The fact is that the Understanding, as this analytic, abstract, and

finite action of mind is called,--the thought which holds objective

ideas distinct from one another, and from the subjective faculties of

thought as a whole,--that this Understanding is, when it claims to be

heard and obeyed in science, not sufficiently thorough-going. It begins

at a point which is not so isolated as it seems, but is a member of a

body of thought: nor is it aware that the whole of this body of thought

is in organic, and even more than organic, union. It errs in taking too

much for granted: and in not seeing how this given point is the result

of a process,--that in it, in any thought or idea, several tendencies

or elements converge and are held in union, but with the possibility

of working their way into a new independence. In other words, the

Understanding requires, as the organon and method of philosophy, to

be replaced by the Reason[4],--by infinite thought, concrete, at

once analytic and synthetic. How then, it may be asked, can we make

the passage from the inadequate to the adequate? To that question the

answer may be given that it is our act of arbitrary arrest which halts

at the inadequate: that in complete Reason, which is the constituent

nature both of us and of things, the Understanding is only a grade

which points beyond itself, and therefore presupposes and struggles up

to the adequate thought. In other words, it is Reason which creates or

lays down for behoof of its own organisation the aims, conditions, and

fixed entities,--the objects, by which it is bound and limited in its

analytic exercise as understanding. Reason, therefore, is the implicit

tendency to correct its own inadequacy: and we have only to check

self-will and prejudice so far that the process may be accomplished.

The movement is not at one step: it has a middle term or mean which

often seems as if it were a step backward. Progress in knowledge is

usually described as produced by the mode of demonstration or the

mode of experience. Formal Logic prefers the first mode of describing

it: Applied Logic prefers the second. Either mode may serve, if we

properly comprehend what demonstration and experience mean. And that

will not be done unless we keep equally before us the affirmative and

the negative element in the process. The law of rational progress in

knowledge, of the dialectical movement of consciousness, or in one

word of experience, is not simple movement in a straight line, but

movement by negation and absorption of the premisses. The conclusion

or the new object of knowledge is a product into which the preceding

object is reduced or absorbed. Thus the movement from faith (which

is concentrated and wholly personal knowledge) to open and universal

knowledge, which is capable of becoming the possession of a

community,--truth and not merely conviction, must pass through doubt.

The premisses from which we start, and the original object with which

we begin, are not left _in statu quo_: they are destroyed in their

own shape, and become only materials to build up a new object and a

conclusion. It is on the stepping-stones of discarded ideas that we

rise to higher truth: and it is on the abrogation of the old objects

of knowledge that the new objects are founded. Not merely does a new

object come in to supplement the old, and correct its inadequacies by

the new presence: not merely do _we_ add new ranges to _our_ powers of

vision, retaining the old faculties and subjoining others. The whole

world--alike inward and outward,--the consciousness and its object--is

subjected to a thorough renovation: every feature is modified, and

the system re-created. The old perishes: but in perishing contributes

to constitute the new. Thus the new is at once the affirmation and

negation of the old. And such is the invariable nature of intelligent

progress, of which the old and not a few modern logicians failed to

render a right account, because they missed the negative element, and

did not see that the immediate premisses must be abolished in order to

secure a conclusion,--even as the grapes must be crushed before the

wine can be obtained.

This is the real meaning of Experience, when it is called the teacher

of humanity: and it was for this reason that Bacon described it as

'far the best demonstration.'[5] Experience is that absolute process,

embracing both us and things, which displays the nullity of what is

immediately given, or baldly and nakedly accepted, and completes it

by the rough remedy of contradiction. The change comes over both

us and the things: neither the one side nor the other is left as it

was before. And it is here that the advantage of Experience over

demonstration consists. Demonstration tends to be looked upon as

subjective only (_constringit assensum, non res_): whereas Experience

is also objective. But Experience is more than merely objective: it

is the absolute process of thought pure and entire; and as such it

is described by Hegel as Dialectic, or Dialectical movement. This

Dialectic covers the ground of demonstration,--a fragment of it

especially described and emphasised in the Formal Logic,--and of

Experience,--under which name it is better known in actual life, and in

the philosophy of the sciences[6].

Dialectic is the negative or destructive aspect of reason, as

preparatory to its affirmative or constructive aspect. It is the spirit

of dissent and criticism: the outgoing as opposed to the indwelling:

the restless as distinguished from the quiet: the reproductive as

opposed to the nutritive instinct: the centrifugal as opposed to the

centripetal force: the radical and progressive tendency as opposed

to the conservative. But no one of these examples sufficiently or

accurately describes it. For it is the utterance of an implicit

contradiction,--the recognition of an existing and felt, but hitherto

unrecognised and unformulated want. Dialectic does not supervene from

without upon the fixed ideas of understanding: it is the evidence of

the higher nature which lies behind them, of the dependence on a larger

unity which understanding implicitly or explicitly denies. That higher

nature, the notion or grasp of reasonable thought, comes forward, and

has at first, in opposition to the one-sided products of understanding,

the look of a destructive agent. If we regard the understanding and

its object, as ultimate and final,--and they are so regarded in the

ordinary estimation of the world,--then this negative action of reason

seems utterly pernicious, and tends to end in the subversion of all

fixity whatever, of everything definite. In this light Dialectic

is what is commonly known as Scepticism; just as the understanding

in its excess is known as Dogmatism. But in the total grasp of the

rational or speculative notion, Dialectic ceases to be Scepticism, and

Understanding ceases to be Dogmatism.

Still there can be no doubt that the Dialectic of reason is dangerous,

if taken abstractly and as if it were a whole truth. For the thoughts

of ordinary men tend to be more abstract than their materials warrant.

Men seek to formulate their feelings, faith, and conduct: but the

_rationale_ of their inmost belief,--their creed,--is generally

narrower than it might be. Out of the undecomposed and massive

'substance,' on which their life and conduct is founded, they extract

one or two ingredients: they emphasise with undue stress one or two

features in their world, and attach to these partial formulae a value

which would be deserved only if they really represented the whole

facts. Hence when the narrow outlines of their creed are submitted

to dialectic,--when the inlying contradictions are exposed, men feel

as if the system of the world had sunk beneath them. But it is not

the massive structure of their world, the organic unity in which they

live, that is struck by dialectic: it is only those luminous points,

the representative terms of material thought, which float before their

consciousness, and which have been formulated in hard and fast outlines

by the understanding. These points, as so defined and exaggerated, are

what dialectic shakes. Not an alien force, but the inherent power of

thought, destroys the temporary constructions of the understanding. The

infinite comes to show the inadequacy of the finite which it has made.

In philosophy this second stage is as essential as the first.

The one-sidedness of the first abstraction is corrected by the

one-sidedness of the other. In the Philosophy of Plato, as has been

noted, the dialectical energy of thought is sometimes spoken of

under the analogy of sexual passion--the Love which, in the words of

Sophocles, 'falls upon possessions' and makes all fixed ordinance of

no account, and finds no obstacles insuperable to its strong desire.

But Love, as the speaker explains, is a child of Wealth and Want:

he is never poor, and never rich: he is in a mean between ignorance

and knowledge[7]. Thus is described the active unrest of growth, the

'_inquietude poussante_,' as Leibniz called it,--the quickening force

of the negative and of contradiction.

At the word 'contradiction' there is heard a murmur of objection,

partly on technical, partly on material grounds. There are, it is said,

other ways of getting from one idea to another than by contradiction:

and it is not right to give the title to mere cases of contrast and

correlation. Now it may be the case that the relations of ideas are

many and various. In particular there is to many people a decided

pleasure in the mere accumulation of bits of knowledge. In their mental

stock there are only aggregates,--conjunctions due to accidents of

time and place,--associations and fusions which do not reach organised

unity. In all of us, perhaps, there are more or less miscellaneous

collections of beliefs, perceptions, hopes, and wishes, in no very

obvious connexion with one another. An united self, one, harmonious,

and complete, is probably rather an ideal of development than a fact

realised. There are in each two or three discordant selves,--among

which it might sometimes be difficult to select the right and true

one (for that will depend on the momentary point of view). The deeper

consciousness may go on entirely independent of the train of the more

superficial ideas: the world of reality may glide past without touching

the world of dream or of fiction: our business part may live in a

region parted off from our religion by gulfs inscrutable. In all these

cases there cannot be said to be any contradiction.

But Hegel speaks of the essential progress of knowledge, and of that

true self or real mind which has attained complete harmony--the self

and mind that is implicitly or explicitly Absolute. In such a mind

where the finite has passed or is passing into the infinite, in a mind

that is really becoming one and total, its parts must meet and modify

each other. At each phase, if that phase is earnest, self-certain, and

real, it claims to be complete, and can brook no rival. The bringer

of new things must appear as an enemy: for the old system, however

imperfect as a mere form, has behind it the strength of an infinite

and perfect content: it is more than it has explicated: but as it

(from its imperfection and honesty) identifies itself with its form,

it is resolved to resist change. Progress then must be by antagonism:

it cannot be real progress otherwise, but only the mere shifting of

dilettante doubt and dilettante toleration. Both new and old are worth

something, and they must prove their value by neither being lost, but

both recognised, in a completer scheme of things.

Yet there is a difference in the measure of contradiction at different

stages of thought. It is always greatest when there is least to be

opposed about. The more meagre an idea, a creed, a term of thought,

the more violent the antitheses to it. The more abstractly we hold a

doctrine, the more readily are we disposed to sniff opposition. And as

in more concrete belief, so in the more abstract terms of thought. They

seem so wide apart--like 'Is' and 'Is not'--and yet, taken alone, they

are really so ready to recoil into one another. As thought deepens,

contradiction takes a more modified form. The relativity of things

becomes apparent: and what were erewhile opposed as contradictory,

turn out as pairs of correlatives, neither of which is fully what it

professed to be, unless it also is all that seemed reserved for the

other. Lastly, and in the full truth of development, progress is seen

to be not merely a sudden recoil from one abstraction to another,

nor merely a continual reference to an underlying correlative, but

the movement of one totality which advances by self-opposition,

self-reconciliation, and self-reconstruction. In this stage, the

weight and bulk of unity keeps the contradiction in its place of due

subordination. But both elements are equally essential, and if the

unity is less palpable in the abstract beginnings, and the divergence

less wide at the close, at neither beginning nor close can either be

absent.

But if we merely look at the differentiation or negation involved

in the action of reason, we miss the half of its meaning: and the

new statement is as one-sided as the old. We have not grasped the

full meaning until we see that what, as understanding, affirmed a

finite, denies, as dialectic, the absoluteness or adequacy of that

finite. Both the partial views have a right to exist, because each

gives its contribution to the science of truth.[8] If we penetrate

behind the surface,--if we do not look at the two steps in the process

abstractly and in separation,--it will be seen that these two elements

coincide and unite. But we must be careful here. This coincidence or

identification of opposites has not annihilated their opposition or

difference. That difference subsists, but in abeyance, reduced to an

element or 'moment' in the unity. Each of the two elements has been

modified by the union: and thus when each issues from the unity it

has a richer significance than it had before. This unity, in which

difference is lost and found, is the rational notion,--the speculative

grasp of thought. It is the product of experience,--the ampler

affirmative which is founded upon an inclusion of negatives.

