THE LOGIC OF HEGEL

WALLACE

Bonbon

HENRY FROWDE

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE

AMEN CORNER, E.G.

MACMILLAN & Co., 66 FIFTH AVENUE

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PROLEGOMENA

TO THE STUDY OF

HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY

AND

ESPECIALLY OF HIS LOGIC

BY

WILLIAM WALLACE, M.A., LL.D.

FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE
AND WHYTE'S PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND AUGMENTED

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1894

I 4

3

S \JO i 2-

PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

BY HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

IN REMEMBRANCE OF

B. JOWETT

LATE REGIUS PROFESSOR OF GREEK
AND

MASTER OF BALLIOL COLLEGE
OXFORD

PREFACE

THE present volume of Prolegomena completes the
second edition of my LOGIC OF HEGEL which originally
appeared in 1874. The translation, which was issued
as a separate volume in the autumn of 1892, had been
subjected to revision throughout : such faults as I could
detect had been amended, and many changes made in
the form of expression with the hope of rendering the
interpretation clearer and more adequate. But, with
a subject so abstruse and complicated as Hegel's Logic,
and a style so abrupt and condensed as that adopted
in his Encyclopaedia, a satisfactory translation can
hardly fall within the range of possibilities. Only
the enthusiasm of youth could have thrown itself
upon such an enterprise; and later years have but
to do what they may to fulfil the obligations of a
task whose difficulties have come to seem nearly in
superable. The translation volume was introduced by
a sketch of the growth of the Encyclopaedia through
the three editions published in its author's lifetime :
and an appendix of notes supplied some literary and
historical elucidations of the text, with quotations
bearing on the philosophical development between
Kant and Hegel.

viii PREFACE.

The Prolegomena, which have grown to more than
twice their original extent, are two-thirds of them new
matter. The lapse of twenty years could not but
involve a change in the writer's attitude, at least in
details, towards both facts and problems. The general
purpose of the work, however, still remains the same,
to supply an introduction to the study of Hegel,
especially his Logic, and to philosophy in general.
But, in the work of altering and inserting, I can
hardly imagine that I have succeeded in adjusting
the additions to the older work with that artful junc
ture which would simulate the continuity of organic
growth. To perform that feat would require a master
who surveyed from an imperial outlook the whole
system of Hegelianism in its history and meaning ;
and I at least do not profess such a mastery. Prob
ably therefore a critical review will discern inequalities
in the ground, and even discrepancies in the statement,
of the several chapters. To remove these strains of
inconsistency would in any case have been a work of
time and trouble : and, after all, mere differences in
depth or breadth of view may have their uses. The
writer cannot always compel the reader to understand
him, as he himself has not always the same faculty
to penetrate and comprehend the problems he deals
with. In these arduous paths of research it may well
happen that the clearest and truest perceptions are
not always those which communicate themselves with
fullest persuasion and gift of insight. Schopenhauer
has somewhere compared the structure of his philo
sophical work to the hundred-gated Thebes : so many,
he says, are the points of access it offers for the

PREFACE. IX

pilgrims after truth to reach its central dogma. So — if
one may parallel little things with his adventurous
quest— even the less speculative chapters, and the less
consecutive discourse, of these Prolegomena may prove
helpful to some individual mood or phase of mind.
If — as I suspect — the Second Book should elicit the
complaint that the reader has been kept wandering
too long and too deviously in the Porches of Philosophy,
I will hope that sometimes in the course of these
rovings he may come across a wicket-gate where he
can enter, and — which is the main thing — gather truth
fresh and fruitful for himself.

Fourteen chapters, viz. II, XXIV, and the group
from VII to XVIII inclusive, are in this edition almost
entirely new. Three chapters of the first edition,
numbered XIX, XXII, XXIII, have been dropped.
For the rest, Chaps. III-VI in the present cor
respond to Chaps. II-V in the first edition : Chap.
XIX to parts of VII, VIII: Chaps. XX-XXIII to
Chaps. IX-XII : Chaps. XXV-XXX to Chaps. XIII-
XVIII: and Chaps. XXXI, XXXII to Chaps. XX,
XXI. But some of those nominally retained have
been largely rewritten.

The new chapters present, amongst other things, a
synopsis of the progress of thought in Germany during
the half-century which is bisected by the year 1800,
with some indication of the general conditions of the
intellectual world, and with some reference to the inter
connexion of speculation and actuality. Jacobi and
Herder, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling have been especi
ally brought under succinct review. In the first edition
I did Kant less than justice. I have now, so far as my

X PREFACE.

limits allowed, tried to rectify the impression; and
even more perhaps, by a clear palinode, to tender
my apology for the meagre and somewhat inapprecia-
tive notice I gave to the great names of Fichte and
Schelling. For like reasons, and from a growing per
ception how much post-Kantian thought owed to the
pre-Kantian thinkers, Spinoza and Leibniz have been
partly brought within my range. If, furthermore, I
may seem to have transgressed the due amount of
allusions and comparisons drawn from Plato and
Aristotle, Bacon and Mill, the excuse must be sought
in that fixture of philosophical horizon which can
hardly but creep on after a quarter of a century spent
in teaching philosophy under the customs and ordi
nances of the Oxford School of Classical Philology.

It would be to mistake the scope of this survey to
seek in it a history of the philosophers of the period
I have named. They have been presented, not in
and for themselves, but as momenta or constituent
factors in producing Hegel's conceptioji__of thp aim
and method of philosophy. To do this it was neces
sary to lay stress on their inner purport and implica
tions : to treat the individual thinker in subordination
to the general movement of ideas : to give, as far as
was possible, a constructive conception of them rather
than an analysis and chronicle. .Yet as the picture
had to be done, so to say, with a few vigorous touches,
and made characteristic rather than descriptive, it can
not have that fairness and completeness which only
patient study of every feature and untiring experiment
in reconstruction can enable even the artist to produce.
I may have seemed to confine the environment too

PREFACE. XI

exclusively to continental thinkers : but this is not,
I think, due to any anti-patriotic bias. English (by
which term, I may explain to my countrymen, I mean
English-writing) thought, if it has its own intrinsic
value, has after all been only an occasional influence,
of suggestion and modification, in Germany. It is not
therefore an integral portion of my theme. Even in
Kant's case, too much may be made of the stimulus
he received from Hume.

Even twenty years ago, my translation could hardly
be described literally as a voice crying in the wilder
ness. But since that time there has been a considerable
out-put of history, translation, and criticism referring
to the great age of German philosophy, and a compara
tively numerous group of writers, more or less familiar
with the aims and principles of that period, have treated
various parts of philosophy with notable independence
and originality. To these writers it has sometimes
been found convenient to give the title of Neo-
Kantians, or Neo- Hegelians. The prefix suggests
that they do not in all points reproduce the ideal or
the caricature which vulgar tradition fancied, and perhaps
still fancies, to be implied in German 'transcendentalism.'
And that for the good reason that the springs of the
movement lie in the natural and national revulsion of
English habits of mind. Slowly, but at length, the
storms of the great European revolution found their
way to our intellectual world, and shook church and
state, society and literature. The homeless spirit of
the age had to reconsider the task of rebuilding its
house of life. It may have been that some of the
seekers, in the fervour of a first impression, spoke

Xll PREFACE.

unadvisedly, as if salvation could and would come to
English philosophy only by Kant and Hegel. Yet,
there was a real foundation for the belief that the
insularity — however necessary in its season, and how
ever admirable in some of its results — which had
secluded and narrowed the British mind since the
middle of the eighteenth century, needed something
deeper and stronger than French 'ideology' to bring
it abreast of the requirements of the age. Whatever
may be the drawbacks of transcendentalism, they are
virtues when set beside the vulgar ideals of enlighten
ment by superficialisation. Mill has well pointed out
how the spirit of Coleridge was for the higher intel
lectual life a needful complement to the spirit of
Bentham. Yet the spirit of Coleridge had but caught
some of the side-lights and romantic illuminations : it
had not dared to face the central sun either in litera
ture or philosophy. The scholar who has given us
excellent versions of Fichte's lighter works, those who
have translated and expounded Kant, and the great
author who opened German literature to the British
public, have brought us nearer the higher teaching
of Germany. In Germany itself it has always been
the possession only of the few. Even at the height
of the classical period there were litterateurs who
vended thousands of their books for Goethe's hun
dreds, and the great philosophers had ten opponents
to one follower even amongst the teachers of their day.
Yet Goethe and not Kotzebue gave the permanent law
to literature; Hegel, and not Krug or Fries, has
influenced philosophy. To have had the resolution
to learn in this school is the merit of 'Neo-Hegelianism.'

