PSEUDO-IDEALISM: JACOBI.
It is hazardous to try to sum up the net result of a philosophy in
a few paragraphs. Since Aristotle separated the pure 'energy' of
philosophy from the activities which leave works made and deeds
done behind them, it need scarcely be repeated that the result of a
philosophical system is nothing palpable or tangible,--nothing on which
you can put your finger, and say definitely: Here it is. The spirit of
a philosophy always refuses to be incarcerated in a formula, however
deftly you may try to charm it there. The statement of the principle
or tendency of a philosophical system tells not what that system is,
but what it is not. It marks off the position from contiguous points
of view; and on that account never gets beyond the borderland, which
separates that system from something else. The method and process of
reasoning is as essential in knowledge, as the result to which it
leads: and the method in this case is thoroughly bound up with the
subject-matter. A mere analysis of the method, therefore, or a mere
record of the purpose and outcome of the system, would be, the one as
well as the other, a fruitless labour, and come to nothing but words.
Thus any attempt to convey a glimpse of the truth in a few sentences
and in large outlines seems foreclosed. The theory of Hegel has an
abhorrence of mere generalities, of abstractions with no life in them,
and no growth out of them. His principle has to prove and verify itself
to be true and adequate: and that verification fills up the whole
circle of circles, of which philosophy is said to consist.
It seems as if there were in Hegel two distinct habits of mind which
the world--the outside observer--rarely sees except in separation.
On one hand there is a sympathy with mystical and intuitional minds,
with the upholders of immediate knowledge and of innate ideas, with
those who find that science and demonstration rather tend to distract
from the one thing needful--who would 'lie in Abraham's bosom all the
year,'--those who would fain lay their grasp upon the whole before they
have gone through the drudgery of details. On the other hand, there
is within him a strongly 'rationalising' and non-visionary intellect,
with a practical and realistic bent, and the full scientific spirit.
Schelling, in an angry mood, could describe him as 'the quintessence
of all that is prosaic, both outside and in[1].' Yet, seen from other
points of view, Hegel has been accused of dreaminess, pietism, and
mystical theology. His merging of the ordinary contrasts of thought
in a completer truth, and what would popularly be described as his
mixing up of religious with logical questions, and the general
unfathomableness of his doctrine,--all seem to support such a charge.
Yet all this is not inconsistent with a rough and incisive vigour
of understanding, a plainness of reason, and a certain hardness of
temperament. This philosopher is in many ways not distinguishable from
the ordinary citizen, and there are not unfrequent moments when his
wife hears him groan over the providence that condemned him to be a
philosopher[2]. He is contemptuous towards all weakly sentimentalism,
and almost brutal in his emphasis on the reasonableness of the actual
and on the folly of dreaming the might-have-been; and keeps his
household accounts as carefully as the average head of a family. And,
perhaps, this convergence of two tendencies of thought may be noticed
in the gradual maturing of his ideas. In the period of his 'Lehrjahre,'
or apprenticeship, from 1793 to 1800, we can see the study of religion
in the earlier part of that time at Bern succeeded by the study of
politics and philosophy at Frankfort-on-the-Main.
His purpose on the whole may be termed an attempt to combine breadth
with depth, the intensity of the mystic who craves for union with
Truth, with the extended range and explicitness of those who multiply
knowledge. 'The depth of the mind is only so deep as its courage
to expand and lose itself in its explication[3]. It must prove its
profundity by the ordered fullness of the knowledge which it has
realised. The position and the work of Hegel will not be intelligible
unless we keep in view both of these antagonistic points.
The purpose of philosophy--as has been pointed out--is, for Hegel--to
know God, which is to know things in their Truth--to see all things in
God--to comprehend the world in its eternal significance. Supposing
the purpose capable of being achieved, what method is open to its
attainment? There is on one hand the method of ordinary science
in dealing with its objects. These are _things,_ found as it were
projected into space before the observer, lying outside one another in
_prima facie_ independence, though connected (by a further finding)
with each other by certain 'accidents' called qualities and relations.
Among the objects of knowledge, there are included, by the somewhat
naïve intellect that accepts tradition like a physical fact, certain
'things' of a rather peculiar character. One of these is God: the
others, which a historical criticism has subjoined, are the Soul and
the World. And whatever may be said of the thinghood, reality, or
existence of the World, there is no doubt that God and the Soul figure,
and figure largely, in the consciousness of the human race as entities,
differing probably in many respects from other things, but still
possessed of certain fundamental features in common, and thus playing a
part as distinct realities amongst other realities.
