If progress were but the addition of bit to bit, of new bits to what

is already there, or if we could change _this,_ and leave _that_

unchanged,--as the word perhaps verbally means, and as many people at

any rate seem to understand it, progress might indeed seem an easy

thing, and to be undertaken with a light heart. For, it would appear

as if we could lose nothing, and might probably (indeed, as enthusiasm

and forgetfulness of the merits of the past are in certain periods

ready to urge, must certainly) gain. But it is a more serious matter

when we realise that we must move altogether, if we really are to move

at all; i. e. really are to make progress, and not merely change, so

to speak, from one foot to rest on another. For progress,--if it be

what it is expected to be, and what it must be if it does what it is

expected to do--is an organic, and not merely a mechanical or chemical

change. A mechanical change is only a nominal or formal change: a

chemical is more than change; but in organic change, that which changes

also abides, and the new is not merely other than the old, and not

merely a re-arrangement of the old, but the old transmuted,--the same

yet not the _mere_ same[8]. Progress in short is always the unity of

differentiation and integration. It must not be an externality, nor a

mere dead product of a transformation scene, but a continuous growth,

inwardly digested, made part and parcel of the collective life, which

it has thereby rendered more full, real, and not merely made less

intense at the cost of some extension. In true progress, which is only

another name for true growth, nothing is quite lost, but only changed,

retained in a richer shape and a fuller reality. How far such progress

is possible, except in limited and finite spheres: how far progress in

one involves necessarily deterioration in another and how, therefore,

progress is not attributable to the Absolute, are questions we need not

here discuss. But so far at least we may go as to say that a progress

which does not follow the natural law of development and carry on into

the future the worth and substance of the past, is not a progress which

any general enthusiasm ought to be spent upon.

Development then has two faces, one to the future and another

to the past. And what is called the historical method is apt to

emphasise only one of the two aspects, just as, it may be added,

practical considerations are often likely to produce an opposite but

equally partial bias in favour of the future. The historical method

in incapable hands is liable to lead to unprofitable sighs,--not

unaccompanied by a certain luxury of tears--over the lowly hole of

the pit--it may even be the filth and brutishness, out of which so

much of noble humanity (for thither the interest of development

always reverts) has been dug; and in empty heads the practical,

the vulgarly-utilitarian satisfaction is liable to equally vain

fits of self-applause on our magnificent progress. But both the

self-depreciation of him who loiters regretfully round the beggarly

rudiments, and the self-laudation of glorious 'improvements' looking

derisively on less glorious days, are unworthy of the reasonable and

scientific spirit. The philosophical method does not allow itself to

be imposed upon by the lapse of time, and insists that in a sense

the past contained the present--that, as the poet says, the child

is father of the man. Not indeed contained in any grosser or more

delicate mechanical way. The coming development does not necessarily

lie prefigured--if we had the proper microscope to see it--as a germ

in the first and original state. That may be, or may not be. Yet

prefigured it is by the law of its structure, or in the intelligible

unity by which only can its existence be understood and construed.

But if this be the method of real development, in the growth of nature,

and the progress of history, it is also the method of that supreme

product of historical progress, the spirit and system of philosophy.

Thought, also, the culminating stage in which the spirit of man becomes

conscious of itself and of its universe, will move or grow on the same

lines as that of which it is the comprehension and theory. It will

begin at the two ends, and each beginning will complete and presuppose

the other. Nature will suppose and yet lead up to Spirit or Mind:

Spirit or Mind will throw light on the mystery of Nature: Being will

point to knowledge or Idea; and Idea show itself the basis of Being.

Or, if we consider the triple division of the philosophic system, as it

runs in Hegel's _Encyclopaedia_, we can see how misleading it may be to

take that one order as absolute. To understand it thoroughly we must

begin with each of the three in turn: so as thus to realise that each

does not except figuratively succeed the other, but that in each an

aspect of the whole truth is presented which had been put by the other

parts somewhat in the background. In each part there is a definition

and a revelation of the Absolute. But each is also, as it were, a

projection, a perspective view, a condensed or expanded image of the

other. In each the Absolute is one and whole, in some more veiled,

more restricted, and more meagre than in others; but the veil, and the

restriction, and the emptying, are self-imposed: and for that reason

the veil is really transparent, the restriction is negatived, and the

emptying is not only a self-humiliating but a self-ennobling irony--the

irony of the Absolute.

[Footnote 1: Of course the term 'equilibrium' may be used loosely to

mean a great deal more than this,--how much will depend on the context.

These quasi-mathematical analyses have great fascination: their

apparent simplicity imposes upon us.]

[Footnote 2: The distinction, it will be observed, lies between the

method of mathematical physics and that of physics which has learned

something from the researches of electricity or chemistry. If the

method or principles of chemistry are thus said to be reduced to those

of physics, this is because the conceptions of physics have been

revolutionised from the side of chemistry, &c., and even of biology.

This tendency of modern science is precisely in the line indicated by

Schelling and Hegel.]

[Footnote 3: _Problems of Life and Mind_, iii. p. 58.]

[Footnote 4: _Eth._ vii. 7 ὁ νοῡς ἀρχή: 6. 6 νοῡς ἐστι τῶν ἀρχῶν.]

[Footnote 5: Statistics only define--and primarily for the

imagination--the general laws and principles on which they rest. The

clear-cut mathematical form strikes and 'catches on,' where a more

universal statement sounds vague and glides off. Hence, as one says,

they may prove _anything._ The fact is, they prove _nothing._ They only

illustrate in diagrammatic form the theory which presided at their

collection. To emphasise the fundamental nature of ethics for human

development you need only say that conduct is three-fourths or (as to

some minds the precision rises with the denominator of the fraction

17/20) of human life.]

[Footnote 6: The resolute misinterpretation--as it often seems--of

the maxim that like is known by like,--is a curious chapter in the

history of Logic. All knowledge is based upon,--or, to speak more

simply, _is_--the identity of differents: of differents, which in

knowledge are identified,--of identity which in knowledge is put under

difference. And yet the ordinary meaningless talk on this matter seems

to assimilate knower and known to two separate things (or persons),

who casually and, we may add, inexplicably know each other: which is

mythology, perhaps, but not epistemology.]

[Footnote 7: Bacon: 'In Praise of Knowledge' (a mere leaflet of much

significance towards estimating his true grandeur). On the _Conjugium_

of _Mens_ and _Universus_ see _Novum Organum_, distrib. op.]

[Footnote 8: The said _mere_ same is not really the same at all.

Nobody in his senses predicates sameness except where he also sees

differences: or, the term always implies relation.]

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE RANGE OF PERSONALITY.

The difference between the conceptions of reality held by Aristotle and

Plato respectively is that where Plato said Being, Essence or Substance

(οὐσία), Aristotle said Activity (ἐνέργεια). To be is to act, to be

active. To the outsider--the plain man of philosophic legend, it seems

at first that a thing must _be_ before it can _do_: that you must have

an agent before you get an action. And, in a way, Aristotle admits

this not quite satisfactory criticism. Every activity presupposes, he

allows, a power to act, a potentiality: every actual presupposes an

implicit or a mere possibility. Existence seems, as it were, to be

doubled; or the mere surface-being is turned into a subject which has

a predicate. But if the existence is to be real, it has to include

both elements, and with the latter or the actuality, as its crown.

Nor is this all. The possibility which issues forth in action may be

fairly called self-realisation. That is to say: A--the hypothetical

agent--acts, does something: and in so doing, seems to go forth and

beyond itself, to externalise itself. Or, A is acted upon, and thus

seems to be diminished. But what it externalises, or puts forth, is

after all what it _is_: it puts forth itself: and, on the other hand,

if it be a patient, it is no less an agent and self-limitative. What a

thing really is, is what it _makes_ itself be: what it allows itself to

be made, that it really is. Yet further, if the word self-realisation

be taken in its fullness of meaning,--if there be really a _self,_

and it be realised, then this self-realisation, which is the truth

or more developed conception of being, seems to imply or postulate

in it a self-consciousness, an awareness of the process of completed

being,--completed in its return from utterance of possibility to

self-fruition or in its re-assumption of itself.

To us, of course, as beings aware of what we do and achieve, this

is simple enough: but it is also true of _things,_ that we only

understand them, in so far as we put them in, or invest them with, the

same activity and apperception of activity as we are familiar with

in our own experience. The veriest materialist cannot help speaking

of things as agents, as behaving, as having a function. He would, no

doubt, if he were to be cross-examined, refuse to identify himself

with the primitive anthropomorphism, or at least zoömorphism of the

natural man who sees the river run and the clouds sweep the sky; and

he would probably mutter something referring to people who cannot see

when they ride a metaphor to death. Still less, perhaps, would he

be inclined to adopt the spiritualistic or animistic hypothesis of

philosophising physicists, like Fechner, who would accredit even the

plants at our feet, and the stars in the sky, with souls, or soul-like

centres of their life. But, however he may shrink from what we may call

the ontological consequences of his language, there is no doubt that

for him the meaning of the world, its reality and truth, is obtained

by an interpretation in terms which, rigidly employed, imply their

environment by a self-consciousness to which they are relative. Take

from him the tacit assumption (which he often finds it difficult to

realise just because it is the foundation of all his language) that

reality is in the last resort a self-conscious reality, and his words

become meaningless, or what he might think worse, metaphorical.

To Bacon, who, though not without a strong speculative impulse,

approached philosophic dicta from the standpoint of an average

intelligent Englishman (and it is on that account that his remarks are

often so instructive), it seemed a grave fault of the Stagirite to

define the soul, that 'most noble substance,' by words of the second

intention. Without substance--a solid something as basis of act and

event--the reality of the soul seemed likely to fare badly. Behind

consciousness he, like many others, felt there must be a something of

which consciousness is the state, act, or predicate and attribute. The

thinking must come from a thinker. There must be a permanent subject of

thought--a persistent substance which does not disappear when thinking

for the nonce stops. And thinking is according to common experience

very liable to stops and interruptions. Both Bacon and Locke felt that

without this refuge to fall back upon, personal identity was in a bad

way, or personality itself little better than a delusion. And therefore

when Aristotle, and his modern followers, treated soul and mind as

essentially definable by the terms activity, self-realisation, it has

been freely urged against them that they are tampering with the pearl

of great price which all our hopes and aspirations fondly guard.

And this is a subject on which there is inevitably a good deal of

misunderstanding. And the misunderstanding will probably last so long

as one set of writers flaunts over it that blessed word Personality

as a holy, a sacrosanct thing, like the visionary cross with its

inscription _In hoc signo vinces_: and as another set treats it as a

mere fetish, under which is hidden nothing better than stock or stone,

or a heap of old bones. Perhaps some concessions might well be made

on both sides. And the first of them would be to try to come to some

clearer understanding what the term in question means. And, on that

point, if we follow the example of Aristotle and examine popular usage,

to see if it can help us to any consistent use of the term, we shall

find that by personal as opposed to real we mean something peculiarly

attached to the individual, of which he cannot divest himself as

of other outward things, though it also is an outward thing[1] The

person in this narrowest sense means the body; and if the epithet

is further extended it still expresses what is directly manipulated

through the members of the living agent, and is more or less closely

attached to it. Yet if it means the body, we must be careful to add

that it is the body, regarded not as such but as the representative,

the outward manifestation, the inseparable sign or symbol of a spirit,

an intelligence and a will. The person is the visible or tangible

phenomenon of something inward,--the phase or function by which

an individual agent takes his place in the common world of human

intercourse and interaction--his peculiar and definite part in the

general or universal world and field.