We began with the bare unit, or simple and unanalysed point,

which satisfied popular language and popular imagination as its

_nucleus_:--the representation which had caught and half-idealised a

point, moment, or aspect in the range of feeling and sensation. In this

stage the notion or thought proper is yet latent. In the first place,

the _nucleus_ of imagination was analysed, defined, and, as we may

surmise, narrowed in the Intellect. And this grade of thought is known

as the Understanding. In the second place, the definite and precise

term, as understanding supposes it, was subjected to criticism: its

contradictions displayed; and the very opposite of the first definition

established in its place. This is the action of Dialectic. In the third

place, by means of this second stage, the real nature or truth was seen

to lie in a union where the opposites interpenetrate and mould each

other. Thus we have as a conscious unity,--conscious because it, as

unity, yet embraces a difference as difference--what we started with

as an unconscious unity, the truth of feeling, faith, and inspiration.

The first was an immediate unity:--that is to say, we were in the midst

of the unity, sunk in it, and making a part of it: the second is a

mediated unity, which has been reached by a process of reflection, and

which as a conscious unity involves that process.

Reason, then, is infinite, as opposed to understanding, which is finite

thinking. The limits which are found and accepted by the analytic

intellect, are limits which reason has imposed, and which it can

take away: the limits are in it, and not over it. The larger reason

has been laying down those limits, which our little minds at first

tend to suppose absolute. Let us put the same law in more concrete

terms. It is reason,--the Idea,--or, to give it an inadequate and

abstract name, Natural Selection--which has created the several forms

of the animal and vegetable world: it is reason, again, which in

the struggle for existence contradicts the very inadequacies which

it has brought into being: and it is reason, finally, which affirms

both these actions,--the hereditary descent, and the adaptation--in

the provisionally permanent and adequate forms which result from the

struggle.

The three stages thus enumerated are therefore not merely stages

in our human reason as subjective. They state the law of rational

development in pure thought, in Nature, and in the world of Mind,--the

world of Art, Morals, and Science. They represent the law of thought

or reason in its most general or abstract terms. They state, mainly

in reference to the method or form of thought, that Triplicity, which

will be seen in those real formations or phases to which thought

moulds itself,--the typical species of reason. They reappear hundreds

of times, in different multiples, in the system of philosophy. The

abstract point of the Notion which parts asunder in the Judgment, and

returns to a unity including difference in the Syllogism:--the mere

generality of the Universal, which, by a disruption into Particulars

and detail, gives rise to the real and actual Individual:--the Identity

which has to be combined with Difference in order to furnish a possible

Ground for Existence:--the baldness and nakedness of an Immediate

belief, which comes to the full and direct certainty of itself, to

true immediacy, only by gathering up the full sense of the antithesis

which can separate conviction from truth, or by realising the Mediation

connecting them:--all these are illustrations of the same law really

applied which has been formally stated as the necessity for a defining,

a dialectical, and a speculative element in thought. The three parts

of Logic are an instance of the same thing: and when the Idea, or

organism of thought, appears developed in the series of Natural forms,

it is only to prepare the kingdom of reason actualised in the world of

Mind. The Understanding, on the field of the world, corresponds, says

Hegel[9], to the conception of Divine Goodness. The life of nature

goes on in the independence and self-possession of all its parts, each

as fixed and proud of its own, as if its share of earth were for ever

assured. The finite being then has his season of self-satisfied ease:

while the gods live in quiet, away from the sight of man's doings.

The dialectical stage, again, corresponds to the conception of God as

an omnipotent Lord: when the Power of the universe waxes terrific,

destroying the complacency of the creatures and making them feel their

insufficiency,--when the once beneficent appears jealous and cruel, and

the joyous equanimity of human life is oppressed by the terrors of the

inscrutable hand of fate. The easy-minded Greek lived for the most part

in the former world: the uneasy Hebrew to a great extent in the latter.

But the truth lay neither in the placid wisdom of Zeus, leaving the

world to its own devices, nor in the jealous Jehovah of Mount Sinai:

the true speculative union is found in the mystical unity of Godhead

with human nature. In this comprehensive spirit did Hegel treat Logic.

This Triplicity runs through Hegel's works. If you open one, the main

divisions are marked with the capitals A, B, C. One of these, it may

be, is broken up into chapters headed by the Roman numerals I, II, III.

Under one or more of these probably come severally the Arabic numerals

1, 2, 3. Any one of these again may be subdivided, and gives rise to

sections, headed by the small letters a, b, c. And, lastly, any one

of these may be treated to a distribution under the three titles α,

β, γ. Of course the division is not in each case carried equally far:

nor does the subject always permit it: nor is Hegel's knowledge alike

vigorous, or his interest in all directions the same.

[Footnote 1: 'Verstand,']

[Footnote 2: 'Die Vernunft ohne Verstand ist Nichts; der Verstand doch

Etwas ohne Vernunft.' Hegel's _Leben_, p. 546.]

[Footnote 3: Ὃτι οὐ κεχώρισται ἀλλήλων τὰ ἐv τῷ ἑvi κόσμῳ ἀὐδὲ

ἀποκέκοπται πελέκεϊ. Simplic. Phys. fol. 38 a (ed. Diels, p. 176).]

[Footnote 4: 'Vernunft.']

[Footnote 5: _Novum Organum_, Book I. 70.]

[Footnote 6: _Phenomenologie des Geistes_, p. 67.]

[Footnote 7: Plato, _Symposion,_ 203.]

[Footnote 8: Cf. Dante, _Parad._ iv. 130.]

[Footnote 9: See in the _Logic_ (vol. ii. p. 145).]

PROLEGOMENA

BOOK III

_LOGICAL OUTLINES_

CHAPTER XXVI.

THOUGHT PURE AND ENTIRE.

The English reader may probably be taken to be familiar with the

conception of Logic as the Science of the _Form_ of Thought. He may

also have heard this explained as equivalent to the Science of Thought

as Thought, or of Thought as Form, or of Formal Thought. But, probably,

also, he brings to the lesson no very high estimate of _form_ as

such. In the old language of Greek philosophy, transmitted through

the Schoolmen of the West, and still lingering in the phraseology of

Bacon and Shakespeare[1], Forms and substantial forms were powers in

the world of reality. But a generation arose which knew them not: to

which they were only belated survivals of the past. The forms had lost

connexion with matter and content, and had come to seem something

occult, transcendent, and therefore, to a practical and realistic age,

something fantastic and superfluous. Yet it may be well to recall

that the same author who has put on record his view that forms are

only mental figments, unless they be fully 'determinate in matter,'

has equally laid it down that the so-called 'causes' of vulgar

philosophy--the matter and the agent--are only 'vehicles of the form,'

Thus spontaneously did Bacon reconstruct the Aristotelian theory of the

interdependence of form and matter, that form is always form _of_ (or

_in_) matter, and that matter is always _for_ form.

The relativity of form and matter, or of form and content, is indeed

almost a commonplace of popular discussion on logical subjects.

But like other uncritical applications of great truths, this is

both carried beyond its proper bounds, and is not carried out with

sufficient thoroughness. There cannot--it is said--be a formal logic,

because every exercise of thought is internally affected or modified by

the material--the subject-matter--with which it deals. It is implied

in such an argument that the 'subject-matter' finds no difficulty

in existing by itself, but that the 'thought' is a mere vacuity or

un-characterised something which owes its every character to the

said matter. But a subject-matter which has content and character

has therefore form: it is already known, already thought. And as to

this thought, which is said to approach its matter with a self so

blank, so impartial, so neutral--what is it? It is a thought or a

thinking which has never as yet thought,--which is only named 'thought'

by right of expectation, but is itself nothing actual. Of such

--fictitious--thought there can hardly be a science.

On the other hand, that may be easily called a formal logic, which is

much more than formal: and that may be called material, which is only

a species of formal. Great indeed is the virtue of names, to suppress

and to replace thought. When forms hang on as mysterious names after

their day is passed--when they are retained in a certain honour, while

the real working methods have assumed other titles; then these forms

become purely formal and antiquated. Thus the Logic of Aristotle seemed

in its unfamiliar language to a later generation to be purely formal

and superfluous. It was only another side of the same mistake when

the new forms--the forms efficient and active in matter,--were not

recognised as formal, but were boldly styled material: and the Logic

which discussed such matter-marked forms was called a material Logic.

The phrase Matter of Thought, like its many congeners, is a fruitful

mother of misconceptions. Caught up by the pictorial imagination, which

is always at hand to anticipate thought, it suggests a matter, which is

not thought, but is _there,_ all the same, lying in expectation of it.

It suggests two things--(for are there not two words, and a preposition

or term of relation between them?). But there are not two things.

This _matter_ is just as much a nonentity as the aforesaid _thought_:

a matter of thought is a thought matter,--matter, thought once, and

possibly to be thought again.

All this talk about the Relativity of form and matter is insincere,

and semi-conventional. It is (like the well-known antithesis between

Matter and Mind, of which indeed it is only a variation) a halting

between two views. That which it chiefly leans to, is that there can

be no form without matter, though there may well be matter which is

not yet formed. At the best it goes no further than to admit or assert

that _besides_ the one there is _also_ the other. It establishes a

see-saw, and is proud of it. This is Dualism. Its maxim is, Don't

forget that there is an Other. You have explored the One: you have

perhaps done well. But there is also and always the Other. The second

view is not the mere negation of this dualism. That there is a

dualism is a fact which it acknowledges.[2] All life and reality is

manifested in dualism--in antithesis: but the life and the reality

is one. Mind--_Geist_--actualised and intelligent experience--is

the one ultimate and essential reality.[3] In the face of its unity,

mere matter is only a half-truth, and mere thought is only another.

The reality, the unity, and the truth, is matter as formed, nature as

reflected in mind. In the reality of experience there is always the

presence of thought: and thought is only real when it is wedded with

nature in the truth of man's mind. So far Bacon and Hegel coincide.

Man--in so far as he is Mind--and of course Mind in its fullness is not

merely subjective nor merely objective, but absolute--is the measure of

all things, the central and comprehensive reality. Such a man--and such

a mind--is, we need hardly add, not the man in the street, nor the man

in the study: but the infinite, universal, eternal mind in whom these

and all others essentially have their being. Such truth of Man--such

Mind--is the Absolute: it is sometimes named God: it is the ideal of

all aspiration, and the fountain of all truth.

'Logic,' says Hegel[4], 'is the science of the Idea in the medium of

mere thought.' It exhibits the truth in one partial aspect, or shows

one appearance of the total unity of the world,--the aspect it would

wear if we could for a moment suppose the reality of Nature to vanish

out of sight, and the ideality of Mind reduced to a ghost. It dissects

the underlying organisation--the scheme of unification--which the world

of mental or spiritual experience presents in all its concreteness.