Given such objects, it is natural for a reflecting mind to attempt
to make out a science of God and a science of the Soul, just as of
other 'things.' And to these, a system-loving philosopher might add a
science of the world (Cosmology)[4]. It was felt, indeed, that these
objects were peculiar and unique. Thus, for example, as regards God,
it was held necessary by the logician who saw tradition in its true
light to prove His existence': and various arguments to that end were
at different times devised. With regard to the human Soul, similarly,
it was considered essential to establish its independent reality as a
thing really separate from the bodily organism with which its phenomena
were obviously connected,--to prove, in short, its substantial
existence, and its emancipation from the bodily fate of dissolution and
decay. With reference to the World, the problem was rather different:
it was felt that the name suggested problems for thought rather than
denoted reality. How can we predicate of the whole what is predicable
of its parts? This or that may have a beginning and a cause, may have
a limit and an end: but can the totality be presented under these
aspects, without leading to self-contradiction? And the result of
these questions in the case of 'Cosmology' was to shed in the long run
similar doubts on 'Rational' Theology and 'Rational' Psychology.
Practically this metaphysical science--which is so called as dealing
with a province or provinces of being _beyond_ the ordinary or natural
_(physical)_ realities--treated God and the Soul by the same terms
(or _categories_) as it used in dealing with 'material' objects. God
e. g. was a force, a cause, a being; so, too, was the Soul. The main
butt of Kant's destructive _Criticism of pare Reason_ is to challenge
the justice of including God and the Soul among the objects of
science,--among the things we can know as we may know plants or stars.
To make an object of knowledge (in the strict sense), to make a thing,
the prerequisite, Kant urges, is perception in space and time. Without
a sensation--and that sensation, as it were, laid out in place and
duration--an object of science is impossible. No mere demonstration
will conjure it into existence. And with that requirement the old
theology and psychology, which professed to expound the object-God and
the object-soul, were ruled out-of-order in the list of sciences, and
reduced to mere dialectical exercises. The circle of the sciences,
therefore, does not lead beyond the conditioned,' beyond the regions
of space and time. It has nothing to say of a 'first cause' or of an
ultimate end.
Such was the result that might fairly be read from Kant's _Criticism of
pare Reason_,--especially if read without its supplementary sequels,
and, above all, if read by those in whom feeling was stronger than
thought, or who were by nature more endowed with the craving for faith
than with the mind of philosophy. Such a personality appeared in J.
H. Jacobi, the younger brother of a poet not undistinguished in his
day. Amid the duties of public office and the cares of business, he
found time to study Spinoza, the English and Scotch moralists, and
above all to follow with interest the development of Kant from the year
1763 onwards. His house at Düsseldorf was the scene of many literary
reunions, and Jacobi himself maintained familiar intercourse with
the leaders of the literary and intellectual world, such as Lessing,
Hamann, Goethe. His first considerable works were two novels, in
letters,--Allwill, begun in a serial magazine in 1775, and Woldemar,
begun in another magazine in 1777; both being issued as complete works
in 1781. Both turn on a moral antithesis, and both leave the antithesis
as they found it. _Here_ pleads the advocate of the heart: 'it is the
heart which alone and directly tells man what is good': 'virtue is a
fundamental instinct of human nature': the true basis of morals is an
immediate certainty; and the supreme standard is an 'ethical genius'
which as it were discovered virtue and which still is a paramount
authority in those exceptional situations in life when the 'grammar
of virtue' fails to supply adequate rules, and where, therefore, the
immediate voice of conscience must in a 'licence of sublime poesy[5]'
dare, as Burke says, to 'suspend its own rules in favour of its own
principles.' _There_, on the other hand, is the champion of reason,
who declares all this sentimentalism 'a veritable mysticism of
antinomianism and a quietism of immorality[6]': 'To humanity,' he says,
'and to every man (every complete man) principles, and some system
of principles, are indispensable.' Woldemar concludes with the pair
of mottoes: 'Whosoever trusts to his own heart is a fool,' and 'Trust
love: it takes everything, but it gives everything.'