Personality thus mingles or unifies in it an universal and an

individual aspect or element: it hints that the universal work always

has in reality an individually-determinate tone,--that nothing in

the world, even if it be called the same, is really and actively

the same. _Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem quod faciunt._ Thus,

what separates personality from individuality is simply that in the

narrower or abstracter use of the latter term there is an absence

of the due subordination of all individuality to universality, and

of all universality to individuality. Personality, in short, is an

individuality which is not a mere freak, not merely different from

other things, but also in itself charged with a universal meaning

or function. Yet even this is not enough to describe it. It is the

individuality of an intelligence: the flesh and blood, and, in a

secondary degree, the outward things, stamped with intelligence.

Every member of a kind, every natural existence, has this double

character; this convergence or union of universal and individual. In

being this individual object, it is at the same time a universal, and

_vice versa._ But in the attribution of personality there is involved

something beyond what is common to all creatures. And that something,

we may first of all say, is this. Whereas in the case of other _things_

the individuality is distinctly subordinate, and each is reckoned

primarily by its kind, in the case of _persons_ we can almost declare

that the universality is subordinate to the individuality. This

union of individuality and universality in a single manifestation,

with the implication that the individuality is the essential and

permanent element to which the universality is almost in the nature

of an accident, is what forms the cardinal point in Personality. And

one can understand, when the distinction is thus put, the obvious and

palpable antagonism in which the view stands to the central principles

of Spinoza[2] We speak of a man as a Personality when we wish to note

the fact that he is no mere manufactured article, the representative

of a common type, with nothing to choose between him and a thousand

others, but that he is, as it were, one of a thousand, one 'Whom

nature printed and then broke the type,' that he has in the highest

sense 'distinction,' the nobility of nature's own patent. Other things

exist, so to speak, for the sake of their kind, and for the sake of

other things; a person, in the strictest sense, is never a mere means

to something beyond, but always at the same time an end in itself

or himself. Other things are mere examples in illustration of a law

that rides superior to them and overrules them: the person is a law

unto himself. He has the royal and divine right of creating law--of

starting by his exception a new law which shall henceforth be a canon

and a standard. For in such a personality when he claims his full

rights there is the visible immanence of the divine and universal--or

there is the visible unity of the eternal and the temporal. He rules

as the natural king, the great ruler whose judgment and authority are

better than the complex code of common laws: he guides as the artistic

genius who sees truth steadily in a single intuition and in that single

picture sees it whole[3].

But when we ask if such a personality is found in the field of

actual experience and history, there arises a divergence of

opinions. It is at any rate matter of common experience that there

is a good deal of unjustified identification of the self with the

universal--identification in which the universal suffers violence and

is taken by force. There are only too often cases where the personal

interest is allowed to disguise itself under a semblance of zeal for

the common good, and that even without conscious intent or act of

deception. No good and noble deed, Hegel has said, can ever be done

without faith in its goodness, and zeal for its attainment: without a

holy passion and fervour of devotion, which exceeds the cold service of

duty rendered for duty's sake[4]. But it is equally true and equally

to be remembered that this interference of personal passion and

disinterested interest has defaced the noblest causes and made flow

endless torrents of fanaticism and persecution. A personality in which

the universal was perfectly incarnated in the individual would be in

truth a God amongst men. And it is probably a more likely occurrence

that where the individual as such arrogates to himself the privilege of

the universal, there should be seen not the deeds of the god, but the

ebullitions of the beast that is in man.

A personality, then, in popular language, and perhaps also in popular

philosophy, is the living and conscious individual in whom general

forces, truths, or ideas become real, active, efficient forces,

truths, and ideas. And the importance of the conception resides in the

safeguard thus supposed to arise, which will prevent the realities of

the world from being dissipated away into the endless and restless

flux of the terms of thought,

'La bufera infernal che mai non resta.'

To such a common frame of mind ideas, truths, forces are vacant,

ghostly forms, devoid of true life and reality: to get such they need

blood and flesh to clothe them, to give them substance and power. Now

Hegel, no less than those who offer this criticism, regards ideas

(in the ordinary sense of that term), truths and forces, also as

abstractions which need something to make them powers in the real

world of nature and the ideal world of mind. Hegel, like Schelling,

has a sublime contempt for mere universals. But as to the something

else, there is a divergence of view. Two well-known answers are given

by the popular philosophy known as materialism or spiritualism: two

systems which are probably not so wide apart as the contrast of

their names might imply. According to the former, thinking, ideas,

truths, goodness and beauty are special functions (the grosser

materialists say secretions) of a special kind of matter--of something

which is accessible to ordinary mechanical and chemical tests, but

which exhibits also, in certain cases, the exceptional phenomena of

consciousness. Here the essential reality is a something, permanent

and essentially indestructible,--something which no man has seen,

nor indeed can see,--but which is called Matter. The spiritualistic

philosopher (as distinguished from the _idealist_) regards as the

essential realities in the universe what he calls spirits. What these

are, also, nobody has as yet (any more than in Kant's time[5]) given

any very authoritative account, but so far as the quasi-scientific

expositions in regard to them throw any general light on the subject,

we may say that they suggest only a differently-constituted matter, a

matter e. g. of less or more dimensions than that we are most familiar

with.

Now the advocate of spiritual reality, who protests most strongly

against the injury done to personality by reducing it to something

fluid and not fixed, something in process and not in persistent

substance, seems mostly to lean to a quasi-spiritualistic hypothesis,

or to the--so-called--higher materialism. He is an advocate of what we

may describe as the soul-thing, of a permanent, (he would even hold,

an absolutely permanent) substance or substratum of psychical reality

which, no doubt, exhibits certain properties, but is always more than

any one, or any mere series of its phenomena. It has been said, indeed,

by one who spoke with authority that he that will save his soul shall

lose it, and he that will lose it shall find it. But this has always

been a hard saying, which has been as far as possible explained away

by exegesis. Yet its moral import is not so very far removed from its

philosophical equivalent. The true life is not that of self-seeking

pleasure, but the life spent in the service of truth and love, the

life dedicated to impersonal interests, and ideal good. So also the

reality of the human soul as we first know it lies not in itself, but

in its transfiguration, its purification, and liberation to higher

forms of being. The Soul, in its first avatar in each of us, is after

all of the earth, earthy, unless it continue on that path of growth

and development on which it has entered. It is as Aristotle said, and

said well, the first actualisation[6]--the proximate ideality of an

organic body. In soul organic body carries out its promise: in soul we,

the observers, or untrained psychologists, note our first awareness of

mental life in its organic environment. But there are other grades,

other heights of achievement, yet set before the principle of life,

which is more than mere life and mere soul: or soul contains a germ

which must bear higher fruit. To be itself, or to become all that it in

promise and potency contains, it must dispossess itself of what clings

to it and possess itself of what is its own; and so transmute its first

phase into one more adequate. The soul is, as Hegel has said, the

awakening of mind from the sleep of nature[7]: it is nature gathering

itself out of its absorption in its dispersion, the breath of life and

feeling striving through the scattered members of the material world,

and finding itself at first half-asleep, a pervading, unifying current

that flows through and makes continuous the various portions of the

universe. It is the earliest real, felt unity in which the logical or

synthetic pulse--as yet purely potential in Nature, and only surmised

by science--re-appears in the actual concrete world. And as the

earliest, it is, like first loves, what one clings to hardest as our

prime and fundamental _differentia._ Here at least we are something--a

centre of being, and not a mere centreless expanse of extension:

something emerging from the world of silence and of night--something in

which each feels

'I am not what I see,

And other than the things I touch.'

And that something we would not lose, at any cost.--But the only way

not to lose it, is to use it as a stepping-stone to higher things. The

metaphor, indeed, like metaphors in general, must not be pressed too

far. For it is more than a stepping-stone and it is never left behind

as a mere dead self: there is

'Nothing of it that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.'

And that richer result into which it is transformed is the

consciousness of a self, and the intelligence which wills and knows.

If it be asked in what respects the result is richer, the answer is

as follows. The soul,--this 'first entelechy--is exclusive, and it

is immersed in its natural limits of organic life. It has yet to go

through the school of self-detachment, the process of 'erecting itself

above itself'; and of thus extending its view and its range of control

over a wider field of objects. Gradually it attains to the rank of a

consciousness before which is unrolled the spectacle of a world of

objects set over against it, and even of a world within it; itself as

an object deposed to the rank of something to be surveyed. As such,

it seems almost to have left all immersion in corporeity completely

behind, and to have completely divested itself of any limitation. It

floats freely above the real psychical life out of which it emerged--a

detached but somewhat shadowy self, not burdened by any restrictions

of nature or circumstance. As such a mere Ego, or logical self--as the

mere theatre on which the play of ideas takes place, it surveys its

real psychical self far below; it finds itself as a strange sort of

thing, and says _This was me_ (which however is not exactly the same

as _I am I_, I = I). Yet it was a great step to have thus ceased to be

absorbed in its qualities, to be the mere breath of life and feeling,

stirring in its several affections and modifications. In order to

get forward, it was necessary to recoil a little: to save itself--and

that must mean to get itself in fuller and richer being--the mind had,

as it were, to measure and realise the full depth of its nonentity,

and to surrender all that it had hitherto clung to as its own. In an

attitude of reflection upon itself it fancies that it is the empty

room, the _tabula rasa_, on which experience is to write itself: but

in its secret heart it retains the faith and acts upon it, that it is

the power of intelligent and intelligible unity which makes the writing

intelligible, if it does not even itself play the writer. What it now

seems to find--what fills up its consciousness, presumed empty and

merely receptive,--it gradually recognises to be its very and original

own. Through labour and experiment it fills up the vacant form (the

passive half of itself to which it deposed itself) of consciousness;

and thus, as an intelligent self, a true mind, it has for itself and

realises as in itself all the life and reality which in its earlier

stage of soul it only was and felt itself naturally to be. But on this

stage of free intelligence it is no longer bound up with its natural

being in such a way as to feel itself a fixed and restricted centre,

sunk in the living environment so as to see no further, and to deem

itself in its seclusion the permanent reality, the exclusive fact.

