just as in its latent notion (§ 359) it was the

substance, and the mere substance, of it.

But this abstract realisation of the soul in its corporeal vehicle is not

yet the self—not the existence of the universal which is for the

universal. It is the corporeity reduced to its mere _ideality_; and so far

only does corporeity belong to the soul as such. That is to say, as space

and time—the abstract one-outside-another, as, in short, empty space and

empty time—are only subjective form—pure act of intuition; so that pure

being (which through the supersession in it of the particularity of the

corporeity, or of the immediate corporeity as such has realised itself) is

mere intuition and no more, lacking consciousness, but the basis of

consciousness. And consciousness it becomes, when the corporeity, of which

it is the subjective substance, and which still continues to exist, and

that as a barrier for it, has been absorbed by it, and it has been

invested with the character of self-centred subject.

§ 410. The soul’s making itself an abstract universal being, and reducing

the particulars of feelings (and of consciousness) to a mere feature of

its being is Habit. In this manner the soul has the contents in

possession, and contains them in such manner that in these features it is

not as sentient, nor does it stand in relationship with them as

distinguishing itself from them, nor is absorbed in them, but has them and

moves in them, without feeling or consciousness of the fact. The soul is

freed from them, so far as it is not interested in or occupied with them:

and whilst existing in these forms as its possession, it is at the same

time open to be otherwise occupied and engaged—say with feeling and with

mental consciousness in general.

This process of building up the particular and corporeal expressions of

feeling into the being of the soul appears as a _repetition_ of them, and

the generation of habit as _practice_. For, this being of the soul, if in

respect of the natural particular phase it be called an abstract

universality to which the former is transmuted, is a reflexive

universality (§ 175); i.e. the one and the same, that recurs in a series

of units of sensation, is reduced to unity, and this abstract unity

expressly stated.

Habit, like memory, is a difficult point in mental organisation: habit is

the mechanism of self-feeling, as memory is the mechanism of intelligence.

The natural qualities and alterations of age, sleep and waking, are

“immediately” natural: habit, on the contrary, is the mode of feeling (as

well as intelligence, will, &c., so far as they belong to self-feeling)

made into a natural and mechanical existence. Habit is rightly called a

second nature; nature, because it is an immediate being of the soul; a

second nature, because it is an immediacy created by the soul, impressing

and moulding the corporeality which enters into the modes of feeling as

such and into the representations and volitions so far as they have taken

corporeal form (§ 401).

In habit the human being’s mode of existence is “natural,” and for that

reason not free; but still free, so far as the merely natural phase of

feeling is by habit reduced to a mere being of _his_, and he is no longer

involuntarily attracted or repelled by it, and so no longer interested,

occupied, or dependent in regard to it. The want of freedom in habit is

partly merely formal, as habit merely attaches to the being of the soul;

partly only relative, so far as it strictly speaking arises only in the

case of bad habits, or so far as a habit is opposed by another purpose:

whereas the habit of right and goodness is an embodiment of liberty. The

main point about Habit is that by its means man gets emancipated from the

feelings, even in being affected by them. The different forms of this may

be described as follows: (α) The _immediate_ feeling is negated and

treated as indifferent. One who gets inured against external sensations

(frost, heat, weariness of the limbs, &c., sweet tastes, &c.), and who

hardens the heart against misfortune, acquires a strength which consists

in this, that although the frost, &c.—or the misfortune—is felt, the

affection is deposed to a mere externality and immediacy; the universal

psychical life keeps its own abstract independence in it, and the

self-feeling as such, consciousness, reflection, and any other purposes

and activity, are no longer bothered with it. (β) There is indifference

towards the satisfaction: the desires and impulses are by the _habit_ of

their satisfaction deadened. This is the rational liberation from them;

whereas monastic renunciation and forcible interference do not free from

them, nor are they in conception rational. Of course in all this it is

assumed that the impulses are kept as the finite modes they naturally are,

and that they, like their satisfaction, are subordinated as partial

factors to the reasonable will. (γ) In habit regarded as _aptitude_, or

skill, not merely has the abstract psychical life to be kept intact _per

se_, but it has to be imposed as a subjective aim, to be made a power in

the bodily part, which is rendered subject and thoroughly pervious to it.

Conceived as having the inward purpose of the subjective soul thus imposed

upon it, the body is treated as an immediate externality and a barrier.