PREFACE. xiii

It has probably not found Kant free from puzzles and
contradictions, or Hegel always intelligible. But the
example of the Germans has served to widen and
deepen our ideas of philosophy: to make us think
more highly of its function, and to realise that it is
essentially science, and the science of supreme reality.
And it has at least familiarised many with the heresy
that dilettantism and occasional fits of speculativeness
are worth as little in philosophy as elsewhere. To have
striven for dignity in its scope, and scientific security
in its method, is something. If the Neo-Hegelian has
not given philosophy a settled language, it may be
urged that a philosophical language cannot be created
by the easy device of inventing a few Hellenistic-
seeming vocables.

I could have wished to make these volumes a
worthier contribution to the work whereby these and
other writers have recently enriched our island philo
sophy. Not least because of the honoured name
I have ventured to write on the dedication-page. If,
as Epicurus said, we should above all be grateful to
the past, the first meed is from the scholar due to the
teachers of earlier years, and not least those who have
now entered into their rest. I do not forget what I,
and others, owed to T. H. Green, my predecessor in
the Chair of Moral Philosophy ; that example of high-
souled devotion to truth, and of earnest and intrepid
thinking on the deep things of eternity. But at this
season the memory of my Oxford tutor and friend is
naturally most prominent. The late Master of Balliol
College was more than a mere scholar or a mere
philosopher. He seemed so idealist and yet so prac-

xiv PREFACE.

tical : so realist and yet so full of high ideals : so
delicately kind and yet so severely reasonable. You
felt he saw life more steadily and saw it more whole
than others : as one reality in which religion and
philosophy, art and business, the sciences and theo
logy, were severally but elements and aspects. To the
amateurs of novelty, to the slaves of specialisation, to the
devotees of any narrow way, such largeness might, with
the impatience natural to limited minds, have seemed
indifference. So must appear those who on higher
planes hear all the parts in the harmony of humanity,
and with the justice of a wise love maintain an intel
lectual Sophrosyne. On his pupils this secret power
of an other-world serenity laid an irresistible spell,
and bore in upon them the conviction that beyond
scholarship and logic there was the fuller truth of life
and the all-embracing duty of doing their best to fulfil
the amplest requirements of their place.

In earlier days Jowett had been keenly interested in
German philosophy, and had made a version (most of
which was still extant in 1868) of the Logic I have
translated. But Greek literature, and above all Plato,
drew him to more congenial fields. It was on his
suggestion, — or shall I say injunction ?— at that date,
that the work I had casually begun was some years
later prosecuted to completion. It was his words,
again, two years ago, that bade me spare no labour
in the work of revision.

OXFORD,
December, 1893.

FROM THE PREFACE TO THE
FIRST EDITION

THE 'Logic of Hegel' is a name which may be
given to two separate books. One of these is the
'Science of Logic' (Wissenschaft der Logik), first
published in three volumes (1812-1816), while its
author was schoolmaster at Nuremberg. A second
edition was on its way, when Hegel was suddenly cut
off, after revising the first volume only. In the ' Secret
of Hegel/ the earlier part of this Logic has been
translated by Dr. Hutchison Stirling, with whose
name German philosophy is chiefly associated in this
country.

The other Logic, of which the present work is a
translation, forms the First Part in the ' Encyclopaedia
of the Philosophical Sciences/ The first edition of
the Encyclopaedia appeared at Heidelberg in 1817 ;
the second in 1827; and the third in 1830. It is
well to bear in mind that these dates take us back
forty or fifty years, to a time when modern science
and Inductive Logic had yet to win their laurels, and
when the world was in many ways different from what
it is now. The earliest edition of the Encyclopaedia
contained the pith of the system. The subsequent
editions brought some new materials, mainly intended
to smooth over and explain the transitions between
the various sections, and to answer the objections of

xvi FROM THE PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION".

critics. The work contained a synopsis of philosophy
in the form of paragraphs, and was to be supplemented
by the viva voce remarks of the lecturer.

The present volume is translated from the edition
of 1843, forming the Sixth Volume in Hegel's Collected
Works. It consists of two nearly equal portions. One
half, here printed in more open type, contains Hegel's
Encyclopaedia, with all the author's own additions.
The first paragraph under each number marks the
earliest and simplest statement of the first edition.
The other half, here printed in closer type, is made up
of the notes taken in lecture by the editor (Henning)
and by Professors Hotho and Michelet. These notes
for the most part connect the several sections, rather
than explain their statements. Their genuineness is
vouched for by their being almost verbally the same
with other parts of Hegel's own writings.

The translation has tried to keep as closely as
possible to the meaning, without always adhering very
rigorously to the words of the original. It is, however,
much more literal in the later and systematic part,
than in the earlier chapters.

The Prolegomena which precede the translation have
not been given in the hope or with the intention of
expounding the Hegelian system. They merely seek
to remove certain obstacles, and to render Hegel less
tantalizingly hard to those who approach him for the
first time. How far they will accomplish this, remains
to be seen.

OXFORD,
September, 1873.

CONTENTS

BOOK I.
OUTLOOKS AND APPROACHES TO HEGEL.

CHAPTER I. PAGE

WHY HEGEL is HARD TO UNDERSTAND ..... 3

CHAPTER II.
WHY TRANSLATE HEGEL? 14

CHAPTER III.
ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY AND HEGEL . 21

CHAPTER IV.
HEGEL AND THEOLOGY 30

CHAPTER V.
PSEUDO- IDEALISM: JACOBI 37

CHAPTER VI.
THE SCIENCES AND PHILOSOPHY 57

CHAPTER VII.
ANTICIPATORY SKETCH OF THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY . 72

CHAPTER VIII.
THE SCEPTICAL DOUBT : HUME 88

CHAPTER IX.

THE ATTEMPT AT A CRITICAL SOLUTION : KANT ... 98

b

xviii CONTENTS.

CHAPTER X.

PAGE

THE CRITICAL SOLUTION (continued} : KANT .... 112

CHAPTER XI.
SYNTHESIS AND RECONSTRUCTION : FICHTE .... 124

CHAPTER XII.
THE BEGINNINGS OF SCHELLING 136

CHAPTER XIII.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND IDEALISM .... 147

CHAPTER XIV.
TRANSITION TO HEGEL ........ 163

BOOK II.
IN THE PORCHES OF PHILOSOPHY.

CHAPTER XV.
THE Two AGES OF REASON .......

CHAPTER XVI.
THE NEW IDEALISM 189

CHAPTER XVII.
METHODS, ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL 202

CHAPTER XVIII.
THE RANGE OF PERSONALITY 230

CHAPTER XIX.
GENESIS IN MENTAL LIFE 261

CHAPTER XX.

GENERAL LAW OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY . . . 277

CHAPTER XXI.
ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE : AND THE ORDINARY LOGIC . . 292

CONTENTS. xix

CHAPTER XXII.
FROM SENSE TO THOUGHT

CHAPTER XXIII.

FlGURATE OR REPRESENTATIVE THOUGHT .... 323

CHAPTER XXIV.
FROM SUBSTANCE TO SUBJECT ....... 335

CHAPTER XXV.
REASON AND THE DIALECTIC OF UNDERSTANDING . . . 348

BOOK III.
LOGICAL OUTLINES.

CHAPTER XXVI.
THOUGHT PURE AND ENTIRE 365

CHAPTER XXVII.
ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE : OR THE CATEGORIES . . . 383

CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE THREE PARTS OF LOGIC 394

CHAPTER XXIX.
THE SEARCH FOR A FIRST PRINCIPLE 404

CHAPTER XXX.
THE LOGIC OF DESCRIPTION : NATURAL REALISM : BEING . 415

CHAPTER XXXI.
THE LOGIC OF EXPLANATION AND REALISTIC METAPHYSICS :

ESSENCE 440

CHAPTER XXXII.
THE LOGIC OF COMPREHENSION AND IDEALISM : THE NOTION . 459

V

ERRATUM

P. 464. 1. 13. for the sense which read the sense in which

PROLEGOMENA

BOOK I

OUTLOOKS AND APPROACHES
TO HEGEL

PROLEGOMENA

CHAPTER I.

WHY HEGEL IS HARD TO UNDERSTAND.

'THE condemnation/ says Hegel, 'which a great
man lays upon the world, is to force it to explain him V
The greatness of Hegel, if it be measured by this
standard, must be something far above common. Inter
preters of his system have contradicted each other,
almost as variously as the several commentators on the
Bible. He is claimed as their head by widely different
schools of thought, all of which appeal to him as the
original source of their line of argument. The Right
wing, and the Left, as well as the Centre, profess to be
the genuine descendants of the prophet, and to inherit
the mantle of his inspiration. If we believe one side,
Hegel is only to be rightly appreciated when we divest
his teaching of every shred of religion and orthodoxy
which it retains. If we believe another class of expo
sitors, he was the champion of Christianity.