It is no longer exclusive and self-concentrated, but inclusive and

all-embracing. It is no longer a mere consciousness--a mere receptive

and synthetic unity of apperception--but a reason and a mind. And a

reason and a mind already refuse to be narrowed and confined by the

same limits as seem appropriate to the soul. In the province of free

self-realised intelligence we at least seem to occupy a ground on

which others can equally come,--to have nothing peculiar or merely

individual. In Knowledge, which is reasoned perception, and in Will,

which is reasoned impulse, there is a king's highway, a public forum,

where souls meet and converse and perform a collective work;--and

in both _mere_, i. e. essentially restricted, individuality is at a

discount[8].

Such would be the course of development if we looked at it only in the

inwardness or subjectivity of psychical, conscious, and intelligent

life. But an analogous or parallel development may be observed if we

look at man as an active, i. e. a practical and moral being, a being

who makes Nature his own, stamps it with his title of possession, and

who gives to his fellowship with other souls an objective, outward

existence in the forms and institutions of social life. Here too

his first achievement is the affirmation of his individuality, the

distinction in outward and tangible shape of the Mine from the Thine:

the creation of property, and the projection of himself in a world of

mutually-recognised personalities. As the individual soul in the inner

life, so the personal being with its property is the solid, insoluble

basis of the life in public--the field of social ethics. The same

instinct, which in its dread of dissolution clings to the perpetuity

of the inner nucleus of soul, upholds the other as containing the

stable and eternal security of all social well-being. The immortality

of soul in the inner world: the sacro-sanctity of property in the

outer. But if these postulates are to be permitted, if individuality

and personality are to abide, they must, in the one case as in the

other, bow to the law of development, the law of history and of life.

They must correct themselves, re-adjust themselves,--include what they

excluded, and re-combine their elements, transmute themselves into

what we have, after Hegel, called their _truth_: must redintegrate

themselves with suppressed correlatives, and carry out their

implications of larger unity. The soul, exclusive and fast-clad in

its mere organic vestment, in which it is as yet only the name and

form of intellectual life, has first of all to retract itself into

the bare abstract consciousness, or mere self, on which the masses

of reality stream, to fill its vacant rooms and empty forms up with

ideas. So too the person--that close concretion or coalescence of mind

with material--that identification of self with its 'clothes,' its

property and all it can vulgarly be said to _own,_ is only an aspect

of truth which tends to be over-estimated when it is reflected upon,

and must notwithstanding be over-ridden and merged. Withdrawing itself

from its clothing of earth and water, and even perhaps from its inner

mansion of flesh and bone, personality floats in the free air as the

impersonal personality of conscience,--the ethereal realm where pure

practical reason rules. In that ether where morals reign absolutely is

the home of the categorical imperative, of the Stoical law of duty,

of the conscience which, here at least, has might as it has right. It

too, like its parallel, consciousness, in the inner mental life, has,

or seems to have, all its fulfilment from without. As even Kant admits,

it is itself a vacant form; yet a form of such influence as to impress

on whatever comes within its range an obligation to be universal and to

be uniform. Here too, as in the parallel stage, it was of inestimable

importance that mind should, in the socio-ethical sphere, see itself

supreme in its innermost dignity and personality,--the personality

which lies within,--even though that supremacy were at first no better

than as a law, a form, a category, recognised as authoritative and

imperative. For conscience, like the field of consciousness, is after

all only a quasi-passive self--a remarkable property or endowment,

a sort of innate principle or idea by which the mind was seen to be

distinguished in a unique way from all things else. To realise once

for all the fact that consciousness and conscience form an absolute

tribunal from which there can be no appeal: that the 'synthetic unity

of apperception' in the theoretical, and the 'autonomy of the rational

will' in the practical sphere, are the ultimate and final _a priori_:

this is a great thing to do,--even though it only expands and defines

the Cartesian principle of clear and distinct ideas, and will remain as

Kant's title of honour in the history of philosophy. He thus fenced off

or consecrated the sanctuary of the mental and moral life.

But it was not enough to set apart the sacred principle, the central

hearth-fire of truth and goodness. If at an earlier stage,--earlier,

i.e. in this logical analysis,--the formal was wholly sunk in the

material, if i. e. the mere series of legal formulae in their hard

and brittle outlines were absolutely identified--without doubt or

hesitation--with the morally and socially good; the formal side, or

mere spirit and will of good, the abstract principle of morality,

is now invested with an equally undue prominence. The actual or

concrete ethical community--be it family or state, or other social

organisation--is animated and maintained by a spirit which transcends

and includes alike the outward shell of civil law and the inward law

of conscience. For, curiously enough, as it may seem at first, both

conscience and civil legislation assume the form of imperative and

definite commands--laws political or civil, and laws moral. Both fall

therefore into an inflexibility, a rigorous and mechanical hardness in

their enouncements. Both worship the lord of what men call logic, i.

e. of formal consistency and formal uniformity, to an excess which

sometimes issues in fantastic irregularities. Their several maxims of

legal conformity and of duty for duty's sake are in first appearance

excellent: but a further reflection shows that the Law covers a good

many inconsistent or at least unrelated laws within its code, and Duty

is often sadly to seek in presence of the collisions between what offer

themselves as _prima facie_ duties in any given case. The amplest code

of laws that ever existed will always leave lots of loop-holes for

negligence and villainy, and would never work for an instant, were it

not for ever supplemented by the spirit of faith and love, by social

piety and political loyalty, by the thousand ties of sentiment and

feeling which really vivify its dry bones. So too the abstractions

of the conscientious imperative, of the law of duty, of the moral

tribunal, of the man within the breast, and of the dignity and beauty

of human nature, would effect nothing unless they could always tacitly

count on the support of recognised and authoritative social law and

usage. Outward rests upon inward; and rules direct feelings.

Here, again, as in the purely intellectual or cognitive sphere, it

is evident that the spirit of man has its source of life neither in

its abstract self-hood (in consciousness and conscience) nor in its

mere natural environment and organic endowment (in sense-affections,

and social law and usage), but in the unity of both,--a unity which

transcends either. Both individual and society live and grow, because

they are continuous and one: because they presuppose an ideal unity

or a living Idea at the root of their being, as their inner and

essential guiding-principle, at once constitutive and regulative of

their action. The machinery of language supplies to the intellectual

sphere a sort of sensible meeting-ground and common field in which

the development of knowledge becomes possible: and the same purpose

is subserved in the social sphere by the machinery of ethical and

political forms and institutions. These are the field, the home of

freedom, as the other are of knowledge. It is in these collective and

objective structures that we get the expression of the law of human

development: the visible sign, viz. of the essentially universal nature

of the individual. The individual in these attains his relative truth:

for they show the weakness of the individuality of the mere individual.

They show that his exclusiveness, his quasi-originality, is only an

appearance:--confronted, no doubt, by an appearance of an opposite

character, as if the originality and the reality lay in the environment

and the collective body. They point therefore beyond and behind both

foci to a common centre or inclusive unity of life.

But they do not destroy personality and individuality: they only

transform it and made it a more adequate and consistent representation

of reality, by giving in it a place to factors or 'moments' which,

though always effective, were not recognised as constitutive elements,

and treated only as externally interfering agencies. It may be a

question, of course, how far it is wise to retain the term after

its meaning has thus been altered by expansion and redistribution

of elements. On the whole it seems impracticable--and it would be

undesirable, perhaps, even if it were more feasible--to be too hard

and fast in our use of denotations. It is hardly the province of

philosophy to coin new terms in which to deposit the results of her

researches. A term no doubt--particularly if, as the phrase runs, it be

luckily discovered, or judiciously selected--may save the expenditure

of thought. But it is hardly the business of philosophy to encourage

economy in this direction. Much more is it the perpetual task of

philosophy to counteract the ossification that sets in in terms,--to

reinterpret the meaning which is absorbed in these 'counters of

thought,' and make them once more sterling money for the market of

life. What, for instance, is the work of Aristotle's Ethics, but to

set free the genii which the black magic of every-day intercourse has

incarcerated in the non-significant Greek term Εὐδαιμονία? Like our own

Happiness, it flits from lip to lip, little better than a mere name,

which is still prized, but--except for a few synonyms that are equally

vague with itself--is attached to things which a little reflection

shows it cannot truly denote. Aristotle seeks--we may say--to define

it. But the phrase 'definition' seems barely applicable to the complex

process thus implied,--a process of which definition, as ordinarily

understood, is only one small portion. For to define happiness, is to

reconstruct the conception. Or, to be more accurate, it is really to

construct it or reproduce in consciousness its construction. As it

stands, the thing to be defined is a name and a thing, of which certain

relations to other things soon begin to show themselves, which is more

or less similar to one thing, and more or less to be distinguished from

another. To mark it off from these co-terminous things, and to show how

they are related to it on different sides,--this would be what we may

perhaps call strict, or formal, or nominal, or _mere_ definition.

Now whatever be the other uses of such definitions--and they are

serviceable at the outgoing in any branch of enquiry,--they are

not precisely the work we expect a philosopher to do for us. And

assuredly it is not Aristotle who would stop short at that sort of

definitions. We find accordingly that for the purpose of realising

what happiness--the common name for human good--means, he is obliged

to bring into the field the whole system of his thought in its

cardinal notions of Energy, Soul, &c. Aristotle here as elsewhere

retraces the path of thought which carries us from mere, vulgar,

inadequately-apprehended happiness (he follows the same process in his

treatment of pleasure, friendship &c.--to take only ethical examples)

to true, essential and completely-apprehended happiness,--or, to use

Hegel's technical phrases, from happiness as it is _an-sich_ (in or

at itself) or as it is _für-sich_ (for or to itself), to happiness as

it is _an-und-für-sich._ In so 'defining' happiness Aristotle is thus

obliged to bring in his conceptions of man and of society, of human

life and its powers, of natural and acquired faculty, of mind in its

relations to nature; and if not to expound, at least to employ, his

fundamental categories of philosophical thought. Such a machinery can

hardly be called less than a construction, i. e. a re-construction by

conscious effort of the latent but actual concatenation of the elements

in the fact.

In this case we traverse the distance which separates mere happiness

from true happiness, from happiness imperfectly or abstractly conceived

to happiness adequately and concretely conceived. Of course when we say

real or true happiness, we use these terms as they are used within the

ordinary range of human speech. An ultimate and absolute in truth and

reality is for us at any given time only a comparatively or relatively

ultimate and absolute. It is that which, so far as we can see and

think (all philosophising presumably goes on under this stipulation,

tacit or express), gives an expression, an interpretation, a meaning

and a construction to reality which leaves no feature unrecognised, no

contradiction unsolved, no discord unreconciled, which leaves nothing

outside and alien to it, and suppresses without acknowledgment nothing

that has ever been recognised within it. It is, if you like so to

call it, the completest, or (if you are really in earnest with your

philosophising and have carried it on to what for you is the end) the

complete formula of the Absolute--of that which in a transcendent sense

_is,_ is _all,_ is the infinite and eternal _one._ Yet, after all, it

is a formula. But here that undying adversary of all thought steps

in and says A _mere_ formula. And to that we must here as elsewhere

rejoin: No, not a mere formula. A mere formula would be not even a

formula,--a formula only in name--and with no reality which it served

to formulate. It is a real and true formula, if it be a formula at all,

and not something which merely swaggers about under that title. Nay

more, if it be a true and real formula, it is the truth and the reality

in its day and generation, until at least a truer truth and a more real

reality shall have been discovered. Let us by all means be modest: but

there is a false humility which becomes no man and is the guise of

hypocrisy or insincere sincerity. Let us--in other words--never assume

that 'we are the men, and that wisdom will die with us': but equally

let us hold fast the faith of reason that what we know as true and

real can never be false, i. e. utterly false, however much it may turn

out one day to be surmounted. And, on the other hand, let us equally

remember that in the mere and abstract commencement--the unreal and

the untrue, as we must perforce style it by contrast with the (_pro

tempore_) truth and reality--there is no utter and sheer error or

unreality. It has always been felt to be one of the most loveable sides

of Aristotelianism--this recognition of the reasonableness of all

actual fact, or of the truth latent in the honest, though narrow and

ill-defined judgments of the mass.