Thus comes out the more decided rupture between the soul as simple

self-concentration, and its earlier naturalness and immediacy; it has lost

its original and immediate identity with the bodily nature, and as

external has first to be reduced to that position. Specific feelings can

only get bodily shape in a perfectly specific way (§ 401); and the

immediate portion of body is a particular possibility for a specific aim

(a particular aspect of its differentiated structure, a particular organ

of its organic system). To mould such an aim in the organic body is to

bring out and express the “ideality” which is implicit in matter always,

and especially so in the specific bodily part, and thus to enable the

soul, under its volitional and conceptual characters, to exist as

substance in its corporeity. In this way an aptitude shows the corporeity

rendered completely pervious, made into an instrument, so that when the

conception (e.g. a series of musical notes) is in me, then without

resistance and with ease the body gives them correct utterance.

The form of habit applies to all kinds and grades of mental action. The

most external of them, i.e. the spatial direction of an individual, viz.

his upright posture, has been by will made a habit—a position taken

without adjustment and without consciousness—which continues to be an

affair of his persistent will; for the man stands only because and in so

far as he wills to stand, and only so long as he wills it without

consciousness. Similarly our eyesight is the concrete habit which, without

an express adjustment, combines in a single act the several modifications

of sensation, consciousness, intuition, intelligence, &c., which make it

up. Thinking, too, however free and active in its own pure element it

becomes, no less requires habit and familiarity (this impromptuity or form

of immediacy), by which it is the property of my single self where I can

freely and in all directions range. It is through this habit that I come

to realise my _existence_ as a thinking being. Even here, in this

spontaneity of self-centred thought, there is a partnership of soul and

body (hence, want of habit and too-long-continued thinking cause

headache); habit diminishes this feeling, by making the natural function

an immediacy of the soul. Habit on an ampler scale, and carried out in the

strictly intellectual range, is recollection and memory, whereof we shall

speak later.

Habit is often spoken of disparagingly and called lifeless, casual and

particular. And it is true that the form of habit, like any other, is open

to anything we chance to put into it; and it is habit of living which

brings on death, or, if quite abstract, is death itself: and yet habit is

indispensable for the _existence_ of all intellectual life in the

individual, enabling the subject to be a concrete immediacy, an “ideality”

of soul—enabling the matter of consciousness, religious, moral, &c., to be

his as _this_ self, _this_ soul, and no other, and be neither a mere

latent possibility, nor a transient emotion or idea, nor an abstract

inwardness, cut off from action and reality, but part and parcel of his

being. In scientific studies of the soul and the mind, habit is usually

passed over—either as something contemptible—or rather for the further

reason that it is one of the most difficult questions of psychology.

(c) The Actual Soul.(126)

§ 411. The Soul, when its corporeity has been moulded and made thoroughly

its own, finds itself there a _single_ subject; and the corporeity is an

externality which stands as a predicate, in being related to which, it is

related to itself. This externality, in other words, represents not

itself, but the soul, of which it is the _sign_. In this identity of

interior and exterior, the latter subject to the former, the soul is

_actual_: in its corporeity it has its free shape, in which it _feels

itself_ and makes _itself felt_, and which as the Soul’s work of art has

_human_ pathognomic and physiognomic expression.

Under the head of human expression are included, e.g., the upright figure

in general, and the formation of the limbs, especially the hand, as the

absolute instrument, of the mouth—laughter, weeping, &c., and the note of

mentality diffused over the whole, which at once announces the body at the

externality of a higher nature. This note is so slight, indefinite, and

inexpressible a modification, because the figure in its externality is

something immediate and natural, and can therefore only be an indefinite

and quite imperfect sign for the mind, unable to represent it in its

actual universality. Seen from the animal world, the human figure is the

supreme phase in which mind makes an appearance. But for the mind it is

only its first appearance, while language is its perfect expression. And

the human figure, though its proximate phase of existence, is at the same

time in its physiognomic and pathognomic quality something contingent to

it. To try to raise physiognomy and above all cranioscopy (phrenology) to

the rank of sciences, was therefore one of the vainest fancies, still

vainer than a _signatura rerum_, which supposed the shape of a plant to

afford indication of its medicinal virtue.

§ 412. Implicitly the soul shows the untruth and unreality of matter; for

the soul, in its concentrated self, cuts itself off from its immediate

being, placing the latter over against it as a corporeity incapable of

offering resistance to its moulding influence. The soul, thus setting in

opposition its being to its (conscious) self, absorbing it, and making it

its own, has lost the meaning of mere soul, or the “immediacy” of mind.

The actual soul with its sensation and its concrete self-feeling turned

into habit, has implicitly realised the ’ideality’ of its qualities; in

this externality it has recollected and inwardised itself, and is infinite

self-relation. This free universality thus made explicit shows the soul

awaking to the higher stage of the ego, or abstract universality in so far

as it is _for_ the abstract universality. In this way it gains the

position of thinker and subject—specially a subject of the judgment in

which the ego excludes from itself the sum total of its merely natural

features as an object, a world external to it,—but with such respect to

that object that in it it is immediately reflected into itself. Thus soul

rises to become _Consciousness_.

