To this rhythmical movement Hegel has appropriated the name of

Dialectic. The name came in the first instance from Kant, but

ultimately from Plato, where it denotes the process which brings the

'many' under the 'one,' and divides the 'one' into the 'many.' But how,

it may be asked, does difference spring up, if we begin with unity, and

how do the differences return into the unity? In other words, given a

universal, how are we ever to get at particulars, and how will these

particulars ever give rise to a real individual? Such is the problem,

in the technical language of the Logic of the 'Notion.' And we may

answer, that the unity or universal in question is either a true and

adequate or an imperfect unity. In the latter case it is a mere unit,

amid other units, bound to them and serving to recall them by relations

of contrast, complement, similarity. It is one of many,--a subordinate

member in a congeries, and not _the One_. If, on the contrary, it be

a true Unity, it is a concrete universal,--the parent of perpetual

variety. The unity, if it be its genuine shape which is formulated by

philosophers, is not mere monotony without differences. If it is a

living and real Idea, containing a complex inter-action of principles:

it is not a single line of action, but the organic confluence of

several. No one single principle by itself is enough to state a life,

a character, or a period. But as the unity comes before the eye of the

single thinker, it is seldom or never grasped with all its fulness of

life and difference. The whole synthesis, although it is implicitly

present and underlies experience and life as its essential basis,

is not consciously apprehended, but for the most part taken on one

side only, one emphatic aspect into which it has concentrated itself.

And even if the master could grasp the whole, could see the unity of

actuality in all its differences, (and we may doubt whether any man

or any philosopher can thus incarnate the prerogative of reason,) his

followers and the popular mind would not imitate him. While his grasp

of comprehension may possibly have been thorough, though he may have

seen life whole through all its differences, inequalities, and schisms,

and with all these reduced or idealised to their due proportions,

into the unity beyond, the crowd who follow him are soon compelled

to lay exclusive stress on some one side of his theory. Some of them

see the totality from one aspect, some from another. It is indeed the

whole which in a certain sense they see: but it is the whole narrowed

down to a point. While _his_ theory was a comprehensive and concrete

grasp, including and harmonising many things which seem otherwise wide

apart, theirs is abstract and inadequate: it fixes on a single point,

which is thus withdrawn from its living and meaning-giving context,

and left as an empty name. Now it is the very nature of popular

reasoning to tend to abstractions, in this sense of the word. Popular

thought wants the time and perseverance necessary to retain a whole

truth, and so is contented with a partial image. It seeks for simple

and sharp precision: it likes to have something distinctly before

it, visible to the eye of imagination, and capable of being stated

in a clear and unambiguous formula for the intellect. And popular

thought--the dogmatic insistence on one-sided truth--is not confined

to the so-called non-philosophic world: just as, on the other hand,

the inclusive and comprehensive unity of life and reality is seen and

felt and recognised by many--and felt by them first--who have no claim

to the technical rank of philosophers. Popular thought is the thought

which skims the surface of reality, which addresses itself to the level

of opinion prevalent in all members of the mass as such, and does not

go beyond that into the ultimate and complex depths of experience.

Thus it comes about that the concrete or adequate synthesis which

should have appeared in the self-conscious thought of the period,

when it reflected upon what it was, has been replaced by a narrow

and one-sided formula, an abstract and formal universal, a universal

which does not express all the particulars. One predominant side of

the synthesis steals the place of the total: what should have been

a comprehensive universal has lowered itself into a particular. Not

indeed the same particular as existed before the union: because it has

been influenced by the synthesis, so as to issue with a new colouring,

as if it had been steeped in a fresh liquid. But still it is really

a particular: and as such, it evokes a new particular in antagonism

to it and exhibiting an element latent in the synthesis. If the

first side of the antithesis which claims unduly to be the total, or

universal, be called Conservative, the second must be called Reforming

or Progressive. If the first step is Dogmatic, the second is Sceptical.

If the one side assumes to be the whole, the other practically refutes

the assumption. If the one agency clings blindly to the unity,--as

when pious men rally round the central idea of religion, the other as

tenaciously and narrowly holds to the difference,--as when science

displays the struggle for existence and the empire of chance among

the myriads of aimless organisms. They are two warring abstractions,

each in a different direction. But as they are the offspring of one

parent,--as they have each in their own way narrowed the whole down to

a point, it cannot but be that when they evolve or develop all that

is in them, they will ultimately coincide, and complete each other.

The contradiction will not disappear until it has been persistently

worked out,--when each opposing member which was potentially a total

has become what it was by its own nature destined to be. And this

disappearance of the antithesis is the reappearance of the unity in all

its strength, reinforced with all the wealth of new distinctions.

Thus on a large scale we have seen the law of growth, of development,

of life. It may be called growth by antagonism. But the antagonism

here is over-ruled, and subject to the guidance of an indwelling

unity. _Mere_ antagonism--if there be such a thing--would lead to

nothing. A mere positive or affirmative point of being would lead

to no antithesis, were it not, so to speak, a point floating in an

ether of larger life and being, whence it draws an outside element

which it overcomes, assimilates and absorbs. A bare national mind

only grows to richer culture, because it lives in a universal human

life, and can say _Nihil humani a me alienum puto._ So too the mere

unit is always tainted with a dependence on outside: or it is always

implicitly more than a mere unit: and what seems to come upon it from

outside, is really an enemy from within, and it falls because there is

treason within its walls. The revolution succeeds because the party

of conservative order is not so hard and homogeneous as it appears.

So, too, it is the immanent presence of the complete thought, of the

Idea, which is the heart and moving spring that sets going the pulse

of the universal movement of thought, and which reappears in every one

of these categories to which the actualised thought of an age has been

reduced. In every term of thought there are three stages or elements:

the original narrow definiteness, claiming to be self-sufficient,--the

antagonism and criticism to which this gives rise,--and the union which

results when the two supplement and modify each other. In the full life

and organic unity of every notion there is a definite kernel, with

rigid outlines as if it were immovable: there is a revulsion against

such exclusiveness, a questioning and critical attitude: and there is

the complete notion, where the two first stages interpenetrate.

[Footnote 1: _Eth._ ii 7.]

[Footnote 2: _Phenomenologie__des Geistes_, p. 22.]

[Footnote 3: Gesetzt.]

[Footnote 4: Aufgehoben.]

[Footnote 5: Idee: Ideeller Weise.]

[Footnote 6: Potenz.]

[Footnote 7: 'Nicht nur die Einsicht in die Abhängigkeit des Einzelnen

vom Ganzen ist allein das Wesentliche; ebenso dass jedes Moment selbst

unabhängig vom Ganzen das Ganze ist, und dies ist das Vertiefen in die

Sache.' (Hegels _Leben_, p. 548.)]

CHAPTER XXI.

ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE I AND THE ORDINARY LOGIC.

The ordinary logic-books have made us all familiar with the popular

distinction between Abstract and Concrete. By a concrete term they mean

the name of an existence or reality which is obvious to the senses, and

is found in time and place;--or they mean the name of an attribute when

we expressly or tacitly recognise its dependence upon such a thing of

the senses. When, on the contrary, the attribute is forcibly withdrawn

from its context and made an independent entity in the mind, the term

expressing it becomes in the usual phraseology abstract. Any term

therefore which denotes a non-sensible or intelligible object would

probably be called abstract. And there is something to be said for the

distinction, which, though unsuccessful in its expression, has some

feeling of the radical antithesis between mere being and mere thought.

It is true, that in the totality of sense and feeling, in the full

sense-experience, there is a concrete fulness, as it were, an infinite

store of features and phases waiting for subsequent analysis to detect.

In the real kind of actual nature there is an inexhaustible mine of

properties, which no artificial classification and description can

ever come to the end of. Every quality which we state, every relation

which we predicate, is a partial and incomplete element in this

presupposed reality, this implicit concrete; and as such is abstract,

and comparatively unreal. It is something forcibly torn out of and held

apart from its context. But on the other hand the concrete reality is

not at first real, but implicit: it becomes really concrete only as it

re-embraces, and re-constitutes in its totality the elements detected

by analysis. But the popular distinction forgets this, and gives the

title and rank of concrete to what very poorly deserves the name, viz.

to the yet undiscerned reality denoted by a substantive name. Yet

there can be little doubt that the popular use of these terms, or the

popular apprehension of what constitutes reality,--for that is what it

comes to,--is sufficiently represented by the ordinary logic-books.

So that, if the whole business of the logician lies in formulating

the distinctions prevalent in popular thought, the ordinary logic is

correct.

Now the popular logic of the day,--the logic which has long been

taught in our schools and universities--has three sources.--In the

first place, but in a slight degree, it trenches upon the province

of psychology, and gives some account of the operation by which

concepts or general ideas are supposed to be formed, and of the errors

or fallacies which naturally creep into the process of reasoning.

This is the more strictly modern, the descriptive part of our

logic-books.--But, secondly, the logic of our youth rests in a much

higher degree upon the venerable authority of Aristotle. That logic,

within its own compass, was a masterpiece of analysis, and for many

centuries maintained an ascendency over the minds of men, which it

well deserved. But it was not an analysis of thought or knowledge as a

whole, and it treated its subject in fragments. It gave in one place

an analysis of science and in another an analysis of certain methods,

which could be observed in popular discussions and practical oratory.

As Lord Bacon remarked, it did little else than state and, it may be,

exaggerate the _rationale_ of argumentation. A high level of popular

thought it unquestionably was, which Aristotle had to investigate,--a

level which many generations of less favoured races were unable to

reach. But there were defects in this Logic which fatally marred its

general usefulness, when the limited scope of its original intention

had been lost sight of. The thoughts of Greece, it has been said, were

greatest and most active in the line of popular action for the city and

the public interest, in the discussions, the quibbles, the fallacies,

and rhetorical arts of the barber's shop and the 'agora.' The aim

of such exercises was to convince, to demonstrate, to persuade, to

overcome;--it might be for good and truth, but also it might not. And

accordingly the Logic of Aristotle has been said to have for its end

and canon the power to convince and to give demonstrative certainty.

There is some ground, it may be, for this charge. The ancient logician

seems to luxuriate in a rank growth of forms of sophism, and in an

almost childlike fondness for variety of argumentative method. He

seems resolved to trace the wayward tricks of thought and its phases

through every nook and cranny, to exhaust all the permutations and

complications of its elements. But let us be just, and remember that

all this was in the main a speculative inquiry--for the sake of theory.

It developed the powers of judgment and inference, just as the modern

research for new metals, new plants, or new planets, develops the

powers of observation. Both have some value in the material results

they discover: but, after all, the mental culture they give is the main

thing. And the talents quickened by deductive research are no whit

less valuable than those owed to the other. Forms are essential, even

if it be possible to make the terrible mistake of regarding them as

all-important to the exclusion of matter.

And then, this is not the whole truth. There is a perfectly serious

Greek science--Mathematics--a science of many branches: a science

which, from Plato downwards, always stood in alliance with the studies

of philosophy. Now, it might be said, perhaps with ground, that the

conception of mathematical method too much dominated all attempts to

get at the rationale of science, and led to the supremacy of syllogism.

It would be fairer perhaps to put this objection in another shape.

