It was formerly a matter of some surprise to me that there should be
so many Hegelians in England, and in such places of influence. I could
imagine how the system might have taken root in circles where the
classic tradition was absent or enfeebled--in America, in Scotland,
among the Dissenters or Jews in England itself; but how could Oxford
and Cambridge fail to see in that system the trail of the serpent? How
could they mistake it for a Christian or for a spiritual philosophy? It
is indeed, in form, an encyclopaedic system, and in that sense suitable
to universities; and it deifies knowledge such as an encyclopaedia can
give, turning it into the sum total of reality, so that it flatters
the self-sufficiency of pedants, or that of any reflective mind. But
in Oxford and Cambridge knowledge is not everything; they are more and
less than universities; the learning they cultivate is selective and
pursued in the service of aristocratic liberty. I should not expect
them to care much for a philosophy that was not poetic and devout. I
sometimes fancy how the genuine Oxonians must have smiled to hear T.
H. Green, in the early days of transcendentalism, talking about his
spiritual principle in nature. By spiritual he meant mind-made; he
thought the world, remaining just as it is, could suddenly be proved to
be spiritual if you could show that a mental synthesis was requisite
to hold it together. But what possible advantage is it to the world to
be held together by a mental synthesis, rather than by space or time
or the truth of its constitution? A synthesis of worthless facts does
not render them severally better, nor itself a good. A spirit whose
essential function was to create relations would be merely a generative
principle, as the spider is to its web; it would be no better than its
work, unless perhaps it was spiritual enough to grow weary of that vain
labour. Spiritual, for those who retain the language of Christendom,
signifies free from the world and from the flesh, and addressed to the
eternal and to the beautiful.
Everything, however, has its explanation, and in the matter of English
Hegelism I think I begin to see it. In the first place, I was rashly
identifying England with a figment of my dreams, with which I was
in love: I saw in my mind's eye a manly and single-minded England,
free, candid, poetical, akin to feudal France, beauty-loving like
old Italy, the Benjamin of the Roman family of nations, adding to
the dignity and disinterestedness of the Castilian character only a
certain blond charm, a certain infusion of northern purity, and of
sympathy with the wild and rural voices of nature. In this England,
in which there was something Spartan and archaically Greek, the men
were like Hippolytus and the women like Antigone. Naturally it was
unintelligible to me that the system of Hegel should take root in such
a nation. Persons with a ripe moral tradition are not attracted by
sophistry. No argument, however specious, will convince them that the
experience of man on earth makes up the whole universe, or the chief
part of it; much less will they allow fortune, under the pompous name
of evolution, to dictate to them their moral allegiance. The chief
force of the Hegelian system for those who are not metaphysicians lies
in the criterion of progress which it imposes. This criterion is not
beauty in art, nor truth in philosophy, nor justice in society, nor
happiness in the individual life: the criterion is simply the direction
which the actual movement happens to be taking. Hegel endeavours to
show in what way forms are inevitably passing into one another. Thus
his ethics begs defence of history, and his history calls for aid on
metaphysics. And what metaphysics? A logic of moral fashions. Now it
seemed to me axiomatic that eager co-operation with whatever is going
on, or is bound to win, would be repulsive to a man of honour. Nor
could I conceive a true Englishman taking kindly even to the grand side
of this system, which to me personally is rather attractive, I mean
to its satirical elevation. The English mind is tender and temperate:
it deprecates scorn. But Hegel, in his scathing moods, is comparable
to Heraclitus; he mocks every opinion with an opinion which refutes
it, and every life with another life which kills it. He has the wisdom
of the serpent; but unlike Heraclitus, whose fabled tears were warm,
he has the heart of the serpent too. He despises finitude because it
is weak, as if an infinity of pervasive weakness were strong, or a
perpetual flux a victory for anything. Laughing, I can't help thinking,
up his sleeve, he suggests that this flux itself is a victory for the
spirit, meaning by spirit the law by which he supposes that this flux
is controlled. But this is sheer mockery: the only moral victory is
that achieved, under favourable conditions, by some living spirit,
glad to be expressed or to have been expressed in some perfect form.
The finite only is good: the infinite tides are worth exactly what
they cast up. There is a bitter idolatry of fate in this system which
might seem splendid to a barbarian; but how, I asked myself, can it be
anything but horrible to a cultivated conscience, or to a pupil of the
Greeks?
In the real England the character I dreamt of exists, but very much
mixed, and overbalanced by its contrary. Many have the minds of true
gentlemen, poetically detached from fortune, and seeing in temporal
things only their eternal beauties. Yet if this type of English
character had been general, England could never have become Puritan,
nor bred so many prosperous merchants and manufacturers, nor sent such
shoals of emigrants to the colonies; it would hardly have revelled
as it does in political debates and elections, and in societies for
the prevention and promotion of everything. In the real England there
is a strong if not dominant admixture of worldliness. How ponderous
these Lord Mayors, these pillars of chapels, these bishops, these
politicians, these solemn snobs! How tight-shut, how moralistic, how
overbearing these intellectuals with a mission! All these important
people are eaten up with zeal, and given over to rearranging the world,
and yet without the least idea of what they would change it into in the
end, or to what purpose. Being so much in earnest, they are convinced
that they must be living on the highest principles: what, then, is more
intelligible than that they should welcome a philosophy which assures
them that such is the case? They are well pleased to hear, on the
highest metaphysical authority, that the first duty of a rich man is to
grow richer, and of a settled man to redouble in loyalty to his wife,
his community, his party, and his business. The Protestant reformers
told them so formerly in biblical language; the Protestant philosophers
tell them so now in the language of Hegel.