These contradictory views may be safely left to
abolish each other. But diversity of opinion on such
topics is neither unnatural, nor unusual. The meaning
and the bearings of a great event, or a great character,
or a great work of reasoned thought, will be estimated
and explained in different ways, according to the effect

1 Hegel's Leben (Rosenkranz), p. 555.

B 2

4 PROLEGOMENA. [i.

they produce on different minds and different levels of
life and society. Those effects, perhaps, will not pre
sent themselves in their true character, until long after
the original excitement has passed away. To some
minds, the chief value of the Hegelian system will lie in
its vindication of the truths of natural and revealed
religion, and in the agreement of the elaborate reason
ings of the philosopher with the simple aspirations
of mankind towards higher things. To others that
system will have most interest as a philosophical history
of thought, — an exposition of that organic development
of reason, which underlies and constitutes all the varied
and complex movement of the world. To a third class,
again, it may seem at best an instrument or method of
investigation, stating the true law by which knowledge
proceeds in its endeavour to comprehend and assimilate
existing nature.

While these various meanings may be given to the
Hegelian scheme of thought, the majority of the world
either pronounce Hegel to be altogether unintelligible,
or banish him to the limbo of a priori thinkers, — that
bourne from which no philosopher returns. To argue
with those who start from the latter conviction would
be an ungrateful, and probably a superfluous task.
Wisdom is justified, we may be sure, of all her chil
dren. But it may be possible to admit the existence of
difficulties, and agree to some extent with those who
complain that Hegel is impenetrable and hard as ada
mant. There can be no doubt of the forbidding aspect
of the most prominent features in his system. He is
hard in himself, and his readers find him hard. His
style is not of the best, and to foreign eyes seems
unequal. At times he is eloquent, stirring, and striking:
again his turns are harsh, and his clauses tiresome to
disentangle : and we are always coming upon that

I.] THINKING IN VACUO. 5

childlikeness of literary manner, which English taste
fancies it can detect in some of the greatest works of
German genius. There are faults in Hegel, which
obscure his meaning : but more obstacles are due to
the nature of the work, and the pre-occupations of our
minds. There is something in him which fascinates
the thinker, and which inspires a sympathetic student
with the vigour and the hopefulness of the spring-time.
Perhaps the main hindrance in the way of a clear
vision is the contrast which Hegelian philosophy offers
to our ordinary habits of mind. Generally speaking, we
rest contented if we can get tolerably near our object,
and form a general picture of it to set before ourselves.
It might almost be said that we have never thought of
such a thing as being in earnest either with our words
or with our thoughts. We get into a way of speaking
with an uncertain latitude of meaning, and leave a good
deal to the fellow-feeling of our hearers, who are ex
pected to mend what is defective in our utterances.
For most of us the place of exact thought is supplied
by metaphors and pictures, by mental images, and
figures generalised from the senses. And thus it
happens that, when we come upon a single precise
and definite statement, neither exceeding nor falling
short in its meaning, we are thrown out of our reckon
ing. Our fancy and memory have nothing left for them
to do : and, as fancy and memory make up the greater
part of what we loosely call thinking, our powers of
thought seem to be brought to a standstill. Those who
crave for fluent reading, or prefer easy writing, some
thing within the pale of our usual mental lines, are
more likely to find what they seek in the ten partially
correct and approximate ways commonly used to
give expression to a truth, than in the one simple
and accurate statement of the thought. We prefer a

6 PROLEGOMENA. [i.

familiar name, and an accustomed image, on which our
faculties may work. But in the atmosphere of Hegelian
thought, we feel very much as if we had been lifted into
a vacuum, where we cannot breathe, and which is a fit
habitation for unrecognisable ghosts only.

Nor is this all. The traveller, as his train climbs
the heights of Alps or Apennines, occasionally, after
circling in grand curve upon the mountain-side, and
perhaps after having been dragged mysterious distances
through the gloom of a tunnel, finds himself as it
would seem back at the same place as he looked forth
from some minutes before ; and it is only after a brief
comparison that he realises he now commands a wider
view from a point some hundreds of feet higher. So
the student of Hegel — (and it might be the case with
Fichte also) as the machinery of the dialectical method,
with its thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, carries him
round and round from term to term of thought — like
the Logos and the Spirit, which blow us whitherso
ever they list — begins to suffer from dizziness at the
apprehension that he has been the victim of phantasma
goria and has not really moved at all. It is only later —
if ever — that he recognises that the scene, though similar,
is yet not altogether the same. It is only later — if ever
— that he understands that the path of philosophy is no
wandering from land to land more remote in search
of a lost Absolute, a vanished God ; no setting forth of
new and strange facts, of new Gods, but the revelation
in fuller and fuller truth of the immanent reality in
whom we live, and move, and have our being, — the
manifestation in more closely-knit unity and more
amply-detailed significance of that Infinite and Eternal,
which was always present among us, though we saw
but few, perhaps even no, traces of its power and
glory.

I.] THINKING IN VACUO. 7

To read Hegel often reminds us of the process we
have to go through in trying to answer a riddle. The
terms of the problem to be solved are all given to us :
the features of the object are, it may be, fully described:
and yet somehow we cannot at once tell what it is all
about, or add up the sum of which we have the several
items. We are waiting to learn the subject of the pro
position, of which all these statements may be regarded
as the predicates. Something, we feel, has undoubtedly
been said : but we are at a loss to see what it has been
said about. Our mind wanders round from one familiar
object to another, and tries them in succession to see
whether any one satisfies the several points in the
statement and includes them all. We grope here and
there for something we are acquainted with, in which
the bits of the description may cohere, and get a unity
which they cannot give themselves. When once we
have hit upon the right object, our troubles are at an
end : and the empty medium is now peopled with a
creature of our imagination. We have reached a fixed
point in the range of our conception, around which the
given features may cluster.

All this trouble caused by the Hegelian theory of
what philosophy involves — viz. really beginning at the
beginning, is saved by a device well known to the
several branches of Science. It is the way with them to
assume that the student has a rough general image of
the objects which they examine; and under the
guidance, or with the help of this generalised image,
they go on to explain and describe its outlines more
completely. They start with an approximate concep
tion, such as anybody may be supposed to have ; and
this they seek to render more definite. The geologist,
for example, could scarcely teach geology, unless he
could pre-suppose or produce some acquaintance on the

8 PROLEGOMENA. [l.

part of his pupils with what Hume would have called
an 'impression' or an 'idea' of the rocks and forma
tions of which he has to treat. The geometer gives a
short, and, as it were, popular explanation of the sense
in which angles, circles, triangles, &c. are to be under
stood : and then by the aid of these provisional defini
tions we come to a more scientific notion of the same
terms. The third book of Euclid, for example, brings
before us a clearer notion of what a circle is, than the
nominal explanation in the list of definitions. By means
of these temporary aids, or, as we may call them,
leading-strings for the intellect, the progress of the
ordinary scientific student is made tolerably easy. But
in philosophy, as it is found in Hegel, there is quite
another way of working. The helps in question are
absent : and until it be seen that they are not even
needed, the Hegelian theory will remain a sealed
mystery. For that which the first glance seemed to
show as an enigma, is only the plain and unambiguous
statement of thought. Instead of casting around for
images and accustomed names, we have only to accept
the several terms and articles in the development of
thought as they present themselves. These terms
merely require to be apprehended. They stand in no
immediate need of illustration from our experience.
What we have to bring to the work, is patience, self-
restraint, the sacrifice of our cherished habits of mind,
the surrender of the natural wish to see at once what it
all comes to, what it is good for, how it squares with
other convictions. As Bacon reminded his age, Into
the kingdom of philosophy, as into the kingdom of
heaven, none can enter, nisi sub persona infantis : i. e.
unless he at least steadfastly resolve to renounce that
world which lieth in the Evil.

Ordinary knowledge consists in referring a new object

I.] WHAT'S IN A NAME? 9

to a class of objects, that is to say, to a generalised image
with which we are already acquainted. It is not so
much cognition as re-cognition. ' " What is the truth ? " '
asked Lady Chettam of Mrs. Cadwallader in Middle-
march. '"The truth? he is as bad as the wrong
physic— nasty to take, and sure to disagree." " There
could not be anything worse than that," said Lady
Chettam, with so vivid a conception of the physic that
she seemed to have learned something exact about
Mr. Casaubon's disadvantages/ Once we have referred
the new individual to a familiar category or a convenient
metaphor, once we have given it a name, and introduced
it into the society of our mental drawing-room, we are
satisfied. We have put a fresh object in its appropriate
drawer in the cabinet of our ideas : and hence, with the
pride of a collector, we can calmly call it our own. But
such acquaintance, proceeding from a mingling of
memory and naming, is not the same thing as know
ledge in the strict sense of the term \ ' What is he ?
Do you know him ? * These are our questions : and
we are satisfied when we learn his name and his calling.
We may never have penetrated into the inner nature of
those objects, with whose tout ensemble, or rough out
lines, we are so much at home, that we fancy ourselves
thoroughly cognisant of them. Classifications are only
the first steps in science: and we do not understand
a thought because we can view it under the guise of
some of its illustrations.