We should then say that the logic of Aristotle,--the _Analytics_--is

too much restricted to dealing with the most general and elementary

principles of reasoning. But this is not in itself a fault. It

becomes a fault only where there is no growth in philosophy--when

it is merely handed on from master to pupil; and where there is a

tendency to put philosophic doctrine to immediate use. To expend the

whole energy of intellect in laying bare the general principles, the

fundamental method, of knowledge and inference, is precisely what the

founder of a science has a duty to do. But the beginning thus made

requires development--and development which is fruitful must proceed

by correction and antithesis, no less than by positive additions. It

was not given to Aristotle's logic to be so carried on. His logic,

like his system in general, had no real successor to carry it on in

the following generation: and when in the less original ages of early

Byzantine rule it again found students, it had become a quasi-sacred

text which could only be commented on, not modified and developed. From

the great _Exegetai_ of Greece it passed westward to Boethius and

eastward to the Syrian and Persian commentators in the early centuries

of the Caliphate. From these, and from other intermediaries, it may be,

it finally culminated in the work of the Latin Schoolmen of the later

Middle Ages. But the very reverence which all these expositors felt for

the text of _the_ Philosopher rendered true development impossible.

Then, on the other hand, the lust of practical utility caused a

grave misconception of what logic can do. For Aristotle, logic

is a scientific analysis of the modes of inference; its uses are

those which follow intrinsically from all noble activity freely and

zealously prosecuted. But with the death of Aristotle the great days

of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and divine wisdom were over.

The Stoics into whose hands the chief sceptre of philosophy, directly

or indirectly, passed never rose above the conception of life as a

task and a duty, and of all other things, literature, science, and

art, as subservient to the performance of that task. The conception is

an ennobling one: but only with a relative or comparative nobility.

It ennobles, if it is set beside and against the view that life is a

frivolous play, a sport of caprice and selfishness. But it darkens and

narrows the outlook of humanity, when it loses sight of life as a joy,

a self-enlarging and self-realising freedom, of life as in its supreme

phase _θεωρία_--or the enjoyment of God. To the Stoic, therefore,--and

to the dominant Christian theory which entered to some extent on the

Stoic inheritance--logic, like the rest of philosophy, was something

only valuable because ultimately it helped to save the soul.

It thus sunk into the position of an Organon or instrument. To the

Stoic,--for instance to Epictetus--its value was its use to establish

the doctrines of the Stoic faith, by confuting the ill-arranged and

futile inferences on which were founded the aims and approvals of

ordinary worldly life. To the Christian, again, it served as a method

for putting into systematic shape (under the guidance of certain

supreme categories or principles also borrowed from Greek thought) the

variety of fundamental and derivative aspects which successive minds,

pondering on the power and mystery of the Christian faith, had set

forward as its essential dogmas. It thus helped to build up (out of

the leading ideas of Greek metaphysics, and the principles emerging in

the earliest attempts to formulate the law of Christ) that amalgam of

the power of a divine life with the reflective thought of the teachers

of successive generations, which constitutes the dogmatic creed of

Christendom. Such a reconstruction in thought of the reality which

underlies experience--(in this case the experience of the Christian

life), is inevitable if man is to be man, a free intelligence, and

not a mere animal-like feeling. But its success is largely, if not

entirely, dependent on the value of the logic and metaphysics which it

employs: and it would be a bold thing to say that the subtle, abstract,

and unreal system of Neo-Platonist and Neo-Aristotelian thought was an

organon adequate to cope with the breadth and depth, latent if not very

explicit, in the fulness and reality of the religious life.

Yet even as an Organon, Logic had to sink to a lower rank. As

traditionalism grew supreme, and religion ossified into a stereotyped

form of belief and practice, logic had less to do as an organiser

of dogma. It sank, or seemed to sink (for it would be rash to speak

too categorically of an epoch of thought so far removed from modern

sympathy and understanding as the age of the Schoolmen), into a futile

(and as it seems occasionally almost a viciously-despairing) play with

_pro_ and _contra_,--into a lust of argumentation which in masters

like Ockam comes perilously close to scepticism or agnosticism. More

and more, Scholastic thought, which, at one time, had been in the

centre of such intellectual life as there was, came to be stranded on

the shore, while the onward-flowing tide spread in other directions.

These were the great days of logical sway, when it seemed as if logic

could create new truth: as if forms could beget matter. So at least

ran an outside rumour, which was probably based on some amount of real

folly. But the more important point was that the old logic had lost

touch with reality. New problems were arising, which it was--without

a profound reconstruction--quite incapable of solving. Of these there

were obviously two--not unconnected perhaps, but arising in different

spheres of life. There was the revival of religious experience, growing

especially since the thirteenth century with an ever-swelling stream

in the souls of men and women, till it burst through all bounds of

outward organisation in the catastrophe of the Reformation. Luther may

have been historically unjust (as Bacon afterwards was) to the 'blind

heathen master,' as he called Aristotle: but he was governed by a true

instinct when (unlike the compromise-loving Melanchthon) he found the

traditional system of logic and metaphysics no proper organon for

the new phase of faith and theory. So, too, the new attempts at an

inception and instauration of the sciences grew up outside the walls

of old tradition, and were at first perhaps discouraged and persecuted

as infidel and heretical, and were, even without that burden, pursued

at much hap-hazard and with much ignorance both in aims and methods.

Intelligent onlookers,--especially if inspired by an enthusiasm for

the signs of an age happier for human welfare--could not but sec how

needful it was to come to some understanding on the aims and methods of

the rising sciences.

This want, which he keenly felt, Francis Bacon tried to satisfy. He

pointed out, vaguely, but zealously and in a noble spirit, the end

which that new logic had to accomplish. Bacon, however, could not do

more than state these bold suggestions: he had not the power to execute

them. He imagined indeed that he could display a method, by which

science would make incredible advances, and the kingdom of truth in a

few years come into the world. But this is a sort of thing which no

man can do. Plato, if we take his _Republic_ for a political pamphlet,

had tried to do it for the social life of Athens. What Plato could

not do for the political world of Greece, Bacon could not do for the

intellectual world in his time: for as the Athenian worked under the

shadow of his own state, over-mastered even without his knowledge by

the ordinances of Athens, so the Englishman was evidently enthralled

by the medieval conceptions and by the logic which he condemned. What

Aristotle had for ages been supposed to do, no philosopher could do for

the new spirit of inquiry which had risen in and before the days of

Bacon. That spirit, as exhibited in his great contemporaries, Bacon,

as he has himself shown, could not rightly understand or appreciate.

He failed, above all, to recognise the self-corrective, tentative,

and hypothetical nature, of all open inquiry. But one need not for

this disparage his work. It showed a new sense of the magnitude of the

modern problem: it set prominently forward the comprehensive aim of

human welfare: and by its conception of the 'forma' it kept science

pledged to a high ideal. But Bacon could only play the part of the

guide-post: he could not himself lay down the road. And negatively he

could warn against the belief that mathematics could _generate_ or do

more indeed than _define_ the sciences. The spirit of free science, of

critical investigation, of inductive inquiry, must and did constitute

its forms, legislation, and methods for itself. For no philosopher can

lay down laws or methods beforehand which the sciences must follow.

The logician only comes after, and, appreciating and discovering the

not always conspicuous methods of knowledge, endeavours to gather

them up and give them their proper place in the grand total of human

thought, correcting its inadequacies by their aid, and completing their

divisions by its larger unities. Or rather this is a picture of what

English logic might have done. But it does not do so in the ordinary

and accepted text-books on the subject. What it does do, is rather as

follows. To the second and fundamental part which it subjects to a few

unimportant alterations,--i. e. to the doctrine of terms, propositions,

and reasonings,--it subjoins an enumeration of the methods used in the

sciences.

To the rude minds of the Teutonic peoples the logical system of

Aristotle had seemed almost a divine revelation. From the brilliant

intellect of Greece a hand was stretched to help them in the

arrangement of their religious beliefs. The Church accepted the aid of

logic, foreign though logic was to its natural bent, as eagerly as the

young society tried for a while to draw support from the ancient forms

of the Roman Empire. So with the advance of the Sciences in modern

times some hopeful spirits looked upon the Inductive Logic of Mill in

the light of a new revelation. The vigorous action of the sciences

hailed a systematic account of its methods almost as eagerly as the

strong, but untaught intellect of the barbarian world welcomed the

lessons of ancient philosophy. For the first time the sciences, which

had been working blindly or instinctively, but with excellent success,

found their procedure stated clearly and definitely, yet without

any attempt to reduce their varied life to the Procrustean bed of

mathematics, which had once been held to possess a monopoly of method.

The enormous influence of the physical sciences saw itself reflected

in a distinct logical outline: and the new logic became the dominant

philosophy. Such for a while was the proud position of the Inductive

Logic. Enthusiastic students of science in all countries, who were not

inaccessible to wider culture, used quotations from Mill to adorn and

authorise their attempts at generalisation and theory. A period of

speculation in the scientific world succeeded the period of experiment,

in which facts had been collected and registered. A chapter on Method

became a necessary introduction to all higher scientific treatises. In

our universities methodology was prodigally applied to the study of

ancient philosophy. And so long as the scientific epoch lasts in its

one-sided prominence, so long the theory of inductive and experimental

methods may dominate the intellectual world.

But the Inductive Logic hardly rose to the due sense of its situation.

It has not held to the same high ideal as Bacon set before it. It has

planted itself beside what it was good enough to call the Deductive

Logic, and given the latter a certain toleration as a harmless lunatic,

or an old pauper who had seen better days. Retaining the latter with

certain modifications, although it has now lost its meaning in the

changed outlines of the intellectual world, Inductive Logic adds a

methodology of the sciences, without however founding this methodology

upon a comprehensive analysis of knowledge as a whole, when

enlarged and enlightened by the work of the sciences. Hence the two

portions,--the old logic, mutilated and severed from the Greek world it

grew out of, and the new Inductive or specially-scientific logic, not

going beyond a mere classification of methods,--can never combine, any

more than oil and water. And the little psychology, which is sometimes

added, does not facilitate the harmony.

But Inductive Logic should have adopted a more thorough policy. There

can only be one Logic, which must be both inductive and deductive, but

exclusively, and in parts, neither. To achieve that task however Logic

must not turn its back indifferently on what it calls metaphysics, and

it must rise to a higher conception of the problems of what it calls

psychology.

In these circumstances the ordinary logic, in its fundamental terms,

is more on the level of popular thought, than in a strictly scientific

region, and does not attempt to unite the two regions, and examine the

fundamental basis of thought on which scientific methods rest. The case

of Concrete and Abstract will illustrate what has been said. To popular

thought the sense-world is concrete: the intellectual world abstract.

And so it is in the ordinary logic. To Hegel, on the contrary, the

intellectual interpretation of the world of reality and experience

is a truer and thus a more concrete description of it than that

contained in a series of sense-terms. Now the difference between the

two uses of the term is not a mere arbitrary change of names. When the

philosopher denies the concreteness of the sense-world, and declares

that it, as merely sensible, is only a mass of excluding elements, a

'manifold,' and in the second instance a series of abstractions, drawn

out of this _congeries_ by perception, the change of language marks

the total change of position between the philosophic and the popular

consciousness. Reality and concreteness as estimated by the one line of

thought are the very reverse of those of the other. A mere sense-world

to the philosopher is a world which wants unity, which is made up of

bits imperfectly adjusted to each other, and always leading us to look

for an explanation of them in sources outside them. The single things

we say we perceive,--the here and the now we perceive them in--are

found, upon reflection and analysis, to depend upon general laws, on

relations that go beyond the single,--on what is neither here nor

now, but everywhere and timeless. The reality of the thing is found

to imply a general system of relations which make it what it is.