Thus, coming back to personality, let us admit that the _mere_

personality which at first sight seemed only worth rejecting, is

an element, at least, in true personality,--or is a part which,

because an organic member and no mere mechanical part, is full of

traces and indications which involve and postulate the whole. The

true personality and the true individuality of being is something

which presupposes for its completeness the social state--the organic

community. It is no doubt familiar to us that, according to an old

but never quite dormant view, the collective community is but the

aggregate or congeries of individuals. But the individuals whose

aggregation makes the community are themselves products of the social

union. Complete, all-round, harmonious personality, it is sometimes

said, is the highest fruit to be yielded by social development. Or,

as the last century would have preferred to put it, the main or sole

aim of the State is furtherance towards Humanity--to the stature of

the perfect man. And these are true sayings,--but perhaps only half

true. If all must grow so that one and each may grow, so and not less

must each one grow so that the all--the commonwealth of reason and

the kingdom of God--may be more and more present, 'may come.' And

that kingdom only comes when All is in Each, and Each is in All: and

when, without loss or diminution, each is each and all is all. Then

and not till then does personality become true and infinite, free and

harmonious individuality, which is in the same instant universality.

The monad--to use the language of the great Idealist who did not find

individuality at all incompatible with universality--never ceases to

be a monad: it is eternal and indestructible, an absolute centre of

being. The monad in its individual measure 'expresses' or 'envelops'

the Infinite or Absolute: it is, i. e. under a subjective limitation,

identical with the absolute, a concentration or condensation of it

into an impenetrable, i. e. literally an individual, point,--but a

point which is in the psychical or intellectual world never entirely

_carens recordatione,_ or oblivious of its essential totality. But if

the monad 'expresses' the Absolute, it no less concords or sympathises

in harmonious development with all its congeners, the other monads: so

that while it neither interferes with them, nor suffers violence from

them, it yet exists and acts in an ideal identity, that is, in a real

fellowship, with them. Again, the monad has what may be called its

side of passivity, but passivity here does not mean _mere_ passivity,

but rather the essential limitation due to its special and peculiar

stand-point--a limitation which in the higher orders of being becomes

transparent or is transcended. How far Leibniz succeeds in reconciling

this apparent contradiction--how far even any one can reveal the mystic

indwelling of universal and individual in each other, this is a serious

question in its place: but it is only bare justice to Leibniz to say

that he at least never failed to emphasise both aspects of reality,

and that if one 'moment' is predominant and fundamental in his work it

is not the monad, but the Monad of Monads. If necessity be the right

word to express the relation of the Universal Law to the individual

being and to affirm that the individual is not a loose self-supporting

unit (and Leibniz, far from thinking so, always uses in its stead the

phrase _inclinat, non necessitat_[9], to emphasise the immanence of

law, or the autonomy of every completed being), then Leibniz is not

less, but more necessitarian than Spinoza. His difference from Spinoza,

in fact, lies mainly, if not solely, in his clearer recognition of

the transcendence, no less than the immanence, of the Absolute, which

Spinoza has somewhat veiled under the apparent insignificance of the

difference between _natura naturans_ and _natura naturata._ Yet the

Monad of Monads is no supra-mundane, or _merely_ transcendent God.

But if we further ask whether such personality is attainable in the

world of experience and describable in terms of thought--whether there

be any actual and visible agent possessed of this true personality,

as we have agreed to call it, we are in face with a higher stage of

the problem of personality. And that question in other words brings

us back to where we began. A true and real personality, a complete

individuality is something which so transmutes all that we are most

accustomed to call by that name that it is hardly any use clinging to

it, unless to protest against the danger of mistaking such expansion

and transmutation to be only a blank negation. Yet to cling to it too

much involves a danger for the true recognition of that transcendent's

universality. All human personality, all natural individuality is, as

Lotze has eloquently pointed out[10], something which falls far short

of what it professes to be. But in the general failure to unite the

universal with the particular, or the fact with the idea, there are

degrees; and we can at least affirm so much as this that the truest

individuality and the most real personality is not that which is least

permeated by thought, but that in which thought has had the largest

share. Individuality is something more than a mere sum of general

qualities;--that is certainly the fact; but it is not less the fact,

that for us an individuality and personality is more perfect and true

in proportion as more general function and universal character coalesce

into harmony and power in it. Assert then the initial presence and

virtue of individuality and personality in the human soul: but remember

that it has this virtue, not for what it is, but for what it promises

and may reasonably be expected to be, and that, to realise the promise,

it has to behave inclusively, rather than exclusively, gather up into

itself and make its own all content, rather than set itself up in

reserve and isolation.

We have seen that the social organisation, animated as it is by the

moral idea, is rather the arena on which the true union of mind and

matter, of idea and nature, of thought and fact may be worked for, than

itself the fruition of such an effort. All-important is the State;

all-important the ethical idea which pervades it. But the world of

freedom--the ideal world so far made actual--is not what it promised

to be. 'Is it not,' said Plato, 'the nature of things that the actual

should always lack the perfection of theory?' In the visible world the

State, indeed, rules supreme: 'it is,' as Hegel might say in the words

of his great predecessor in political theory, 'that Leviathan or mortal

God to whom under the immortal God we owe our welfare and safety.' But

there is something in the State which the State in its palpable reality

cannot adequately express. If it is highest in the hierarchy of this

world, the lowest in the ideal kingdom of the Absolute is higher than

it. Above the State as the embodiment and the guarantee of the moral

life, there is the realm of Art, Religion, and Philosophy. In them

man's craving for individuality and personality finds a satisfaction it

could never hope for below them: they at least restore the truth and

reality of man's life and of the universe in a measure far exceeding

what even morality could do. If we ask then what Art, Religion, and

Science have to show of Personality or true realised individuality,

the answer is briefly as follows. Had it not been that august names

have spoken of imitation as the essence of Art-work, we should hardly

have deemed it possible that men should speak of Realistic Art. Yet

here, as in Religion and in Science, the epithet is introduced to guard

against a misconception of the province of Idealism. All Art, all

Religion, all Science, are and must be idealistic: but they can never

be--as the familiar phrase puts it--merely idealistic, i. e. visionary,

fantastic, unreal. All of them, in other words, may be said to show

us 'the light that never was on sea or land'--the heavenly city--the

eternal truth of things. But they must, on their peril, show it here

and now, and not in a pretended or other world. They must--no less than

law and morality--work in terrestrial materials, and not with superfine

celestialities. _Mentem mortalia tangunt._ It is out of the oldest and

commonest realities of life and death that the poet and the painter

make the melodies of heaven sound in our ears, and gladden us with

the rays of the empyrean. It is out of the hard rock of the real that

the artist's rod must strike the well-spring of the ideal. So too, in

like manner, a religion must show the Divine, but show Him immanent:

an immanence which, on one hand, shall not drag Godhead down to the

level of casual reality, nor on the other set Him far off in lonely

transcendence.

The aesthetic faculty, awakened as it is by the natural response of

man's perceptions to the harmonies of existence, to the spontaneous

coherency of its many parts in a united whole, and stimulated by the

creative work of human art, which moulds even the naturally discordant

or unconnected into a concordant expression (sometimes it may be,

as in handicraft, only to satisfy human needs), lifts us above the

imperfections and fragmentariness of things, above our selfish interest

in them, into a frame of mind where they are seen whole and perfect,

and yet one and veritably individual. In its supreme or comprehensive

phase it does not deal merely with the beautiful, nor merely with

the beautiful and sublime. All true art, whether it awakes awe or

admiration, laughter or tears, whether it melts the soul, or steels it

to endurance, has a common characteristic; and that is to raise the

single instance, the prosaic or commonplace fact, into its universal,

eternal, infinite significance. It frees the fact from the limitations

which our distractions, our practicality, our temporary hopes and

fears, have deeply stamped upon it. It is still, after art has dealt

with it, to all appearance a single fact: but it now has the universe

behind it and within it. It carries us away from the incompleteness,

the pressure of externals, the solicitude for the future and the

regrets for the past, into a self-contained, self-satisfying totality,

into freedom and leisure, rest which is not stolid, and action which

involves no toil. Such a result is partly, as was said, the gift

of common nature, which speaks peace, comfort, joy, self-possessed

fruition for all her children when their sense is open and free: partly

it comes through those select ones among these children who have a

larger perception of the meaning and inner truth of her works, and who

can by a sensible reconstruction, which if it is fair and successful

will only bring out more clearly the unity and harmony which deeper

insight detects, help others to see and enjoy what they have felt and

rejoiced over. Such are the poets--in the widest sense--the makers, the

seers, who in verse, in music, in picture and sculpture--who, in human

lives, it may be even in the conduct of their own, show us how divine a

thing is nature and humanity: show us the secret and unheard harmonies

that to the full-opened ear absorb and transmute the lower discords of

life and vulgar reality. It is they who give immortality and divinity,

who make heroes and demigods[11]. Or, if they may not be said to make

them, they half-reveal and half-construct the ideal figures which stand

high and beneficent in the history of the world. And by those who

thus half-construct, and half-reveal, are meant not merely the single

artists in whom the process culminates to final outline and publicity,

but the many-voiced poesy of the collective human heart which out of

its myriad elemental springs constitutes the total figure, the august

image of the hero, and the saint, lending him from its plenitude all

that his abstract self seemed to want. It is on the tide of national

and human enthusiasm that the individual artist is lifted up to realise

the full significance of his ideal figure, and his imaginative craft

can only be inspired by the vigour and warmth of the collective passion

for noble ends and high action.

Nowhere it would seem is the ideal of personality and many-sided

individuality more adequately realised. Here, at last, the whole truth

of life, the indwelling of individual and universal in one body, seems

to be realised. But it is realised in an ideal. It is--if we analyse

it--a synthesis of three elements; partly in the material reality which

serves as bodily vehicle; partly in the conception and technique of the

artist; partly in the general mind which inspires both the material

and the form with its own larger life. It is--as its name implies--an

artificial product--a synthesis of elements which tend to fall apart.