Sub-Section B. Phenomenology Of Mind. Consciousness.

§ 413. Consciousness constitutes the reflected or correlational grade of

mind: the grade of mind as _appearance_. _Ego_ is infinite self-relation

of mind, but as subjective or as self-certainty. The immediate identity of

the natural soul has been raised to this pure “ideal” self-identity; and

what the former _contained_ is for this self-subsistent reflection set

forth as an _object_. The pure abstract freedom of mind lets go from it

its specific qualities,—the soul’s natural life—to an equal freedom as an

independent _object_. It is of this latter, as external to it, that the

_ego_ is in the first instance aware (conscious), and as such it is

Consciousness. Ego, as this absolute negativity, is implicitly the

identity in the otherness: the _ego_ is itself that other and stretches

over the object (as if that object were implicitly cancelled)—it is one

side of the relationship and the whole relationship—the light, which

manifests itself and something else too.

§ 414. The self-identity of the mind, thus first made explicit as the Ego,

is only its abstract formal identity. As _soul_ it was under the phase of

_substantial_ universality; now, as subjective reflection in itself, it is

referred to this substantiality as to its negative, something dark and

beyond it. Hence consciousness, like reciprocal dependence in general, is

the contradiction between the independence of the two sides and their

identity in which they are merged into one. The mind as ego is _essence_;

but since reality, in the sphere of essence, is represented as in

immediate being and at the same time as “ideal,” it is as consciousness

only the _appearance_ (phenomenon) of mind.

§ 415. As the ego is by itself only a formal identity, the dialectical

movement of its intelligible unity, i.e. the successive steps in further

specification of consciousness, does not to it seem to be its own

activity, but is implicit, and to the ego it seems an alteration of the

object. Consciousness consequently appears differently modified according

to the difference of the given object; and the gradual specification of

consciousness appears as a variation in the characteristics of its

objects. Ego, the subject of consciousness, is thinking: the logical

process of modifying the object is what is identical in subject and

object, their absolute interdependence, what makes the object the

subject’s own.

The Kantian philosophy may be most accurately described as having viewed

the mind as consciousness, and as containing the propositions only of a

_phenomenology_ (not of a _philosophy_) of mind. The Ego Kant regards as

reference to something away and beyond (which in its abstract description

is termed the thing-at-itself); and it is only from this finite point of

view that he treats both intellect and will. Though in the notion of a

power of _reflective_ judgment he touches upon the _Idea_ of mind—a

subject-objectivity, an _intuitive intellect_, &c., and even the Idea of

Nature, still this Idea is again deposed to an appearance, i.e. to a

subjective maxim (§ 58). Reinhold may therefore be said to have correctly

appreciated Kantism when he treated it as a theory of consciousness (under

the name of “faculty of ideation”). Fichte kept to the same point of view:

his non-ego is only something set over against the ego, only defined as in

_consciousness_: it is made no more than an infinite “shock,” i.e. a

thing-in-itself. Both systems therefore have clearly not reached the

intelligible unity or the mind as it actually and essentially is, but only

as it is in reference to something else.

As against Spinozism, again, it is to be noted that the mind in the

judgment by which it “constitutes” itself an ego (a free subject

contrasted with its qualitative affection) has emerged from substance, and

that the philosophy, which gives this judgment as the absolute

characteristic of mind, has emerged from Spinozism.

§ 416. The aim of conscious mind is to make its appearance identical with

its essence, to raise its _self-certainty to truth_. The _existence_ of

mind in the stage of consciousness is finite, because it is merely a

nominal self-relation, or mere certainty. The object is only abstractly

characterised as _its_; in other words, in the object it is only as an

abstract ego that the mind is reflected into itself: hence its existence

there has still a content, which is not as its own.

§ 417. The grades of this elevation of certainty to truth are three in

number: first (_a_) consciousness in general, with an object set against

it; (_b_) self-consciousness, for which _ego_ is the object; (_c_) unity

of consciousness and self-consciousness, where the mind sees itself

embodied in the object and sees itself as implicitly and explicitly

determinate, as Reason, the _notion_ of mind.

(a) Consciousness Proper(127).

(α) Sensuous consciousness.

§ 418. Consciousness is, first, _immediate_ consciousness, and its

reference to the object accordingly the simple and underived certainty of

it. The object similarly, being immediate, an existent, reflected in

itself, is further characterised as immediately singular. This is

sense-consciousness.