In the case of the English reader of Hegel some
peculiar hindrances spring from the foreign language.
In strong contrast to most of the well-known German
philosophers, he may be said to write in the popular
and national dialect of his country. Of course there

' Das Bekannte uberhaupt ist darum, well es bekannt ist, nicht
erkannt.' Phenomenologie des Geistes, p. 24.

IO

PROLEGOMENA. [l.

are tones and shades of meaning given to his words by
the general context of his system. But upon the whole
he did what he promised to J. H. Voss— the translator
of Homer, and the poet of the Luise, in a letter written
from Jena in 1805. He there says of his projects :
4 Luther has made the Bible, and you have made Homer
speak German. No greater gift than this could be
given to the nation. So long as a nation is not
acquainted with a noble work in its own language, it is
still barbarian, and does not regard the work as its own.
Forget these two examples, and I may describe my
own efforts as an attempt to teach philosophy to speak
in German V

Yet, in this matter of nationalising or Germanising
philosophy, he only carried a step further what Wolff
and even Kant had begun ; just as, on the other hand,
he falls a long way short of what K. C. F. Krause, his
contemporary, attempted in the same direction. Such
an attempt, by its very nature, could never command
a popular success. It runs directly counter to that
tendency already noted, to escape the requirement to
think and think for ourselves, by taking refuge under
the shadow of a familiar term, which conceals in its
apparent simplicity a great complex of ill-apprehended
elements. The ordinary mind— and the more readily
perhaps the more vulgar it is — flees for ease and safety
to a cosmopolitan term, to the denationalised vocable of
learned origin, to the language of general European
culture. To such an ordinary mind — and up at least
to a certain extent we all at times come under that
heading — the effort to remain in the pellucid air of our
unadulterated mother-tongue is too embarrassing to be
long continued. Nor, after all, is it more than partially
practicable. The well of German undefiled is apt to

1 Vermischte Schriften, vol. ii. p. 474.

I.] THE RIGHTS OF COMMON SPEECH. 1 1

run dry. Hegel himself never shrinks when it is
needful to appropriate non-Teutonic words, and is in
the habit of employing the synonymous terms of native
and of classical origin with a systematic difference of
meaning l.

Hegel is unquestionably par excellence the philosopher
of Germany, — German through and through. For
philosophy, though the common birthright of full-grown
reason in all ages and countries, must like other
universal and cosmopolitan interests, such as the State,
the Arts, or the Church, submit to the limits and
peculiarities imposed upon it by the natural divisions of
race and language. The subtler nuances, as well as the
coarser differences of national speech, make themselves
vividly felt in the systems of philosophy, and defy
translation. If Greek philosophy cannot, no more can
German philosophy be turned into a body of English
thought by a stroke of the translator's pen. There is
a difference in this matter, a difference at least in
degree, between the special sciences and philosophy.
The several sciences have a de-nationalised and cosmo
politan character, like the trades and industries of
various nations ; they are pretty much the same in one
country and another, especially when we consider the
details, and neglect the general subdivisions. But in
the political body, in the works of high art, and in the

1 e. g. Dasein and Existenz : Wirklichkeit and Realitcit : Wesen and
Substanz. It is the same habit of curiously pondering over the tones
and shades of language which leads him to something very like
playing on words, and to etymologising, as one may call it, on un-
etymological principles : e. g. the play on Mein and Meinung (vol. ii.
32 : cf. Werke, ii. 75) : the literal rendering of Erinnerung (Encycl.
§§ 234 and 450); and the abrupt transitions, as it would seem, from
literal to figurative use of such a term as Grund. At the same time
it is well not to be prosaically certain that a free play of thought does
not follow the apparently fortuitous assonance of words.

12 PROLEGOMENA. [l.

systems of philosophy, the whole of the character and
temperament of the several peoples finds its expression,
and stands distinctly marked, in a shape of its own. If
the form of German polity be not transferable to this
side of the Channel, no more will German philosophy.
Direct utilisation for English purposes is out of the
question : the circumstances are too different. But the
study of the great works of foreign thought is not on
that account useless, any more than the study of the
great works of foreign statesmanship.

Hegel did good service, at least, by freeing philosophy
from that aspect of an imported luxury, which it usually
had, — as if it were an exotic plant removed from the
bright air of Greece into the melancholy mists of
Western Europe. ' We have still/ he says, ' to break
down the partition between the language of philosophy,
and that of ordinary consciousness : we have to over
come the reluctance against thinking what we are
familiar with1.' Philosophy must be brought face to
face with ordinary life, so as to draw its strength from
the actual and living present, and not from the memories
or traditions of the past. It has to become the organised
and completed thinking of what is contained blindly and
vaguely in the various levels of popular intelligence, as
these are more or less educated and ordered. It must
grow naturally, as in ancient Greece, from the neces
sities of the social situation, and not be a product of
artificial introduction and nurture : the revelation by the
mind's own energy of an implicit truth, not the com
munication of a mystery sacramentally received. To
suppose that a mere change of words can give this
grace, would be absurd. Yet where the national life
pulses strong, as that of Germany in those days did at
first in letters and then in social reform, the dominant

1 Hegel's Leben (Rosenkranz), p. 552.

I.] THE RIGHTS OF COMMON SPEECH. 13

note will make itself felt even in the neutral regions of
speculation. It was a step on the right road to banish
a pompous and aristocratic dialect from philosophy, and
to lead it back to those words and forms of speech,
which are at least in silent harmony with the national
feeling.

CHAPTER II.

WHY TRANSLATE HEGEL?

' BUT/ it is urged, ' though it be well to let the stream
of foreign thought irrigate some of our philosophical
pastures, though we should not for ever entrench our
selves in our insularity — why try to introduce Hegel, of
all philosophers confessedly the most obscure? Why
not be content with the study and the " exploitation " of
Kant, whom Germans themselves still think so impor
tant as to expound him with endless comment and
criticism, and who has at length found, after some
skirmishes, a recognised place in the English philo
sophical curriculum ? Why seek for more Teutonic
thinking that can be found in Schopenhauer, and found
there in a clear and noble style, luminous in the highest
degree, and touching with no merely academic abstruse-
ness the problems of life and death ? Or — as that song
is sweetest to men which is the newest to ring in their
ears — why not render accessible to English readers the
numerous and suggestive works of Eduard von Hart-
mann, and of Friedrich Nietzsche — not to mention
Robert Hamerling 1 ? Or, finally, why not give us more
and ever more translations of the works in logic, ethics,
psychology, or metaphysics, of those many admirable
teachers in the German universities, whom it would be

1 A book by V. Knauer published last year (Hauptprobleme der
Philosophic), a series of popular lectures, gives one-sixth of its space
to the 'Atomistic of Will' by the Austrian poet Hamerling.

PR 0 TES T A GAINST HEGELIANISM. 1 5

invidious to try to single out by name ? As for Hegel,
his system, in the native land of the philosopher, is
utterly discredited ; its influence is extinct ; it is dead
as a door-nail. It is a pity to waste labour and distract
attention, and that in English lands, where there are
plenty of problems of our own to solve, by an attempt,
which must perforce be futile, to resuscitate these
defunctitudes ? '

That Hegelianism has been utterly discredited, in
certain quarters, is no discovery reserved for these later
days. But on this matter perhaps we may borrow an
analogy. If the reader will be at the trouble to take up
two English newspapers of opposite partisanship and
compare the reports from their foreign correspondents
on some question of home politics, he may, if a novice,
be surprised to learn that according to one, the opinion
e. g. of Vienna is wholly adverse to the measure, while,
according to the other, that opinion entirely approves.
It is no new thing to find Hegelianism in general
obloquy. Even in 1830 the Catholic philosopher and
theologian Giinther1— an admirer, but by no means
a follower of Hegel — wrote that, ' for some years it had
been the fashion in learned Germany to look upon
philosophy, and above all Hegelian philosophy, as
a door-mat on which everybody cleaned his muddy
boots before entering the sanctuary of politics and
religion/ What is true as regards the alleged surcease
of Hegelianism is that in the reaction which from
various causes turned itself against philosophy in the
two decennia after 1848, that system, as the most
deeply committed part of the 'metaphysical* host,
suffered most severely. History and science seemed
to triumph along the whole line. But it may be perhaps
permissible to remark that Hegelianism had predicted

1 Hegel's Briefe, ii. 349.

1 6 PROLEGOMENA. [li.

for itself the fate that it proved had fallen on all other
philosophies. After the age of Idealism comes the turn
of Realism. The Idea had to die— had to sink as a
germ in the fields of nature and history before it could
bear its fruit. Above all it is not to be expected that
such a system, so ambitious in aim and concentrated in
expression, could find immediate response and at once
disclose all its meaning. His first disciples are not the
truest interpreters of any great teacher. What he saw
in the one comprehensive glance of genius, his successors
must often be content to gather by the slow accumulation
of years, and perhaps centuries, of experience. It is not to
Theophrastus that we go for the truest and fullest con
ception of Aristotelianism ; nor is Plato to be measured
by what his immediate successors in the Academy
managed to make out of him. It is now more than
a century since Kant gave his lesson to the public, and
we are still trying to get him focussed in a single view :
it may be even longer till Hegel comes fully within the
range of our historians of thought. Aristotelianism too
had to wait centuries till it fully entered the conscious
ness even of the thinking world.