And it does so because it exhibits the last result of the ever clearer

and clearer experience which Mind achieves as it comes to see and

realise itself. The logical skeleton is the sublimated product of

a rich concrete experience. It has been a curious delusion of some

who were probably satisfied by a casual glance at Hegel's _Logic_,

especially in its earlier chapters, to suppose that the Logic was

meant to be the absolute beginning: and that pure or mere thought was

the congenital endowment of the heaven-born philosopher[5]. To Hegel,

on the contrary, Logic was an abstraction from a fuller, more concrete

reality. He did not indeed suppose that the symbolical conception of

Movement--in its popular pictorialness--would be an adequate substitute

or representative for thought; but he knew that the energy of mental

development was the fact, and the truth, of which 'becoming' is a

meagre, abstract phase.

Logic, then, is not the Science of mere or pure thought, but of the

Idea (which is co-terminous with reality)--of the Mind's synthetic

unity of experience--looked at, however, abstractly, in the medium

of pure thought. Just so, Nature-philosophy is the same Idea, as it

turns up bit after bit distracted, fragmentary, and more or less

mutilated, in the multiplication, the time and space division, of

physical phenomena. But as science requires us to go from the simple

to the more complex, as the truth has to prove itself true, by serving

in its conclusion as the corroboration of all its premisses or

presuppositions; so the system of philosophy begins with the Logic.

Yet it can only begin there, because it has already apprehended itself

in its completeness: and it can only move onward because it is the

concentrated essence--the implicit being--of all that it actually and

explicitly is. It may appear to emerge from a point: but that point

has at its back the intellectual unity of a philosophy which embraces

the world. It presupposes the complete philosopher who shall be the

complete organ of absolute intelligence, of universal and eternal

Spirit.

A satisfactory Logic then presupposes or implies a complete system of

philosophy. No doubt, for a logic which deals with the minor problems

of ratiocination or formal induction, all that is needed is a certain

general acquaintance with popular conceptions, and with the results or

methods of physical science. But if logic takes its business seriously,

it must go behind these presuppositions. It must trace back reasoning

to its roots, fibres, and first principles. And to do that it is not

enough to put at the front a psychological chapter. Far from helping,

psychology in these matters is much more in need of being helped

itself. Till it has learned a little of the puzzle of the one and the

many, the same and the diverse, being, quality, and essence, psychology

will be as little use to Logic as blind guides generally are. Nor need

this prevent us from saying that when psychology has thoroughly learned

these mysteries, it will give fresh life and reality to the logic which

it touches upon. The principles of Logic lie in another field,[6] and

are deeper in the ground, than obvious psychological gossip.

If Logic then deals with form, it deals with a form of forms--the

form of the world, of life, and of reality. It is a form, which

is a unity in diversity, an organism,--a form which is infinitely

manifold, and yet in all its multiplicity one. Logic is the morphology

of thought,--of that thought which in Nature is concealed under

the variety and divisions of things, and which in the theory of

mental and spiritual life is resumed into a complete biology of the

world-organism. The problem of Logic then demands an abstraction--an

effort of self-concentration--an effort by which the whole machinery

of the sensible universe shall be left behind, and the accustomed

clothing of our thoughts be removed. To move in this ether of pure

thought is clearly one of the hardest of problems.

Like Plato, we may occasionally feel that we have caught a glimpse of

the super-sensible world unveiled; but it disappears as the senses

regain their hold. We can probably fix a firm eye on one term of

reason, and criticise its value: but it is less easy to survey the

Bacchic dance from term to term[7], and allow them to criticise

themselves. The distracting influence of our associations, or of

outside things, is always leading us astray. Either we incline to treat

thoughts as psychological products or species, the outcome of a mental

process, which are (_a_) given to us from the beginning, and so _a

priori_ or innate, or which (_b_) spring up in the course of experience

by mutual friction between our mind and the outside world, and so are

_a posteriori_ or derivative. Or disregarding the subjective side of

thoughts, we act as if they were more correctly called things: we

speak of relations between phenomena: we suppose things, and causes,

and quantities to form part of the so-called external universe, which

science explores. The one estimate of thought, like the other, keeps in

view, though at some distance, and so as not to interfere with their

practical discussions, the separate and equal existence of thoughts

and things. The psychologists or subjectivists of logic scrutinise the

world within us first of all, and purpose to accomplish what can be

done for the mind as possessing a faculty of thought, before they turn

to the world of things. The realists or objectivists of logic think it

better for practical work to allow thought only the formal or outside

labour of surveying and analysing the laws of phenomena out of the

phenomena which contain them. Neither of them examines thought--'the

original synthetic unity'--in its own integrity as a movement in its

own self, an inner organisation, of which subject and object, the

mind and the things called external, are the vehicles, or, in logical

language, the accidents.

If it is possible to treat the history of the English Constitution as

an object of inquiry in itself and for its own sake, without reference

to the individuals who in course of time marred and mended it, or

to the setting of events in which its advance is exhibited, why not

treat the thought, which is the universal element of all things, of

English Constitution, and Italian Art, and Greek Philosophy, in the

same way,--absolutely, i. e. in itself and for its own sake? When

that is done, distinctions rigidly sustained between _a priori_ and

_a posteriori_ become meaningless because now seen to belong to a

distinction of earlier and later in the history of the individual

consciousness. There is at best only a modified justification for such

mottoes and cries, as 'Art for Art's sake,' or 'Science must be left

free and unchecked,' or 'The rights of the religious conscience ought

always to be respected': but there can be no demur or limitation to the

cry that Thought must be studied in Thought by Thought and for the sake

of Thought. For Art, and Science, and Religion are specialised modes

in which the totality or truth of things presents itself to mankind,

and none of them can claim an unconditioned sway: their claims clash,

and each must be admitted to be after all a partial interpretation, a

more or less one-sided interpretation of the true reality of the world.

Thought on the other hand is unlimited: for it exists not merely in

its own abstract modes, but interpenetrates and rules all the other

concrete forms of experience, manifesting itself in Art and Religion,

not less than in Science. And thus when we study Thought, we study that

which is in itself and for itself,--we study Absolute Being. On the

other side it must be noted that in Logic it is Absolute Being, only

when and as it is _thought,_ which we study. The two sides, Being and

Thought, must both come forward: and come in unity, although in some

phases of the Idea the thought-element, in others the being-element is

more pronounced.

Thought, too, is Being. An old distinction of the Stoics, which not

inaptly represents popular views on this matter, set on one side ὄντα,

existences (which were always corporeal, whether they were the things

we touch and feel, or the words and breathings by which we utter them),

and on the other side the meanings or thoughts proper or σημαινόμενα

(which were incorporeal). These λεκτά, as they were otherwise called,

were to the Stoics the proper sphere of Logic. In the sense therefore

which the Stoics and popular consciousness give to being, the object of

logic does not possess being. It is not corporeal. It cannot however

be said to be in the sphere of non-being. It is rather a part of

reality--of concrete being--which can be considered apart, as if it

stood alone. Alone it does not stand. And yet it holds a position so

fundamental,--is the same theme again and again repeated under endless

variations,--is so obviously the universal of things--that it may

properly form the subject of independent study.

It is, moreover, a part of Reality, which may well claim to stand for

the whole. It is, so to say, the score of the musical composition,

rolled up in its bare, silent, unadorned lineaments; the articulated

theme, besides, and not the mere germinal concept, of all the variety

of melody. But it is only laid up there _in abstracto_, because in

the soul of the composer it had already taken concrete form, due to

his capacity and training, his mental force, his art and science. It

is there that the score has its source. But secondly, the musical work

exists in the performance of the orchestra: in the manipulations of the

several instruments, in the notes of the singers, in all the diversity

of parts which make up the mechanism for unfolding the meaning or

theme--that unreality, that mere thought, which to the stricter Stoic

might be said to have no ὔπαρξις, or bodily subsistence. And there are

still people who will be disposed to assert that it is only in the

multitude of notes of violin, trombone, flute, &c., that the music is

real:--though perhaps these hardy realists do not quite mean what they

say. For what they probably mean, and what is the fact, is that the

music exists as a complete reality in those who have ears and minds

capable of comprehending and enjoying it: in those who can reunite

meaning and theme to execution and orchestration: and we may even add

that it is more and more real, in proportion to the greater power with

which they can bring these two into one.

We shall rather say then that thought points to reality, and that mere

nature seeks for interpretation: that mere thought and mere being both

seek for reunion. Yet if in the complete reality we thus distinguish

two elements, we may follow Hegel in setting the pure Idea first. It

is no doubt in a way true that, as has been said, Hegel may be often

read most easily if we first begin with his concluding paragraphs. In

psychology and ethics the fundamental principles have assumed a more

imposing, a larger, a more humanly-interesting shape, than they bear

in the intangible outlines of Logic. There they are written in blacker

ink and broader lines than in the grey on grey. But after all, it is

only for those who have grasped the faint--yet fixed--outlines that the

full-contoured figure speaks its amplest truth. The true sculptor must

begin with a thorough study of anatomy. For those therefore who do not

care merely for results, it is indispensable to begin--or at least to

turn back to the beginning--to the Logic. No doubt the full tones of

the heard and sounded harmony are the true and adequate presentation

of the composer's purpose: but they will be best comprehended and

appreciated by those who have thoroughly grasped the score.

In Logic, so regarded, thought is no longer merely our thought. It is

the constructive, relational, unifying element of reality. Without it

reality would not articulately be anything for us: and such thoughts

seem to be its net extract, its quintessence, its concentrated meaning.

But really they are only the potent _form_ of reality. Or, more

exactly, in its limits, under its phases, must come all reality if it

is to be part and parcel of our intelligent possession, our certified

property. Such a thought is the frame-work, the shape-giver of our

world, of our communicable experience. It is the formative principle of

our intelligent life, as it is the principle through which things have

meaning for us, and we have meaning for and fellowship with others.

It is not so rich as religion and art, perhaps it does not have the

intensity of feeling and faith: but it is at the very basis of all of

these, or it is the concentrated essence of what in them is explicated

and developed. Humanity in these its highest energies is more than mere

thought--more than mere logic: but it is still at the root thought, and

it is still governed by the laws and movement of this higher logic. For

this is a logic which is no mere instrument of technical reasoning,

for proof or disproof: no mere code of rules for the evaluation of

testimony. It is a logic which deals with a thought--or an Idea in

thought-form--which is the principle of all life and reality: the way

of self-criticism which leads to truth: a thought which is at home in

all the phases and provinces of experience.

Under the same name, Logic, therefore, we find something quite

different from what the example of Aristotle and his ancient and modern

followers had accustomed us to.[8] Under the auspices of Kant and his

'Transcendental logic' there has emerged the need of something more

corresponding to the title. For the word itself was not used either by

Aristotle or the Stoics. Neither the Analytics and Topics of the one,

nor the Dialectic of the other, exhaust the conception of the science,

or, to put it more accurately, they are only inceptions of a science,

the fulfilment of which was reserved for a later time. Bacon and Locke,

Descartes and Spinoza, all the thinkers of modern Europe call for a

deeper probing of the logical problem: for a grasp of it which shall

be more worthy of its conventional name, Logic, the theory of Reason.