Consciousness—as a case of correlation—comprises only the categories

belonging to the abstract ego or formal thinking; and these it treats as

features of the object (§ 415). Sense-consciousness therefore is aware of

the object as an existent, a something, an existing thing, a singular, and

so on. It appears as wealthiest in matter, but as poorest in thought. That

wealth of matter is made out of sensations: they are the _material_ of

consciousness (§ 414), the substantial and qualitative, what the soul in

its anthropological sphere is and finds _in itself_. This material the ego

(the reflection of the soul in itself) separates from itself, and puts it

first under the category of being. Spatial and temporal Singularness,

_here_ and _now_ (the terms by which in the Phenomenology of the Mind (W.

II. p. 73), I described the object of sense-consciousness) strictly

belongs to _intuition_. At present the object is at first to be viewed

only in its correlation to _consciousness_, i.e. a something _external_ to

it, and not yet as external on its own part, or as being beside and out of

itself.

§ 419. The _sensible_ as somewhat becomes an _other_: the reflection in

itself of this _somewhat_, the _thing_, has _many_ properties; and as a

single (thing) in its immediacy has several _predicates_. The muchness of

the sense-singular thus becomes a breadth—a variety of relations,

reflectional attributes, and universalities. These are logical terms

introduced by the thinking principle, i.e. in this case by the Ego, to

describe the sensible. But the Ego as itself apparent sees in all this

characterisation a change in the object; and self-consciousness, so

construing the object, is sense-perception.

(β) Sense-perception(128).

§ 420. Consciousness, having passed beyond the sensibility, wants to take

the object in its truth, not as merely immediate, but as mediated,

reflected in itself, and universal. Such an object is a combination of

sense qualities with attributes of wider range by which thought defines

concrete relations and connexions. Hence the identity of consciousness

with the object passes from the abstract identity of “I am sure” to the

definite identity of “I know, and am aware.”

The particular grade of consciousness on which Kantism conceives the mind

is perception: which is also the general point of view taken by ordinary

consciousness, and more or less by the sciences. The sensuous certitudes

of single apperceptions or observations form the starting-point: these are

supposed to be elevated to truth, by being regarded in their bearings,

reflected upon, and on the lines of definite categories turned at the same

time into something necessary and universal, viz. _experiences_.

§ 421. This conjunction of individual and universal is admixture—the

individual remains at the bottom hard and unaffected by the universal, to

which however it is related. It is therefore a tissue of

contradictions—between the single things of sense apperception, which form

the alleged ground of general experience, and the universality which has a

higher claim to be the essence and ground—between the individuality of a

thing which, taken in its concrete content, constitutes its independence

and the various properties which, free from this negative link and from

one another, are independent universal _matters_ (§ 123). This

contradiction of the finite which runs through all forms of the logical

spheres turns out most concrete, when the somewhat is defined as _object_

(§ 194 seqq.).

(γ) The Intellect(129).

§ 422. The proximate _truth_ of perception is that it is the object which

is an _appearance_, and that the object’s reflection in self is on the

contrary a self-subsistent inward and universal. The consciousness of such

an object is _intellect_. This inward, as we called it, of the thing is on

one hand the suppression of the multiplicity of the sensible, and, in that

manner, an abstract identity: on the other hand, however, it also for that

reason contains the multiplicity, but as an interior “simple” difference,

which remains self-identical in the vicissitudes of appearance. This

simple difference is the realm of _the laws_ of the phenomena—a copy of

the phenomenon, but brought to rest and universality.

§ 423. The law, at first stating the mutual dependence of universal,

permanent terms, has, in so far as its distinction is the inward one, its

necessity on its own part; the one of the terms, as not externally

different from the other, lies immediately in the other. But in this

manner the interior distinction is, what it is in truth, the distinction

on its own part, or the distinction which is none. With this new

form-characteristic, on the whole, consciousness _implicitly_ vanishes:

for consciousness as such implies the reciprocal independence of subject

and object. The ego in its judgment has an object which is not distinct

from it,—it has itself. Consciousness has passed into self-consciousness.

(b) Self-consciousness(130).

§ 424. _Self-consciousness_ is the truth of consciousness: the latter is a

consequence of the former, all consciousness of an other object being as a

matter of fact also self-consciousness. The object is my idea: I am aware

of the object as mine; and thus in it I am aware of me. The formula of

self-consciousness is I = I:—abstract freedom, pure “ideality.” In so far

it lacks “reality”: for as it is its own object, there is strictly

speaking no object, because there is no distinction between it and the

object.

