ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY AND HEGEL.
Although we need not take too seriously Hegel's remark (vol. ii. p.
13) on the English conception of philosophy, it may be admitted that,
by the dominant school of English thought, philosophy, taken in the
wide sense it has predominantly born abroad, was, not so very long
ago, all but entirely ignored. Causes of various kinds had turned the
energy of the English mind into other directions, not less essential to
the common welfare. Practical needs and an established social system
helped--to bind down studies to definite and particular objects, and to
exclude what seemed vague and general investigations with no immediate
bearing on the business of life. Hence philosophy in England could
hardly exist except when it was reduced to the level of a special
branch of science, or when it could be used as a receptacle for the
principles and methods common to all the sciences. The general term
was often used to denote the wisdom of this world, or the practical
exhibition of self-control in life and action. For those researches,
which are directed to the objects once considered proper to philosophy,
the more definite and characteristic term came to be Mental and Moral
Science.
The old name was in certain circles restricted to denote the vague and
irregular speculations of those thinkers, who either lived before the
rise of exact science, or who acted in defiance of its precepts and its
example. One large and influential class of English thinkers inclined
to sweep philosophy altogether away, as equivalent to metaphysics and
obsolete forms of error; and upon the empty site thus obtained they
sought to construct a psychological theory of mind, or they tried to
arrange and codify those general remarks upon the general procedure
of the sciences which are known under the name of Inductive Logic. A
smaller, but not less vigorous, school of philosophy looked upon their
business as an extension and rounding off of science into a complete
unification of knowledge. The first is illustrated by the names of J.
S. Mill and Mr. Bain: the second is the doctrine of Mr. Herbert Spencer.
The encyclopaedic aggregate of biological, psychological, ethical
and social investigation which Mr. Spencer pursues, under the
general guidance of the formula of evolution by differentiation
and integration, still proceeds on its course: but though its
popularity--as such popularity goes--is vast and more than national,
it does not and probably cannot find many imitators. Very differently
stand matters with the movement in psychology and logic. Here
the initiative has led to divergent and unexpected developments.
Psychology, which at first was partly an ampler and a more progressive
logic, a theory of the origin and nature of knowledge, partly a
propaedeutic to the more technical logic and ethics, and pursued in
a loosely introspective way, has gravitated more and more towards
its experimental and physiological side, with occasional velleities
to assume the abstractly-mathematical character of a psycho-physical
science. Logic, on the other hand, has also changed its scope. Not
content to be a mere tool of the sciences or a mere criterion for the
estimation of evidence, it has in one direction grown into a systematic
effort to become an epistemology--a system of the first principles of
knowledge and reality--a metaphysic of science; and in another it has
sought to realise the meaning of those old forms of inference which
the logicians of half a century ago were inclined to pooh-pooh as
obsolete. Most remarkable--and most novel of all--is the vast increase
of interest and research in the problems of ethics and v of what is
called the philosophy of religion--subjects which at that date were
literally burning questions, apt to scorch the fingers of those who
touched them. In all of this, but especially marked in some leading
thinkers, the ruling feature is the critical--the sceptical, i. e. the
eager, watchful, but self-restrained--attitude towards its themes. Ever
driving on to find a deeper unity than shows on the surface, and to get
at principles, the modern thinker--and in this we see the permanent
and almost overwhelming influence of Kant upon him--recoils from the
dogmatism of system, at the very moment it seems to be within his grasp.
Thus the recent products of English thought have been, as Mr. Spencer
has taught us to say, partly in the line of differentiation, partly
of integration. At one moment it seems as if the ancient queen of the
sciences sat like Hecuba, _exul, inops,_ while her younger daughters
enjoyed the freedom and progress of specialisation. The wood seems lost
behind the trees. And at another, again, the centripetal force seems to
preponderate: every department, logic, ethics, psychology, sociology,
rapidly carries its students on and up to fundamental questions, if
not to fundamental principles. Philosophy--the one and undivided
truth and quest of truths--emerges fresh, vigorous, and as yet rather
indeterminate, from the mass of detailed investigations. That the
position is now altered from what it was in times when knowledge had
fewer departments, is obvious. The task of the 'synoptic' mind--which
Plato claims for the philosopher--grows increasingly difficult: but
that is hardly a reason for performing it in a more perfunctory way.
It seems rather as if in such a crisis one of the great reconstructive
systems of a preceding age might be in some measure helpful.