And we may even say that what is wanted is a unification of the problem

of the Organon with that of the first philosophy, a unification of

Logic with Metaphysics: a recognition that the problem of reason is

not merely the method of reasoning, but the whole theory as to the

correlations of perception and conception, of thinking and reality.

This conception of Logic as the self-developing system of Thought

pure and entire, is the distinctive achievement of Hegel. 'I cannot

imagine,' he says, 'that the method which I have followed in this

system of Logic, or rather the method which this system follows in

its own self, is otherwise than susceptible of much improvement, and

many completions of detail: but I know at the same time that it is the

only genuine method. This is evident from the circumstance that it is

nothing distinct from its object and subject-matter: for it is the

subject-matter within itself, or its inherent dialectic, which moves it

along.'[9]

But how is this universe of thought to be discovered, and its law of

movement to be described? From times beyond the reach of history,

from nations and tribes of which we know only by tradition and vague

conjectures, in all levels of social life and action, the synthetic

energy of thought has been productive, and its evolution in the field

of time has been going on. For thousands of years the intellectual city

has been rearing its walls: and much of the process of its formation

lies beyond the scope of observation. But fortunately there is a help

at hand, which will enable us to discover at least the main outlines in

the system of thought.

The key to the solution was found somewhat in the same way as led

to the Darwinian theory concerning the Origin of Species. When the

question touching the causes of variation and persistence in the

natural kinds of plants and animals seemed so complex as to baffle all

attempts at an answer, Darwin found what seemed a clue likely to lead

to a theory of descent. The methods adopted in order to keep up, or to

vary, a species under domestication were open to anybody's inspection:

and those principles, which were consciously pursued in artificial

selection by the breeder, suggested a theory of similar selection

in free nature. In studying the phenomena of thought, of which the

species or types were no less numerous and interesting than those in

organic nature, it was perhaps impossible to survey the whole history

of humanity. But it was comparatively easy to observe the process of

thought in those cases where its growth had been fostered consciously

and distinctly. The history of philosophy records the steps in the

conscious and artificial manipulation of what for the far greater part

is transacted in the silent workshops of nature. Philosophy, in short,

is to the general growth of intelligence what artificial breeding is to

the variation of species under natural conditions. In the successive

systems of philosophy, the order and concatenation of ideas was, as it

were, clarified out of the perturbed medium of real life, and expressed

in its bare equivalents in terms of thought, and thus first really

acquired. Half of his task was already performed for the logician,

and there remained the work, certainly no slight one--of showing the

unity and organic development which marked the conscious reasoning,

and of connecting it with the general movement of human thought. The

logician had to break down the rigid lines which separated one system

of philosophy from another,--to see what was really involved in the

contradiction of one system by its successor,--and to show that the

negation thus given to an antecedent principle was a definite negation,

ending not in mere zero or vacuity, but in a distinct result, and

making an advance upon the previous height of intelligence.

To say this was to give a new value to the history of philosophy.

For it followed that each system was no _mere_ opinion or personal

view, but was in the main a genuine attempt of the thinker to give

expression to the tacit or struggling consciousness of his age. Behind

the individual--who is often unduly regardless of his contemporaries

and predecessors, and who writes or thinks with little knowledge or

sympathy for them, there is the general bearing and interest of the

age, its powerful solidarity of purpose and conception. The philosopher

is the prophet, because he is in a large part the product of his age.

He is an organ of the mind of his age and nation; and both he and it

play a part in the general work of humanity.

On the other hand, it is dangerous to insist too forcibly on the

rationality of the history of philosophy. For it may be taken to

mean--probably only by blinded or wooden commentators--that each

step in the evolution and concatenation of the logical idea is to be

identified with some historical system, and that these systems must

have appeared in this precise order. And this would be to expect

too much from the 'impotence of nature' which plays its part in the

historical world also: as that on one side forms part of the Natural.

There is Reason in the world--and in the world of history; but not in

the pellucid brightness and distinct outlines proper to the Idea in

the abstract element of thought. It may take several philosophers to

make one step in thought; and sometimes one philosopher of genius may

take several steps at once. There may even be co-eval philosophies:

and there may be philosophies which appear to run on in independent

or parallel lines of development. It may well be that Hegel has

underestimated these divergencies, and that he has been too apt to see

in all history the co-operation to one dominant purpose. But these

errors in the execution of a philosophy of history, and especially of

the history of philosophy, should not diminish our estimate of its

principle.[10]

At first this process was seen in the medium of time. But the

conditions of time are of practical and particular interest only. The

day when the first leaves appear, and the season when the fruit ripens

on a tree, are questions of importance to practical arboriculture. But

botany deals only with the general theory of the plant's development,

in which such considerations have to be generalised. So logic leaves

out of account those points of time and chance which the interests of

individuals and nations find all-important. And when this element of

time has been removed, there is left a system of the types of thought

pure and entire,--embalming the life of generations in mere words. The

same self-identical thought is set forth from its initial narrowness

and poverty on to its final amplitude and wealth of differences. At

each stage it is the Absolute: outside of it there is nothing. It is

the whole, pure and entire: always the whole. But in its first totality

it is all but a void: in its last a fully-formed and articulated

world,--because it holds all that it ever threw out of itself resumed

into its grasp.

In these circumstances nothing can sound higher and nobler than the

Theory of Logic. It presents the Truth unveiled in its proper form and

absolute nature. If the philosopher may call this absolute totality

of thought ever staying the same in its eternal development,--this

adequacy of thought to its own requirements--by the name of God, then

we may say with Hegel that Logic exhibits God as He is in His eternal

Being before the creation of Nature and a finite Mind.[11] But the

logical Idea is only a phantom Deity--the bare possibility of a God

or of absolute reality in all the development of its details.

The first acquaintance with the abstract theory is likely to dash

cold water on the enthusiasm thus awakened, and may sober our views

of the magic efficacy of Logic. 'The student on his first approach

to the Science,' says Hegel, 'sees in Logic at first only one system

of abstractions apart and limited to itself, not extending so as

to include other facts and sciences. On the contrary, when it is

contrasted with the variety abounding in our generalised picture of

the world, and with the tangible realities embraced in the other

sciences,--when it is compared with the promise of the Absolute Science

to lay bare the essence of that variety, the inner nature of the mind

and the world, or, in one word, the Truth,--this science of Logic

in its abstract outline, in the colourless cold simplicity of its

mere terms of thought, seems as if it would perform anything sooner

than this promise, and in the face of that variety seems very empty

indeed. A first introduction to the study of Logic leads us to suppose

that its significance is restricted to itself. Its doctrines are not

believed to be more than one separate branch of study engaged with the

terms or dimensions of thought, besides which the other scientific

occupations have a proper material and body of their own. Upon these

occupations, it is assumed, Logic may exert a formal influence, but

it is the influence of a natural and spontaneous logic for which the

scientific form and its study may be in case of need dispensed with.

The other sciences have upon the whole rejected the regulation-method,

which made them a series of definitions, axioms, and theorems, with the

demonstration of these theorems. What is called Natural Logic rules

in the sciences with full sway, and gets along without any special

investigation in the direction of thought itself. The entire materials

and facts of these sciences have detached themselves completely

from Logic. Besides they are more attractive for sense, feeling, or

imagination, and for practical interests of every description.

And so it comes about that Logic has to be learned at first, as

something which is perhaps understood and seen into, but of which the

compass, the depth, and further import are in the earliest stages

unperceived. It is only after a deeper study of the other sciences that

logical theory rises before the mind of the student into a universal,

which is not merely abstract, but embraces within it the variety

of particulars.--The same moral truth on the lips of a youth, who

understands it quite correctly, does not possess the significance or

the burden of meaning which it has in the mind of the veteran, in whom

the experience of a lifetime has made it express the whole force of its

import. In the same way, Logic is not appreciated at its right value

until it has grown to be the result of scientific experience. It is

then seen to be the universal truth,--not a special study beside other

matters and other realities, but the essence of all these other facts

together.[12]

[Footnote 1: E. g. 'formal' in _Hamlet_, iv. 5. 215; 'informal' in

_Measure for Measure,_ v. 236.]

[Footnote 2: _Encycl._ § 574 (_Philosophy of Mind,_ p. 196).]

[Footnote 3: _Encycl._ § 377.]

[Footnote 4: _Logic_, vol. ii. p. 30.]

[Footnote 5: The criticisms of A. Trendelenburg, in his _Logische

Untersuchungen,_ rest on such assumptions. 'Trendelenburg,' says

Hartmann, 'means low-water mark in German philosophy.']

[Footnote 6: See above all Bradley's _Principles of Logic_, and

Bosanquet's _Logic_, &c.]

[Footnote 7: 'Das Wahre ist der bacchantische Taumel, an dem kein Glied

nicht trunken ist; und weil jedes, indem es sich absondert, ebenso

unmittelbar sich auflöst,--ist es ebenso die durchsichtige und einfache

Ruhe.' _Phenom. des Geistes,_ p 35.]

[Footnote 8: Prantl, _Geschichte der Logik,_ i. 87.]

[Footnote 9: _Wissenschaft der Logik_, i. p. 39.]

[Footnote 10: See _Encyclop._ § 549 _(Philosophy of Mind_, pp. 148

seqq.). It is, of course, quite another question--to be answered by

intelligent research--how far in particular cases Hegel has accurately

studied a thinker, and faithfully interpreted him. Some of his critics

in this line appear to mistake philology--which is a highly important

authority in its own field--for philosophy: and will no doubt go on

doing so.]

[Footnote 11: Hegel's _Werke_, iii., 33.]

[Footnote 12: _Wissenschaft der Logik_, i. p. 43.]

CHAPTER XXVII.

ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE: OR THE CATEGORIES.

According to the strict reasonings of Kant in his _Criticism of Pure

Reason_, and the somewhat looser discussions of Mr. Spencer in his

_First Principles_ a science of Metaphysics or theory of the Infinite,

Absolute, or Unconditioned is impossible. As a result of the criticism

by Kant, Jacobi claimed the Absolute for Faith: and Spencer banishes

the Absolute or Unknowable to the sphere of Religion to be worshipped

or ignored, but in either case blindly. As we have already seen, Hegel

does not accept this distribution of provinces between religion and

philosophy. There is only one world, one reality: but it is known more

or less fully, more or less truly and adequately. It is presented in

one way to the sensuous imagination: in another to the scientific

analyst: in a third to the philosopher. To the first it is a mere

succession or expanse of pictures, facts, appearances: and outside

it--somewhere, but not here,--there is a land, a being of perfect

wholeness and harmony. To the second it is an unending chain of causes

and effects, of one thing simplified by being referred to another till

at last a mighty all-explaining nullity, called an 'Ultimate Cause,'

is presumed to linger, eternally unperceived at the infinitely-distant

end of the series. To the third everything is seen in connexion, but

not a mere uni-linear connexion: each, when studied, more and more

completes itself by including those relations which seemed to stand

outside: each fully realised, or completely invested with its ideal

implications, is seen no longer to be an incident or isolated fact, but

an implicit infinite, and a vice-gerent of the eternal. Philosophy thus

releases both ordinary and scientific knowledge from their limitations;

it shows the finite passing into the infinite. And Hegel, accordingly,

purposes to show that this unfathomable Absolute is very near us, and

at our very door: in our hands, as it were, and especially present

in our every-day language. If we are ever to gain the Absolute, we

must be careful not to lose one jot or tittle of the Relative[1]. The

Absolute--this term, which is to some so offensive and to others so

precious--always presents itself to us in Relatives: and when we have

persistently traced the Proteus through all its manifestations,--when

we have, so to speak, seen the Absolute Relativity of Relation, there

is very little more needed in order to apprehend the Absolute pure and

entire. One may say of the Absolute what Goethe[2] says of Nature: 'She

lives entirely in her children: and the mother, where is she?'