Technique varies, conceptions lose their interest, the tone of general

culture alters, and materials are dependent on locality. When that

happens, the work of art is left high and dry: no longer a living

God, but a dead idol, still wondrous, but speaking no more its human

language.

So it is with the heroic figures who rise into the purer air of

universal history. They also--so far as they live with a personal

power--are works of art: works of real-idealism. For all history which

deserves the name, and is not mere abstract dry-as-dust chronicle (as

to the possibility of which utter aridity there may be legitimate

doubts), is a work of fiction or invention, of reconstruction. It

seeks to understand its characters. But to understand them it is not

(and as historical art cannot be) content with a mere reference to

motives acting on them from outside. It seeks to understand them with

and in their times--to see in them the full measure of contemporary

life and thought which elsewhere has found so meagre expression. Such

is the artistic completion of personality in the ideal,--whether in

what is called history, or what is called art. It exaggerates a truth,

because it loses sight of the background. And that background, which

helps to constitute such ideal personality, is no constant element.

The centuries and generations as they roll contribute their varying

quota to set, as they say, the historical character in its true light,

in its fulness and truth of reality. And thus this personality of

the great leaders of human life is only an image and a sign--a fruit

of development, no bare fact which remains unchanged and always the

same. It is rather a personification than a personality. It incarnates

the living spirit who is universal and eternal in the limits of a

sensuously-defined individual, and indeed incarnates there only so much

as the generation it speaks to can see of complete truth. It is only

after all a vehicle of truth; though a nobler vehicle than social and

personal ethics can afford.

As it is felt that the treasure of the idea--that the full power of

spiritual life--cannot be adequately stored in the earthen vessels

of mortality, the consummation of personality is forced to recede

into the invisible if it would be still conceived as attainable.

'True personality,' says Lotze, 'is with the Infinite,' What here is

fragmentary, is there a rounded total, a perfect unity: He alone is

absolutely self-determining, self-explaining: is all that He means to

be, and means all that He is. In a sense, philosophy does not hesitate

to countersign all this. But, in adopting it, philosophy must reserve

the right of noting the danger and the ambiguity of such language.

Religion does well, philosophy may say, in thus insisting upon the

dependence of all appearance on one Absolute reality; but it is well

also not to forget that all appearance is also the appearance of that

reality or Absolute. And in so saying, be it added, philosophy assumes

no essential superiority to religion. Religion in its fulness, and

apart from any theories that may grow up under its wing, is more than

theory, more than mere philosophy: it is the consummating unity of

life--the enthusiasm and supreme power of life, its consecration and

divinisation by its assured immanence in the eternal and universal.

It is, in short, as was long ago said of it, the true life, the light

which is the light and life of men; and its inspiring principles are

faith, hope, and love. But when unassisted religion proceeds to set

before itself the meaning and lesson of its life, when it proceeds to

formulate a theory of the world and set out a scheme of world-history,

it trespasses on the field of knowledge, and is amenable to the

criticisms of the reflective spirit--the spirit of philosophy. And

that criticism briefly is to the effect that the religious theory

in its ordinary form is an imperfect interpretation of the religious

experience. Nor is this to derogate from the prerogative of the friends

of God. It is only to criticise the formulae and phrases of dogmatic

theology--a theology, however, which is as old as religion itself,

and which takes different forms from age to age, and from one level

of thought to another, always in its measure translating religious

reality, truth, or experience into the categories, naive or artificial,

simple or complex, of the science (it may be the pseudo-science) of

the time. Philosophy, therefore, is the criticism of the science of

God--that is of theology--as it is the criticism of other sciences.

For criticism philosophy always is: always the reflection upon fixed

dogma, and the discussion of it till it becomes sensible of its

defects, and stands upon another and higher plane. And to some it may

seem that this is the sole function which philosophy can legitimately

undertake. 'Yet,' as Aristotle remarked, 'the good critic must know

what he criticises.' He must not merely reflect upon it from outside,

but deal with it from the plenitude of experience, from the abundance

of the heart. If he be a critic then, he cannot be a mere critic, but

also an agent in the work of reconstruction. Or, if we put the thing

otherwise; though, as Fichte said (p. 28), philosophy is a different

thing from life, the true philosopher can never be a mere philosopher,

but must, if he is to reach the height of his vocation, have also

entered into the full experience of reality, into the whole truth of

life. His philosophy will then not be outside of religion and aesthetic

perception. In its comprehension of all grades and forms of reality and

truth, goodness, holiness, beauty, will have their place. He also will

be among the theologians.

And when the philosopher deals with personality in this high, this

supreme sphere, he will submit that the truth of personality is

subordinate to the truth of spirituality. He will argue that by

sticking too closely and fixedly to personality we are running a risk

of bringing down the divine to the level of the human. If, with Dante,

he can say that in its very heart the Light Eternal

'Mi parve pinta della nostra effige;'

he will undoubtedly add with Dante

'Oh quanto è corto 'l dire e come fioco

Al mio concetto;'

or, with the first philosophical theologian who interpreted the

experience of Christian life, he will rise from the historical Jesus to

the inward witness of the Spirit.

[Footnote 1: The legal use of the distinction between 'real' and

'personal' is only partly 'logical,' and largely retains traces of

the larger logic of life and history. Yet, roughly speaking, personal

property is what we can, so to speak, carry on our backs or in our

pockets.]

[Footnote 2: See Spinoza, _Cogitata Metaph_., Pars II. cap. 8: 'Nec

fugit nos vocabulum (_Personalitatis_ scilicet) quod theologi passim

usurpant ad rem explicandam: verum quamvis vocabulum non ignoremus

eius tamen significationem ignoramus: quamvis constanter credamus, in

visione Dei beatissima Deum hoc suis revelaturum.' For Hegel, it may be

noted, Person, so far as he uses the term at all, bears its restricted

legal and juridical sense. A person is a free intelligence, which

realises that independence by appropriating an external thing as its

sign and property. It probably belongs therefore to a world in which

people count rather by what they _have_ than by what they _are_; the

world of law where rights and duties tend to oppose each other. This is

not the highest kind of world for human beings.]

[Footnote 3: This one may call the Platonic ideal of the State, where

Equity rules supreme in the incarnate spirit of wisdom,--a guide

adapting its measures to circumstances, not tied down to the inflexible

letter of one law in an incoherent and imperfect code. See the

_Politicus_, p. 294; _Phaedrus,_ p. 275; and compare Aristotle's Wise

man whose conduct is not κατὰ λόγον but μετὰ λόγου.]

[Footnote 4: See e. g. _Encyclopaedia_, § 475.]

[Footnote 5: See his 'Dreams of a Spirit-seer, illustrated by Dreams of

Metaphysics.' (_Werke,_ ed. Ros. und Schub. Bd. VII. p. 38 sqq.)]

[Footnote 6: It is perilous and misleading (said the ancient Graiae,

who dwell on the way to the Hesperides of philosophy) to interpret an

old system by the language of modern (and especially German) idealism.

It is much worse, replied Perseus, not to interpret it at all, but to

repeat its magic _ipsissima verba_,--carefully Latinised, as if they

belonged to a cabinet of fossils.]

[Footnote 7: _Encyclopaedia_, §§ 387, 389.]

[Footnote 8: The above is an attempt to give a very condensed synopsis

of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (_Encyclopaedia_).]

[Footnote 9: See especially in the _Theodicee,_ part I. § 43 seqq. Cf.

Nouv. Ess. II. § 9, _incline sans necessiter:_ I. § 13, _La nécessité

ne doit pas être confondue avec la détermination._]

[Footnote 10: _Microcosmus_, Book IX. chap. 4.]

[Footnote 11: See the well-known passage in _Wilhelm Meisters

Lehrjahre__,_ Book II. chap. a.]

CHAPTER XIX.

GENESIS IN MENTAL LIFE.

Aristotle, who saw into the nature of abstract entities, remarked that

the mind was nothing before it exercised itself[1]. The mind,--and

the same will turn out true of many things else where it is at first

unsurmised,--is not a fixed thing, a sort of exceedingly refined

substance, which we can lay hold of without further trouble. It is what

it has become, or what it makes itself to be. This point, that 'To be'

= 'To have become,' or rather to have made itself, is an axiom never

to be lost sight of in dealing with the mind. It is easy to talk of

and about conscience and freewill, as if these were existing things

in a sort of mental space, as hard to miss or mistake as a stone and

an orange, or as if they were palpable organs of mind, as separately

observable as the eye or ear. One asks if the will is free or not, as

glibly as one might ask whether an orange is sweet; and the answer can

be given with equal ease, affirmatively or negatively, in both cases.

Everything in these cases depends on whether the will has made itself

free or not, whether indeed we are speaking of the will at all, and

on what we mean by freedom. To ask the question in an abstract way,

taking no account of circumstances, is one of those temptations which

lead the intellect astray and produce only confusion and wordy war--as

a good deal of so-called popular metaphysics has done. The mind and

its phenomena, as they are called, cannot be dissected with the same

calmness of analysis as other substances which adapt themselves to the

scalpel: nor is dissection after all more than a part of the scientific

process, subject to the control of the synthesis in physiology.

The ordinary metaphysician makes his own task easy and his thoughtful

reader's a burden, by plunging too lightly _in medias res._ He wants

patience--often, perhaps, because he thinks too much of his reader's

impatience at analysis--to unravel the tangled mass which human

experience, when first looked at, presents. He is apt to catch at any

end which promises to effect a temporary clearance. True philosophy,

on the contrary, must show that it has got hold of what it means to

discuss: it has to construct its subject-matter: and it constructs it

by tracing every step and movement in its construction shown in actual

history. The mind is what it has been made and has made itself; and

to see what it is we must consider it not as an Alpha and Omega of

research, as popular conception and language tend to represent it,

but in the stages constituting its process, in the fluidity of its

development, in the elements out of which it results. We must penetrate

the apparent fixity and simplicity under which it comes forward,

and see through it into the process which bears it into being. For,

otherwise, the object of our investigation is taken, as if it were

the most unmistakable thing of sense and fancy,--as if everybody were

agreed that this and no other were the point in question.

But in this matter of stability and the reverse, there is a broad

distinction between the natural and the spiritual world. In Nature

every step in the organisation, by which the Cosmos is developed,

has an independent existence of its own: and the lowest formation

confronts the highest, each standing by itself beside the other.

Matter and motion, for example, are not merely found as subordinate

elements entering into the making of a plant or an animal. They have

a free existence of their own: and the free existence of matter in

motion is seen in the shape of the planetary system. So, too, chemical

or electrical phenomena can be observed by themselves, operating in

spheres where they are untrammeled by the influence of biological

conditions. It seems, at least at first sight, to be different in

the case of mind. There the specific types or several stages in the

integrating process of mental development seem to have no substantive

existence in the earlier part of the range, and to appear only as

states or factors entering into, and merged in, the higher grades

of development. This causes a peculiar difficulty in the study of

mind. We cannot seize a formation in an independent shape of its

own: we must trace it in the growth of the whole. Mental fusion and

coalescence of elements is peculiarly close, and hardly leaves any

traces of its constituent factors[2]. Sensation, for instance, in its

purity, as mere sensation, is apparently something which we can never

study in isolation. All the sensation which we can, in the strictly

psychological (as opposed to the physiological) mode of study, examine,

i. e. which we can reproduce in ourselves, is more than mere sensation:

it includes elements of thought, and probably of desire and will.