In 1780 Jacobi had his historic conversation with Lessing at
Wolfenbüttel[7]. The talk turned on Spinoza. For many years the
philosophy of Spinoza had seemed to vanish from the world. His name
was only heard in a reference of obloquy, as if it were dangerous to
be even suspected of infection with the taint of Atheism. But both
Lessing and Jacobi had found him out. The former saw in him an ally in
that struggle for higher light and wider views which he undertook in
a spirit and with a scope hardly surmised by those he usually wrought
with. Jacobi, on the contrary, saw in him personified the conjunction
of all those irreligious tendencies which all philosophy in some degree
exhibited: the tendency to veil or set aside God and personality. 'I
believe,' says Jacobi, as he began the conversation 'in an intelligent
personal cause of the world.' 'Then I am going,' replied Lessing, 'to
hear something quite new': and he dryly put aside the other's rhapsody
on the 'personal extra-mundane deity with the remark 'Words, my dear
Jacobi, words.' Jacobi's work _Letters on the doctrine of Spinoza_
(it appeared in 1785) was the beginning of a controversy in which
Mendelssohn and Herder took part, and in which Goethe took an interest
under Herders tutorship. To the exact philological study of Spinoza
it did not contribute much: for the Spinoza whom Herder and Goethe
saw as their spiritual forefather was transfigured in their thought
to a figure to which Leibniz had almost an equal right to give his
name. He upheld to them the symbol of the immanence of the divine in
nature: he was the leader in the battle against 'philistine' deism and
utilitarianism.
With the Kantian criticism of the pseudo-science of theology Jacobi had
in one way no fault to find. That reasoning by its demonstration cannot
find out God, was to him an axiomatic belief. But the 'man of feeling'
felt uneasy at the trenchant methods of the Königsberg man of logic.
He seemed to see the world of men and things passing under Kant's
manipulation into a mere collection of phenomena and ideas of the mind.
Still more was he sensible to the loss of his God. That surrogate of an
argument for theism which Kant seemed to offer in the implications of
the Moral Law did not give what Jacobi wanted. Mere morality is a cold
and mechanical principle--he thinks--compared with that infinite life
and love which we deem we have in God. The son of man, he felt, was, in
virtue of an indwelling genius of conscience, supreme over the moral
law: how much more, then, the Absolute and Eternal on a higher grade of
being than its mechanical regularities!
If the way of reasoning will not carry us to the Absolute, still
less (and that is whither Jacobi wishes to reach) to God, there must
be another way: for something in him, which may be called Faith
or Feeling, Spiritual Sense or Reason, proclaims itself certain
of the reality both of God and Nature. There _is_ an objective
reality--outside and beyond him--yet somehow to be reached by a daring
leap,--whereby, out of sheer force of will, he, shutting his eyes
to the temporal and the mechanical, finds himself carried over the
dividing gulf into the land of eternal life and love.
'I appeal' he says in his latest utterances[8] 'to an imperative, an
invincible feeling as the first and underived ground of all philosophy
and all religion,--to a feeling which lets man become aware of and
alive to the fact that he has a sense for the supersensuous.' 'As it
is religion which makes man man,' he continues, 'and which alone lifts
him above the animals, so it also makes him a philosopher.' Such an
organ for the supersensuous is what in his later writings he calls
_Vernunft_ (Reason) and distinguishes from _Verstand_ (Understanding).
'This reason,' says Coleridge (to whom we owe this use of the terms in
English) in the _Friend,_ 'is an organ bearing the same relation to
spiritual objects as the eye bears to material phenomena,' It is 'that
intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves as one with
the whole and is opposed to that 'science of the mere understanding'
in which 'transferring reality to the negations of reality (to the
ever-varying framework of the uniform life) we think of ourselves
as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as
object to subject, thing to thought, death to life.' But this Reason
is even more than this. It is the direct contact with reality, which
it affirms and even _is._ It apprehends the _me_ and the _thee,_ it
apprehends above all the great _Thee,_ God: apprehends, and we may even
say appropriates[9]. And it apprehends them at one bound--in one _salto
mortale_--because it is really in implicit possession of them. Call the
step a miracle, if you will: you must admit, he adds, that 'some time
or other every philosophy must have recourse to a miracle[10].'
And yet the asseveration rings false--it shows a womanish wilfulness
and weakness in its reiteration. He has the reality; yet he has it
not. 'Were a God known,' he says in one place, 'He would not be God.'