It is to be said too that without Hegel it would be diffi
cult to imagine what even teachers, like Lotze, who were
very unlike him, would have had to say. It does not
need a very wide soul, nor need one be a mere dilet-
tantist eclectic, to find much of Schopenhauer's work far
from incompatible with his great, and as some have
said, complementary opposite. It is not indeed prudent
as yet for a writer in Germany who wishes to catch the
general ear to affix too openly a profession of Hegelian
principles, and he will do well to ward off suspicion by
some disparaging remarks on the fantastic methods, the
overfondness for system, the contempt for common sense
and scientific results which, as he declares, vitiate all

II.] COUNTER-PROTEST FOR HEGELIANISM. 17

the speculations of the period from 1794 to 1830. But
under the names of Spinoza and of Leibniz the leaven
of Hegelian principles has been at work : and if the
Philistines solve the riddle of the intellectual Samson,
it is because they have ploughed with his heifer, — because
his ideas are part of the modern stock of thought,— not
from what they literally read in the great thinkers at the
close of the seventeenth century. Last year saw appear
in Germany two excellent treatises describable as
popular introductions to philosophy \ one by a thinker
who has never disguised his obligations to Hegel, the
other by a teacher in the University of Berlin who may
in many ways be considered as essentially kindred with
our general English style of thought. But both treatises
are more allied in character to the spirit of the Hegelian
attempts to comprehend man and God than to the forma-
listic and philological disquisitions which have for some
years formed the staple of German professorial activity.
And, lastly, the vigorous thinker, who a quarter of a
century ago startled the reading public by the portent of
a new metaphysic which should be the synthesis of
Schelling and Schopenhauer, has lately informed us2
that 'his affinity to Hegel is, taken all in all, greater
than his affinity to any other philosopher'; and that
that affinity extends to all that in Hegel has essential
and permanent value.

But it is not on Eduard von Hartmann's commenda
tion that we need rest our estimate of Hegelianism. We
shall rather say that, till more of Hegel has been assimi
lated, he must still block the way. Things have altered
greatly in the last twenty years, it is true ; and ideas of

1 J. Volkelt, Vortrdge ziir Einfithrung in die Philosophic der Gegen-
wart (Munchen 1892) : F. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophic (Berlin
1892).

K. v. Hartmann, Kritische Wanderungen, p. 74.
C

1 8 PROLEGOMENA. [11.

more or less Hegelian origin have taken their place in
the common stock of philosophic commodities. But it
will probably be admitted by those best qualified to
speak on the subject, that the shower has not as yet
penetrated very deeply into the case-hardened soil, still
less saturated it in the measure most likely to cause
fruitful shoots to grow forth. We have to go back to
Hegel in the same spirit as we go to Kant, and, for that
matter, to Plato or Descartes : or, as the moderns may
go back — to borrow from another sphere — to Dante or
Shakespeare. We do not want the modern poet to
resuscitate the style and matter of King Lear or of the
Inferno. Yet as the Greek tragedian steeped his soul
in the language and the legend of Homeric epic, as
Dante nurtured his spirit on the noble melodies of
Mantua's poet ; so philosophy, if it is to go forth strong
and effective, must mould into its own substance the
living thought of former times. It would be as absurd,
and as impossible to be literally and simply a Hegelian,
— if that means one for whom Hegel sums up all philo
sophy and all truth — as it is to be at the present day in
the literal sense a Platonist or an Aristotelian. The
world may be slow, the world of opinion and thought may
linger : e pur si muove. We too have our own problems
—the same, no doubt, in a sense, from age to age, and yet
infinitely varying and never in two ages alike. New
stars have appeared on the spiritual sky ; and whether
they have in them the eternal light or only the flash
and glare of a passing meteor, they alter the aspects
of the night in which we are still waiting for the dawn.
A new language, born of new relations of ideas, or of
new ideas, is perforce for our generation the vehicle of
all utterances, and we cannot again speak the dialect,
however imposing or however quaint, of a vanished
day.

II.] COUNTER-PROTEST FOR HEGELIAN1SM. 19

And for that reason there must always be a new
philosophy, couched in the language of the age, sym
pathetic with its hopes and fears, conscious of its
beliefs, more or less sensible of its problems — as indeed
we may be confident there always will be. But, per
haps, the warrior in that battle against illusion and pre
judice, against the sloth which takes things as they are
and the poorness of spirit which is satisfied with first
appearances, will not do wisely to disdain the past. He
will not indeed equip himself with rusty swords and
clumsy artillery from the old arsenals. But he will not
disdain the lessons of the past, — its methods and princi
ples of tactics and strategy. Recognising perhaps some
defects and inequalities in the methods and aims of
thought most familiar to him and current in his vicinity,
he may go abroad for other samples, even though they
be not in all respects worth his adoption. And so
without taking Hegel as omniscient, or pledging him
self to every word of the master, he may think from
his own experience that there is much in the system
that will be helpful, when duly estimated and assimi
lated, to others. There is — and few can be so bigoted
or so positive-minded as to regret it — there is un
questionably a growing interest in English-speaking
countries in what may be roughly called philosophy —
the attempt, unprejudiced by political, scientific, or
ecclesiastical dogma, to solve the questions as to what
the world really is, and what man's place and func
tion is. ' The burthen of the mystery, the heavy and
the weary weight of all this unintelligible world ' is
felt — felt widely and sometimes felt deeply. To the
direct lightening of that burthen and that mystery it
is the privilege of our profoundest thinkers and our
far-seeing poets and artists to contribute. To the
translator of Hegel there falls the humbler task of

c 2

20 PROLEGOMENA.

making accessible, if it may be, something of one of the
later attempts at a solution of the enigma of life and
existence,— an attempt which for a time dazzled some
of the keenest intellects of its age, and which has at
least impressed many others with the conviction, born of
momentary flashes from it of vast illuminant power, that
— si sic otnnia— there was here concealed a key to many
puzzles, and a guard against many illusions likely to
beset the inquirer after truth.

CHAPTER III.

ENGLISH PHILOSOPHY AND HEGEL.

ALTHOUGH we need not take too seriously Hegel's
remark (vol. ii. p. 13) on the English conception of philo
sophy, it may be admitted that, by the dominant school
of English thought, philosophy, taken in the wide sense
it has predominantly born abroad, was, not so very long
ago, all but entirely ignored. Causes of various kinds
had turned the energy of the English mind into other
directions, not less essential to the common welfare.
Practical needs and an established social system helped
to bind down studies to definite and particular objects,
and to exclude what seemed vague and general investi
gations with no immediate bearing on the business of
life. Hence philosophy in England could hardly exist
except when it was reduced to the level of a special
branch of science, or when it could be used as a recep
tacle for the principles and methods common to all the
sciences. The general term was often used to denote
the wisdom of this world, or the practical exhibition of
self-control in life and action. For those researches,
which are directed to the objects once considered proper
to philosophy, the more definite and characteristic term
came to be Mental and Moral Science.

The old name was in certain circles restricted to
denote the vague and irregular speculations of those
thinkers, who either lived before the rise of exact
science, or who acted in defiance of its precepts and its
example. One large and influential class of English

22 PROLEGOMENA. [ill.

thinkers inclined to sweep philosophy altogether away,
as equivalent to metaphysics and obsolete forms of error ;
and upon the empty site thus obtained they sought to
construct a psychological theory of mind, or they tried
to arrange and codify those general remarks upon the
general procedure of the sciences which are known
under the name of Inductive Logic. A smaller, but not
less vigorous, school of philosophy looked upon their
business as an extension and rounding off of science
into a complete unification of knowledge. The first is
illustrated by the names of J. S. Mill and Mr. Bain : the
second is the doctrine of Mr. Herbert Spencer.