Sense-perception in short is the beginning of knowledge: and it begins

by taking up its task piecemeal. It rests upon a felt totality: and to

raise this to an intelligible totality, it must at first only isolate

one attribute at a time.

The apprehension of a thing from one side or aspect,--the apprehension

of one thing apart from its connexions,--the retention of a term or

formula apart from its context,--is what Hegel terms 'abstract.'

Ordinary terms are essentially abstract. They spring from the

analysis of something which would, in the first stage of the process,

in strictness be described not as concrete, but as chaos:--as the

indefinite or 'manifold' of sensation. But the first conceptions, which

spring from this group when it is analysed, are abstract: they are

each severed from the continuity of their reality. To interpret our

feeling, our experience as felt, we must break it up. But the first

face that presents itself is apt to impress us unduly, and seems more

real, because nearer feeling: on the other it is more unreal, because

less adequate as a total expression of the felt unity. In the same

sense we call Political Economy an abstract science, because it looks

upon man as a money-making and money-distributing creature, and keeps

out of sight his other qualities. Our notions in this way are more

abstract or more concrete, according as our grasp of thought extends

to less or more of the relations which are necessarily pre-supposed by

them. On the other hand, when a term of thought owns and emphasises

its solidarity with others, when it is not circumscribed to a single

relation, but becomes a focus in which a variety of relations converge,

when it is placed in its right post in the organism of thought,

its limits and qualifications as it were recognised and its degree

ascertained,--then that thought is rendered 'concrete.' A concrete

notion is a notion in its totality, looking before and after, connected

indissolubly with others: a unity of elements, a meeting-point of

opposites. An abstract notion is one withdrawn from everything that

naturally goes along with it, and enters into its constitution. All

this is no disparagement of abstraction. To abstract is a necessary

stage in the process of knowledge. But it is equally necessary to

insist on the danger of clinging, as to an ultimate truth, to the

pseudo-simplicity of abstraction, which forgets altogether what it is

in certain situations desirable for a time to overlook.

In a short essay, with much grim humour and quaint illustrations,

Hegel tried to show what was meant by the name 'abstract,' which in

his use of it denotes the cardinal vice of the 'practical' habit of

mind. From this essay, entitled 'Who is the Abstract Thinker[1]?'

it may be interesting to quote a few lines. A murderer is, we may

suppose, led to the scaffold. In the eyes of the multitude he is a

murderer and nothing more. The ladies perhaps may make the remark that

he is a strong, handsome, and interesting man. At such a remark the

populace is horrified. "What! a murderer handsome? Can anybody's mind

be so low as to call a murderer handsome? You must be little better

yourselves." And perhaps a priest who sees into the heart, and knows

the reasons of things, will point to this remark, as evidence of the

corruption of morals prevailing among the upper classes. A student

of character, again, inquires into the antecedents of the criminal's

up-bringing: he finds that he owes his existence to ill-assorted

parents; or he discovers that this man has suffered severely for some

trifling offence, and that under the bitter feelings thus produced

he has spurned the rules of society, and cannot support himself

otherwise than by crime. No doubt there will be people who when they

hear this explanation will say "Does this person then mean to excuse

the murderer?" In my youth I remember hearing a city magistrate

complain that book-writers were going too far, and trying to root out

Christianity and good morals altogether. Some one, it appeared, had

written a defence of suicide. It was horrible! too horrible! On further

inquiry it turned out that the book in question was the _Sorrows of

Werther._

'By abstract thinking, then, is meant that in the murderer we see

nothing but the simple fact that he is a murderer, and by this single

quality annihilate all the human nature which is in him. The polished

and sentimental world of Leipsic thought otherwise. They threw their

bouquets, and twined their flowers round the wheel and the criminal

who was fastened to it.--But this also is the opposite pole of

abstraction.--It was in a different strain that I once heard a poor

old woman, an inmate of the workhouse, rise above the abstraction

of the murderer. The sun shone, as the severed head was laid upon

the scaffold. "How finely," said the woman, "does God's gracious sun

lighten up Binder's head!" We often say of a poor creature who excites

our anger that he is not worth the sun shining on him. That woman saw

that the murderer's head was in the sunlight, and that it had not

become quite worthless. She raised him from the punishment of the

scaffold into the sunlit grace of God. It was not by wreaths of violets

or by sentimental fancies that she brought about the reconciliation:

she saw him in the sun above received into grace.'

[Footnote 1: 'Wer denkt abstrakt!' (_Vermischte Schriften_, vol. ii. p.

402.)]

CHAPTER XXII.

FROM SENSE TO THOUGHT.

Induction and Experience are names to which is often assigned the

honour of being the source of all our knowledge. But what induction

and experience consist in, is what we are supposed to be already

aware of; and that is--it may be briefly said--the concentration

of the felt and sense-given fragments into an intimate unity. The

accidents and fortunes that have befallen us in lapses of time, the

scenes that have been set before and around us in breadths of space,

are condensed into a mood of mind, a habitual shading of judgment,

or frame of thought. The details of fact re-arrange themselves into

a general concept; their essence gets distilled into a concentrated

form. Their meaning disengages itself from its embodiment, and floats

as a self-sustaining form in an ideal world. Thus if we look at the

larger process of history, we see every period trying to translate the

sensuous fact of its life into a formula of thought, and to fix it in

definite characters. The various parts of existence, and existence as

a whole, are stripped of their sensible or factual nature, in which we

originally feel and come into contact with them, and are reduced to

their simple equivalents in terms of thought. From sense and immediate

feeling there is, in the first place, generated an image or idea which

at least represents and stands for reality; and from that, in the

second place, comes a thought or notion proper, which holds the facts

in unity.

The phenomenon may, perhaps, be illustrated by the case of numbers. To

the adult European, numbers and numbering are an obvious and essential

part of our scheme of things that seems to need no special explanation.

But the experience of children suggests its artificiality, and the

evidence from the history of language corroborates that surmise. If

number be in a way describable as part of the sense-experience, or

total impression, it certainly does not come upon us with the same

passivity on our part as the perception of taste or colour, or even

of shape. It postulates a higher grade of activity. As Plato says, it

'awakes the intelligence': it implies a question and looks forward

to an answer: it is thus the first appearance of what in its later

fullness will be called 'Dialectic,' To put it otherwise: Numbering

can only proceed where there is a unit, and an identity: it implies a

one, and it implies an infinite repetibility of that one[1] It thus

postulates the double mental act, first of reducing the various to

its basis of identity, and, secondly, of performing a synthesis of

the identical units thus created. In the highly artificial world in

which we live all this seems simple enough. The products of machinery,

articles of furniture, dress, &c., &c., are already uniform items: and

the strokes of a clock seem almost to invite summation. But in free

nature this similarity is much less obviously stamped on things: and

the products of primitive art--of literal _manu_-facture--display an

individuality, an element of personal taste, even, which is necessarily

lacking in things turned out by machinery. Thus it was necessary,

before we could number, to reduce the qualitatively different to

a quantitative equality or comparability. There are indeed some

instances, in that nearest of things to us, the human body, which

might help. There is the obvious similarity of organs and limbs which

go in pairs, and which might easily suggest a dual, as, so to speak,

a sensuous fact amongst other facts. Again, there is the hand and its

five fingers, or the two hands and the ten fingers. The five or ten,

as a whole naturally given, suggest a grouping of numbers in natural

aggregates. The fingers, again, (and here we may keep at first to the

fingers proper, minus the thumb,) may be without much ingenuity said

to give us a set of four, naturally distinct, yet naturally alike,

and needing, so to speak, the minimum of intelligence to create the

numerical scale from one to four. It is by them, indeed, that Plato, it

may be unconsciously, illustrates the genesis of number. Here in short

you have the natural abacus of the nations, but one restricted, first,

perhaps to the group 1-4, secondly to the group 1-10.

We have seen how the dual was, in certain instances, almost a natural

perceptive fact. But when it is so envisaged, it is hardly recognised

as number strictly so called. It is only a fresh and peculiar sensuous

attribute of things: a thing which has the quality of duplication, not

a thought which is the synthesis of two identical units. It is a sort

of accident, not part of a regular system or series. So again with

the plural, which may appear in several shapes before it is assigned

to its proper place as a systematic function of the singular. If the

Malay, in order to say 'the king of all apes' has to enumerate one

after another the several sub-species of ape, or if to express 'houses'

he has to reduplicate the singular, to insert a word meaning 'all'

or 'many,' we can see that the conception of number is for him still

in the bonds of sense. It is not a synthetic category, but only a

material multitude. But in other cases the plural proper is almost

confounded with the so-called 'collective.' It is not an unfamiliar

fact in Greek and Latin that the plural has acquired a meaning of

its own,--not the mere multiple of its singular; as also that the

collective term is occasionally used as an abstract, occasionally

as the more or less indeterminate collection of the individuals.

Such plurals and such collectives represent a stage of language and

conception when the aggregate of singulars form a uniquely-qualified

case of the object. And the peculiarity of them is seen in the way

the plurality is immersed in and restricted to the special class of

objects: as e. g. when in English the plurality of a number of ships

is verbally stereotyped as against the plurality of a number of sheep,

or of partridges (fleet, flock, covey). In such instances the category

of number is completely pervaded and modified by the quality of the

objects it is applied to. So, in the Semitic languages, the so-called

'broken plural' is a quasi-collective, which grammatically counts as

a feminine singular (like so many Latin and Greek collectives): and

whereas the more regular plural is generally shown by separable affix,

this quasi-collective plural enters the very body of the word by

vowel-change, indicating as it were by this absorption the constitution

of a specifically new view of things. On the other hand, it may be

said, there is in this collective a trace of the emergence of the

universal and identical element through the generalisation due to the

conjunction of several similars all acting as one[2]

In a true plural, on the contrary, it is required that the sign of

number be clearly eliminated from any peculiarities of its special

object, and be distinctly separated from the collective. And similarly

the true numeral has to be realised in its abstractness, as a category

_per se._ And to do this requires some amount of abstraction. In

Greek, for example, we meet the distinction between numbers in the

abstract, pure numbers (such as four and six), and bodily or physical

numbers (such as four men, six trees)[3]. The geometrical aspect

under which numbers were regarded by the Greeks, e. g. as oblong or

square numbers, bears in the same direction. But another phenomenon

in language tells the tale more distinctly[4]. Abundantly in Sanscrit

and Greek, more rarely in Zend and Teutonic, and here and there in

the Semitic languages, we meet with what is known as the dual number,

a special grammatical form intended to express a pair of objects.

The witty remark of Du Ponceau[5] concerning the Greek dual, that it

had apparently been invented only for lovers and married people, may

illustrate its uses, but hardly suffices to explain its existence in

language. But a comparison of barbarian dialects serves to show that

the dual is, as it were, a prelude to the plural,--a first attempt to

grasp the notion of plurality in a definite way, which served its turn

in primitive society, but afterwards disappeared, when the plural had

been developed, and the numerals had attained a form of their own. If

this be so, the dual is what physiologists call a rudimentary organ,

and tells the same story as these organs do of the processes of nature.