It is a great step, when we have detected the Relativity of what had

hitherto seemed Absolute,--when a new aspect of the infinite fullness

of the world, the truth of things, dawns upon us. But it is even a

greater step when we see that the Relativity which we have thus

discovered is itself Relative. And this is one advantage of first

studying the value of the categories of ethics and physics on Logical

ground. On the concreter region of Nature and Mind, the several grades

and species into which reality is divided have a portentous firmness

and grandeur about them, and the intrinsic dialectic seems scarcely

adequate to shaking the foundations of their stability. They severally

stand as independent self-sustaining entities, separate from each

other, and stereotyped in their several formations. But in the ether of

abstract Idea, in the fluid and transparent form of mere thoughts, the

several stages in the development of the Absolute, the various grades

of category, clearly betray their Relativity, and by the negation of

this Relativity lead on to a higher Absolute.

To the practical man,--so long as his reflection does not go deep,--the

concepts on which his knowledge and faith are built seem eternal,

unshifting rock, parts of the inmost fabric of things. He accepts them

as ultimate validities. To him matter and force, cause and effect,

distinctions between form and content, whole and part, quantity and

quality, belong to the final constitution of the world. (And so, in a

sense, they do.) If he ever overcome the absoluteness which popular

thought attributes to the individual things of sense and imagination,

and show their relativity, he does so only to fall under the glamour

of a new deception. Causes and matters, forces and atoms, become new

ultimates, new absolutes, of another order. Fictions or postulates of

the understanding take the place of the figments of imagination. The

ordinary scientific man labours especially under the 'metaphysical'

fallacy: he realises abstractions in their abstractness. As against

this it is the business of the logician to show how such terms are to

be interpreted as steps in a process of interpretation--containing so

much that others of simpler structure have handed on, and themselves

presupposing by implication a great deal they fail properly to

explicate. Thus, the logician evinces at one blow the relativity of

each term in its mereness, abstractness, or false absoluteness, and the

ideal absoluteness which always carries it beyond itself, and makes it

mean more than it says.

The natural mind always hastens to substantiate the terms it employs.

It makes them a fixed, solid foundation, an hypostasis, on which

further building may be raised. If such pseudo-absolutising of concepts

is to be called metaphysics, then logic has to free us from the

illusions of metaphysics, to de-absolutise them, to disabuse us of a

false Absolute. The false Absolute is what Hegel calls the Abstract:

it is the part which, because it succeeded in losing sight of its

dependence, had believed itself to be a whole. Logic shows--in the

phrase of Hegel--that each such term or concept is only an attempt

to express, explicate, or define the Absolute[3]: a predicate of the

Absolute, but falling short of its subject, or only uttering part of

the whole truth of reality. But while Logic shows it only to be an

attempt, and therefore in an aspect relative, it equally shows its

ingrained tendency to complete itself, to carry out to realisation

its ideal implication,--shows, in short, that e. g. force is more

than _mere_ force, that thing-in-itself is not properly even a thing;

that a veritable notion (_Begriff_) or grasp of a thing is more than

a _mere_ (subjective) notion, &c. Thus the true Absolute is not the

emptiest and most meagre of abstractions,--what is left as a residual

after the relative in all its breadth and length has been cut out

of it; it is the concretest of all being, the whole which includes

without destroying all partial aspects. Yet as it includes them, it

shows itself their master and more than master: making each lose and

win in the other, till all are satisfied in unity, and no shade of

individuality is utterly lost in the totality of the Universal.

Accordingly, Metaphysics and Logic tend to form one body. For the

distant and transcendent Absolute, which was the object of older

Metaphysics, was substituted an Absolute, self-revealing in the terms

of thought. Being is deposed from its absoluteness, and made the

first postulate of thought. Former Metaphysics had dashed itself in

vain against the reefs that girdle the island of the supersensible

and noümenal, the supposed world of true Being: and the struggle at

last grew so disastrous that Kant gave the signal to retreat, and to

leave the world of true Being, the impregnable Thing-in-itself, to its

repose. His advice to metaphysicians[4] was that, while scientific

research continued to concentrate the attack of analysis upon single

experiences conforming to certain conditions, they should investigate

these' conditions of possible experience or foundations of objectivity.

In other words, he turned observation to what he called Transcendental

Logic. It was by means of this suggestion, understood in the widest

sense, that Hegel was led to treat Logic as the science of ultimate

reality. He had to show how these conditions when carried out in

full gave the Unconditioned. He attacked the Absolute, if we may say

so, in detail. The Absolute, as the totality, universe or system of

Relativity, lays itself open to observation by deposing itself to a

Relative. It possesses the differentiating power of separating itself

as an object in passivity, from itself as a subject in action,--of

deposing itself to appearance, of being _for_ itself, and also _in_

and _for_ itself. And thus Thought is the active universal,--which

actualises itself more and more out of abstraction into concreteness.

Hegel, then, solved the problem of Metaphysics by turning it into

Logic. The same principle, Thought, appeared in both: in the former

as a fixed and passive result, showing no traces of spontaneity,--in

the latter as an activity, with a mere power of passing from object

to object, discovering and establishing connexions and relations. The

two sciences were fragments, unintelligible and untenable, when taken

in abstract isolation. This is the justification, if justification

be required, for Hegel's unification of Logic and Metaphysics. The

Hegelian Logic falls into three parts: the theory of Transitory Being:

the theory of Relative Being: and the theory of the Notion. The first

and second of these in his Science of Logic are called Objective Logic;

they also might be described as Metaphysics. The third part is more

strictly on Logical ground. Or perhaps it is best to describe the whole

as the Metaphysics of Logic.

The Logic of Hegel is the Science of Thought as an organic system of

its characteristic forms, which in their entirety constitute the Idea.

These forms or types of thought, the moulds in which the Idea confines

itself in its evolution, are not unlike what have been otherwise called

the Categories. (Of course the foreign word 'Categories' does not

commend itself to Hegel).[5] They are the modifications or definite

forms, the articulated and distinct shapes, in which the process of

Thought ever and anon culminates in the course of its movement. The

Infinite and Absolute at these points conditions itself, and as so

conditioned or differentiated is apprehended and stamped with a name.

They specify the unspecified, and give utterance to the ineffable.

They are the names by which reason grasps the totality of things,--the

names by which the truth (or God) reveals itself, however inadequately.

From one point of view they constitute a series, each evolved from

the other, a more completely detailed term or utterance of thought

resulting by innate contradiction from a less detailed. From another

point of view the total remains perpetually the same; and the change

seems only on the surface. The one aspect of the movement conceals the

Absolute: the other puts the Relative into the background.

What then are the Categories? We may answer: They are the ways in

which expression is given to the unifying influence of thought: and we

have to consider them as points or stations in the progress of this

unification, and in the light of this influence. These Categories are

the typical structures marking the definite grades in the growth of

thought,--the moulds or forms which thought assumes and places itself

in,--those instants when the process of thought takes a determinate

form, and admits of being grasped. The growth of thought, like

other growths, is often imperceptible and impalpable. And then,

unexpectedly, a condensation takes place, a form is precipitated out of

the transparent medium. A new concept, a new grasp of reality, emerges

from the solution of elements: and a name is created to realise the

new shade of the Idea. These thought-terms are the world of Platonic

forms, if we consider his 'form of Good' as corresponding to the 'Idea'

of Hegel. For if we look carefully into this mystic word 'Good' which

plays so brilliant a part in ancient philosophy, we shall see that it

only expresses in a more concrete and less analytic form, as ancient

thought often does, the same thing as so many moderns love to speak

of as Relativity, and which is also implied in Aristotle's conception

of an End. To see things _sub specie boni_--which Plato describes

as the supreme quality of the truth-seeker who is to guide men into

uprightness, or into conformity with the true nature of things,--is

to see them elevated above their partial self-subsistence into the

harmony and totality of that which is always and unvaryingly its real

self. The Good is the sun-light in which things lose their earlier

character (which they had in the days of our bondage and ignorance) of

mysterious and perplexing spectres of the night. In the light of the

Good, things are shorn of their false pretence of self-subsistence and

substantiality, deposed by comparison with the perfect and unspotted,

and as it were stung into seeking a higher form of being by struggle.

And this is the abstract moral way of looking. But to see them in the

form of Good means also that they are seen to be more and better than

we thought, that they are not condemned to inadequacy, but bear in them

the witness and revelation of infinity and absoluteness. And this is

rather the faith of religion and the vision of art. And the 'form of

Good' is only a brief and undeveloped vision of an Absolute, which is

the 'form of Relativity,'--Relativity elevated into an Absolute.

A Category is often spoken of as if it were the highest extreme of

generalisation, the most abstract and most widely applicable term

possible. If we climb sufficiently far and high up the Porphyry's tree

of thought, we may expect, thought the old logicians, to reach the

'_summa genera_' or highest species of human thought. Nor have modern

logicians always refrained from this byway. But these quantitative

distinctions of greater and less, in which the Formal Logic revels,

are not very suitable to any of the terms or processes of thought,

and they certainly give an imperfect description of the Categories.

The essential function which the Categories perform in the fabric

of thought and language is, in the first place, to combine, affirm,

demonstrate, relate, and unify,--and _not_ to generalise.[6] Their

action may be better compared to that fulfilled by those symbols in

an algebraical expression, which like _plus_ and _minus_ denote an

operation to be performed in the way of combining or relating, than

to the office of the symbols which in these expressions denote the

magnitudes themselves.