He yearns with passionate longing to find the living and true: he
feels himself and the Eternal clasped in one: his faith effects the
reality of things hoped for. But, he adds, 'We never see the Absolute':
the primal light of reason is but faint. It is but a presage--a
pre-supposition--of the Everlasting. This reason, in short, needs
discipline and development, it needs the ethical life to raise it:
'without morality no religiosity,' he says. 'Light,' he complains,
'is in my heart,' but at the moment I want to bring it into the
understanding, the light goes out.' And yet he knows--and Coleridge
repeats--'the consciousness of reason and of its revelations is only
possible in an understanding.'
'There seem to be one or two motives acting upon Jacobi. The 'plain
man,' especially if he be of high character and of 'noble' religiosity,
has a feeling that the lust of philosophising disturbs the security of
life, and endangers things which are deservedly dear to him. In such
an one the 'enthusiasm of logic'--the calm pursuit of truth at all
costs, so characteristic of Lessing--is inferior to the 'enthusiasm
of life,'--a passion in which the terrestrial and the celestial are
inextricably blended, where one clings to God as the stronghold of
self, and sets personality--our human personality--in the throne of
the Eternal. He will be all that is noble and good, if only he be not
asked utterly to surrender self. So, too, Jacobi's God--or Absolute
(for he leaves his 'non-philosophy' so far as to use both names), is
rather the final aim of a grand, overpowering yearning, than a calm,
self-centred, self-expanding life which carries man along with it.
It would be, he feels, so very terrible, if at the last there were
no God to meet us--to find the throne of the universe vacant. Avaunt
philosophy, therefore! Let us cling to the faith of our nature and our
childhood, and refuse her treacherous consolations! With the central
proposition of Jacobi, Hegel, for one, is not inclined to quarrel. He
too, as he asks and answers the question as to the issues of this and
of the better life, might say
'Question, answer presuppose
Two points: that the thing itself which questions, answers,--_is,_ it
knows;
As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself--a force
Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course,
Unaffected by its end,--that this thing likewise needs must be;
Call this--God, then, call that--Soul, and both the only facts for me.
Prove them facts? that they o'erpass my power of proving proves
them such:
Fact it is, I know, I know not something which is fact as much.'
But when Jacobi goes on to say that it is the supreme and final duty
of the true sage 'to unveil reality,'--meaning thereby that, given the
feeling, he has only to
'Define it well
For fear divine Philosophy
Should push beyond her mark and be
Procuress to the Lords of Hell,'
Hegel withdraws. It is the duty of philosophy to labour to make the
perception--the fleeting, uncertain, trembling perception--of faith,
a clear, sure, inwardly consistent knowledge: to show, and not merely
to assert, that 'the path of (this world's) duty is the way to (that
world's) glory.' There is, Hegel himself has said more than once,
something opposed to ordinary ways of thinking in the procedure of the
philosopher. To the outsider, it seems like standing on your head.
It involves something like what, in religious language, is termed
conversion--a new birth--becoming a new man. But though such a change
always seems to culminate in a moment of sudden transformation,--as if
the continuity of old and new were disrupted, the process has a history
and a preparation. Of that pilgrim's progress of the world-distracted
soul to its discovery of its true being in God, philosophy is the
record: a record which Hegel has written both in the _Phenomenology of
Mind_, and, more methodically, in his _Encyclopaedia._ The passage from
nature to God--or from man's limitations to the divine fullness--must
be made, he urged, in the open day and not in the secret vision when
sleep falls upon men. When the aged Jacobi read these requirements of
Hegel, he wrote to a friend: 'He may be right, and I should like once
again to experiment with him all that the power of thinking can do
alone, were not the old man's head too weak for it[11].'
'For a philosophy like this,' says Hegel[12], 'individual man
and humanity are the ultimate standpoint:--as a fixed invincible
finitude of reason, not as a reflection of the eternal beauty, or as
a spiritual focus of the universe, but as an ultimate sense-nature,
which however with the power of faith can daub itself over here and
there with an alien supersensible. Let us suppose an artist restricted
to portrait-painting; he might so far idealise as to introduce in the
eye of a commonplace countenance a yearning look, and on its lips a
melancholy smile, but he would be utterly debarred from depicting the
Gods, sublime over yearning and melancholy--as if the delineation of
eternal pictures were only possible at the cost of humanity. So too
Philosophy--on this view--must not portray the Idea of man, but the
abstraction of a humanity empirical and mingled with short-comings, and
must bear a body impaled on the stake of the absolute antithesis; and
when it clearly feels its limitation to the sensible, it must at the
same time bedeck itself with the surface colour of a supersensible,
and point the finger of faith to a something Higher.