This, of course, makes the difficulties of so-called introspection:

difficulties so great and real that they have provoked in natural

reaction a set against introspection altogether, and the adoption of

the external observation (physiological or so-called psycho-physical)

employed in the 'objective' sciences. And hence when we accept the

name, such as intellect, conscience, will, &c., as if it expressed

something specially existent in a detached shape of its own, we make

an assumption which it is impossible to justify. We are reckoning

with paper-money which belongs to no recognised currency, and may be

stamped as the dealer wills. The consequence is that the thing with

which we begin our examination is an opaque point,--a mere _terminus a

quo_, from which we start on our journey of explication, leaving the

_terminus_ itself behind us unexplained.

The constituents of mind do not lie side by side tranquilly

co-existent, like the sheep beside the herbage on which it browses.

Their existence is maintained in an inward movement, by which, while

they differentiate themselves, they still keep up an identity. In

our investigations we cannot begin with what is to be defined. The

botanist, if he is to give us a science of the plant, must begin with

something whose indwelling aim it is to be itself and to realise its

own possibility. He must begin with what is not the plant, and end

with what is; begin, let us say, with the germ which has the tendency

to pass into the plant. The speculative science of biology begins with

a cell, and builds these cells up into the tissues and structures out

of which vegetables and animals are constituted. The object of the

science appears as the result of the scientific process: or, _a science

is the ideal construction of its object_. As in these cases, so in the

case of thought. We must see it grow up from its simplest element, from

the bare point of being, the mere speck of being which, if actually no

better than nothing, is yet a germ which in the air of thought will

grow and spread; and see it appear as a result due to the ingrowing and

outgrowing union of many elements, none of which satisfies by itself,

but leads onward from abstractions to the meeting of abstractions in

what is more and more concrete. The will and conscience, understanding

and reason, of man are not matter-of-fact units to be picked up and

examined. You must, first of all, make sure what you have in hand: and

to be sure of that is to see that the mind is the necessary outcome

of a course of development. The mind is not an immediate _datum,_

with nothing behind it, coming upon the field of mental vision with

a divinely-bestowed array of faculties; but a mediated unity, i. e.

a unity which has grown up through a complex interaction of forces,

and which lives in differences through comprehending and reconciling

antagonisms.

If the mind be not thus exhibited in its process, in the sum and

context of its relations, we may mean what we like with each mental

object that comes under our observation: but with as much right another

observer may mean something else. We may, of course, define as we

please: we may build up successive definitions into a consistent total:

but such a successful arrangement is not a real science. Unless we

show how this special form of mind is constituted, we are dealing with

abstractions, with names which we may analyse, but which remain as they

were when _our_ analysis is over, and which seem like unsubstantial

ghosts defying our coarse engines of dissection. They are not

destroyed: like immaterial and aery beings they elude the sword which

smites them, and part but to re-unite. The name, and the conception

bodied forth in it, is indeed stagnant, and will to all appearance

become the ready prey of analysis: but there is something behind

this materialised and solidified conception, this worn-out counter

or sign, which mere analysis cannot even reach. And that underlying

nature is a process or movement, a meeting of elements, which it is

the business of philosophy to unfold. The analyst in this case has

dealt with ideas as if they were a finer sort of material product, a

fixed and assailable point: and this is perhaps the character of the

generalised images, which take the place of thoughts in our customary

habits of mind. But ideas, when they have real force and life, are

not hard and solid, but, as it were, fluid and transparent, and can

easily escape the divisions and lines which the analytical intellect

would impose. Perhaps some may think that it is unwise to fight with

ghosts like these, and that the best plan would be to disregard this

war of words altogether. But, on the other hand, it may be urged that

such unsubstantial forms have a decided reality in life: that men will

talk of them and conjure by their means, with or without intelligence;

and that the best course is to understand them. It will then be seen

that it is our proper work as philosophers to watch the process, by

which the spiritual unity divides and yet retains its divided members

in unity. Even in the first steps we take to get a real hold of an

object we see this. To understand it, we must deprive it of its seeming

independence. Every individual object is declared by the logician to

be the meeting of two currents, the coincidence of two movements. It

concentrates into an undecompounded unit,--at least such it appears to

representative or material thought,--two elements, each of which it is

in turn identifiable with. The one of these elements has been called

the self-same (or identity), the universal, the genus, the whole: while

the second is called the difference, the particular, the part. And by

these two points of reference it is fixed,--by two points which are

for the moment accepted as stationary. What has thus been stated in

the technical language of Logic is often repeated in the scientific

parlance of the day, but with more materialised conceptions and in

more concrete cases. The dynamic theory of matter represents it as a

unity of attraction and repulsion. A distinguished Darwinian remarks

that 'all the various forms of organisms are the necessary products

of the unconscious action and reaction between the two properties of

adaptability and heredity, reducible as these are to the functions of

nutrition and reproduction[3]. The terms 'action and reaction' are

hardly sufficient, it may be, to express the sort of unity which is

called for: but the statement at least shows the reduction of an actual

fact to the interaction of two forces, the meeting of two currents.

The one of these is the power of the kind, or universal, which tends

to keep things always the same: the other the power of localised

circumstances and particular conditions, which tends to render things

more and more diversified. The one may be called a centripetal, the

other a centrifugal force. If the one be synthetic, the other is

analytic. But such names are of little value, save for temporary

distinction, and must never be treated as permanent differences which

explain themselves. The centre is relative, and so is the totality.

Thus it is that the so-called Evolutionist explains the origin of

natural kinds. They are what they severally are by reason of a process,

a struggle, by alliances and divisions, by re-unions and selections.

They are not independent of the inorganic world around them: it has

entered into their blood and structure, and made them what they are.

To understand them we must learn all we can of the simpler and earlier

forms, which have left traces in their structure: traces which,

without the existence of such more primitive forms, we might have

misunderstood, or have passed by unperceived. And, again, we learn

that our hard and fast distinctions are barely justified by Nature.

There, kind in its extreme examples seems to run into kind, and we do

not find the logically-exact type accurately embodied anywhere. Our

classifications into genera and species turn out to be in the first

instance prompted by a practical need to embrace the variety in a

simple shape. But though perfectly valid, so far as we use them for

such ends, they tend to lead us false, if we press them too far.

And when we have seen so much, we may learn the further lesson that

the variety of organisation, animal and vegetable, is only the

exhibition in an endless detail by single pictures, more or less

complementary, more or less inclusive of each other, of that one

vital organisation in principle and construction which we could not

otherwise have had presented to us. In a million lessons from the vast

ranges of contemporary and of extinct life there is impressed upon

the biological observer the idea of that system of life-function and

life-structure which is the goal of biological science. The interest

in the mere variety whether of modern or of primeval forms of life is

as such merely historical; its truer use is to enable the scientific

imagination to rise above local or temporary limitations. And thus in

the end the records and guesses of evolution in time and place serve

to build up a theory of the timeless universal nature of life and

organisation.

And what is true of Nature is equally true of the Mind. For these

two, as we have already seen, are not isolable from each other.

Neither the mind nor the so-called external world are either of them

self-subsistent existences, issuing at once and ready-made out of

nothing. The mind does not come forth, either equipped or un-equipped,

to conquer the world: the world is not a prey prepared for the spider,

waiting for the mind to comprehend and appropriate it. The mind and

the world, the so-called 'subject' and so-called 'object,' are equally

the results of a process: and it is only when we isolate the terminal

aspects of that process, and in the practical business of life forget

the higher theoretical point of view, that we lose sight of their

origin, and have two worlds facing each other. As the one side or

aspect of the process gathers feature and form, so does the other. As

the depth and intensity of the intellect increases, the limits of the

external world extend also. For the psychical life is just the power

which maintains a continuing correlation between the body and its

environment, and between the various elements in that environment. It

is the unity in which that correlation lives and is aware of itself.

It is the subject-object, which sets one element against another, and

gives it quasi-independence. The mind of the savage is exactly measured

by the world he has around him. The dull, almost animal, sensation

and feeling, which is what we may call his mental action, is just the

obverse of the narrow circumference that girdles his external world.

The beauty and interest of the grander phenomena of terrestrial nature,

and of the celestial movements, are ideally non-existent for a being,

whose whole soul is swallowed up in the craving for food, the fear of

attack, and the lower enjoyments of sense. In the course of history we

can see the intellect growing deeper and broader, and the limits of the

world recede simultaneously with the advance of the mind. This process

or movement of culture takes place in the sequence of generations, and

in the variety of races and civilisations spread over the face of the

world. But here too, the higher science, not resting in the merely

historical inquiry, takes no interest in the medium of time, and merely

uses it to supply material for the rational sequence of ideas[4].

The objective world of knowledge is really at one with the subjective

world: they spring from a common source, what Kant called the 'original

synthetic unity of apperception.' The distinction between them flows

from abstraction, from failure to keep in view the whole round of

life and experience. The subjective world--the mind of man--is really

constituted by the same force as the objective world of nature: the

latter has been translated from the world of extension, with its

externality of parts in time and space, into an inner world of thought

where unity, the fusion or coalescence of all types and forms, is the

leading feature. The difficulty of passing from the world of being to

the world of thoughts, from notion to thing, from subject to object,

from Ego to Non-ego, is a difficulty which men have unduly allowed to

grow upon them. It grows by talking of and analysing _mere_ being,

_mere_ thought, _mere_ notion, or _mere_ thing. And it will be

dispelled when it is seen that there is no _mere_ being, and no _mere_

thought: that these two halves of the unity of experience--the unity

we divide and the division we unify in every judgment we make--are

continually leaning out of themselves, each towards the other. But

men, beginning as they must from themselves, and failing to revise and

correct their stand-point till it became an _ἀρχὴ ἀνυπόθετος,_ argued

from a belief that the individual mind was a fixed and absolute centre,

from which the universe had to be evaluated. In Hegel's words, they

made man and not God the object of their philosophy[5]. So that Kant

really showed the outcome of a system which acted on the hypothesis

that man in his individual capacity was all in all. Hegel, on his own

showing, came to prove that the real scope of philosophy was God;--that

the Absolute is the 'original synthetic unity' from which the external

world and the Ego have issued by differentiation, and in which they

return to unity.

If this be so, then there is behind the external world and behind the

mind an organism of pure types or forms of thought,--an organism which

presents itself, in a long array of fragments, to the senses in the

world of nature, where all things lie outside of one another, and which

then is, as it were, reflected back into itself so as to constitute the

mind, or spiritual world, where all parts tend to coalesce in a more

than organic unity. The deepest craving of thought, and the fundamental

problem of philosophy, will accordingly be to discover the nature and

law of that totality or primeval unity,--the totality which we see

appearing in the double aspect of nature and mind, and which we first

become acquainted with as it is manifested in this state of dis-union.