To the student of language the Categories sometimes present themselves

as pronominal, or formal roots,--those roots which, as it is said, do

not denote things, but relations between things. He meets them in the

inflections of nouns and verbs; in the signs of number, gender, case,

and person: but, as thus presented, their influence is subordinate to

the things of which they are, as it were, the accidents. He meets them

in a more independent and tangible shape in the articles, pronouns,

prepositions, conjunctions, and numerals, and in what are called the

auxiliary verbs. In these apparently trifling, and in some languages

almost non-existent words or parts of words, we have the symbols of

relations,--the means of connexion between single words,--the cement

which binds significant speech together. There are languages, such as

the older and classical forms of Chinese, where these categorising

terms are, as it were, in the air: where they are only felt in accent

and position, and have no separate existence of their own. But in

the languages of the Indo-European family they gradually appear, at

first in combination, perhaps, with the more material roots, and only

in the course of time asserting an independent form. Originally they

appear to denote the relations of space and time,--the generalised or

typical links between the parts of our sense-perceptions: but from

there they are afterwards, and in a little while, transferred into

the service of intellect. These little words are the very life-blood

of a language,--its spirit and force. It is in these categories,

as they show themselves in the different linguistic families, that

a nation betrays its mode and tone of thought. The language of the

Altaic races, e. g., expresses activity only as a piece of property,

an appropriation of a substance, and knows no true distinction of noun

and verb: the Semitic Tongues in their tense-system perhaps betray the

intense inwardness of the race: whereas the immense inflectionalism of

the Indo-European seems not unconnected with his greater versatility

and energy. Complete mastery in the manipulation of these particles

and forms is what makes an idiomatic knowledge of a language, as

distinct from a mere remembrance of the vocabulary. And philosophy

is the recognition of their import and significance. Thus in Greek

philosophy the central questions turn upon such words as Being and

not-Being: Becoming: that out of which: that for the sake of which: the

what-was-being: the what is: the other: the one: the great and small:

that which is upon the whole: what is according to each: this somewhat:

&c.[7] And again in Modern Philosophy, how often has the battle raged

about the meaning of such words as I: will: can: must: because: same

and different: self: &c.!

[Footnote 1: Cf. Herbart's maxim, 'Wie viel Schein, so viel Hindeutung

auf Sein.' (_Hauptpunkte der Metaphysik._)]

[Footnote 2: _Die Natur_ (1780): 'Sie lebt in lauter Kindern: und die

Mutter, wo ist sie?.... Sie ist ganz und doch immer unvollendet.... Sie

verbirgt sich in tausend Namen und Termen, und ist immer dieselbe.']

[Footnote 3: _Logic (Encyclop.)_ §§ 85, 87, 112, 194, &c.]

[Footnote 4: Metaphysic is, in Kant's usage, ambiguous. It means (_a_)

a supposed science of the supersensible or unconditioned reality;

(_b_) a study of the conditions or presuppositions--the Kantian _a

priori_--of some aspect of Experience, e. g. a Metaphysic of Moral

rules.]

[Footnote 5: His usual term is _Denkbestimmungen,_ the several

expressions or specific forms of the unification which thought is.

The term Categories has been identified by Kant with his list of

_Stammbegriffe._ and by Mill with his classes of nameable things,--with

some critical remarks on Aristotle's use of the word. That use--to

denote the elements of predicable reality, what Grote called _ens_--is

probably not so 'rhapsodical' as Kant, with his new-born zeal for the

contrast of sensibility and intellect, was inclined to suppose. A real

history of the Category-theory would be almost a history of philosophy.

Perhaps the name might be more sparingly used.]

[Footnote 6: Generalisation is only one small aspect of thought, with

specialisation as its, at least as important, pendant. To read certain

logics, one might think the all-comprehensive virtue of truths were to

be general,--not to be true.]

[Footnote 7: ὅν and μὴ ὅν: τὸ γιγνόμενον: τὸ ἐξ οὗ: τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα: τὸ τί

ἦν εἶναι: τὸ τί ἐστι: θάτερον: ἕν: τὸ μέγα καὶ τὸ μικρόν: τὸ καθ' ὅλου:

τὸ καθ' ἔκαστον: τόδε τί.]

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE THREE PARTS OF LOGIC.

Logic, as it is understood in these pages, is the critical history

of the terms of thought by which reality, the sum of experience, the

world, is described or expressed. It is the philosophical criticism

of the concepts, or elements of conception, by which we define or

develop the Totality, the Absolute. It describes the constitution

of the intellectual realm, by and in which we give body, coherence,

unity, and system to reality. It is the self-developing organisation

of the thoughts by which we think things, and by which things are

what they are. It is the ripe fruit of the experience of the ages of

humanity, and it therefore bears in itself a principle of growth. But

if it be a fruit, it is a fruit which can watch its own growth, which

reflects upon its own life. Its three parts show the main stages of its

development, beginning with the least adequate and most abstract or

general description of reality.

The first part of Logic, the theory of Being[1], may be called the

theory of unsupported and freely-floating Being. We do not mean

something which _is,_ but the mere 'is,' the bare fact of Being,

without any substratum. The degree of condensation or development,

where substantive and attribute, or noun and verb, co-exist, has not

yet come. The terms or forms of Being float as it were freely in the

air, and we go from one to another, or--to put it more correctly--one

passes into another. The terms in question are Is and Not: Become:

There is: Some and Other: Each: One: Many: and so on through the

terms of number to degree and numerical specificality. This Being is

immediate: i.e. it contains no reference binding it with anything

beyond itself, but stands forward baldly and nakedly, as if alone;

and, if hard pressed, it turns over into something else. It includes

the three stages of Quality, Quantity, and Measure. The ether of

'Is' presumes no substratum, or further connexion with anything: and

we only meet a series of points as we travel along the surface of

thought. To _name,_ to _number_, to _measure_, are the three grades

of our ordinary and natural thought: so simple, that one is scarcely

disposed to look upon them as grades of thought at all. And yet if

thought is self-specification, what more obvious forms of specifying

it are there than to name (so pointing it out, or qualifying it), to

number (so quantifying it, or stating its dimensions), and to measure

it? These are the three primary specificates by which we think,--the

three primary dimensions of thought. Thought, in so determining,

plays upon the surface, and has no sense of the interdependence of

its terms. And if we could imagine a natural state of consciousness

in which sensations had not yet hardened into permanent things, and

into connexions between things, we should have something like the

range of Immediate Being. Colours and sounds, a series of floating

qualities, pass before the eye and the ear: these colours and sounds

are in course of time counted: and then, by applying the numbers to

these qualities, we get the proportions or limits ascertained. When

this process in actual life,--the advance from the vague feelings

which tell us of sweet, cold, &c., by means of a definite enumeration

of their phenomena, to the rules guiding their operation,--is reduced

to its most abstract terms, we have the process of Being. It would

be the period when a distinction between things and their actions

or properties has not arisen. The demonstrative pronouns and the

numerals are among the linguistic expressions of Being in its several

stages. Perhaps too we may illustrate it by the so-called 'impersonal'

verb--which has hardly reached the stage of verb proper, having no

subject: or by the name which still fluctuates between the stage of

substantive or adjective.

The first sphere was that of Being directly confronting us, and using

the demonstrative pronouns first of all. The second is Relative or

Reflective Being: and in this we have to deal with the relative

pronouns. The surface of Being is now seen to exhibit a secondary

formation, to involve a sort of permanent standard in itself, and to

be essentially relative. The mere quality, when reduced to number, is

seen to be subjected to a certain measure, rule, sort, or standard:

and this reflex of itself always haunts it, modifying and determining

it. Thus instead of qualities, we begin to speak of the properties of

a thing: we have, as it were, two levels of Being, in intimate and

necessary connexion, where there was only one before. At first it was

but a mere surface-picture, one thing here and another there: a this

and a that; one, _now,_ and another, _then. This,_ it might be, was

round, and _that_ square: _now,_ it was bright, and _then,_ it was

dull: _here_ was a head, and _there_ was a limb. But the comparison of

quality with quantity, measuring one by the other, gave rise to the

conception of something permanent, a true nucleus amid the changes. The

fact, previously single, is now become double: the mere event is now a

phenomenon, a temporary and outward manifestation of something inner.

We now see each that _is,_ in the halo of what it _has been,_ or will

be: the passing modification in the light of the permanent type. But as

yet the permanent and the passing are separate, and only throw light

on each other: A explaining itself by B and B by A. We have apparently

two facts; neither of which can however stand by itself and therefore

refers us to the other. But to get a real rest in this incessant round

of mutual reference of one to another we must take a higher stand-point.

In this sphere of Relativity the terms expressive of things come in

pairs: such as Same and Different, Like and Unlike: True Being and Show

or Semblance: Cause and Effect: Substance and Accident: Matter and

Form: and the like. If we compare mere Being to the cell in its simple

state, we may say that in the second sphere of Logic a nucleus has been

formed,--that a distinction has sprung up between two elements, which

are still in closest interconnexion. We have penetrated behind the

seeming simplicity of the surface: and in fact discovered it to be mere

seeming in the light of the substratum, cause, or essence, upon which

it is now reflected. In immediate Being one category, or specificate,

or dimension of thought passes over into another, and then disappears:

but in mediated Being one category has a meaning only by its relation

to another,--only by its reflection on another,--only by the light

which another casts upon it. Thus a cause has no meaning except in

connexion with its effect: a force implies or postulates an exertion

of that force: an essence is constituted by the existence which issues

from it. Instead of 'is,' therefore, which denotes resting-upon-self,

or connexion-with-self, the verb of the second sphere is 'has,'

denoting reference, or connexion-with-something-else: e.g. the cause

_has_ an effect: the thing _has_ properties. Instead of numerals,

come the prepositions and pronouns of relation, such as which, same,

like, as, by, because. The only conjunction in the first stage or

Being was 'And,'--mere juxtaposition; and even that conjunction was

perhaps premature, and due to reflective thought, going beyond what was

immediately before it, and tracing out connexions with other things.

The first stage, as we have seen, treated of the terms of natural

thought present in the action of the senses: the second stage--that of

Essential Being--deals with scientific, reflective, or mediate thought.

What, why, are the questions: comparison and connexion the methods: the

establishment of relations of similarity, causation, and co-existence,

the purpose in this range of logical method. Its categories are those

most familiar to science in its reflective and comparative stage. It

is the peculiar home of what are known as Metaphysical subtleties. The

natural but delusive tendency of reasoning is to throw the emphasis

on one side of the relation, and to regard the other as accessary and

secondary. Contrasts between _essentia_ and _existentia: substantia_

and _modi_: cause and effect: real and apparent: constantly occur.

If the first branch of Logic was the sphere of simple Being in a point

or series of points, the second is that of difference and discordant

Being, broken up in itself. The progress in this second sphere--of

_Essentia_ or Relative being--consists in gradually overcoming the

antithesis and discrepancy between the two sides in it--the Permanent

and the Phenomenal. At first the stress rests upon the Permanent

and true Being which lies behind the seeming--upon the essence or

substratum in the background, on which the show of immediate Being has

been proved by the process in the first sphere really to rest. Then,

secondly, Existence comes to the front, and Appearances or Phenomena

are regarded as the only realities with which science can deal. And

yet even in this case we cannot but distinguish between matter and

form, between the phenomena and their laws, between force and its

exercises: and thus repeat the relativity, though both terms in it are

now on the whole transferred into the range of the Phenomenal world.