The language of the Melanesian island of Annatom, one of the New

Hebrides, may be taken as an instance of a state of speech in which

the dual is natural. That language possesses a fourfold distinction of

number in its personal pronouns, a different form to mark the singular,

dual, trial, and plural: and the pronoun of the first person plural

distinguishes in addition whether the person addressed is or is not

included in the 'we-two,' 'we-three,' or 'we-many' of the speaker[6].

The same language however possesses only the first three numerals, and

in the translation of the Bible into this dialect it was necessary

to introduce the English words, four, five, &c. The two facts must

be taken together: the luxuriance of the personal pronouns and the

scanty development of numerals in such languages are two phenomena

of the same law. The numeral 'four' to these tribes is said to bear

the meaning of 'many' or 'several,' Another fact points in the same

direction. In many languages, such as those of China, Further India and

Mexico, it is customary in numbering to use what W. von Humboldt has

called class-words. Here it is felt that an artificial unity has to

be created, a common denominator found, and all reduced to it, before

any summation can be carried out. Scholars and officials, in Chinese,

can only be classed under the rubric of 'jewel' or dignity: and

animals or fish by 'tails,' as if thereby only could one get a handle

to hold them and count them. (The idiom still lingers in western

languages: as in English, heads of cabbage, or of cattle: or German,

_sechs Mann Soldaten._) So in Malay, instead of 'five boys' the phrase

used is 'boy five-man': in other words, the numerals are supposed to

inhere as yet in objects of a special kind or common occurrence[7].

And among the South Sea Islanders the consciousness of number is

decidedly personal: that is to say, the distinction between one and

two is first conceived as a distinction between 'I' and 'we two.' Even

this amount of simplification surpasses what is found amongst some

Australian tribes. There we find four duals: one for brothers and

sisters: one for parents and children: one for husbands and wives: and

one between brothers-in-law[8]. Each pair has a different form. We

thus seem to see to what early language is applied: not to designate

the objects of nature, but the members of the primitive family and

their interests. The consciousness of numbers was first awakened by the

need of distinguishing and combining the things that belonged to and

specially interested men and women in the narrow circle of barbarian

life[9]. It is not altogether imaginative in principle, though it may

be occasionally surmise in details, to connect the rise of grammatical

forms with the temperament and character of the people, and therefore

with its social organisation. If the Bantoo or Caffir languages of

Southern Africa instead of a single third personal pronoun and third

personal termination to the verb use the separate forms corresponding

to the ten class-prefixes of the nouns, it must be in accordance with

the general spirit and system of these tribes. The various plural

forms, if they persist, will reflect contemporary modes of life.

Numbers were at first immersed in the persons, and then, as things

came to be considered also, in the things numbered. The mind seems to

have proceeded slowly from the vague one to definite numbers. And the

first decided step was taken towards an apprehension of numbers when

two was distinguished from one, and the distinction was made part of

the personal terminations. The plural was a further step in the same

direction: the real value of which, however, did not become apparent

until the numerals had been separately established in forms of their

own. When that was accomplished, the special form of the dual became

useless: it had outlived its purpose, and henceforth it ceased to have,

any but that poetical beauty of old association which often adorns the

once natural, but now obsolete growths of the past. When the numerals

were thus emancipated from their material and sensuous environment,

quantity was translated from outward being in its embodiments into a

form of thought. At first, indeed, it was placed in an ethereal or

imaginative space, the counterpart as it were of the sensuous space

in which it had been previously immersed. It became a denizen of the

mental region, as it had been before a habitant of the sense-world.

The mind was informed with quantity in the shape of number: but it does

not follow from this, that the new product was comprehended, or the

process of its production kept in view. Like all new inventions (and

numeration may fairly be classed under that head), it was laid hold

of, and all its consequences, results, and uses estimated and realised

by the practical and defining intellect. In one direction, it became,

like many new inventions in the early days of society, a magic charm,

and was invested with mystery, sacredness, and marvellous powers. But

the intelligent mind,--the understanding,--resolved to make better use

of the new instrument: and that in two ways, in practical work and in

theory. On the one hand it was applied practically in the dealings

of life,--in commerce, contracts, legislation, and religion. On the

other hand, the new conception of number, which common sense and the

instinctive action of men had evolved, was carried out in all its

theory: it was analysed in all directions, and its elements combined

in all possible ways. The result was the science of arithmetic,

and mathematics in general. Such consequences did the reflective

understanding derive from the analysis of its datum,--the fact of

quantity freed from its sensuous envelope.

The general action of understanding, and of practical thought, is of

this kind. It accepts the representative images which have emerged from

sensation, as they occur: and tries to appreciate them, to give them

precision, to carry them into details, and to analyse them until their

utmost limits of meaning are explored. Where they have come from, and

where they lead to,--the process out of which they spring, and which

fixes the extent of their validity,--are questions of no interest

to the understanding[10]. It takes its objects, as given in popular

conception, as fixed and ultimate entities to be expounded in detail.

We have taken number as one example of the transference of a sensible

or sense-immersed fact into a form of thought: but a form which is

still placed in a superior or mental space. One advantage of taking

number as illustration, is that numbered things are distinguished from

numbers in an emphatic and recognised way. Nobody will dispute that

the abstraction, as it is called, has an existence of its own, and

can be made a legitimate object of independent investigation. But if

the process be more obvious in the case of the numerals, there must

have been a similar course of development leading to the pronouns, the

prepositions, and the auxiliary verbs--to what has been called the

'formal' or 'pronominal' or 'demonstrative' element, the connective and

constructive tissue of language. Whether these pronominal 'roots' form

a special and originally-distinct class of their own, or are derived

from a transmutation of more material or substantial elements, is a

question on which linguistic research casts as yet no very certain

light. It is true that on the one hand etymology is mainly silent on

the origin of pronouns, numerals, and the more fundamental prepositions

(i. e. cannot refer them to roots significant of qualitative being):

and one need not lay much stress on remarks, like that of Gabelenz[11],

that in the Indo-Chinese languages the words for _I, five, fish_

have a like sound, as do those for _thou, two, ear_, or that _I am,_

originally means _I breathe_. In all languages--though with immense

diversities of degree, this formal element has attained a certain

independence. And in many instances we can more or less trace the

process by which there grew up in language an independent world of

thought: we can see the natural existence passing out of the range of

the senses into spiritual relations. Before our eyes a world of reason

is slowly constituting itself in the history of culture: and we, who

live now, enter upon the inheritance which past ages have laid up for

us.

There is, however, a difference between the way in which these

results look to us now, and the way in which they originally

organised themselves. The child who begins to learn a language in the

lesson-books and the grammars finds the members of it all, as it were,

upon one level: adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and verbs confront

him with the same authority and rank. This appearance is deceptive:

it may easily suggest that the words are not members in an organism,

in and out of which they have developed. And this organism of thought

has its individual types, expressed in the great families of human

speech. Its generic form (as drawn out in a logical system) appears

in different grades, with different degrees of fullness, in Altaic

and Dravidian from what it does in Malay, or in Chinese, and these

again have their own predominant categories as compared with those

used in the American or African languages, or in Indo-Germanic and

Semitic. If the Altaic languages e. g. are wanting in the verb proper,

and manage with possessive suffixes and nouns; if the Semitic tenses

display a poverty which contrasts with their wealth in Greek; and

yet each group performs its function, we may infer that each speech

has a complete organism, though it does not bring all its parts to

adequate expression. All this distinction of 'parts of speech,' of

forms, prefixes and suffixes, &c., is part of the life of language,

embodying in more or less distinct organs the organisation of thought

in the individual form it reached in that speech-type. Thus in Chinese

there are strictly speaking no isolated words, nouns, or verbs: there

are only abstract parts of a concrete sentence; and grammar in Chinese

therefore has no accidence (no declensions, conjugations, &c.) but

only syntax. Yet it is these abstract fragments which exist and seem

to have independence and inherent meaning: whereas the unity in which

they cohere to form a concrete context is the fleeting sentence of

the moment. At the opposite extreme, again, the Mexican family of

languages tend to incorporate relations to subject and object with

the verb, in such a degree that the word almost becomes a sentence.

Facts like these suggest that a science of the forms of language, in

proportion as it generalises, tends to approach logic; and that logic

will have a converse tendency to elevate to an unduly typical position

the grammatical form of the languages with which the logician is best

acquainted.

If these points were remembered, there would be less absurd employment

of the grammatical categories of one group of languages to systematise

another. Greek and Sanscrit grammar plays sad havoc with the organism

of a Semitic tongue, and it is not less out of place as a schema

for delineating e. g. South African dialect. Isolated words even in

an Indo-Germanic language--even, we may say, in such a language as

English--are still fractional, and do not get life and individuality

except in their context. And it needs but a little experience to show

how various that individuality may be. It needs perhaps still more

meditation to realise that it is in this individuality that the real

life of language lies: in the words said and written to express the

thought of a personality. But, first, because language has its material

and mechanical side, and secondly, because in civilised countries it

further acquires a more stereotyped mechanism in written and printed

language, its parts tend to gain a pseudo-independence. It is one aim

of a philosophical dictionary to restore the organic interconnexion

which in the mere sequence of vocables in juxtaposition is apt to be

lost. What we call the meaning of a word is something which carries us

beyond that mere word,--which restores the connexions which have been

broken off and forgotten. In the form of a dictionary, of course, this

can only be done piece-meal: but if each piece is done thoroughly, it

can hardly fail to bring out certain comprehensive connexions. The mere

word seems a simple thing; and one is at first disposed to get rid of

its difficulty by substituting a so-called synonym. But a deeper study

reveals the fact that an exact synonym is a thing one can no more find

than two peas which are absolutely indistinguishable. A synonym is only

a practical _pis aller_. But every word is really as it were a point

in an infinitely complex organic life, with its essence or meaning

determined by the currents to and fro which meet in it.

Words as we see them _prima facie_ in a printed page do look separate

entities. They stand, one here and another there, in a quasi-extension,

with marks of direction and connexion pointing from one to another,

but of connexion apparently extraneous to the more solid points which

are represented by nouns and verbs, or names of substances, actions,

and attributes. Results, as they are, of that practical analysis which

the need of writing down language has led to, they are treated as

complete wholes, which by the speaker are forced into certain temporary

connexions. But this is an illusion which, because a thing changes

its relationships, assumes that it can exist out of all relationships

whatever. Every word of Language is such an abstraction, isolated from

its context. But amid these contexts there are certain similarities:

identical elements are detected: and these identical elements are the

common names of language, the terms of general significance. In all

cases, however, what an utterance of language describes or expresses

is a definite individual event or scene, conceived as a concrete

of several parts. Each separate vocable is a contribution to the

total: a step towards the real redintegration of the whole out of its

several parts. But the total itself--the content of fact in any single

sentence--is only an abstraction,--a part of the universe which human

interest and need have isolated from the comprehensive scope of things.

Thus, in two degrees, we may say, the picture produced in the sentence

falls short of the truth of things. Each statement is an arbitrary or

accidental cutting out of the totality: each element of the cutting is

dependent on that abstraction, and relative to it. But--as in a given

group of speech, the same sets of circumstances will naturally be

selected, and tend to recur again and again,--the terms which describe

them will acquire a certain association with the objects, and will come

to be called the common names of these agents, acts, and qualities.