To satisfy this want is what the Logic of Hegel seeks. It lays bare

the kingdom of those potent shades,--the phases of the Idea--which

embodies itself more concretely in the external world of body, and the

inward world of mind. The psychological or individualist conditions,

which even in the Kantian criticism sometimes seem to set up mind as an

entity parallel to the objects of nature, and antithetic to nature as

a whole, have fallen away. Reason has to be taken in the whole of its

actualisation as a world of reason, not in its bare possibility, not in

the narrow ground of an individual's level of development, but in the

realised formations of reasonable knowledge and action, as shown in Art

and Life, Science and Religion. In this way we come to a reason which

might be in us or in the world, but which, being to a certain extent

different from either, was the focus of two orders of manifestations.

To ascertain that ultimate basis of the world and mind was the chief

thing philosophy had to see to. But in order to do this, a good deal

of preliminary work was necessary. The work of Logic, as understood

by Hegel, involves a stand-point which is not that of every-day life

or reflection on experience. It presupposes the whole process from

the provisional starting-point which seems at first sight simplest

and universally acceptable, upwards to the unhypothetical principle

which--though at a long distance--it involves and leads up to, or

presupposes. We all know Aristotle's dictum ᾽Εν τοῐς αὶσθητοῐς τὰ

νοητά ἐστιν: _Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu._ The fact

of sense and feeling _is_ the fact of experience: or rather the fact

and reality of experience is the underlying truth which the expression

of it in terms of sense and perception inadequately interprets. Even

in the principles of sensation there is judgment, thought, reasoning:

but it needs eliciting, re-statement, opening up, and explanation.

The Phenomenology of Mind is, as Hegel himself has said, his voyage of

discovery. It traces the path, and justifies the work of traversing

it, from the ill-founded and imperfect certainties of sense and

common-sense, up through various scientific, moral, and religious modes

of interpreting experience and expressing its net sum of reality,

till it culminates in the stand-point of 'pure thought,' of supreme

or 'absolute' consciousness. It is certainly not a history of the

individual mind: and equally little is it a history of the process of

the intellectual development of the race. In a way it mixes up both.

For its main interest is not on the purely historical side. It indulges

in bold transitions, in sudden changes of scene from ancient Greece

and Rome to modern Germany, from public facts and phases of national

life to works of fiction (compare its use of Goethe's _Faust_ and his

version of _Rameau's Nephew)._ It lingers--for historical accuracy and

proportion unduly--over the period of Kant and Fichte, and reads Seneca

by the light of the _Sorrows of Werther._ For its aim is to gather from

the inspection of all ways in which men have attempted to reach reality

the indication of their several content of truth, and of the several

defects from it, so as to show the one necessary path on which even all

their errors converge and which they serve to set out in clearer light.

Hegel's philosophy is undoubtedly the outcome of a vast amount of

historical experience, particularly in the ancient world, and implies

a somewhat exhaustive study of the products of art, science, politics,

and religion. By experience he was led to his philosophy, not by

what is called _a priori_ reasoning. It is curious indeed to observe

the prevalent delusion that German philosophy is the 'high _priori_

road,'--to hear its profundity admired, but its audacity and neglect of

obvious facts deplored. The fact is that without experience neither

Hegel nor anybody else will come to anything. But, on the other hand,

experience is in one sense only the yet undeciphered mass of feeling

and reality, the yet unexpounded psychical content of his life; or,

taken in another acceptation, it is only a form which in one man's case

means a certain power of vision, and in another a different degree. One

man sees the idea which explains and unifies experience as actuality:

to the other man it is only a subjective notion. And even when it is

seen, there are differences in the subsequent development. One man

sees it, asserts it on all hands, and then closes. Another sees it,

and asks if this is all, or if it is only part of a system. An appeal

to 'my experience' is very much like an appeal to 'my sentiments' or

'my feelings': it may prove as much or as little as can be imagined:

in other words, it can prove nothing. The same is true of the appeal

to consciousness, that oracle on whose dicta it has sometimes been

proposed to found a system of philosophy. By that name seems meant the

deliverances of some primal and unerring nucleus of mind, some real

and central self, whose voice can be clearly distinguished from the

mere divergent cries of self-interest and casual opinion. That such

discernment is possible no philosophy will seek to deny: but it is a

discernment which involves comparison, examination, and reasoning.

And in that case the appeal to consciousness is the exhortation to

clear and deliberate thinking. While, on another side, it hints that

philosophy does not--in the end--deal with mere abstractions, but with

the real concrete life of mind. And if an appeal to other people's

experience is meant, that is only an argument from authority. What

other people experience is their business, not mine. Experience

_means_ a great deal for which it is not the right name: and to give

an explanation of what it is, and what it does, would render a great

service to English methodologists.

There are, however, two modes in which these studies to discover the

truth may appear. In the one case they are reproduced in all their

fragmentary and patch-work character. They are supposed to possess a

value of their own, and are enunciated with all the detail of historic

incident. The common-place books of a man are, as it were, published

to instruct the world and give some hint of the extent of his reading.

But, in the other case, the scaffolding of incident and externality

may be removed. The single facts, which gave the persuasion of the

idea, are dismissed, as interesting only for the individual student on

his way to truth: or, if the historical vehicle of truth be retained

at all, it is translated into another and intellectual medium. Such a

history, the quintessence of extensive and deep research, is presented

in the Phenomenology. The names of persons and places have faded from

the record, as if they had been written in evanescent inks,--dates

are wanting,--individualities and their biographies yield up their

place to universal and timeless principles. Such typical forms are

the concentrated essence of endless histories. They remind one of the

descriptions which Plato in his Republic gives of the several forms

of temporal government. Or, to take a modern instance, the Hegelian

panorama of thought which presents only the universal evolution of

thought,--that evolution in which the whole mind of the world takes the

place of all his children, whether they belong to the common level,

or stand amongst representative heroes,--may be paralleled to English

readers by Browning's poem of _Sordello._ There can be no question

that such a method is exposed to criticism, and likely to excite

misconception. If it tend to give artistic completeness to the work,

it also tantalises the outsider who has a desire to reach his familiar

standing-ground. He wishes a background of time and space, where the

forms of the abstract ideas may be embodied to his mind's eye. In most

ages, and with good ground, the world has been sceptical, when it

perceived no reference to authorities, no foot-notes, no details of

experiments made: nor is it better disposed to accept provisorily, and

find, as the process goes on, that it verifies itself to intelligence.

[Footnote 1: _De Anima,_ iii. 4.]

[Footnote 2: A philological parallel may make this clearer. 'The

Indo-German,' says Misteli _(__Typen des Sprachbaues,_ p. 363),

'embraces or condenses several categories in a single idea in a

way which though less logical is more fruitful; for in this way he

procures graspable totals with which he can work further, and not

patch-work which would crumble away in his hands. Our _He_ includes

four grammatical categories, which work not separately, but as a

whole:--third person, masculine gender, singular, nominative; whereas

the Magyar _ö_ is the vehicle only of one category, the third person,

which is either determined as singular by the context, or as plural

by the addition of _k_: gender in these languages does not exist: and

as subject again _ö_ is specially interpreted from the context. The

unification of the four categories makes _He_ an individual and a word;

the generality and isolation of one category makes _ö_ an abstract and

a stem.']

[Footnote 3: Häckel, _Natürliche Schöpfungs-Geschichte_, p. 157.]

[Footnote 4: See above, pp. 155, 198.]

[Footnote 5: Hegel's _Werke,_ vol. i. p. 15.]

CHAPTER XX.

GENERAL LAW OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.

'The order and concatenation of ideas,' says Spinoza, 'is the same as

the order and concatenation of things[1].' The objective world at least

of acts and institutions develops parallel with the growth and system

of men's ideas. In the tangled skein which human life and reality

present to the observer, the only promising clue is to be found in the

process by which in history the past throws light on the present and

gets light in return. There in the stream of time and in the expanses

of space the condensed results, the hard knots, which present life

offers for explanation, are broken up into a vast number of problems,

each presenting a different aspect, and one helping towards a fairer

and clearer appreciation of another.

The present medium of general intelligence and theory in which we live

embraces in a way the results of all that has preceded it, of all the

steps of culture through which the world has risen. But in this body of

intellectual beliefs and ideas with which our single soul is clad,--in

this common soil of thought,--the several contributions of the past

have been half or even wholly obliterated, and are only the shadows of

their old selves. What in a former day was a question of all-engrossing

interest has left but a trace: the complete and detailed formations

of ancient thought have lost their distinctness of outline, and have

shrunk into mere shadings in the contour of our intellectual world.

Questions, from which the ancient philosophers could never shake

themselves loose, are now only a barely perceptible _nuance_ in the

complex questions of the present day. Discussions about the bearings of

the 'one' and the 'many,' puzzles like those of Zeno, and the casuistry

of statesmanship such as is found in the Politics of Aristotle, have

for most people little else than an antiquarian interest. We scarcely

detect the faint traces they have left in the 'burning questions'

of our own age. We are too ready to forget that the past is never

altogether annihilated, and that every step, however slight it may

seem, which has once been taken in the movement of intellect, must be

traversed again in order to understand the constitution of our present

intellectual world. To outward appearance the life and work of past

generations have so completely lost their organic nature, with its

unified and vital variety, that in their present phase they have turned

into hard and opaque atoms of thought. The living forces of growth,

as geologists tell us, which pulsed through the vegetables of one

period are suspended and put in abeyance: and these vegetables turn

into what we call the inorganic and inanimate strata of the earth.

Similarly, when all vitality has been quenched or rendered torpid in

the structures of thought, they sink into the material from which

individuals draw their means of intellectual support. This inorganic

material of thought stands to the mind, almost in the same way as the

earth and its products stand to the body of a man. If the one is our

material, the other is our spiritual _substance_. In the one our mind,

as in the other our body, lives, moves, and has its being.

But in each case besides the practical need, which bids us consume the

substance as dead matter, and apply it to use, there is the theoretical

bent which seeks to reproduce ideally the past as a living and fully

developed organism. 'This past,' says Hegel, 'is traversed by the

individual, in the same way as one who begins to study a more advanced

science repeats the preliminary lessons with which he had long been

acquainted, in order to bring their information once more before his

mind. He recalls them: but his interest and study are devoted to other

things. In the same way the individual must go through all that is

contained in the several stages in the growth of the universal mind:

but all the while he feels that they are forms of which the mind has

divested itself,--that they are steps on a road which has been long

ago completed and levelled. Thus, points of learning, which in former

times tasked the mature intellects of men, are now reduced to the level

of exercises, lessons, and even games of boyhood: and in the progress

of the schoolroom we may recognise the course of the education of the

world, drawn, as it were, in shadowy outline[2].'