The third range of Essential Being is known as Actuality, where the

two elements in relation rise to the level of independent existences,

essences in phenomenal guise--bound together, and deriving their very

characteristics from that close union. Relativity or correlation is

now clearly apparent in actual form, and comprises the three heads of

Substantial Relation, Causal Relation, and Reciprocal Relation. In

this case while the two members of the relation are now indissolubly

linked together, they are no more submitted to each other than they

are independent. According to Reciprocity everything actual is at once

cause and effect: it is the meeting-point of relations: a whole with

independent elements in mutual interconnexion. Such a total is the

Notion.

This brings us to the third branch of Logic,--the theory of the

Notion, or Grasp of Thought.[2] The theory of Causality, with which

the second branch closed, continued to let the thought fall asunder

into two unequal halves--always however in relation or connexion with

each other. But in the present part of the Logic the two halves are

re-united, or in their difference their identity is also recognised.

Instead of a cause of a thing (which is separate from it in order), we

have a concept which is its principle of unity, its universal in which

it is individualised. Instead of incessant and endless Relativity,

we have Development. By development is meant self-specification, or

self-actualisation: the thing is what it becomes, or while it changes

it remains identical with itself. The Category or Development is the

category or method of philosophic or speculative science: just as

Being corresponded to natural thought, and Relativity or Reflection to

metaphysical and realistic science. According to the law of Development

diversity and unity both receive their due. Mere unity or Being

reappears now as Universality or Generality. Mere diversity, or the

relativity of essence, re-appears as Particularity, or the speciality

of details. And the union of the two is seen in the Individualised

notion or real object. In other words, the true thought which really

grasps and gets all round its object, which is a real whole, is a

Triplicity: it is first seen all as the ground or self-same, the

possibility--secondly, all as the existence in details, and difference,

the actuality or contingency--and thirdly, all as the self-same in

difference, and the possible in actuality. Every object in its full

reality is an innate movement; and to grasp it wholly we must apprehend

it as such a self-evolving and self-involving unity of elements, in

each of which however it is whole and entire. Thus the Notion embraces

the three elements or factors of universal, particular and individual.

These three elements first rise to independence and get their full

significance or explication in the syllogism, with its three terms

and judgments, exhibiting the various ways in which any two of these

elements in thought are brought into unity by means of the third. This

adequate form is a system or organic unity which contains in itself the

premisses of its conclusion or the means to its realisation,--which is

a process within itself, and when complete and self-supporting perforce

gives itself reality.

The Notion or _Begriff_ is where Hegel makes his special mark on

Logic. Schelling, even, following on Kant, had (like Schopenhauer

after him) lauded the merit of the Intuition at the expense of the

mere notion[3] and expressed himself surprised at Hegel's use of the

word. But what Hegel wants first to insist upon is that the Intuition

or Perception (_Anschauung_) is built upon the Notion--that it is

only because there is a universal principle in its details that the

individual reality of the percept is assured. That we can elicit a

notion from a perception is only possible because it is implicitly

dominated by a universal. Secondly, Hegel wishes to note (as elsewhere)

that the full adequate notion, the notion as self-explaining and

self-constituting, is all that is meant by the object. Thus the Notion

or Subject_--Causa Sui_--when it is fully realised in the plenitude

of its elements or differences,--when each element has scope of its

own, is the Object--the actual and individualised total of thought, or

syllogism in reality. This objective world or Object appears in three

forms. An Object is either a mechanical, a chemical, or a teleological

object. The terms mechanical and chemical are not to be understood in

the narrow sense of a machine or chemical compound. They are to be

taken in an analogical sense, just as J. S. Mill speaks of a chemical

or geometrical method of treating social problems. The object or

realised notion is mechanical, when the unification of the members in

the totality comes or seems to come from without, so that the whole

or universal they form is external and almost indifferent to the

particulars, and only arranges them. An object is chemical, when the

connexion or genesis of the compound from its factors is not evident:

when the elements are as it were lost, and only give rise to a fresh

particular. An object is teleological, when the universal is, though

not distinctly conceived as realised, still always as tending to be

realised by the particulars. And in each of these grades the object

comes more and more to be seen to be a self-enacting, self-legislating

being; more and more a due pendant to the subject-notion. Modern

science is a vehement opponent of teleology: and with justice, so

far as in teleology, means and end fall apart. But it is mistaken in

supposing itself to return to the mechanical point of view. On the

contrary its success is most generally secured by rising to the point

of view given by the Idea of Life, and by looking upon the objective

world as an Organism, that is, as the notion in objectivity, soul

indissolubly united with body. But even the Idea of Life, in which we

enter the third stage of the notion, is defective as a representation

of the truth of Objectivity: for body and soul must part. The

conception of an Organism or living being is too crude. Reality is no

doubt well described as alive: the Absolute well defined as Life. But

here again Life is taken in a higher than its sense of _mere_ Life:

it is life as intelligent and volitional energy. If the universe--the

Absolute--can be said to be living, it must be said also that it is

more than Living. Such a life--such existence--is what Aristotle has

called _θεωρία_ and ἐνέργεια of the highest in man. It is mental and

spiritual life. In its consummation it is the Idea--the absolute

Idea--the totality which is and is aware of itself,--the developed

unity of the Notion with Objectivity. This unity thus presented is

what lies implicit to our perception in Nature: and thus the Idea,

as developed in Logic, forms the prologue and presupposition to the

Philosophy of Nature.

[Footnote 1: Being (_das Seyn_) probably conveys much more to an

English reader than is here meant or wanted. It is Being, where the

distinction between essence and appearance has not yet emerged or been

thought of. If being = τὸ ὄν, then essence (_Wesen_) = _τὸ ὄντως_ ὄν,

the being which underlies and yet includes appearance. _Wesen_ has more

right to the substantival vocable of Being: _Seyn_ is little better

than an 'Is' or 'Be.'

In writers of Locke's time, 'Being seems to mean a reality, an actually

existing object, e.g. Clarke: 'There has existed from eternity some one

unchangeable and independent Being.' 'What the substance or _essence_

of that Being is, we have no idea.' 'Essence,' says Locke, 'may be

taken for the very being of anything, whereby it is what it is.' Of

course Aristotle long ago noted Being as one of the terms with variety

of implication; and his own fluctuation about _οὐσία_ is an obvious

illustration of this.

In the translation of the _Logic_, _Wesen_ is occasionally rendered by

Being (e. g. Supreme Being); _Seyn,_ by existence. _Seyn_ here means

so little that one can hardly find any word of sufficiently minimal

content for it.]

[Footnote 2: No doubt, as Dr. W. T. Harris remarks, _Notion_ (used

by Dr. Stirling) is a quite insignificant rendering of Hegel's

_Begriff_:--for which he proposes Self-activity. But, as he admits,

that is just Hegel's way: he coins brand-new the old terms, and forces

us, if we will follow him, to think full meaning into them.]

[Footnote 3: See vol. ii, Notes and Illustrations, p. 408.]

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE SEARCH FOR A FIRST PRINCIPLE.

If there be one thing which, more than another, distinguishes Modern

Philosophers from the Ancient Philosophy of Athens, it is the desire

to discover a First Principle of certainty, a handle by which they

may get hold of and set in due order the perplexed mass of reality.

They find themselves born to an inheritance of tradition, a mass of

belief and lore which overwhelms where it does not support. The long

watches of the Middle Ages had been a time of preparation--even if

the 'cerebration' had been somewhat unconscious. The mind had been

by discipline trained to freedom. As it worked amid the material and

tried to order it and defend it, the intellect grew to recognise its

lordship over the load of authority. Overt revolts indeed against

coercion by decrees and by canons of dogma had never been wanting even

in the quietest of the so-called 'ages of faith.' But it is not in the

loudest outcry or the most rampant dissent that progress shows its most

effective course. The 'catholic' and 'orthodox' tradition equally bears

witness to a movement to emancipation, to self-centred intelligence.

Such an emancipation however cannot be complete and self-realised

without a sharp and painful wrench at the moment of mental birth.

The great word of disruption, of self-assertion, of defiance to the

past and to the dominant, must be said: and, as human beings are

constituted, it will be said in a tone of acerbity for which neither

the revolutionist nor the reactionary are severally alone responsible.

Thus to hear the brave words and the bold defiance hurled out by

the thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one might

fancy they, like Archimedes, sought a supernal vantage-ground from

which they could move the world. Yet, unlike the material earth,

the intellectual globe is a burden we each carry with us,--which we

find upon us when--if ever--we begin to shake ourselves out of the

slothful unconsciousness of our merely vegetative life. For though

we all carry it, we do not all feel its weight. In some individuals

and in some ages there is so accurate a proportion between the inner

power and the outer pressure that the load of belief and custom is

but a well-fitting garb, almost a second nature. To others there

is a felt disproportion, a sense of superincumbent clothes and

uncongenial, unnatural trappings. Out of such struggles to be free,

grow, occasionally, philosophers, and reformers. To the former the

burden is the burden of the unintelligible: to the latter the burden of

the unbearable and intolerable. To the philosopher the removal of the

burden consists in such a re-adjustment of the intellectual world that

it shall be no longer a foreign thing, but bone of his bone and flesh

of his flesh. But, to re-adjust and to re-organise, one must stand

back from the objective: one must cast it forth, and look about for a

clue to an exit from the maze of confusion. The given and subsistent

is put on probation: not rejected, but for the moment declined: not

denied, but asked to present its credentials.[1] This is the ἐποχή

of the sceptical schools of later Greece; the invitation to doubt

addressed by Descartes to his own soul. It is the protest against that

vulgar precipitancy which in primitive and modern credulity is ready to

give itself away to any doctrine which has the voice and the garb of

outward authority. Or is it the assertion! of the royal and inalienable

sovereignty of the Subjectivity to be _certain_ of whatever claims to

be objective and _true_: the assertion that what is true must be seen

and experienced to be true. Or it is, in another way, the principle of

Socrates: that the beginning of knowledge, the first step in the way

of wisdom, is to know that you know nothing--to realise the absolute

supremacy of self-consciousness.

It is in short the same demand as Augustine's. There is indeed a wide

gulf of temperament and circumstances dividing the bishop of Hippo from

the mathematician Descartes and the rationalist Spinoza. But in the cry

for the knowledge of 'God and my Soul' as the first, the indispensable,

the sole knowledge: as the _one_ knowledge which binds the finite and

the infinite together,--the knowledge on which turns the truth of

science, and the reality of experience, the great thinkers of these

diverse ages are at one.[2] They turn their backs upon the external

that they may find rest in the truly internal, on the inner certainty,

which is not a mere subjective but a very objective also: not a mere

_anima mea,_ but in close unity therewith _Deus meus._ This is perhaps

more explicit in Spinoza, in some points, than in Descartes, and in

many respects more decisively put by Augustine than by either. But this

is what is really meant by the initial concentration of suspense: this

is what is sought when a Principle is sought. Nothing short of this

unity of subjective and objective in an Absolute--we may say--Ego, is a

principle.