They denote or 'represent' the things and acts, conceived however in

certain aspects and relations, and not in their entirety and totality

of nature.

In this product of intellectual movement above the limits of sensation

we have the 'representation'[12] as Hegel calls it, on which the

Understanding turns its forces. We have one product of the organic

whole of thought taken by itself as if it were independent, set

forth as a settled nucleus for further acquaintance: and this one

point discussed fully and with precision, elaborated in all detail

and consequence, to the neglect of its context, and the necessary

limitations involved in the notion. The process of name-giving may

illustrate this tendency in human thought to touch its objects only in

one point. The names given to objects do not embrace the whole nature

of these objects, but give expression only to one striking feature

in them. Thus the name of the horse points it out as 'the strong' or

'the swift': the moon is 'the measurer' or 'the shining one'; and so

in all cases. The object as expressed in these names is viewed from

one aspect, or in one point: and the name, which originally at least

corresponds to the conception, meets the object, properly speaking,

on that side only, or in that relation. The object is not studied in

its own nature, and in its total world, but as it specially enters the

range of human interest, and serves human utilities. One can at least

guess why it should be so: why a name should, in logical language,

express an 'accidens' and not the 'essentia' of the object. For the

investigation of primitive language seems to show that words, as we

know them in separate existence, are a secondary formation: and that

the first significant speech was an utterance intended to describe a

scene, an action, a phenomenon, or complex of event. In point of time,

the primary fact of language is an agglomeration or aggregate,--we

may call it either word or clause (λόγος in short)--which describes

in one breath a highly individualised action or phenomenon. The

spirit or unifying principle in this group might be the accent. Such

a word-group denotes a highly specialised form of being: and if we

call it a word, we may say that the earliest words, and the words of

barbarous tribes, are ingeniously special.[13] But it would be more

correct to say, that in such a group the elements of the scene enter

only from a single aspect or in a single relation. Accordingly when

disintegration begins, the result is as follows. The elements of the

group, having now become independent words held together by the syntax

of the sentence, are adopted to denote the several objects which

entered into the total phenomenon. But these words, or fragments of the

word-group, 'represent' the objects in question from a certain point

of view, and not in their integrity. The names of things therefore

touch them only in one point, and express only one aspect. And thus,

although different names will arise for the same thing, as it enters

into different groups, in each case the name will connote only a

general attribute and not the nature of the thing. These names are in

the Hegelian sense of the term 'abstract.' In popular phraseology, they

are only 'signs' of things: i. e. not 'symbols' (though they may have

been in some cases symbolic in origin), for in a symbol there is a

_natural_ correspondence or sensible analogy to the thing symbolised,

but something 'instituted,' due to an 'understanding' or convention.

[Footnote 1: See vol. ii. p. 190, (Logic, § 102).]

[Footnote 2: See Max Müller in Mind, vol. i. 345.]

[Footnote 3: Pure number is ἀριθμὸς μοναδικός: applied number is

ἀριθμὸς φυσικὸς or σωματικός. Aristotle, _Metaph_. N. 5, speaks of

αριθμὸς πύρινος ἤ γήϊνος. But this is only Greek idiom: as we say

'Greek history' instead of 'History of Greece:' or vice versa, when we

translate _Populus Romanus_ by 'people of Rome.' Aristotle is speaking

of 'proportions' or 'amounts' of fire or earth in the compounds of

these elements.]

[Footnote 4: See L. Geiger, _Ursprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen

Sprache und Vernunft_ (vol. i. p. 380). And Gabelenz 'Die melanesischen

Sprachen' in the _Abhandlungen der Sächsischen Gesellschaft der

Wissenschaften_ (VIII), 1861, pp. 89-91.]

[Footnote 5: _Mémoire sur le Systeme grammatical_, &c. p. 155.]

[Footnote 6: Cf. _nous_ and _nous autres_. The same distinction is

found in some American languages. There is a dual in the language of

the Greenlanders; but it is not, however, used when a natural duality

seems to call for it, but in cases when, though there might have been

several things, only two are actually found.]

[Footnote 7: W. von Humboldt, _Verschiedenheit des menschlichen

Sprachbaues_, p. 423 (ed. 1841); Misteli, _Typen des Sprachbaues_

(1893).]

[Footnote 8: Capt. Grey, _Vocabulary of the dialects of S. W.

Australia_, pp. xxi and 104 (1840).]

[Footnote 9: The sharp distinction between the first and second

personal pronouns and the third: the want of any apparent connexion

in the Indo-Germanic languages between the first and second persons

singular and the plural form seems to point in the same direction.]

[Footnote 10: Cf. vol. ii. _Notes and Illustrations_, p. 400.]

[Footnote 11: _Die Sprachwissenschaft_, p. 168.]

[Footnote 12: 'Vorstellung,' as distinguished from 'Begriff.']

[Footnote 13: Thus in Malay, there are about twenty words for

strike, according as it is done with thick or thin wood, downwards,

horizontally, or upwards, with the hand, with the fist, with the

flat hand, with a club, with the sharp edge, with a hammer, &c. (See

Misteli, _Typen des Sprachbaues_, p. 265.)]

CHAPTER XXIII.

FIGURATE OR REPRESENTATIVE THOUGHT.

The compensating dialectic whereby reason, under the guise of

imagination, overthrows the narrowness of popular estimates, makes

itself observed even in the popular use of the terms abstract and

concrete. Terms like state, mind, wealth, may from one point of view

be called abstract, from another concrete. At a certain pitch these

abstractions cease to be abstract, and become even to popular sense

very concrete realities. In the tendency to personification in language

we see the same change from abstract to concrete: as when Virtue is

called a goddess, or Fashion surnamed the despot of womankind. In

such instances, imagination, more or less in the service of art and

religion, upsets the narrow vulgar estimates of reality. But it upsets

them, so to speak, by giving to the abstraction (through its creative

power) that sensuous concreteness which the mere abstract lacks and

which the ordinary mind alone recognises as real. It 'stoops to

conquer.' Such a representation is, as Hegel says[1], 'the synthetic

combination of the Universal and Individual': 'synthetic,' because not

their free, spontaneous, and essential unity, but the supreme product

of the artistic will and hand, which, rather than let the universal

perish by neglect, build for it, the eternal and omnipresent, 'a

temple made with hands.' In mythology we can see the same process: by

which, as it is phrased, an abstract term becomes concrete: by which,

as we may more correctly say, a thought is transformed into, or rather

stops short at, a representative picture. The many gods of polytheism

are the fixed and solidified shapes in which the several degrees of

religious growth have taken 'a local habitation and a name': or they

bear witness to the failure of the greater part of the world to grasp

the idea of Deity in its unity and totality apart from certain local

and temporary conditions. So, too, terms like force, law, matter,--the

abstractions of the mere popular mind--are by certain periods reduced

to the level of sensuous things, and spoken of as real entities,

somewhere and somehow existent, apart from the thinking medium to

which they belong. Such terms, again, as property, wealth, truth, are

popularly identified with the objects in which they are for the time

and place manifested or embodied.

In these ways the abstract, in the ordinary meaning, becomes in the

ordinary meaning concrete. The distinction between abstract and

concrete is turned into a distinction between understanding and sense,

instead of, as Hegel makes it, a distinction in the adequacy and

completeness of thought itself. Thought (the Idea), as has been more

than once pointed out, is the principle of unification or unification

itself: it is organisation plus the consciousness of organisation:

it is the unifier, the unity, and the unified,--subject as well as

object, and eternal copula of both. An attempt is at first made in

two degrees to represent the thought in terms of the senses as a sort

of superior or higher-class sensible. When the impossibility of that

attempt is seen, common sense ends by denying what it has learned to

call the super-sensible altogether. These three plans may be called

respectively the mythological, the metaphysical, and the positive or

nominalist fallacies of thought. In the mythological, or strictly

anthropomorphic fallacy, thought is conceived under the bodily shape

and the physical qualities of humanity, as a separate unifying,

controlling, synthetic agent, through whose interference the several

things, otherwise dead and motionless, acquire a semblance of life

and action, though in reality but puppets or marionettes: that is to

say, it is identified with a subject of like passions with ourselves,

a repetition of the particular human personality, with its narrowness

and weakness. The action of the Idea is here replaced by the agency

of supposed living beings, invested with superhuman powers. In the

metaphysical or realist fallacy we have a feeble ghostly reproduction

of the mythological. The living personal deity is replaced by a faint

scare-crow of abstract deity. The cause of the changes that go on in

nature is now attributed to indwelling sympathies and animosities,

to the abhorrence of a vacuum, to selection, affinity, and the like:

to essences and laws conceived of as somehow existent in a mystic

space and time. In the positive or nominalist fallacy, the failure of

these two theories begins to be felt: and the mind, which had only

heard of unifying reason under these two phases and is meanwhile sure

of its sense-perceptions, treats the objective synthesis as a dream

and a delusion. Or, at best, it regards the synthesis as essentially

subjective--as a complementary idealising activity of ours which

ekes out the defects of reality, and brings continuity into the

discontinuous. Our thought--(it is only _our_ thought)--is but an

instrument, distinct from us and from the reality: yet acting as a

bridge to connect these two opposing shores--a bridge however which

does not really reach the other side, but only an artificial image,

which simulates to us, and will for ever simulate, the inaccessible

reality. This last view is the utterance of the popular matter-of-fact

reason, when in weariness and tedium it turns from the attempt to grasp

thought pure and simple, and instead of reducing the metaphysical

antitheses to the transparent unity of comprehension, relapses into

mere acceptance of a given reality.

In some of these cases the full step into pure thought is never

made. The creations of mythology, for example, display an unfinished

and baffled attempt to rise from the separation of sense to the

unity and organisation of thought. The gods of heathenism are only

individuals--and individuals only _meant to be,_ and by the act of

faith and devotion set forth as reality before the worshipper: but they

are individuals in which imagination embodies a unified and centralised

system of forces or principles. They _mean_ the powers of nature and of

mind, but the sceptre in their hands is only a sign of power attributed

by the believer; and far away, encompassing alike them and him, is the

great relentless necessity. In other cases there is a relapse: when

the higher stage of thought has been attained, it is instantaneously

lost. Terms which are really thoughts are again reduced to the level of

the things of sense, individualised in some object, which, though it

is only a representation or sign, is allowed to usurp the place of the

thought which it but partially and by extraneous institution embodies.

The intuition of the sensuous imagination at every step throws its

spells on the products of thought, and turns them into a representative

picture, which in popular use and wont occupies the place of the

notion. Instead of being retained in their native timelessness, the

terms of the Idea are brought under the laws of Sense-perception, under

the conditions of space and time.

The term 'representation,' which Hegel employs to name these

picture-thoughts or figurate conceptions, corresponds to the facts

of their nature. A 'representation' is one of two things: either a

particular thing sent out accredited with general functions, or a

universal narrowed down into a particular thing. Thus, as it has been

seen, a general name implies or connotes a universal relation or

attribute, but confines it to denote a particular object or class.