The encyclopaedic aggregate of biological, psycho
logical, ethical and social investigation which Mr. Spencer
pursues, under the general guidance of the formula of
evolution by differentiation and integration, still pro
ceeds on its course : but though its popularity — as such
popularity goes — is vast and more than national, it does
not and probably cannot find many imitators. Very
differently stand matters with the movement in psycho
logy and logic. Here the initiative has led to divergent
and unexpected developments. Psychology, which at
first was partly an ampler and a more progressive logic,
a theory of the origin and nature of knowledge, partly
a propaedeutic to the more technical logic and ethics,
and pursued in a loosely introspective way, has gravi
tated more and more towards its experimental and phy
siological side, with occasional velleities to assume the
abstractly-mathematical character of a psycho-physical
science. Logic, on the other hand, has also changed
its scope. Not content to be a mere tool of the sciences
or a mere criterion for the estimation of evidence, it has
in one direction grown into a systematic effort to become
an epistemology — a system of the first principles of
knowledge and reality — a metaphysic of science ; and

III.] PHASES OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT. 23

in another it has sought to realise the meaning of those
old forms of inference which the logicians of half a cen
tury ago were inclined to pooh-pooh as obsolete. Most
remarkable — and most novel of all — is the vast increase
of interest and research in the problems of ethics and
of what is called the philosophy of religion — subjects
which at that date were literally burning questions,
apt to scorch the fingers of those who touched them.
In all of this, but especially marked in some leading
thinkers, the ruling feature is the critical — the sceptical,
i. e. the eager, watchful, but self-restrained — attitude
towards its themes. Ever driving on to find a deeper
unity than shows on the surface, and to get at principles,
the modern thinker— and in this we see the permanent
and almost overwhelming influence of Kant upon him —
recoils from the dogmatism of system, at the very
moment it seems to be within his grasp.

Thus the recent products of English thought have
been, as Mr. Spencer has taught us to say, partly in the
line of differentiation, partly of integration. At one
moment it seems as if the ancient queen of the sciences
sat like Hecuba, exul, mops, while her younger daughters
enjoyed the freedom and progress of specialisation.
The wood seems lost behind the trees. And at another,
again, the centripetal force seems to preponderate :
every department, logic, ethics, psychology, sociology,
rapidly carries its students on and up to fundamental
questions, if not to fundamental principles. Philo
sophy — the one and undivided truth and quest of truth
— emerges fresh, vigorous, and as yet rather indeter
minate, from the mass of detailed investigations. That
the position is now altered from what it was in times
when knowledge had fewer departments, is obvious.
The task of the ' synoptic ' mind— which Plato claims
for the philosopher— grows increasingly difficult : but

24 PROLEGOMENA. [ill.

that is hardly a reason for performing it in a more
perfunctory way. It seems rather as if in such a crisis
one of the great reconstructive systems of a preceding
age might be in some measure helpful.

If we consult history, it is at once clear that philosophy,
or the pursuit of ultimate reality and permanent truth,
went hand in hand with scientific researches into facts
and their particular explanations.

In their earlier stages the two tendencies of thought
were scarcely distinguishable. The philosophers of
Ionia and Magna Graecia were also the scientific
pioneers of their time. Their fragmentary remains
remind us at times of the modern theories of
geology and biology, — at other times of the teachings
of idealism. The same thing is comparatively true of
the earlier philosophers of Modern Europe. The
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in spite of Bacon
and Newton, endeavoured to study the mental and
moral life by a method which was a strange mixture of
empiricism and metaphysics. In words, indeed, the
thinkers from Descartes to Wolff duly emphasise,
perhaps over-emphasise, the antithesis between the
extended and the intellectual. But in practice their
course is not so clear. Their mental philosophy is often
only a preliminary medicina mentis to set the individual
mind in good order for undertaking the various tasks
awaiting a special research. They are really eager to
get on to business, and only, as it were, with regret
spend time in this clearance of mental faculty. And
when they do deal with objects, the material and extended
tends to become the dominant conception, the basis of
reality. The human mind, that nobilissima substantia,
is treated only as an aggregate, or a receptacle, of ideas,
and the mens, — with them all nearly as with Spinoza, —
is only an idea carport's, and that phrase not taken so

III.] THE EMANCIPATION OF PHILOSOPHY. 25

highly as Spinoza's perhaps should be taken. In the
works of these thinkers, as of the pre-Socratics, there
is one element which may be styled philosophical, and
another element which maybe styled scientific, — if we
use both words vaguely. But with Socrates in the
ancient, and with Kant in the modern epoch of philo
sophy, an attempt was made to get the boundary
between the two regions definitively drawn. The dis
tinction was in the first place accompanied by something
like turning the back upon science and popular concep
tions. Socrates withdrew thought from disquisitions
concerning the nature of all things, and fixed it upon
man and the state of man. Kant left the broad fields
of actually-attained knowledge, and inquired into the
central principle on which the acquisition of science,
the laws of human life, and the ideals of art and
religion, were founded.

The change thus begun was not unlike that which
Copernicus effected in the theory of Astronomy. Hu
man personality, either in the actualised forms of the
State, or in the abstract shape of the Reason, — that
intellectual liberty, which is a man's true world,— was,
at least by implication, made the pivot around which
the system of the sciences might turn. In the contest,
which according to Reid prevails between Common
Sense and Philosophy, the presumptions of the former
have been distinctly reversed, and Kant, like Socrates,
has shown that it is not the several items of fact, but
the humanity, the moral law, the thought, which under
lies these doctrines, which give the real resting-point
and true centre of movement. But this negative atti
tude of philosophy to the sciences is only the beginning,
needed to secure a standing-ground. In the ancient
world Aristotle, and in the modern Hegel (as the
inheritor of the labours of Fichte and Schelling), exhibit

26 PROLEGOMENA. [ill.

the movement outwards to reconquer the universe, pro
ceeding from that principle which Socrates and Kant
had emphasised in its fundamental worth.

Mr. Mill, in the closing chapter of his Logic, has
briefly sketched the ideal of a science to which he gives
the name of Teleology, corresponding in the ethical
and practical sphere to a Philosophia Prima, or Meta
physics, in the theoretical. This ideal and ultimate
court of appeal is to be valid in Morality, and also
in Prudence, Policy and Taste. But the conception,
although a desirable one, falls short of the work which
Hegel assigns to philosophy. What he intended to
accomplish with detail and regular evolution was not a
system of principles in these departments of action only,
but a theory which would give its proper place in our
total Idea of reality to Art, Science, and Religion, to all
the consciousness of ordinary life, and to the evolution
of the physical universe. Philosophy ranges over the
whole field of actuality, or existing fact. Abstract prin
ciples are all very well in their way ; but they are not
philosophy. If the world in its historical and its present
life develops into endless detail in regular lines, philo
sophy must equally develop the narrowness of its first
principles into the plenitude of a System, — into what
Hegel calls the Idea. His point of view may be
gathered from the following remarks in a review of
Hamann, an erratic friend and fellow-citizen of Kant's.
' Hamann would not put himself to the trouble, which
in an higher sense God undertook. The ancient philo
sophers have described God under the image of a round
ball. But if that be His nature, God has unfolded it ;
and in the actual world He has opened the closed shell
of truth into a system of Nature, into a State-system, a
system of Law and Morality, into the system of the
world's History. The shut fist has become an open

ill.] THE WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 27

hand, the fingers of which reach out to lay hold of
man's mind, and draw it to Himself. Nor is the human
mind a self-involved intelligence, blindly moving within
its own secret recesses. It is no mere feeling and
groping about in a vacuum, but an intelligent system of
rational organisation. Of that system Thought is the
summit in point of form : and Thought may be described
as the capability of going beyond the mere surface of
God's self-expansion, — or rather as the capability, by
means of reflection upon it, of entering into it, and then
when the entrance has been secured, of retracing in
thought God's expansion of Himself. To take this
trouble is the express duty and end of ends set before
the thinking mind, ever since God laid aside His
rolled-up form, and revealed Himself1.'