Besides, on its technical side, the Hegelian system has a great
strength, and was most apposite in the predicament in which, fifty
years ago, philosophy found itself in England. It supplied three
illusions which idealism sadly needed if it was to become orthodox and
popular: the illusions of profundity, of comprehensiveness, and of
finality. It was a philosophy of progress--another claim to popularity
in the nineteenth century--not only progress in the world at large,
but especially in philosophy itself; and a philosophy of progress
cannot ask us to go back, to cry _peccavi_, and reconsider the false
assumptions on which we may have been reasoning for two hundred or for
two thousand years. It must accept these assumptions and go on building
upon them, always a higher and a higher structure. Now the principal
assumption of British philosophy, on which German philosophy itself
rests, was that nothing can be experienced except experience itself,
and nothing known except knowledge. But the Germans analysed far more
accurately than the British had formerly done what the notions of
experience and knowledge contain. They demonstrated the unity of glance
that is essential to it, and thus refuted (without of course removing)
the successive and episodic character of experience, as the honest
but unwary empiricists had conceived it. Hume and Mill had remained
naturalists in regard to the distribution of those volatile ideas
to which they pretended to reduce the world. John Stuart Mill had a
deeper and a sweeter mind than his critics; there was something in him
akin to Wordsworth or to Matthew Arnold; but his inherited principles
were treacherous, and opened the door to just such a concentration
of egotism as the Hegelians brought about. Moreover, Hume and Mill
had seemed depressing; they perplexed without filling the mind; they
made everything that is most familiar and interesting seem strangely
hypothetical; whereas in Hegel the pageant of nature and history
appeared to be re-formed and to march round and round the stage of the
ego under the strongest light to the loudest music. There was a sort of
deafening optimism about it; and not only was a convenient school-book
universe offered you, warranted complete, but all previous philosophies
were succinctly described, refuted, and linked together, in a manner
most convenient for tutorial purposes. Of course, the true character
and eternal plausibility of each great system were falsified in such
a survey; each was attached artificially to what happened to precede
and to follow it in time, or in the knowledge of the historian; as if
history were a single chain of events, and its march dialectical--a
fiction which Hegel did not blush to maintain. An inner instability was
thus attributed to each view which came only from the slippery mind
of the critic touring amongst them, without the least intention of
finding anywhere a home in which to rest. Hegel was not looking for the
truth--why dream of truth when you possess learning?--he was writing
an apology for opinion. He enjoyed understanding and imagining things
plausibly, and had a great intelligence to pour into his constructions;
but this very heat of thought fused everything into the mould of his
method, and he gave out that he had understood every system much better
than those who believed in it, and had been carried by its inner
contradictions (which its adepts never saw) to the next convenient
position in the development of human fancy, and of his own lectures.
Abstraction, such as withdrawal of the mind from worldly affairs, is
condemned by this philosophy: you must glut the brain and heart with
everything that exists. An even worse abstraction, for a philosopher,
is to detach the object from the subject, and believe it to exist
independently. But what is abstraction? Can attention ever render
things more discrete than they are in their own nature? Suppose I
abstract a coin from another man's pocket: it is easily proved by
Hegel's logic that such an abstraction is a mere appearance. Coins
cannot exist as coins except as pocketed and owned; at the same time
they imply an essential tendency to pass into the pockets of other
men: for a coin that could not issue from the pocket would be a coin
in name only, and not in function. When it actually passes from one
man's pocket into another's, this circumstance, far from justifying us
in thinking the coin a separable thing, shows that all men's pockets
(when not empty and therefore, in function, not pockets at all) are
intrinsically related and, in a higher sense, one and the same purse.
Therefore, we may conclude, it was not the sly transference of the coin
from my neighbour's pocket into mine that was the wrongful abstraction,
but only the false supposition that if the coin was his it was not,
by right of eminent domain, mine also. A man, in so far as he is the
possessor of coins, is simply a pocket, and all pockets, in so far as
there is transferable coin, in them, are one pocket together. In this
way we avoid false abstraction by proving that everything is abstract.
Nor is this all; for strange as it may seem, Hegel appeals also to one
type of religious people, and seems to them to lift religious faith
triumphantly above all possible assaults of fact or of science. Are
not all facts mere ideas? And must not all ideas be bred in the mind
according to its own free principles of life and effort? Is not all
this semblance of externality in things a blessed foil to spiritual
activity? Does not this universal mutation pay loud homage to eternal
law? Things go by threes: that is the reason why they exist and why
they move, and the sovereign good to be attained by their motion. If
every truth turns out to be a lie, every lie is a part of some higher
truth; if everything becomes unreal, because it passes into something
else, this other thing inherits its reality; and if we look at things
as a whole instead of _seriatim_, and spread out our moving film into a
panorama, we perceive that everything has implied everything else from
the beginning, and formed a part of it; So that only from the point
of view of ignorance is anything earlier, or better, or truer than
anything else. Here, in the All, we have rest from our labours.
In this way even the slaves of the world at last learn to overcome the
world; but it is too late. This All, even if it were open to human
survey, would have no value: it defeats each of its constituent lives
and is itself responsive to no living desire. The indistinction which
the vague idea of it produces in the mind may be soothing to the weary;
but better than mystical relief at the end would have been moral
freedom in the beginning. That a different life will supersede mine is
nothing against my happiness; that time is swallowing me up is nothing
against my appropriate eternity. How vain the crabbed hand of the miser
stringing his pearls and never looking at them, counting the drops
that trickle into his cup and never emptying it, never feeling the
intoxication of living now, of telling the truth frankly, and of being
happy here I If the devil laughs at me because I am mortal, I laugh at
him for imagining that death can trouble me, or any other free spirit,
so long as I live, or after I am dead.
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