'Swift,' for example, was an epithet tied down to express the horse. In

the first instance we may suppose the name to be a sort of metaphor:

differing only by its simplicity and frequency of suggestion from those

endless epithets, which in Norse or Arabic poetry veil and adorn the

object which they are meant to designate. That is, we conceive the

object as an embodiment or representation of the quality, as an eagle

is the emblem of strength: only in the latter case we distinguish

between the object and its metaphorical signification. In the second

place, however, the object of experience is allowed completely to

coincide with the aspect discriminated by the selective epithet, and we

can no longer in ordinary thought separate the imaging object from the

general relation which it images forth. This is the level of thought to

which Hegel appropriates the term 'representation.' It includes under

it the three fallacies of thought already noted and saves the trouble

of comprehending the reality. In the Hegelian sense, a representation

is abstract; because it solidifies, hardens, and isolates the term of

thought, makes it a particular, and never rises above the single case

to the general notion embodied in it.

The world of representative thought is a world of independent points

in juxtaposition, which we arrange as seems best to us. It lies in

an undefinable borderland between us and things. It is a would-be,

but not an actual, reality. It is not like a true Idea--the unity of

subjective and objective: but only a make-believe. We have put it

there, and yet we credit it with an effective existence. When our mind

moves amongst these picture-thoughts, it can only institute external

relations between the terms. A judgment, in that case, is interpreted

to mean the conjunction of two terms, which at once step into the rank

of subject and predicate by means of the copula. A sentence is an

arrangement of words _ab extra_ in conscious or unconscious conformity

with the rules of grammar. The world of knowledge, or the Idea, as

a whole is turned into a plane surface with its typical terms,--the

members of the organism of reason,--like dots put in co-ordination and

juxtaposition, not spontaneously affected towards each other. Even if

they are not embodied and reduced to a sensuous level of existence,

they are held to be originally separate and unconnected. How they

all came into being, and whether they do not all by gradations and

differentiation-proceed from one root, are questions neither asked nor

answered.

The level of representative thinking--thinking i. e. which is not

the grasp (_Begriff_) of the reality, but only the apprehension of

something which stands for and represents it--is the level on which we

all come, more or less, to stand in our non-philosophic moments. It

is, in essentials, the realm of what Plato called _δόξα_,--the level

of consciousness which fails to rise to see the unity of essence in

the many single goods and beauties, which holds its knowledge (such

at is) at the mercy of accidents, not bound by the conclusions of

reasoning,--the realm which is not without reality, but an immature

and uncertain reality. It is, in essentials, the same as what, as

opposed to _intellectus_, Spinoza styled _imaginatio._ Imagination,

to Spinoza, is an understanding under the bondage of particular

passions and temporary interests, which loses sight of the great

bond of being or _Substantia_, and fixes its glance on the parts in

subordinate and infra-essential relationships: which is always finite,

i. e. never really comprehensive and self-sustaining in its view, but

always limited by a tacit reference to something outside itself. The

'Representation' is the idea, in the loose and inexact use of that

word, which goes with the phrase _mere idea_,--i. e. a mere mental

image, which is not the reality, though it is believed to do duty for

and to represent it[2]. Yet it is not a mere thought: rather its whole

aim and meaning is to refer to reality, to suggest it, to bring it

nearer us. Its fault is that it is an imperfect, partial, one-sided,

or even one-pointed idea. It is really an instance and phase of

the _ignava ratio_, to which a date or name serves as a ποῦ στῶ of

explanation.

'At Kilne there was no weathercock,

And that's the reason why.'

Such 'representation,' according to Hegel, is, e. g., the mode of

intelligence accessible to those who cling to the mere, or abstractly,

religious mood, and who cannot or will not rise to the comprehension

of their creed. Its facts or dogmas present themselves to such a

restricted conception as the parts of a picture or the stages of a

history, in visible or imaginatively-construable space, and in a

succession of times. The essence of religion, of course, for Hegel as

for other exponents of its inmost nature, is a feeling of certitude

or faith which transcends the gulfs and separations of the secular

consciousness, which sees with the believing soul the inner peace,

the absolute harmony of the true reality. _Pectus facit theologum._

The sense of utter dependence on God, in complete identity with the

sense of absolute independence in God--that strength of faith is the

very life of religion. But when religion seeks to give an intelligent

expression of her faith, when she tries to give a reason acceptable to

the outside world, she is apt, unless specially trained in the high

things of the spirit, to base her creed not on the rock of ages, but

on the signs and miracles of the times. She has tried to theorise the

faith: but, although her faith may be sound and true, the religious

spirit, unless it be also the spirit of wisdom and reasoned truth, runs

a risk of falling into the fallacy of _Post hoc_, _ergo propter hoc._

She descends therefore to the region of representation: she uses the

language of sense and analogy; she presents the spiritual under the

guise of the natural. Yet in her heart of hearts these things are only

a parable,--they are but

'Flesh and blood

To which she links a truth divine.'

Hegel--in the introduction to his lectures on the Philosophy of

Religion--is reported to have given the following characteristics of

'representation,' (_a_) It is still trammeled by the senses. Thought

and sensation strive for the mastery in it. Thought is bound fast to

an illustration: and of this illustration it cannot as representative

thought divest itself:--the eternally living idea is chained to the

transient and perishable form of sense. It is metaphorical and material

thinking, which is helpless without the metaphor and the matter. (_b_)

Representative thought envisages what is timeless and infinite under

the conditions of time and space. It loses sight of the moral and

spirit of historical development under the semblance of the names,

incidents, and forms in which it is displayed. The historical and

philosophical sense is lost under the antiquarian. Representative

thought keeps the shell, and throws away the kernel. (_c_) The terms

by which such a materialised thought describes its objects are not

internally connected: each is independent of the other; and we

only bring them together for the occasion by an act of subjective

arrangement[3].

The thing--the so-called _subject_ of the properties, of which it is

really no more than the _substratum_--affords no sufficient ground

for the unity of the properties attached to it. The substratum or

subject of the proposition is given, and we then look around to see

what other properties accompany the primary characteristic for which

the name was applied. But the term of popular language is not a real

unity capable of supporting differences; it is only one aspect of a

thing, a single point fixed and isolated in the process of language

by the action of natural selection. And so, to ask how the properties

are related to the thing, is to ask how one aspect, taken out of its

setting, is related to another isolated aspect: which is evidently an

unanswerable question. Science is right in rejecting the 'thing' of

popular conception. If _a_ is _a,_ and nothing more, as the law of

Identity informs us, then it is for ever impossible to get on to _b,

c, d_, and the rest. The union between the thing divided or defined,

and its divided or defining members, is what is termed extra-logical;

in other words, it is not evident from what is given or stated in the

popular conception. That union must be sought elsewhere, and deeper.

And when _we_ step in to overcome the repugnance which the point of

conception, or what is supposed the subject, shows against admitting

a diversity of predicates,--when _we_ force it into union with these

properties: or when we try to remove the separation which leaves

the cause and effect as two independent things to fall apart; our

action, by which we effect a unification of differences, may, from

another and a universal point of view, be said to be the notion, or

grasp of thought, coming to the consciousness of itself. Thought,

as it were, recognises itself and its image in those objects of

representative conception, which seem to be given and imposed upon

the intellect. The two worlds, which the understanding accepts

as each solid and independent,--the world of external objects or

conceptions, and the world of self,--meet and coincide in the free

agency of thought, developing itself under a double aspect. It is

the 'original synthetical unity of apperception' (to quote Kant's

words), from which the Ego or thinking subject, and the 'manifold'

or body and world, are simultaneously differentiated. Thus, on the

one hand, we ourselves no longer remain a rigid unity, existing in

antithesis to the objects presupposed or referred to by representative

thought: and on the other hand the so-called thing loses its hardness

and fragmentary independence, as distinguished from our apprehension

of it. _Our_ action, as we incline to call it, which mends the

inadequacies of terms, is from a philosophic point of view, the notion

itself coming to the front and claiming recognition. The process of

thought is then seen to be a totality, of which our faculties, on

the one hand, and the existing thing, on the other, are isolated

abstractions, supposed habitually to exist on their own account.

To view either of these systems, the mental, on the one hand, and

the objective world, on the other, as self-subsistent, has been the

error in much of our metaphysics, and in the popular conceptions of

what constitutes reality. The idealism of metaphysicians has been

often as narrow and insufficient as the realism of common sense. An

adequate philosophy, on the contrary, recognises the presence of both

elements, in a subordinate and formative position. Representations

may be compared to the little pools left here and there by the sea

amongst the rocks and sand: the notion, or grasp of thought, is the

tidal wave, which left them there to stagnate, but comes back again to

restore their continuity with the great sea. In our thinking we are

only the ministers and interpreters of the Idea,--of the organic and

self-developing system of thought.

The difference between a representative conception and a thought proper

may be illustrated by the case of the term 'Money.' Money may be

either a materialised thought, i. e. a Representative Conception, or

a Notion Proper. In the former case, money is identified with a piece

of money. It is probably, in the first instance, embodied in coins of

gold, silver, and bronze. In the second place, a wide gulf is placed

between it and the other articles for which it is given in exchange.

If other things are regarded as money, they are generally treated on

the assumption that they can in case of need be reduced to coinage. The

conception of money by the unscientific vulgar considers it separately

from other commodities: and the laws which forbade its exportation

gave a vigorous expression to the belief that it was something _sui

generis_, and subject to conditions of its own. The scientific notion

of money modifies this belief in the peculiarity and fixity of money.

Science does so historically, when it can point to a time and a race

where money in our sense of the word does not exist, and where barter

takes the place of buying and selling. Science does so philosophically,

when it expounds what may be called the _process_ of money,--the

inter-action or meeting of conditions to which the existence of money

is due. The notion of money, as given in the _Ethics_ of Aristotle,

says that it is the common measure of utility or demand. When we leave

out of sight the specific quality of an object, and consider only its

capacity of satisfying human wants, we have what is called its worth

or value. This value of the thing,--the psychological fact which is

left, when all the qualities marking the objective thing are reduced

to their social efficiency--is the notion, of which the currency is

the representation, reducing thought to the level of the senses, and

embodying the 'ideality' of value in a tangible and visible object.

So long as this 'idea' of value is kept in view, the currency is

comprehended: but when the perception of the notion disappears, money

is left a mere piece of currency, the general notion being narrowed

down to the coinage. Thus the notion of money, like other notions in

their ideal truth, is not in us, nor in the things merely: it is what

from a minor point of view, when we and the things are regarded under

the head of want or need, may be called the _truth_ of both, the unity

of the two sides. Thus considered, money falls into its proper place in

the order of things.

[Footnote 1: _Werke,_ ii. 529, 555.]

[Footnote 2: Hegel's _Werke_, ii. 431: '_Wobei das Selbst nur

repräsentirt_ und vorgestellt ist, da ist es nicht wirklich: we es

vertreten ist, ist es nicht.' Cf. _ib._ 416.]

[Footnote 3: _Philosophie der Religion,_ i. p. 137 seqq.]

CHAPTER XXIV.

FROM SUBSTANCE TO SUBJECT.

'It is, in my view, all important,' says Hegel[1], 'to apprehend and

express the True not as _Substance,_ but equally much as _Subject_.'

Substance, as Spinoza defines it, is that which is in itself and

which is conceived through itself, something which does not need the

conception of something else by which its concept may be formed[2].