Enthusiastic admirers have often spoken as if the
salvation of the time could only come from the He
gelian philosophy. 'Grasp the secret of Hegel,' they
say, 'and you will find a cure for the delusions of your
own mind, and the remedy which will set right the
wrongs of the world.' These high claims to be a panacea
were never made by Hegel himself. According to him,
as according to Aristotle, philosophy as such can pro
duce nothing new. Practical statesmen, and theoretical
reformers, may do their best to correct the inequalities
of their time. But the very terms in which Bacon
scornfully depreciated one great concept of philosophy
are to be accepted in their literal truth. Like a virgin
consecrated to God, she bears no fruit2. She repre
sents the spirit of the world, resting, as it were, when
one step in the progress has been accomplished, and
surveying the advance which has been made. ' Philo
sophy is not,' says Fichte, ' even a means to shape life :

1 Vermischte Schriften, vol. ii. p. 87.

2 De Augnt. Scient. iii. 5.

28 PROLEGOMENA. [in.

for it lies in a totally different world, and what is to
have an influence upon life must itself have sprung from
life. Philosophy is only a means to the knowledge of
life.' Nor has it the vocation to edify men, and take
the place of religion on the higher levels of intellect.
'The philosopher/ Fichte boldly continues, 'has no
God at all and can have no God : he has only a con
cept of the concept or of the Idea of God. It is only in
life that there is God and religion : but the philosopher
as such is not the whole complete man, and it is impos
sible for any one to be only a philosopher V Philosophy
does not profess to bring into being what ought to be,
but is not yet. It sets up no mere ideals, which
must wait for some future day in order to be realised.
Enough for it if it show what the world ts, if it were
what it professes to be, and what in a way it must be,
otherwise it could not be even what it is. The subject-
matter of philosophy is that which is always realising
and always realised — the world in its wholeness as it is
and has been. It seeks to put before us, and embody
in permanent outlines, the universal law of spiritual life
and growth, and not the local, temporary, and indi
vidual acts of human will.

Those who ask philosophy to construe, or to deduce
a priori a single blade of grass, or a single act of a
man, must not be grieved if their request sounds absurd
and meets with no answer. The sphere of philosophy
is the Universal. We may say, if we like, that it is
retrospective. It is the spectator of all time and all
existence : it is its duty to view things sub specie aeter-
nitatis. To comprehend the universe of thought in
all its formations and all its features, to reduce the solid
structures, which mind has created, to fluidity and

1 The passages occur in some notes (written down by F. in reference
to the charge of Atheism) published in his Werke, v. pp. 342, 348.

ill.] THE WORK OF PHILOSOPHY. 29

transparency in the pure medium of thought, to set free
the fossilised intelligence which the great magician who
wields the destinies of the world has hidden under the
mask of Nature, of the Mind of man, of the works of
Art, of the institutions of the State and the orders of
Society, and of religious forms and creeds : — such is the
complicated problem of philosophy. Its special work is
to comprehend the world, not try to make it better. If
it were the purpose of philosophy to reform and im
prove the existing state of things, it comes a little too
late for such a task. 'As the thought of the world/
says Hegel, 'it makes its first appearance at a time,
when the actual fact has consummated its process of
formation, and is now fully matured. This is the
doctrine set forth by the notion of philosophy; but
it is also the teaching of history. It is only when the
actual world has reached its full fruition that the ideal
rises to confront the reality, and builds up, in the
shape of an intellectual realm, that same world grasped
in its substantial being. When philosophy paints its
grey in grey, some one shape of life has meanwhile
grown old : and grey in grey, though it brings it into
knowledge, cannot make it young again. The owl of
Minerva does not start upon its flight, until the evening
twilight has begun to fall V

1 Philosophic des Rechts, p. 20 (Werke, viii).

CHAPTER IV.

HEGEL AND THEOLOGY.

EVEN an incidental glance into Hegel's Logic can
not fail to discover the frequent recurrence of the
name of God, and the discussion of matters not gene
rally touched upon; unless in works bearing upon
religion. There were two questions which seem to have
had a certain fascination for Hegel. One of them, a
rather unpromising problem, referred to the distances
between the several planets in the solar system, and the
law regulating these intervals1. The other and more
intimate problem turned upon the value of the proofs
usually offered in support of the being of God. That
God is the supreme certitude of the mind, the basis of
all reality and knowledge, is what Hegel no more put
in question, than did Descartes, Spinoza, or Locke.
What he often repeated was that the matter in these
proofs must be distinguished from the imperfect manner
in which the arguers presented it. Again and again

1 Hegel's Leben, p. 155. It was in his dissertation de Orbitis
Planetarum, that the notorious contretemps occurred, whereby,
whilst the philosopher, leaning to a Pythagorean proportion, hinted
— in a line — that it was unnecessary to expect a planet between
Mars and Jupiter, astronomers in the same year discovered Ceres,
the first-detected of the Planetoids. A good deal has been made out
of this trifle ; but it has not yet been shown that the corroboration
was anything but the luck of the other hypothesis.

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION. 31

in his Logic, as well as in other discussions more
especially devoted to it, he examines this problem.
His persistence in this direction might earn for him
that title of 'Knight of the Holy Ghost/ by which
Heine, in one of the delightful poems of his ' Reise-
bilder,' describes himself to the maid of Klausthal in
the Harz. The poet of Love and of Freedom had
undoubted rights to rank among the sacred band :
but so also had the philosopher. Like the Socrates
whom Plato describes to us, he seems to feel that
he has been commissioned to reveal the truth of God,
and quicken men by an insight into the right wisdom.
Nowhere in the modern period of philosophy has
higher spirit breathed in the utterances of a thinker.
The same theme is claimed as the common heritage
of philosophy and religion. A letter to Duboc1, the
father of a modern German novelist, lets us see how
important this aspect of his system was to Hegel
himself. He had been asked to give a succinct ex
planation of his standing-ground : and his answer
begins by pointing out that philosophy seeks to ap
prehend in reasoned knowledge the same truth which
the religious mind has in its faith.

Words like these may at first sight suggest the bold
soaring of ancient speculation in the times of Plato and
Aristotle, or even the theories of the medieval School
men. They sound as if he proposed to do for the
modern world, and in the full light of modern know
ledge, what the Schoolmen tried to accomplish within
the somewhat narrow conceptions of medieval Chris
tianity and Greek logic. Still there is a difference
between the two cases. While the Doctors of the

Vermischte Schriften, vol. ii. p. 520. Duboc was a retired hatter,
of French origin, who had settled at Hamburg (Hegel's Briefe.
ii. 76 seqq.).

32 PROLEGOMENA. [iv.

Church, in appearance at least, derived the form of
exposition, and the matter of their systems, from two
independent and apparently heterogeneous sources,
the modern Scholastic of Hegel claims to be a har
monious unity, body finding soul, and soul giving
itself body. And while the Hegelian system has the
all-embracing and encyclopaedic character by which
Scholastic science threw its arms around heaven and
earth, it has also the untrammeled liberty of the Greek
thinkers. Hegel, in short, shows the union of these two
modes of speculation : free as the ancient, and compre
hensive as the modern. His theory is the explication
of God ; but of God in the actuality and plenitude of
the world, and not as a transcendent Being, such as an
over-reverent philosophy has sometimes supposed him,
in the solitude of a world beyond.

The greatness of a philosophy is its power of com
prehending facts. The most characteristic fact of
modern times is Christianity. The general thought
and action of the civilised world has been alternately
fascinated and repelled, but always influenced, and to
a high degree permeated, by the Christian theory of
life, and still more by the faithful vision of that life
displayed in the Son of Man. To pass that great
cloud of witness and leave it on the other side, is to
admit that your system is no key to the secret of the
world, — even if we add, as some will prefer, of the
world as it is and has been. And therefore the
Hegelian system, if it is to be a philosophy at all,
must be in this sense Christian. But it is neither a
critic, nor an apologist of historical Christianity. The
voice of philosophy is as that of the Jewish doctor of
the Law : ' If this council or this work be of men, it
will come to nought : but if it be of God, ye cannot
overthrow it.' Philosophy examines what is, and not

IV.] HEGEL AND CHRISTIANITY. 33

what, according to some opinions, ought to be. Such
a point of view requires no discussion of the 'How' or
the 'Why' of Christianity. It involves no inquiry into
historical documents, or into the belief in miracles :
for to it Christianity rests only incidentally on the
evidence of history; and miracles, as vulgarly explained,
can find no reception in a philosophical system. For
it Christianity is ' absolute religion ' : religion i. e. which
has fully become and realised all that religion meant to
be. That religion has, of course, its historical side : it
appeared at a definite epoch in the annals of our race :
it revealed itself in a unique personality in a remarkable
nation. And at an early period of his life Hegel had
tried to gather up in one conception the traits of that
august figure, in his life and speech and death. But, in
the light of philosophy, this historical side shrivels up
as comparatively unimportant. Not the personality,
but the ' revelation of reason ' through man's spirit :
not the annals of a life once spent in serving God and
men, but the words of the ' Eternal Gospel,' are hence
forth the essence of Christianity.

Thus the controlling and central conception of life
and actuality, which is the final explanation of all that
man thinks and does, has a twofold aspect. There is,
as it were, a double Absolute — for under this name
philosophy has what in religion corresponds to God.
It is true that in the final form of his system the
Absolute Spirit has three phases — each as it were
passing on into and incorporated with the next — Art
working out its implications till it appears as Religion,
and Religion calling for its perfection in Philosophy.
But in the Phenomenology, his first work, the religion
of Art only intervenes as a grade from ' natural ' religion
to religion manifest or revealed ; and in the first edition
of the Encyclopaedia what is subsequently called Art is

34 PROLEGOMENA. [iv.

entitled the Religion of Art. It is in entire accord
ance with these indications when in the Lectures on
Aesthetics1 it is said 'the true and original position of
Art is to fee the first-come immediate self-satisfaction of
Absolute Spirit ' ; though in our days (it is added) ' its
form has ceased to be the highest need of the spirit/
It is hardly too much then to say that, for Hegel, the
Absolute has two phases, Religion and Philosophy.