'But the truth cannot be defrauded by such a consecration if finitude
be still left subsisting; the true consecration must annihilate it.
The artist, who fails to give actuality the true truth by letting
fall upon it the ethereal illumination and taking it completely in
that light, and who can only depict actuality in its bare ordinary
reality and truth (a reality however which is neither true nor real)
may apply the pathetic remedy to actuality, the remedy of tenderness
and sentimentality, everywhere putting tears on the cheeks of the
commonplace, and an O God! in their mouth. No doubt his figures in
this way direct their look over the actual heavenwards, but like
bats they belong neither to the race of birds nor beasts, neither to
earth nor heaven. Their beauty is not free from ugliness, nor their
morals without weakness and meanness: the intelligence they haply may
show is not without banality: the success which enters into it is
not without vulgarity, and the misfortune not without cowardice and
terror; and both success and misfortune have something contemptible.
So too philosophy, if it takes the finite and subjectivity as absolute
truth in the logical form habitual to her, cannot purify them by
bringing them into relation with an infinite: for that infinite is not
itself the true, because it is unable to consume finitude. But where
a philosophy consumes the temporal as such and burns up reality, its
action is pronounced a cruel dissection, which does not leave man
complete, and a forcible abstraction which has no truth, above all
no truth for life. And such an abstraction is treated as a painful
amputation of an essential piece from the completeness of the whole:
that essential piece, and absolute substantiality being believed to
consist in the temporal and empirical, and in privation. It is as if
a person, who sees only the feet of a work of art, were to complain,
should the whole work be unveiled to his eyes, that he was deprived of
the privation, that the incomplete was decompleted.'
Jacobi has been spoken of as the leader of this 'Un-philosophy' of
faith. As such his allies lie on one side among philosophers who hold
by the deliverances of 'common sense,' by the consciousness of the
unsophisticated man shrinking from the waywardness of an idealism that
deprives him of his solidest realities. The type of such a philosopher
has been drawn by Hegel[13] in Krug. But, on the other side, Jacobi
touched hands--though not in a sympathetic spirit--with a somewhat
motley band which also had set its face to go to the everlasting gates,
but had turned aside to aimless wandering on the Hill Difficulty, or
sought too soon the repose of the Delectable Mountains, without due
sojourn in the valley of Humiliation or descent under the Shadow of
Death. Like Wordsworth, they felt that the world is too much with
us: that our true self is frittered away into fragments and passing
stages, in which we are not ourselves,--whereby we also lose the true
perception of the essential life of nature. Gradually we have sunk
into the deadening arms of habit, reduced ourselves to professional
and conventional types, and lost the freer and larger mobility of
spiritual being. We have grown into _verständige Leute_--people of
practical sense and worldly wisdom. To such, philosophy would come--if
it could come--as the great breath of life--of 'reason' (_Vernunft_)
which transcends the separations inevitable in practical will and
knowledge. But to this band--which has been styled the Romantic School
of Germany--the liberation came in ways more analogous to that craved
for by Jacobi. Their way was the way of Romance and Imagination. The
principle of Romance is the protest against confining man and nature
to the dull round of uniformities which custom and experience have
imprisoned them in. Boundless life, infinite spontaneity is surging
within us and the world, ready to break down the dams convention
and inertia have established. That inner power is an ever-fresh,
ever-restless Irony, which sets up and overthrows, which refuses to be
bound or stereotyped, which is never weary, never exhausted,--free in
the absolute sense. It is the mystic force of Nature, which they seemed
to see ever on the spring to work its magic transformations, and burst
the bulwarks of empirical law. It is the princely _jus aggratiandi,_
the sportive sovereignty of the true artist, who is able at any moment
to enter into direct communion with the heart of things.
The beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany, as well as in
England, was a period of effervescence:--there was a good deal of fire,
and naturally there was also a good deal of smoke. Genius was exultant
in its aspirations after Freedom, Truth, and Wisdom. The Romantic
School, which had grown up under the stimulus of Fichte's resolve to
enact thought, and had for a time been closely allied with Schelling,
counted amongst its literary chiefs the names of the Schlegels, of
Tieck, Novalis, and perhaps Richter. The world, as that generation
dreamed, was to be made young again,--first by drinking, where
Wordsworth led, from the fresh springs of nature,--afterwards when, as
often has happened, doubts arose as to where Nature was really to be
found, by an elixir distilled from the withered flowers of medieval
Catholicism and chivalry,
'Since the Mid-Age was the Heroic Time'
and even from the old roots of primeval wisdom. The good old times of
faith and harmonious beauty were to be brought back again by the joint
labours of ideas and poetry.--
'So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
This Duke would fain know he was without being it.'
To that period of incipient and darkling energy Hegel stands in
very much the same position as Luther did to the pre-Reformation
mystics, to Meister Eckhart, and the unknown author of the 'German
Theology.' It was from this side, from the school of Genius and Romance
in philosophy, that Hegel was proximately driven, not into sheer
re-action, but into system, development, and science.
To elevate philosophy from a love of wisdom into the possession of real
wisdom, into a system and a science, is the aim which he distinctly
set before himself from the beginning. In almost every work, and every
course of lectures, whatever be their subject, he cannot let slip the
chance of an attack upon the mode of philosophising which substituted
the strength of belief or conviction for the intervention of reasoning
and argument. There may have been a strong sympathy in him with the
end which these German contemporaries and, in some ways, analogues
to Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Byron had in view. No one who
reads his criticism of Kant can miss perceiving his bent towards the
Infinite. But he utterly rejects the vision of feeling, whether as
longing faith or devout enjoyment, as an adequate exposition of the
means to this end. Whereas these fantastic seers and sentimentalists
either disparage science as a limitation to the spirit, in the calm
trust of their life in God, or yearn throughout life for a peace
which they never quite reach, Hegel is bent upon showing men that the
Infinite is not unknowable, as Kant would have it, and yet that man can
not, as Jacobi would have it, naturally and without an effort enjoy
the things of God[14]. He will prove that the way of Truth is open, and
prove it by describing in detail every step of the road. Philosophy for
him must be reasoned truth. She does not visit favoured ones in visions
of the night, but comes to all who win her by patient study.
'For those,' he says, 'who ask for a royal road to science, no more
convenient directions can be given than to trust to their own sound
common sense, and, if they wish to keep up with the age and with
philosophy, to read the reviews criticising philosophical works, and
perhaps even the prefaces and the first paragraphs in these works
themselves. The introductory remarks state the general and fundamental
principles; and the reviews, besides their historical information,
contain a critical estimate, which, from the very fact that it is
such, is beyond and above what it criticises. This is the road of
ordinary men: and it may be traversed in a dressing-gown. The other
way is the way of intuition. It requires you to don the vestments of
the high-priest. Along that road stalks the ennobling sentiment of the
Eternal, the True, the Infinite. But it is wrong to call "this a road.
These grand sentiments find themselves, naturally and without taking
a single step, centred in the very sanctuary of truth. So mighty is
genius, with its deep original ideas and its high flashes of wit. But
a depth like this is not enough to lay bare the sources of true being,
and these rockets are not the empyrean. True thoughts and scientific
insights are only to be gained by the labour which comprehends and
grasps its object. And that thorough grasp alone can produce the
universality of science. Contrasted with the vulgar vagueness and
scantiness of common sense, that universality is a fully-formed and
rounded intellect; and, contrasted with the un-vulgar generality of
the natural gift of reason when it has been spoilt by the laziness and
self-conceit of genius, it is truth put in possession of its native
form, and thus rendered the possible property of every self-conscious
reason[15].'
These words which were taken to heart (unnecessarily, perhaps) by the
patron of the _Intellectual Intuition_ rung the knell to the friendship
of Hegel with his great contemporary Schelling. Yet this hard saying
is also the keynote to the subsequent work of the philosopher. In
Hegel we need expect no brilliant _apergus_ of genius, no intellectual
legerdemain, but only the patient unraveling of the clue of thought
through all knots and intricacies: a deliberate tracing and working-out
of the contradictions and mysteries in thought, until the contradiction
and the mystery disappear. Perseverance is the secret of Hegel.