§ 425. Abstract self-consciousness is the first negation of consciousness,

and for that reason it is burdened with an external object, or, nominally,

with the negation of it. Thus it is at the same time the antecedent stage,

consciousness: it is the contradiction of itself as self-consciousness and

as consciousness. But the latter aspect and the negation in general is in

I = I potentially suppressed; and hence as this certitude of self against

the object it is the _impulse_ to realise its implicit nature, by giving

its abstract self-awareness content and objectivity, and in the other

direction to free itself from its sensuousness, to set aside the given

objectivity and identify it with itself. The two processes are one and the

same, the identification of its consciousness and self-consciousness.

(α) Appetite or Instinctive Desire(131).

§ 426. Self-consciousness, in its immediacy, is a singular, and a desire

(appetite),—the contradiction implied in its abstraction which should yet

be objective,—or in its immediacy which has the shape of an external

object and should be subjective. The certitude of one’s self, which issues

from the suppression of mere consciousness, pronounces the _object_ null:

and the outlook of self-consciousness towards the object equally qualifies

the abstract ideality of such self-consciousness as null.

§ 427. Self-consciousness, therefore, knows itself implicit in the object,

which in this outlook is conformable to the appetite. In the negation of

the two one-sided moments by the ego’s own activity, this identity comes

to be _for_ the ego. To this activity the object, which implicitly and for

self-consciousness is self-less, can make no resistance: the dialectic,

implicit in it, towards self-suppression exists in this case as that

activity of the ego. Thus while the given object is rendered subjective,

the subjectivity divests itself of its one-sidedness and becomes objective

to itself.

§ 428. The product of this process is the fast conjunction of the ego with

itself, its satisfaction realised, and itself made actual. On the external

side it continues, in this return upon itself, primarily describable as an

individual, and maintains itself as such; because its bearing upon the

self-less object is purely negative, the latter, therefore, being merely

consumed. Thus appetite in its satisfaction is always destructive, and in

its content selfish: and as the satisfaction has only happened in the

individual (and that is transient) the appetite is again generated in the

very act of satisfaction.

§ 429. But on the inner side, or implicitly, the sense of self which the

ego gets in the satisfaction does not remain in abstract

self-concentration or in mere individuality; on the contrary,—as negation

of _immediacy_ and individuality the result involves a character of

universality and of the identity of self-consciousness with its object.

The judgment or diremption of this self-consciousness is the consciousness

of a “_free_” object, in which ego is aware of itself as an ego, which

however is _also_ still outside it.

(β) Self-consciousness Recognitive(132).

§ 430. Here there is a self-consciousness for a self-consciousness, at

first immediately as one of two things for another. In that other as ego I

behold myself, and yet also an immediately existing object, another ego

absolutely independent of me and opposed to me. (The suppression of the

singleness of self-consciousness was only a first step in the suppression,

and it merely led to the characterisation of it as _particular_.) This

contradiction gives either self-consciousness the impulse to _show_ itself

as a free self, and to exist as such for the other:—the process of

_recognition_.

§ 431. The process is a battle. I cannot be aware of me as myself in

another individual, so long as I see in that other an other and an

immediate existence: and I am consequently bent upon the suppression of

this immediacy of his. But in like measure _I_ cannot be recognised as

immediate, except so far as I overcome the mere immediacy on my own part,

and thus give existence to my freedom. But this immediacy is at the same

time the corporeity of self-consciousness, in which as in its sign and

tool the latter has its own _sense of self_, and its being _for others_,

and the means for entering into relation with them.

§ 432. The fight of recognition is a life and death struggle: either

self-consciousness imperils the other’s like, and incurs a like peril for

its own—but only peril, for either is no less bent on maintaining his

life, as the existence of his freedom. Thus the death of one, though by

the abstract, therefore rude, negation of immediacy, it, from one point of

view, solves the contradiction, is yet, from the essential point of view

(i.e. the outward and visible recognition), a new contradiction (for that

recognition is at the same time undone by the other’s death) and a greater

than the other.

§ 433. But because life is as requisite as liberty to the solution, the

fight ends in the first instance as a one-sided negation with inequality.

While the one combatant prefers life, retains his single

self-consciousness, but surrenders his claim for recognition, the other

holds fast to his self-assertion and is recognised by the former as his

superior. Thus arises the status of _master and slave_.

In the battle for recognition and the subjugation under a master, we see,

on their phenomenal side, the emergence of man’s social life and the

commencement of political union. _Force_, which is the basis of this

phenomenon, is not on that account a basis of right, but only the

necessary and legitimate factor in the passage from the state of

self-consciousness sunk in appetite and selfish isolation into the state

of universal self-consciousness. Force, then, is the external or

phenomenal commencement of states, not their underlying and essential

principle.