But 'principles' like other terms are sometimes lightly taken; and can

be in the plural--just as in lower levels of religion and society there

can be gods many and lords many. Nor in a way wrongly. For, as has been

before pointed out, a principle is the unity of beginning and end: it

is only caught hold of by approaching from different directions: it

loses its life and power when cut off from the many organs by which it

distributes itself so as to grasp reality. If it be essentially one,

it is not a bare unit: it cannot, without injury, be reduced to utter

simplicity, and accepted in the shape of a single term. And yet this is

what almost inevitably happens to every so-called principle.

Like a _deus ex machina_, or a trick of the trade, it is applied to

unloose every knot, and to clear any difficulties that arise. But a

principle of this stamp possesses no intimate connexion or organic

solidarity with the theory which it helps to prop. It is always at

hand as a ready-made schema or heading, and can be attached to the

most incongruous orders of fact. Thus in the works of Aristotle, the

principle of 'End' or 'Activity' has sometimes seemed to be applied

to whatever subject comes forward, and like a hereditary official

vestment to suit all its wearers equally well or equally ill. What is

true 'on the whole' is not always true 'of each': the _καθόλον_ never

quite equals the _καθ' ἔκαστον._ The modern principle of Utility is

equally flexible in its application to the problems of moral and social

life. It costs no trouble to pronounce the magic word, and even 'such

as are of weaker capacity' may make something out of such a formula.

But an abstract formula, which is equally applicable to everything,

is not particularly applicable to anything. While it seems to save

trouble, and is so plain as to be almost tautological (as when the

worth of a thing or act is explained to mean its utility), it really

suggests fresh questions in every case, and multiplies the difficulty.

Having an outward adaptability to every kind of fact, the principle

has no true sympathy with any: it becomes a mere form, which we use as

we do a measuring-rod, moving it along from one thing to another. We

are always reverting to first principles as our last principles also.

Even Aristotle, when he remarked that an object had to be criticised

from its own principles and not from general formulae, saw through the

fallacy of this style of argument.

This is like asking for bread and getting a stone. The philosopher,

who ought to take us through the shut chambers of the world, merely

hands us a key at the gate, telling us that it will unlock every door,

and then the insides will speak for themselves. But we would have our

philosopher do a little more than this. Not being ourselves omniscient,

we should be glad of a guide-book at the least, and perhaps even of

the services of an interpreter to explain some peculiarities, some

startling phenomena, and sights even more unpleasant than those which

appalled the spouse of the notorious Bluebeard. Or, dropping metaphor,

we wish the formula to be applied systematically and thoroughly.

When that is done the formula loses its abstractness; it gains those

necessary amplifications and qualifications, as we call them, without

which no theory explains much or gives much information. And thus,

instead of fancying that our initial formula contains the truth in a

nutshell, we shall find that it is only one step to be taken on the

way to truth, and that its narrow statement sinks more and more into

insignificance, as its amplified theory gains in significance.

But an adequate principle must have other qualities.[3] What has been

said up to this point, only amounts to a condition, that our principle

must cease to be abstract and formal, and must become concrete and

real. What we want, it may be said, is a Beginning. But a beginning is

not exactly the same thing as a principle: a beginning is to a large

extent a matter of choice and convenience,--a matter depending on the

state and prospects of the beginner; and the main point is not where we

should begin, but that we should be thorough in our treatment. It is

otherwise, however, in the present case. For the skill of the expositor

simply lies in the exactitude with which he reproduces the spontaneous

movement of growth in his object. His art is _celare artem:_ to

retire, as it were, into the background, and seem to leave the object

to expound itself. In a dramatic work it is no doubt the hand of the

dramatist that seems to set the whole of the characters in motion, that

weaves destinies and snips the thread of life. And yet in a perfect

work of dramatic art everything must seem to flow on by a necessity of

character, a consecution of inner fate. The true artist dare not act or

allow the _deus ex machina._ So every genuine work of science--which

is more than a compilation, a school-book, a bundle of notes, and

contributions toward a subject--must be a self-determined unity--a

self-justifying scheme in which the personality of the worker enters

into and is absorbed in the system of his work.

If this is generally true, it is above all a canon to rule the

logician. He at least must follow the Logos and the Logos alone. His

theme must be a law unto itself: all its movements must be freely

and nobly objective. For his subject-matter is at least an organism,

and develops according to an inward law. But it is even more than an

organism: it must not merely develop, as organisms do,--not merely

live and grow--but _know_ that it develops and as it were _will_ its

own development--and in that harmony of being, willing, and knowing,

be essentially one. In Hegelian language it must not merely be

implicit_--an sich_ or _für uns_--the subject of a change which it

undergoes and feels, but without definitely realising,--the subject

of a change which we (the historians) perceive. It must also be _für

sich_: aware of its modifications, an agent in bringing them about:

and yet withal in so looking forth and willing, be self-possessed, and

self-enjoying.

The principle of Hegelianism is the principle of Development, the

principle of the Notion--but a Notion which is objective as well as

subjective--the Idea. That principle then determines the beginning

of Logic. We must know the whole course of growth and history before

we can say where is the true commencement. It must be that out of

which the end can obviously and spontaneously issue. In a sense, it

must implicitly contain the end. It must show us the very beginning

of thought, before it has yet come to the full consciousness of

itself,--when the truth of what it is still lurks in the background and

has to be developed. We must see thought in its first and fundamental

calling. As the biologist, when he describes the structure of a plant,

rests upon the assumption of a previous development of parts, in an

existing plant, which has resulted in a seed,--but begins with the seed

from which the plant is derived: so the logician must begin with a

point which in a way presupposes the system to which it leads. But in

its beginning this presupposition is not apparent: and in fact, the

presupposition will only appear when the development of the system

is complete. The first step in a process, just because it is a step,

may be said to presuppose the completed process. Thus the beginning

of Logic presumes the fullest realisation of Mind, as the beginning

of botany can only be told by one who knows the whole story of the

plant. It is from this circumstance that Hegel describes philosophy as

a circle rounded in itself, where the end meets with the beginning, or

says that philosophy has to grasp its original grasp or conceive its

concept. In other words, it is not till we reach the conclusion that

we see, in the light thus shed upon the beginning, what that beginning

really was. From the general analogy of the sciences we should not

expect that the beginning of thought would be full-grown thought, or

indeed seem to the undiscerning eye to be thought at all. In many

cases, the embryonic organism shows but little similarity to the adult,

and occasionally a violent abruptness seems, on cursory glance, to

mark off one stage of a creation's growth from the next. Who that knew

not the result could in the seed prefigure to himself the tree? The

beginning is not usually identifiable with the final issue, except by

some effort to trace the process of connexion. The object of science

only appears in its truth when the science has done its work.

The beginning of philosophy must hold a germ of development, however

dead and motionless it may seem. But it must also to some extent

be a result,--the result of the development or concentration of

consciousness;--of the other forms of which it is the hypothetical

foundation, or, of which it is (otherwise viewed) the first

appearance. The variety of imaginative conception, and the chaos

of sense, must vanish in a point, by an act of abstraction, which

leaves out all the variety and the chaos,--or rather by an act

of distillation, which draws out of them their real essence and

concentrated virtue. This variety, when thoroughly examined and tested,

shrivels up into a point:--it only _is._ Everything definite as we call

it, the endless repetitions of existence, have disappeared, and have

left only the energy of concentration, the unitary point of Being.

We may describe the process in two ways. We may say that we have left

out of sight all existing differences,--that we have stripped off

every vestige of empirical conceptions, and left a residue of pure

thought. The thought is pure, perhaps, but it is not entire. In this

way of describing it, pure thought is the most abstract thought,--the

last outcome of those operations which have divested our conceptions

of everything real and concrete about them. But thus to speak of the

process as Abstraction would be to express half of the truth only:

and would really leave us a mere zero, or gulf of vacuity. In the

beginning there would then be nothing--the mere annihilation of all

possible and actual existence. And it is certainly true that in the

beginning there can be nothing.--On the other hand, and secondly, there

is affirmation as well as negation involved in the ultimate action

by which sense and imagination pass into thought. They are not left

behind, and the emptiness only retained: they are carried into their

primary consequence, or into their proximate truth. They are reduced

to their simplest equivalent or their lowest term in the vocabulary

of thought: which is Being. The process which creates the initial

point of pure thought is at once an abstraction from everything, and a

concentration upon itself in a point:-- which point, accordingly, is

a unity or inter-penetration of positive and negative. This absolute

self-concentration into a point is the primary step by which Mind

comes to know itself,--the first step in the Absolute's process of

self-cognition--that process which it is the purpose of Logic to trace,

so far as it is conducted in the range of mere thought.

The bare point of Being and nothing more is the beginning in the

process of the Absolute's self-cognition: it is, in other words, our

first and rudimentary apprehension of reality,--the narrow edge by

which we come in contact with the universe of Reason. For these are two

aspects of the same. The process of the self-cognition or manifestation

of the Absolute Idea is the very process by which philosophers (not

philosophers only) have built up the edifice of thought. What the

one statement views from the universal side or the totality, the

other views in connexion with the several achievements of individual

thinkers. Of course the evolution of the system of thought, as it

is brought about by individuals, leaves plenty of room for the play

of what is known as Chance. The Natural History of Thought or the

History of Philosophers has to regard the action of national character

upon individual minds, and the reciprocal action of these minds upon

one another. The History of Organic Nature similarly presents the

dependence of the species upon their surroundings, and of one species

upon another in the medium of its conditions. Gradually Physical

Science reduces these conditions to their universal forms, and may

try to exhibit the evolution of the animal through its species in all

grades of development. So in the Science of the development of this

Idea the accidents, as we may call them, disappear: and the temporary

and local questions, which once engrossed the deepest attention, fade

away into generalised forms of universal application. Philosophy, as

it historically presents itself in the world, is not an accidental

production, or dependent on the arbitrary choice of men. The accident,

if such there be, is that these particular men should have been the

philosophers, and not that such should have been their philosophy.

They were, according to their several capacity for utterance, only

the mouth-pieces of the Spirit of the Times,--of the absolute mind

under the superficial limitations of their period. They saw the

Idea of their world more clearly and distinctly than other men; and

therein lies their title to fame: but really their words were only

a reflex,--an almost involuntary and necessary movement, due to the

pressure of the cosmical reason. The great philosophers are, like all

men in all estates, and according to their measure, the ministers of

the Truth,--apostles charged to bring about that consummation of the

times in which reality is more fully apprehended and more adequately

estimated. Necessity is laid upon them to consecrate themselves to the

service of the Idea, and to devote their lives to the noble but austere

work of speculation--the work which seeks _sine ira et studio_ to

reconstruct that city of God which is the permanent, if it often be the

hidden, foundation of human life.

[Footnote 1: Cf. p. 90.]

[Footnote 2: Augustin. _Soliloq._ i. 7. 'Deum et animam scire cupio.

Nihilne plus? Nihil omnino.']

[Footnote 3: 'A Principle,' says Herbart (_Psychologie als

Wissenschaft,_ Einl.) 'should have the double property of having

originally a certainty of its own, and of generating other certainty.

The way and manner in which the second comes about is the Method.']

CHAPTER XXX.

THE LOGIC OF DESCRIPTION: NATURAL REALISM: BEING.