Substance, in other words, is something which serves to explain

itself, which is _causa sui._ The mind, looking out on the wide world

of mutable and manifold objects, finds its rest in the great calm of

a something at their base, the eternal nature which, itself unmoved,

is the one foundation, complete and sufficient, of all things,--a

_res aeterna et infinita,_ which can feed the mind with joy alone[3].

These words suggest only an object--a transcendent object--the basis

of an objective order. They seem to leave little for the contemplating

subject to do save to discern it and, so discerning, to rest in it

and to love. They seem to leave substance a mere datum, a far-off

all-embracing end in which the variety of human effort can find a

central object and a final close. Yet, in the end it appears[4] that

this _Res aeterna_ loves himself with an intellectual love, and

this love is identified with the love of man to God, so far at least

as man's mind, considered _sub specie aeternitatis_, can be said to

'explicate' Deity. From this conclusion it might be said that Spinoza

rises above the mere category of substance: God is no longer the mere

foundation of things--the absolute object of all objects. He rises in

human spirit (regarded in its eternal significance) to the rank of

a true subject. He is not merely known as the True; but He himself,

living and moving in the essential spirit of man, knows himself and

acquiesces in his infinite beatitude. But if this be the legitimate

inference to be drawn from the closing sections of the _Ethics_, it is

not the view ordinarily suggested by the mention of Spinoza's doctrine.

That doctrine, on the contrary, seems, as it first confronts us, and

as it has taken its place in history, to omit the subjectivity which

had found so decided a recognition in the commencement of Cartesianism.

In the _cogito ergo sum_ so much at least is clearly stated: true

being--the true--is not merely known, but itself knows; not a mere

object, but a subject: a subject-object, or, an Idea. It is to be

admitted, indeed, that Descartes hardly remains at this altitude, but

he touches it for a moment. Even when he finds in the conception of God

a security for truth and reality, and thus seems to base these on a

one-sidedly objective standard, he regards God as, on the other hand,

the truth and reality postulated and presupposed by the structural

system of our ideas. God--such seems the tendency of his so-called

'proof'--is the inevitable prius and presupposition of our thought and

being: He makes us know, as much as He is ultimately the object known:

He is the unity and the creator of subject and object.

But it is hardly possible to get in philosophy the full recognition of

the antithesis between subject and substance and the inclusion of both

in the fuller Idea, till after the time of Kant. Kant himself is, in

essentials, the antithesis of Spinoza, but it is not till Fichte that

the full force of that antithesis is expressly recognised. With Hegel,

the two opposite points of view are equally insisted on: the immanence

and the transcendence of the True, the Real, the Absolute: or, in

other words, the unity in it of subject and object, or of thought and

existence. Or, in the words of the religious spirit, though heaven and

the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him, He dwells in the spirit of

the righteous, and is not far from any one of us. The truth is not the

correspondence or agreement of an idea with a further reality which it

represents. Such an idea or 'representation' is a projection which has

escaped from our hands, which has slipped from our grip, and which,

while owning its mere vicarious character, at the same time beckons

us on to seek a reality we can never find. The 'representation' is in

a way objective--it is set over against us: but yet it is not truly

objective, not self-subsistent and self-possessed. Its objectivity is

the objectivity of a name: a quasi-objectivity, which requires to be

dipped in the living waters of intelligence before it can really exist

and act. It seems, to the untrained observer, to point only outwards to

the real object which it copies or designates: to a deeper reflection,

it is seen to point equally inward to the mind which informed it and

projected it. Thus the knowing subject, and the known object, with the

representation which acts as a perpetual mediator to connect and yet

not unify the one of these terms with the other,--all at last take

their place, reduced and transfigured, in the unity of the Idea.

According to the Spinozist point of view, thought, it might seem by

a sort of miracle, dispels the mists that envelop and bewilder it,

sees through the multeity of modes, and the isolated pictures of

imagination, to the true reality, one, infinite and eternal. Before

that august vision of absolute wholeness the only attitude of a finite

mind would seem to be resignation, worship, reverence,--deeply shading

into the submission of absorption. For in it intellect and will are

declared to have no place[5]. With such a statement, we get that first

aspect of religion which has found its most imposing representative

in the faith of Islam. In every religion there must, however, be more

than this: or it would fail to do what all religion essentially does.

Sheer dependence_--Schlechthinnige Abhängigkeit_ (as Schleiermacher

has named it)--can never be the whole burden of a religious teacher's

message. Always--at least in the background--there is a contradictory

element--in apparent discrepancy with the first--the deification of the

worshipper. And as the Ethics of Spinoza--like every complete system

of speculative truth--deals with a problem parallel to, if not even

identical with, that of religion, its initial definitions and main

programme must never let us forget the tacit presuppositions worked out

to explicitness, as they are partly, in its conclusion. When Intellect

and Will are denied to the _Deus = Natura = Substantia,_ it is meant

that the Absolute is and has more than intellect and will can well

name, and that in Him (or Her, or It, for the pronominal distinctions

of gender matter nothing here), the separation of will from intellect

is a fallacy which can have no place. What Spinoza casts out are the

lower passions, the affections of weakness; these _as such,_ i. e. as

elements of weakness, can have no place in Him. But in God, as in the

free man who most resembles God, and in whose love He loves himself,

there is--but that also in terms we cannot fathom--abundance of

joy--the joy of infinite self-realisation.

Partly by the complementary theory of Leibniz, partly by the antagonist

theories of Kant, the way had been prepared for setting forth, and

in fuller outline, the implications so tardily admitted by Spinoza.

It was only by a misuse or mal-extension of a word that Herder's

God--a God who is Force--and the Force of Forces--could be supposed

an advance upon Spinoza. There is in Force an analogue of Life; but

it is life in dependence, life not self-centred, always going forth,

and when it goes forth dissipated. It is as it were pushed from

behind, and is lost in what comes after it. If a Force of Forces means

anything, it means something more than Force: it means a master of

force, a force-controller and force-adjuster, a unity and principle

of forces. And Substance, as Spinoza understood it, is more than

this variability, this deification of instability. It is the unity

in which the variety and disparity of existence, the multiplicity of

vicissitude, is merged and lost, only again to issue from it, and yet

not leave it behind, in the infinitely-various modes of its two great

and conspicuous attributes of consciousness and extensionality. If

Hegel then sought to go beyond Spinoza, he sought to find a formula

which would lose nothing that Spinoza had reached, but would at the

same time bring out what Spinoza had left an implication, or noted in

a partial rectification. As in religion, besides the utter dependence

on God (so that, God failing, I perish), there must be also an absolute

union, complete reconciliation--complete as culminating in unity and

identity (so that God shall not be God, unless I am I): so it is in

philosophy. The Absolute cannot merely _be_, and be far away--the last

goal in which the variety of life is made one, and the turmoil of the

passionate existences laid to rest. The Soul which is (as some of the

medieval Christians would say) still _in itinere_, a wayfarer, is such

because its glance is turned on outward circumstances: but country is

no accident: the soul even here carries with it that _patria_, 'which

is the heavenly,' in its longings, and has it, even while yet on

pilgrimage, in that strong possession of all things by itself, which

the theologian styles Faith. This goal determines the pilgrimage, fixes

its direction, gives progress to its steps.

In the myth-loving language of Plato (and of Wordsworth in his Platonic

ode) the Soul has in other spheres of being dwelt with the gods and

seen the secret of the world: it is itself one of the immortals, and

as it is here and now, is in a land of exile. At the morning of birth,

the living sample of humanity has left his original glory behind; and

a deep forgetfulness--only short of absolute--cuts it off from his

every-day consciousness. In his present reality he finds himself in a

land of darkness, fast bound in a hollow of the rock, looking out only

on the ghostly images that flit across his prison wall, cast there by

the objects that move between his back and the light of a mysterious

fire behind him and them. Such is his natural estate, as it meets the

bodily eye: the estate of the lowly savage, whom superstition and

ignorance seem to hold as their captive for ever. But, though his

high home and his glory of other days have left no conscious memory

in the soul, asleep and imbruted in its fleshly house, they have not

departed without leaving a trace behind. For forgetfulness is not

blank non-existence. The sample of humanity inherits the birthright

of his fathers--he has hopes and fears, duties and rights, which are

his, if he can mature himself to take possession of them. He suffers

from the pains of growth, from the sense of disparity between what

he is and what he may and should be--from the noble uneasiness and

dissatisfaction of a being who feels--if he does not know--his infinite

potentialities. For these potentialities--otherwise they have no title

even to that name--are also actualities, yet actualities which protest

their own incompleteness, and crave imperiously for what they lack.

What he has is his right, but his right only in so far as it is also

his duty. It is as such, and only as such, that he still retains the

soul in all its prerogatives: as the right, which is the duty, of

knowledge. Such a pre-figured and promised, but yet to be realised,

possession is what Plato has called _Eros_, or Love. But it is a Love

whose wings are at first invisible, and who often seems rather to crawl

among ignoble things than to soar in the free fresh air.

The process of experience has been by Plato called Anamnesis or

Recollection. But Recollection is not always an easy, and never a

merely passive, process; and sometimes the forgetfulness seems so deep

that no extraneous stimulus can at all move it. We have seen already

one of these stimuli which rouse the sleeping sense--the mystery of

numbers: and there are many others. But, we have also learned, that

in the psychical sphere items of memory are not, as reckless fancy

puts it, stored up in compartments, sorted and arranged, ready to be

pulled out. The process of recollection is a complicated affair: an

affair of give and take, of comparison and selection and rejection,

of construction and reconstruction. You cannot haul up ready-made

memories from the mine. And this perhaps was sometimes forgotten by

Plato; it certainly has been by more than one of his commentators.

You may, no doubt, call up ideas from the vasty deep: but they come

by laws and principles of their own. Even when they come, which they

sometimes do unexpectedly, they come as an echo of the calling mind.

Recollection involves intellectual process: as Kant said, the synthesis

of imagination reposes upon the synthesis in the concept. Yet--and this

is the point which Plato's title of _Anamnesis_ accentuates--unless

'the soul had been such as to be affected in this way' (the words are

those of Aristotle), unless the soul had been implicitly intellectual

in tone and faculty, it would not have grasped the presented universe

under the categories which it uses. There is, says Aristotle, in the

barest act of sensation a congenital power of judgment; there is, says

Plato, an eye of the soul--a natural virtue of intelligence, which can

never be put into it, and must always be presupposed in any theory of

its processes.

There are, therefore, no innate ideas, says Cudworth in explanation of

Plato, if these ideas mean formed and completed products of knowledge.

All ideas in this sense begin and grow within the range of experience,

and the history of their growth or development in literature and art

can be at least approximately traced. We can trace, that is, the

successions and connexions of the various types of beauty, or goodness:

can show how the idea at one time dwelt in one of its aspects, at

another in a different one. We can observe the variation, and it may

be the progress, in men's conception of God. But it is another matter

when we seek to explain these ideas themselves out of other elements,

heterogeneous to them. When that question is asked, then with Plato we

seem, in the absence of any theory of origins, obliged to own that it

is by the Beautiful that beautiful things come to be beautiful. The

μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένοs--the crossing of essential boundaries--which

Aristotle forbids to science, still raises its eternal barrier in

the logical, if it cease to hold good (as has been suggested) in the

physical sphere. In the totality which we call the world and experience

of reality there are, so to say, ultimate and irreducible provinces.