If we consult history, it is at once clear that philosophy, or the
pursuit of ultimate reality and permanent truth, went hand in hand with
scientific researches into facts and their particular explanations.
In their earlier stages the two tendencies of thought were scarcely
distinguishable. The philosophers of Ionia and Magna Graecia were also
the scientific pioneers of their time. Their fragmentary remains remind
us at times of the modern theories of geology and biology,--at other
times of the teachings of idealism. The same thing is comparatively
true of the earlier philosophers of Modern Europe. The seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, in spite of Bacon and Newton, endeavoured
to study the mental and moral life by a method which was a strange
mixture of empiricism and metaphysics. In words, indeed, the thinkers
from Descartes to Wolff duly emphasise, perhaps over-emphasise, the
antithesis between the extended and the intellectual. But in practice
their course is not so clear. Their mental philosophy is often only a
preliminary _medicina mentis_ to set the individual mind in good order
for undertaking the various tasks awaiting a special research. They are
really eager to get on to business, and only, as it were, with regret
spend time in this clearance of mental faculty. And when they do deal
with objects, the material and extended tends to become the dominant
conception, the basis of reality. The human mind, that _nobilissima
substantia_, is treated only as an aggregate, or a receptacle, of
ideas, and the _mens_,--with them all nearly as with Spinoza,--is only
an _idea corporis,_ and that phrase not taken so highly as Spinoza's
perhaps should be taken. In the works of these thinkers, as of the
pre-Socratics, there is one element which may be styled philosophical,
and another element which maybe styled scientific,--if we use both
words vaguely. But with Socrates in the ancient, and with Kant in the
modern epoch of philosophy, an attempt was made to get the boundary
between the two regions definitively drawn. The distinction was in the
first place accompanied by something like turning the back upon science
and popular conceptions. Socrates withdrew thought from disquisitions
concerning the nature of all things, and fixed it upon man and
the state of man. Kant left the broad fields of actually-attained
knowledge, and inquired into the central principle on which the
acquisition of science, the laws of human life, and the ideals of art
and religion, were founded.
The change thus begun was not unlike that which Copernicus effected in
the theory of Astronomy. Human personality, either in the actualised
forms of the State, or in the abstract shape of the Reason,--that
intellectual liberty, which is a man's true world,--was, at least by
implication, made the pivot around which the system of the sciences
might turn. In the contest, which according to Reid prevails between
Common Sense and Philosophy, the presumptions of the former have
been distinctly reversed, and Kant, like Socrates, has shown that it
is not the several items of fact, but the humanity, the moral law,
the thought, which underlies these doctrines, which give the real
resting-point and true centre of movement. But this negative attitude
of philosophy to the sciences is only the beginning, needed to secure
a standing-ground. In the ancient world Aristotle, and in the modern
Hegel (as the inheritor of the labours of Fichte and Schelling),
exhibit the movement outwards to reconquer the universe, proceeding
from that principle which Socrates and Kant had emphasised in its
fundamental worth.
Mr. Mill, in the closing chapter of his Logic, has briefly sketched
the ideal of a science to which he gives the name of Teleology,
corresponding in the ethical and practical sphere to a _Philosophia
Prima_, or Metaphysics, in the theoretical. This ideal and ultimate
court of appeal is to be valid in Morality, and also in Prudence,
Policy and Taste. But the conception, although a desirable one, falls
short of the work which Hegel assigns to philosophy. What he intended
to accomplish with detail and regular evolution was not a system of
principles in these departments of action only, but a theory which
would give its proper place in our total Idea of reality to Art,
Science, and Religion, to all the consciousness of ordinary life, and
to the evolution of the physical universe. Philosophy ranges over
the--whole field of actuality, or existing fact. Abstract principles
are all very well in their way; but they are not philosophy. If the
world in its historical and its present life develops into endless
detail in regular lines, philosophy must equally develop the narrowness
of its first principles into the plenitude of a System,--into what
Hegel calls, the Idea. His point of view may be gathered from the
following remarks in a review of Hamann, an erratic friend and
fellow-citizen of Kant's.