This characteristic of patient work is seen, for example, in the
incessant prosecution of hints and glimpses, until they grew into
systematic and rounded outline. Instead of vague anticipations and
guesses at truth, fragments of insight, his years of philosophic study
are occupied with writing and re-writing, in the _V_ endeavour to clear
up and arrange the masses of his ideas. Essay after essay, and sketch
after sketch of a system, succeed each other amongst his papers. His
first great work was not published before his 37th year, after six
years spent in university work at Jena, following as many spent in
preliminary lucubration. The notes which he used to dictate some years
afterwards to the boys in the Gymnasium at Nürnberg bear evidence
of constant remodelling, and the same is true of his professorial
lectures.
Such insistance in tracing every suggestion of truth to its place
in the universe of thought is the peculiar character and difficulty
of Hegelian argument. Other observers have now and again noticed,
accentuated, and, it may be, popularised some one point or some one
law in the evolution of reason. Here and there, as we reflect, we
are forced to recognise what Hegel termed the dialectical nature in
thought,--the tendency, by which a principle, when made to be all that
it implied, when, as the phrase is, it is carried to extremes, recoils
and leaves us confronted by its antithesis. We cannot, for example,
study the history of ancient thought without noting this phenomenon.
Thus, the persistence with which Plato and Aristotle taught and
enforced the doctrine that the community was the guide and safeguard
of the several citizens, very soon issued in the schools of Zeno and
Epicurus, teaching the rights of self-seeking and of the independent
self-realisation of the individual. But the passing glimpse of an
indwelling discord in the terms, by which we argue, is soon forgotten,
and is set aside under the head of accidents, instead of being referred
to a general law. Most of us take only a single step to avoid what has
turned out wrong, and when we have overcome the seeming absoluteness of
one idea, we are content and even eager to throw ourselves under the
yoke of another, not less one-sided than its predecessor. Sometimes
one feels tempted to say that the course of human thought as a whole,
as well as that branch of it termed science, exhibits nothing but a
succession of illusions, which enclose us in the belief that some idea
is all-embracing as the universe,--illusions, from which the mind is
time after time liberated, only in a little while to sink under the
sway of some partial correction, as if it and it only were the complete
truth.
Or, again, the Positive Philosophy exhibits as one of its features an
emphatic and popular statement of a fallacy much discussed in Hegel.
One of the best deeds of that school has been to protest against a
delusive belief in certain words and notions; particularly by pointing
out the insufficiency of what it calls metaphysical terms, i. e. those
abstract entities formed by reflective thought, which are little else
than a double of the phenomenon they are intended to explain. To
account for the existence of insanity by an assumed basis for it in
the 'insane neurosis,' or to attribute the sleep which follows a dose
of opium to the soporific virtues of the drug, are some exaggerated
examples of the metaphysical intellect which is so rampant in much
of our popular, and even of our esoteric science. Positivism by its
logical precepts ought at least to have instilled general distrust of
abstract talk about essences, laws, forces and causes, whenever they
claim an inherent and independent value, or profess to be more than
a reflex of sensation. But all this is only a desultory perception,
the reflection of an intelligent observer. When we come to Hegel, the
Comtian perception of the danger lying in the terms of metaphysics is
replaced by the Second Part of Logic, the Theory of Essential Being,
where substances, causes, forces, essences, matters, are confronted
with what Mr. Bain has called their 'suppressed correlative[16].'
[Footnote 1: Aus Schellings Leben (Plitt.), ii. 161.]
[Footnote 2: Hegel's _Briefe_, ii. 377.]
[Footnote 3: _Phenomenologie des Geistes,_ p. 9.]
[Footnote 4: Cf. Notes and Illustrations in vol. ii. 396, and chapter
iii. of the _Logic._]
[Footnote 5: Jacobi's _Werke_, v. 79, III, 115, 417.]
[Footnote 6: Ibid., i. 178.]
[Footnote 7: Jacobi's _Werke,_ iv. i. Abth. p. 55 seqq.]
[Footnote 8: Jacobi's _Werke_, iv. i, p. xxi.]
[Footnote 9: Jacobi's _Briefwechsel,_ i. 330.]
[Footnote 10: Jacobi's _Werke_, iii. 53.]
[Footnote 11: Jacobi's _Briefwechsel_, ii. 468.]
[Footnote 12: Hegel's _Werke,_ i. 15.]
[Footnote 13: Hegel's _Vermischte Schriften,_ i. 50.]
[Footnote 14: Compare pages 121-142 of the _Logic._]
[Footnote 15: _Phenomenologie des Geistes_, p. 54 (_Werke_, ii).]
[Footnote 16: _Practical Essays,_ p. 43.]