The utmost that philosophy, i. e. science, can do with these is to

co-ordinate them,--to show their mutual filiations, adaptations, and

harmonies,--to note their inadequacies and discrepancies. They are

not all of equal rank, perhaps; they have to yield to each other, it

may be in turn: but none of them can be arbitrarily expunged from

the totality, and none of them shown to be a mere phase of others.

To do that is to strip the universe of its variety and--it may be

added--of its beauty and its interest. If it be a false philosophy

that does it, there is a good deal of false philosophy abroad. There

is a lust of explanation which is never content till it has found an

equation for everything, till it has expressed everything in terms of

the common-place, till it has emptied everything of all that made it

individual and real, and turned it into an abstract, identical (as

only abstracts can be) with some other abstract. Such abstractions

are of course useful, and therefore need no excuse, when restricted

to a special sphere. So long, that is, as we remember that it is an

abstraction we are making, and that we are arbitrarily simplifying

the real natural problem, no harm is done by these artificial

constructions; and they are important steps in a larger process. But

what is correct and useful within a range whose limits we can define,

becomes dangerous when carried beyond all bounds. Its approximate truth

then becomes misleading error.

It is these irreducible elements--these great provinces in human

experience, in reality, in the system of reason--that correspond to

the more important of what are known as Platonic ideas. As ultimate

constituents of the actual world they are in the narrower sense

inexplicable. One does not amount to an exact sum of some others, nor

is one got from another by the simple process of subtraction. But

if they cannot be explained, by being reduced to multiples of some

one basis, they can be comprehended in the respective implication

and explication they exhibit with their co-realities. They can be

correlated, reduced, and unified: we may even say, they can be

identified; but if we use such a term, we must mean that there is

some totality beyond and above them in which they all find a place

and all are harmonious; in which all when brought to their Truth are

really one and the same. This birthright of human nature in all ages

and countries--this central essence of man's spirit--is the realm of

Platonic ideas. They are the great elements, or constituent members, of

humanity and of reality: the framework of his mind and of the world.

How in each case they may be wrought out in detail, to what degree

they may here be evolved, and there stunted, is a matter of historical

research. And, in a sense, even it is not wrong to try to trace them

one to another: to explain them, as the phrase is, one by another. For

they are essentially connected: they are members of one system: they

are unified and harmonised in a way for which even the word 'organism'

is wholly insufficient. They are the poles and lines on which the tent

of human life, of intelligent life, is stretched: but they are also the

invisible ties which bind together the earth and heavens, and all that

is therein.

These ideas therefore are immanent in man: for they are the basis

of human nature. But to name, to disentangle them, to measure out

their bounds and describe their connexions--that is no easy work.

And that is the work of Platonic recollection. That is the process

of historical experience. But it is a small thing for Plato to say

that these ideas are innate in man. What he is more concerned to make

clear is that in the possession or vision of these eternal forms, the

human soul is a partner of the gods, a citizen of the heavens. In

less mythical language, man, as an intelligent, artistic, moral, and

religious being, is not a mere accidental on-looker on the surface of

things, but near their central and abiding truth. The forms of his

mind, to speak after the manner of Kant, are the objective essences of

the real world of experience. Degrees there may be in the reality which

they possess--less or larger measures of truth to full experience--but

true and real they are: never mere falsity or emptiness. To estimate

the amounts of that reality is a problem Plato often tried. At one time

it seems as if the Good were in his estimate the form of forms, the

real of reals: but when we look closely, we see that it is a goodness

which is synonymous with real reality or perfect being. At another time

truth, i. e. reality, seems to be lord of all: at another, beauty:

and again he seems to confess his inability to lay down the order

of precedence in this hierarchy. Of one thing only he is perfectly

clear: and that is the unreality, the non-entity of the sense-world

as merely perceived, and the true being of the world of reason. But

he has no doubts as to the central truth that in the good, the true,

and the beautiful, there is a higher reality--a more far-reaching and

deep-piercing influence than in all the mere variety of sensation, the

mere multitude of sensible fact.

What Plato has sometimes called the act of reminiscence, what he has

sometimes called the instinct of Love, is also known to him as the

process of Dialectic. For reminiscence has to watch and wrestle with

the inertia of oblivion, has to set the imagined beside the real, and

to correct percepts by concepts, concepts by percepts, has to brace

up its energies, and to advance not by mere pressing onward, but by

tacking and zigzagging through contrary difficulties finally realise

itself. And love too is a battle, where the craving for union has to

measure its force with the instinct of independence, where selfishness

and self-surrender seek a reconciliation, and where in the close, if

the close be love, each is self-retained only as self-abandoned, and

each rises to a higher union in which lower selfhoods are absorbed.

Even so in the course of Dialectic. It is the art which divides

and conjoins, which unifies and distinguishes: the art of asking

and answering. To Plato it appears in the main as an action of the

intelligent subject: but an action which, as he hints, is almost a

natural instinct, which through discipline has become an art. In the

hands of its typical artist, it proceeds, or seems to proceed, as if

unconscious of its principle and end. Socrates has, as he professes,

no overt conception of the result: he has no knowledge of the positive

conclusion to be reached. It is the Logos--the logic of reality--which

sustains the movement. Abandoning any subjective humour of carrying

the argument to a preconceived end, one is swept on by the current of

real logic--the reason in things. The dogma we have set up and seemed

to see before us, will, if we are dispassionate, carry us on beyond

itself, and suggest aspects calling for recognition and acceptance. If

only we refrain from arresting the movement of criticism,--a course

to which prudence, ease, custom, and every form of the _ignava ratio_

counsel us,--truth will reveal itself in us, and by us. It is because

other aims, personal and particular, are so ever-present with us, that

speculative free inquiry seems so hard. It is we who insist on closing

up the door, not the truth that is reluctant to show itself.

Truth, then, is self-revelation or development. Not a result which is

to be accepted, bowed to, and reverenced: but the result issuing (and

only valuable as issuing) from a process in which we and objectivity

are fellow-workers. The truth may no doubt be presented--as Spinoza

does present it--in definitions, stating the net result as fundamental

fact. Fundamental fact it is; but as so stated, as Substance, it comes

as a stranger, almost as an enemy: the great vision, suddenly offered

to untrained eyes, overwhelms and alarms the living sense of self, of

personality. Hegel wishes to show it as a friend, as our very own,--as

Subject (but not merely subject). It is for this that philosophy runs

through its cycle and returns into itself. Man points to nature and

nature to man: universal to individual: thought to things: the self to

God, and God to the human soul.

[Footnote 1: Hegel, _Werke_, ii. 14.]

[Footnote 2: Spinoza, _Eth._ Def. 3.]

[Footnote 3: Spin. _De inteil. Em._ i. 10.]

[Footnote 4: Spin. _Eth._ v. 35.]

[Footnote 5: _Eth._ i. 17 schol.]

CHAPTER XXV.

REASON AND THE DIALECTIC OF UNDERSTANDING.

Representative conceptions, besides being the burden of our ordinary

materialising consciousness, are also the data of science, accepted

and developed in their consequences. Because they are so accepted,

as given into our hand, scientific reasoning can only institute

relations between them. Its business as thus conceived is progressive

unification, comparing objects with one another, demonstrating the

similarities which exist between them, and combining them with each

other. The exercise of thought which deals with such objects is limited

by their existence: it is only formal. It is finite thought, because

it is only subjective: it begins at a given point and stops somewhere,

and never gets quite round its materials so as to call them truly its

own. Each of the objects on which it is turned seems to be outside

of it, and independent of it. Each point of fact, again, when it is

carried out to its utmost, meets with other thoughts which limit it,

and claim to be equally self-centred. Such knowledge creeps on from

point to point. To this thinking German philosophy from the time of

Kant and Jacobi applied a name, which since the days of Coleridge has

been translated by 'Understanding'[1]. This degree or mode of thinking

--not a faculty of thought--is the systematised and thorough exercise

of what in England is called 'Common Sense.' In the first place, it is

synonymous with practical intelligence. It takes what it calls facts,

or things, as given, and aims only at arranging and combining them and

drawing from them counsels of prudence or rules of art. Seeing things

on a superficies, as it were so many unconnected points, here itself

and there the various things of the world, it tries to bring them into

connexion. It accepts existing distinctions, and seeks to render them

more precise by pointing out and sifting the elements of sameness.

Its greatest merit is an abhorrence of vagueness, inconsistency, and

what it stigmatises as mysticism: it wishes to be clear, distinct, and

practical. In its proper sphere,--and it has an indispensable function

to perform even in philosophy: wherever, that is, it is unnecessary

to go into the essential truth of things, and one has only to do good

work in a clearly defined sphere,--the understanding has an independent

value of its own[2] Nor is this true merely of practical life, where

a man must accommodate himself to facts: it is equally applicable

in the higher theoretic life,--in art, religion, and philosophy. If

intelligent definiteness does not make itself apparent in these, there

is something wrong about them.

It is only when this exercise of thought is regarded as a _ne plus

ultra,_ and its mandates to restrict investigation by the limits of

foregone conclusions find obedience, that understanding deserves

the reproachful language which was lavished upon it by the German

philosophers at the close of the last century. The understanding is

abstract: this sums up its offences in one word. Its objects, that

is the things it deals with and believes utterly real, are only

partly so, and when that incompleteness is unrecognised, are only

abstractions. Both in its contracted forms, such as faith and common

sense, and in its systematic form, the logical or narrowly-consistent

intellect, it is partial and liable to be tenacious of half-truths.

Only that whereas in feeling and common-sense there is often a great

deal which they cannot express,--whereas the heart is often more

liberal than its interpreting mind will allow--the reverse is true of

the logically-consistent intellect. The narrowness of the latter is,

in its own opinion, exactly equal to the truth of things: and whatever

it expresses is asserted without qualification to be the absolute

fact. Its business is, given the initial point (which is assumed to be

certain and perspicuous), to see all which that point will necessarily

involve or lead to. For example, Order may be supposed to be the chief

end of the State. Let us consider, says the intelligent arguer (without

wasting time on abstruse inquiries as to what Order is or means, and

what sort of Order we want), to what consequences and institutions

this conception will lead us. Or, again, the chief end of the State

is assumed to be Liberty. To what special forms of organisation will

this hypothesis (also assumed a self-evident conception) lead? Or we

may go a step further. It is evident, some will say, that in a State

there must be a certain admixture of Order and Liberty. How are we to

proceed--what laws and ordinances will be necessary, to secure the

proper equilibrium of these two principles? The two must be blended,

and each have its legitimate influence.

These are examples of the operation of Understanding. It can only reach

a synthesis (or conjunction), never a real unity, because it believes

in the omnipotence of the abstractions with which it began: but must

either carry out one partial principle to its consequences, or allow

an alternate and combined force to two opposite principles. Its canon

is identity: given something, let us see what follows when we keep the

same point always in view, and compare other points with the one which

we are supposed to know. Its method is analytic: given a conception

in which popular thought supposes itself at home, and let us see all

the elements of truth which can be deduced from it. Its statements are

abstract and narrow: or, in the words of Anaxagoras, one thing is cut

off from another with a hatchet[3]. In its excess it degenerates into

dogmatism, whether that dogmatism be theological or naturalistic.