The scope of historical investigation therefore is this. It shows

how every shading in the present world of thought, which makes our

spiritual environment, has been once living and actual with an

independent being of its own. But it also reveals the presence of

shades and elements in the present which if our eyes had looked on the

present alone we should scarcely have suspected: and it thus enables us

to interpolate stages in development of which the result preserves only

rudimentary traces. And, when carried out in a philosophical spirit,

it shows further, that in those formations, which are produced in

each period of the structural development of reason, the universe of

thought, or the Idea, is always whole and complete, but characterised

in some special mode which for that period seems absolute and final.

Each form or 'dimension' of thought, in which the totality is grasped

and unified, is therefore not so simple or elementary as it may seem

to casual observers regarding only the simplicity of language: it is

a total, embracing more or less of simpler elements, each of which

was once an inferior total, though in this larger sphere they are

reduced to unity. Thus each term or period in the process is really

an individualised whole, with a complex interconnexion and contrast

included in it: it is _concrete._ No single word or phrase explains it:

yet it is one totality,--a rounded life, from which its several spheres

of life must be explained. But when that period is passing away, the

form of its idea is separated, and retained, apart from the life and

mass of the elements which constituted it a real totality; and then the

mere shading or shell, with only part of its context of thought, is

left _abstract._ When that time has come, a special form, a whole act

in the drama, of humanity has been transformed into an empty husk, and

is only a name.

The sensuous reality of life, as it is limited in space and time, and

made palpable in matter and motion, is however the earliest cradle

of humanity. The environment of sense is prior in the order of time

to the environment of thought. Who, it may be asked, first wrought

their way out of that atmosphere of sense into an ether of pure

thought? Who first saw that in sense there was yet present something

more than sensation,--that the deliverances of sense-perception rest

upon and involve relations, ties, distinctions, which contradict its

self-confidence and carry us beyond its simple indications?. Who laid

the first foundations of that world of reason in which the civilised

nations of the modern period live and move? The answer is, the Greek

philosophers: and in the first place the philosophers of Elea. For

Hegel the history of thought begins with Greece. All that preceded the

beginnings of Greek speculation, and most that lies outside it, has

only a secondary interest for the culture of the West.

But 'many heroes lived before the days of Agamemnon,' The records of

culture no longer begin with Greece. Even in Hegel's own day, voices,

like those of the poet Rückert (in his 'habilitation'-exercise), were

heard declaring that the true fountain of European thought, the real

philosophy, was to be sought in the remoter East. Since the time of

Hegel, the study of primitive life, and of the rise of primitive ideas

in morals and religion, has enabled us to some extent to trace the

early gropings of barbarian fancy and reason. The comparative study

of languages has, on the other hand, partly revealed the contrivances

by which human reason has risen from one grade of consciousness to

another. The sciences of language and of primitive culture have

revealed new depths in the development of thought, where thought is

still enveloped in nature and sense and symbols,--depths which were

scarcely dreamed of in the earlier part of the present century. Here

and there, investigators have even supposed that they had found the

cradle of some elements in art, religion, and society, or, it may be,

of humanity itself.

These researches have accomplished much, and they promise to accomplish

more. They help us perhaps to take a juster view of the early Greek

thinkers, and show how much they still laboured under conditions

of thought and speech from which their struggles have partly freed

us. But for the present, and with certain explanations to be given

later, it may still be said that the birthday of our modern world

is the moment when the Greek sages began to construe the facts of

the universe. Before their time the world lay, as it were, in a

dream-life. Unconsciously in the womb of time the spirit of the world

was growing,--its faculties forming in secresy and silence,--until

the day of birth when the preparations were completed, and the young

spirit drew its first breath in the air of thought. A new and to us

all-important epoch in the history of thought begins with the Greeks:

and the utterances of Parmenides mark the first hard, and still

somewhat material, outlines of the spiritual world in which we live.

Other nations of an older day had gathered the materials: in their

languages, customs, religions, &c., there was an unconscious deposit of

reason. It was reserved for the Greeks to recognise that reason: and

thus in them reason became conscious.

For us, then, it was the Greek philosophers who distinctly drew the

distinction between sense and thought, and who first translated the

actual forms of our natural life into their abbreviated equivalents in

terms of logic. The struggle to carry through this transition, this

elevation into pure thought, is what gives the dramatic interest to

the Dialogues of Plato and keeps the sympathy of his readers always

fresh. Socrates, we are told, first taught men to seek a general

definition: not to be content with having--like Pythagoreans--their

meaning wrapped up inseparably in psychical images and quasi-material

symbols. He taught them to refer word to fellow word, to elicit the

underlying idea by the collision and comparison of instances, to get

at the 'content' which was identical in all the multiplicity of forms.

He taught them, in--brief, to think: and Plato carried out widely and

deeply the lesson. The endeavour to create an ideal world, which, at

its very creation, seems often to be transformed into a refined and

attenuated copy of the sense-world, meets us in almost every page of

his Dialogues. In Aristotle this effort, with its concomitant tendency

to give 'sensible' form to the ideal, is so far over and past; and

some sort of intellectual world, perhaps narrow and inadequate,

is reached,--the logical scheme in which immediate experience was

expressed and codified. What these thinkers began, succeeding ages have

inherited and promoted.

In the environment of reason, therefore, which encompasses the

consciousness of our age, are contained under a generalised form and

with elimination of all the particular circumstances, the results won

in the development of mind and morals. These results now constitute

the familiar joints and supports in the framework of ordinary thought:

around and upon them cluster our beliefs and imaginations. During each

epoch of history, the consciousness of the world, at first by the mouth

of its great men, its illustrious statesmen, artists, and philosophers,

has explicitly recognised, and translated into terms of thought,--into

logical language,--that synthesis of the world which the period had

practically secured by the action of its children. That activity went

on, as is the way of natural activities, spontaneously, through the

pressure of need, by an immanent adaptation of means to ends, not in

conscious straining after a result. For the conscious or reflective

effort of large bodies of men is often in a direction contrary to

the Spirit of the Time. This Spirit of the Time, the absolute mind,

which is neither religious nor irreligious, but infinite and absolute

in its season, is the real motive principle of the world. But that

Spirit of the Time is not always the voice that is most effective at

the poll, or rings loudest in public rhetoric. It is often a still

small voice, which only the wise, the self-restrained, the unselfish

hear. And he who hears it and obeys it, not he who follows the blatant

crowd, is the hero. It is only to a mistaken or an exaggerated

hero-worship, therefore, that Hegel can be said to be a foe. Great

men are great: but the Spirit of the Time is greater: their greatness

lies in understanding it and bringing it to consciousness. The man,

who would act independently of his time and in antagonism to it, is

only the exponent of its latent tendencies. Nor need the synthesis

be always formulated by a philosopher in order to leaven the minds

of the next generation. The whole system of thought,--the theory of

the time,--its world, in short, influences minds, although it is not

explicitly formulated and stated: it becomes the nursery of future

thought and speculation. Philosophy in its articulate utterances only

gives expression to the silent and half-conscious grasp of reason over

its objects. But when the adaptation is not merely reached but seen and

felt, when the synthesis or world of that time is made an object of

self-consciousness, the exposition has made an advance upon the period

which preceded. For that period started in its growth from the last

exposition, the preceding system of philosophy, after it had become

the common property of the age, and taken its place in their mental

equipment.

Each exposition or perception of the synthesis by the philosopher

restores or re-affirms the unity which in the divided energies of

the period, in its progressive, reforming, and reactionary aspects,

in its differentiating time, had to a great extent been lost. By the

reforming, progressive, and scientific movement of which each period

is full, the unity or totality with which it began is shown to be

defective. The value of the initial synthesis is impaired; its formula

is found inadequate to comprehend the totality: and the differences

which that unity involved, or which were implicitly in it, are now

explicitly affirmed. But the bent towards unity is a natural law

making itself felt even in the period of differentiation. And it

makes itself felt in the pain of contradiction, of discord, of broken

harmony. And that pain--which is the sign of an ever-present life that

refuses to succumb to the encroaching elements--is the stimulus to

re-construction. Only so far as pain ceases to be pain, as it benumbs,

and deadens, does it involve stagnation: as pain proper, felt as

resistance to an inner implicitly victorious principle, it stimulates

and quickens to efforts to make life whole again. The integrating

principle is present and active. There is then an effort, a re-action;

the feeling has to do something to make itself outwardly felt: the

implicit has to be actually put in its place, forced as it were into

action and set forth[3]: and the existing contrasts and differences

which the re-forming agency has called into vigorous life are lifted

from their isolation, and show of independence, and kept, as it were,

suspended in the unity[4]. The differences are not lost or annihilated:

but they come back to a centre, they find themselves, as it were,

at home: they lose their unfair prominence and self-assertion, and

sink into their places as constituents in the embracing organism[5].

The unity which comes is not however the same as the unity which

disappeared, however much it may seem so. The mere _notion_--the

inner sense and inner unity--has put itself forward into the real

world: it is no longer a mere subjective principle, but as moulded

into actuality, into the objective world, it has become an Idea.

(_Begriff_ is now _Idee._) For the Idea is always more than a notion:

it is a notion translated into objectivity, and yet in objectivity

not sinking into a mere congeries of independent parts, but retaining

them 'ideally'--united by links of thought and service--in its larger

ideal-reality. It is all that the object ought to be (and which in a

sense it must be, if it is at all), and all that the subject sought to

be and looked forward to.

The mind of the world moves, as it were, in cycles, but with each new

cycle a difference supervenes, a new tone is perceptible. History,

which reflects the changing aspects of reality, does and does not

repeat itself. The distinctions and the unity are neither of them the

same after each step as they were before it: they have both suffered a

change: it is a new scene that comes above the horizon, however like

the last it may seem to the casual observer. Thus when the process

of differentiation is repeated anew, it is repeated in higher terms,

multiplied, and with a higher power or wider range of meaning[6]. Each

unification however is a perfect world, a complete whole: it is the

same sum of being; but in each successive level of advance it receives

a fuller expression, and a more complexly-grouped type of features[7].

Such is the rhythmic movement,--the ebb and flow of the world, always

recurring with the same burden but, as we cannot but hope, with richer

variety of tones, and fuller sense of itself. The sum of actuality, the

Absolute, is neither increased nor diminished. The world, the ultimate

reality of experience and life, was as much a rounded total to the

Hebrew Patriarchs as it is to us: without advancing, it has been, we

may say, in its expression deepened, developed, and organised. In one

part of the sway of thought, however, there is a harder, narrower,

insistance (by practical and business minds) on the sufficiency of

a definite principle to satisfy all wants and to make all mysteries

plain, and a disposition to ignore all other elements of life: at

another, there is a fuller recognition of the differences, gaps, and

contradictions, involved in the last synthesis,--which recognition

it is the tendency of scientific inquiry, of reforming efforts, of

innovation, to produce: and in the last period of the sway, there is

a stronger and more extended grasp taken by the unity pervading these

differences,--which is the work appointed to philosophy gathering up

the results of science and practical amendments.