Hamann would not put himself to the trouble, which in an higher sense
God undertook. The ancient philosophers have described God under the
image of a round ball. But if that be His nature, God has unfolded it;
and in the actual world He has opened the closed shell of truth into a
system of Nature, into a State-system, a system of Law and Morality,
into the system of the world's History. The shut fist has become
an open hand, the fingers of which reach out to lay hold of man's
mind, and draw it to Himself. Nor is the human mind a self-involved
intelligence, blindly moving within its own secret recesses. It is no
mere feeling and groping about in a vacuum, but an intelligent system
of rational organisation. Of that system Thought is the summit in point
of form: and Thought maybe described as the capability of going beyond
the mere surface of God's self-expansion,--or rather as the capability,
by means of reflection upon it, of entering into it, and then when the
entrance has been secured, of retracing in thought God's expansion of
Himself. To take this trouble is the express duty and end of ends set
before the thinking mind, ever since God laid aside His rolled-up form,
and revealed Himself[1].'
Enthusiastic admirers have often spoken as if the salvation of the time
could only come from the Hegelian philosophy. 'Grasp the secret of
Hegel,' they say, 'and you will find a cure for the delusions of your
own mind, and the remedy which will set right the wrongs of the world.'
These high claims to be a panacea were never made by Hegel himself.
According to him, as according to Aristotle, philosophy _as such_ can
produce nothing new. Practical statesmen, and theoretical reformers,
may do their best to correct the inequalities of their time. But the
very terms in which Bacon scornfully depreciated one great concept of
philosophy are to be accepted in their literal truth. Like a virgin
consecrated to God, she bears no fruit[2]. She represents the spirit
of the world, resting, as it were, when one step in the progress has
been accomplished, and surveying the advance which has been made.
Philosophy is not,' says Fichte, 'even a means to _shape_ life: for
it lies in a totally different world, and what is to have an influence
upon life must itself have sprung from life. Philosophy is only a means
to the _knowledge_ of life.' Nor has it the vocation to edify men, and
take the place of religion on the higher levels of intellect. 'The
philosopher,' Fichte boldly continues, 'has no God at all and can have
no God: he has only a concept of the concept or of the Idea of God. It
is only in life that there is God and religion: but the philosopher as
such is not the whole complete man, and it is impossible for any one
to be _only_ a philosopher[3].' Philosophy does not profess to bring
into being what ought to be, but is not yet. It sets up no mere ideals,
which must wait for some future day in order to be realised. Enough
for it if it show what the world _is,_ if it were what it professes
to be, and what in a way it must be, otherwise it could not be even
what it is. The subject-matter of philosophy is that which is always
realising and always realised--the world in its wholeness as it is and
has been. It seeks to put before us, and embody in permanent outlines,
the universal law of spiritual life and growth, and not the local,
temporary, and individual acts of human will.
Those who ask philosophy to construe, or to deduce _a priori_ a
single blade of grass, or a single act of a man, must not be grieved
if their request sounds absurd and meets with no answer. The sphere
of philosophy is the Universal. We may say, if we like, that it is
retrospective. It is the spectator of all time and all existence: it
is its duty to view things _sub specie aeternitatis_. To comprehend
the universe of thought in all its formations and all its features, to
reduce the solid structures, which mind has created, to fluidity and
transparency in the pure medium of thought, to set free the fossilised
intelligence which the great magician who wields the destinies of the
world has hidden under the mask of Nature, of the Mind of man, of
the works of Art, of the institutions of the State and the orders of
Society, and of religious forms and creeds:--such is the complicated
problem of philosophy. Its special work is to comprehend the world,
not try to make it better. If it were the purpose of philosophy to
reform and improve the existing state of things, it comes a little
too late for such a task. 'As the thought of the world,' says Hegel,
'it makes its first appearance at a time, when the actual fact has
consummated its process of formation, and is now fully matured. This is
the doctrine set forth by the notion of philosophy; but it is also the
teaching of history. It is only when the actual world has reached its
full fruition that the ideal rises to confront the reality, and builds
up, in the shape of an intellectual realm, that same world grasped in
its substantial being. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, some
one shape of life has meanwhile grown old: and grey in grey, though
it brings it into knowledge, cannot make it young again. The owl of
Minerva does not start upon its flight, until the evening twilight has
begun to fall[4].'
[Footnote 1: _Vermischte Schriften_, vol. ii. p. 87.]
[Footnote 2: _De Augm. Scient._ iii. 5.]
[Footnote 3: The passages occur in some notes (written down by F. in
reference to the charge of Atheism) published in his _Werke,_ v. pp.
342, 348.]
[Footnote 4: _Philosophie des Rechts_, p. 20 (_Werke,_ viii).]