The Hegelian view presents itself most decisively,
though perhaps with a little lecture-like over-insistance,
in the Philosophy of Religion 2. ' The object of religion
as of philosophy is the eternal truth in its very objec
tivity—God and nothing but God,— and the "explica
tion" of God. Philosophy is not a wisdom of the
world, but cognition of the non-worldly : not a cogni
tion of the external mass of empirical existence and
life, but cognition of what is eternal, what is God,
and what flows from His nature. For this nature
must reveal and develop itself. Hence philosophy
" explicates " itself only when it " explicates " religion ;
and in explicating itself it explicates religion. . . . Thus
religion and philosophy coincide : in fact, philosophy is
itself a divine service, is a religion : for it is the same
renunciation of subjective fancies and opinions, and is
engaged with God alone/

Again, it may be asked in what sense philosophy
has to deal with God and with Truth. These two
terms are often synonyms in Hegel. All the objects
of science, all the terms of thought, all the forms of
reality, lead out of themselves, and seek for a centre
and resting-point. They are severally inadequate and
partial, and they crave adequacy and completeness.
They tend to organise themselves ; to call out more

1 Werke, x. i, p. 131.

2 Werke, xi. p. 21.

35

IV.] PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION.

and more distinctly the fuller reality which they pre
suppose, — which must have been, otherwise they could
not have been : they reduce their first appearance of
completeness to its due grade of inadequacy and bring
out their complementary side, so as to constitute a
system or universe; and in this tendency to a self-
correcting unity consists their progress to truth. Their
untruth lies in isolation and pretended independence
or finality. This completed unity, in which all things
receive their entireness and become adequate, is their
Truth : and that Truth, as known in religious language,
is God. Rightly or wrongly, God is thus interpreted
in the Logic of Hegel.

Such a position must seem very strange to one who
is familiar only with the sober studies of English
philosophy. In whatever else the leaders of the
several schools in this country disagree, they are
nearly all at one in banishing God and religion to
a world beyond the present sublunary sphere, to an
inscrutable region beyond the scope of scientific in
quiry, where statements may be made at will, but
where we have no power of verifying any statement
whatever. This is the common doctrine of Spencer
and Mansel, of Hamilton and Mill. Even those
English thinkers, who show some anxiety to support
what is at present called Theism, generally rest content
with vindicating for the mind the vague perception of
a Being beyond us, and differing from us incommen-
surably. God is to them a residual phenomenon, a
marginal existence. Outside the realm of experience
and knowledge there is not-nothing— a something—
beyond definite circumscription : incalculable, and
therefore an object, possibly of fear, possibly of hope :
the reflection in the utter darkness of a great What-
may-it-not-be ? He is the Unknown Power, felt by

D 2

36 PROLEGOMENA.

what some of these writers call intuition, and others
call experience. They do not however allow to know
ledge any capacity of apprehending in detail the truths
fhich belong to the kingdom of God. Now the whole
aching of Hegel is the overthrow of the limits thus
it to religious thought. To him all thought, and all
actuality when it is grasped by knowledge, is from
man's side, an exaltation of the mind towards God :
while, when regarded from the divine standing-point,
it is the manifestation by God of His own nature in its
infinite variety.

It is only when we fix our eyes clearly on these
general features in his speculation, that we can under
stand why he places the maturity of ancient philosophy
in the time of Plotinus and Proclus. Not that these
Neo-Platonists are, as thinkers, of power equal to their
master of Athens. But, in the realm of the blind the
one-eyed may be king. The later thinkers set their
vision more distinctly and persistently on the land that
is eternal — 'on the further side of being/ to quote
Plato's phrase. It is for the same reason Hegel gives
so much attention to the religious or semi-religious
theories of Jacob Bohme and of Jacobi, though these
men were in many ways so unlike himself.

CHAPTER V.

PSEUDO-IDEALISM I JACOBI.

IT is hazardous to try to sum up the net result of a
philosophy in a few paragraphs. Since Aristotle sepa
rated the pure 'energy ' of philosophy from the activities
which leave works made and deeds done behind them,
it need scarcely be repeated that the result of a philo
sophical system is nothing palpable or tangible,—
nothing on which you can put your finger, and say
definitely : Here it is. The spirit of a philosophy
always refuses to be incarcerated in a formula, however
deftly you may try to charm it there. The statement of
the principle or tendency of a philosophical system tells
not what that system is, but what it is not. It marks
off the position from contiguous points of view ; and
on that account never gets beyond the border-land,
which separates that system from something else. The
method and process of reasoning is as essential in
knowledge, as the result to which it leads : and the
method in this case is thoroughly bound up with the
subject-matter. A mere analysis of the method, there
fore, or a mere record of the purpose and outcome of
the system, would be, the one as well as the other,
a fruitless labour, and come to nothing but words.
Thus any attempt to convey a glimpse of the truth in
a few sentences and in large outlines seems foreclosed.

38 PROLEGOMENA. |_v-

The theory of Hegel has an abhorrence of mere
generalities, of abstractions with no life in them, and
no growth out of them. His principle has to prove
and verify itself to be true and adequate : and that
verification fills up the whole circle of circles, of which
philosophy is said to consist.

It seems as if there were in Hegel two distinct habits
of mind which the world — the outside observer — rarely
sees except in separation. On one hand there is a
sympathy with mystical and intuitional minds, with the
upholders of immediate knowledge and of innate ideas,
with those who find that science and demonstration
rather tend to distract from the one thing needful —
who would 'lie in Abraham's bosom all the year/ —
those who would fain lay their grasp upon the whole
before they have gone through the drudgery of details.
On the other hand, there is within him a strongly
' rationalising ' and non-visionary intellect, with a prac
tical and realistic bent, and the full scientific spirit.
Schelling, in an angry mood, could describe him as 'the
quintessence of all that is prosaic, both outside and in1.'
Yet, seen from other points of view, Hegel has been
accused of dreaminess, pietism, and mystical theology.
His merging of the ordinary contrasts of thought in a
completer truth, and what would popularly be described
as his mixing up of religious with logical questions, and
the general unfathomableness of his doctrine, — all seem
to support such a charge. Yet all this is not incon
sistent with a rough and incisive vigour of under
standing, a plainness of reason, and a certain hardness
of temperament. This philosopher is in many ways
not distinguishable from the ordinary citizen, and there
are not unfrequent moments when his wife hears him
groan over the providence that condemned him to be a

1 Aus Schellings Leben (Plitt), ii. 161.

V.] CONTRASTS IN HEGEL. 39

philosopher1. He is contemptuous towards all weakly
sentimentalism, and almost brutal in his emphasis on
the reasonableness of the actual and on the folly of
dreaming the might-have-been ; and keeps his house
hold accounts as carefully as the average head of a
family. And, perhaps, this convergence of two ten
dencies of thought may be noticed in the gradual
maturing of his ideas. In the period of his ' Lehrjahre/
or apprenticeship, from 1793 to 1800, we can see the
study of religion in the earlier part of that time at
Bern succeeded by the study of politics and philo
sophy at Frankfort-on-the-Main.

His purpose on the whole may be termed an attempt
to combine breadth with depth, the intensity of the
mystic who craves for union with Truth, with the
extended range and explicitness of those who multiply
knowledge. ' The depth of the mind is only so deep
as its courage to expand and lose itself in its explica
tion V It must prove its profundity by the ordered
fullness of the knowledge which it has realised. The
position and the work of Hegel will not be intelligible
unless we keep in view both of these antagonistic
points.

The purpose of philosophy — as has been pointed
out — is, for Hegel — to know God, which is to know
things in their Truth— to see all things in God— to
comprehend the world in its eternal significance.
Supposing the purpose capable of being achieved,
what method is open to its attainment? There is
on one hand the method of ordinary science in
dealing with its objects. These are things, found as
it were projected into space before the observer,
lying outside one another in prima facie indepen-

1 Hegel's Brief e, ii. 377.

2 Phenomenologie des Geistes, p. 9.

40 PROLEGOMENA. [v.

dence, though connected (by a further rinding) with
each other by certain 'accidents' called qualities
and relations. Among the objects of knowledge, there
are included, by the somewhat naive intellect that
accepts tradition like a physical fact; certain 'things*
of a rather peculiar character. One of these is God :
the others, which a historical criticism has subjoined,
are the Soul and the World. And whatever may be
said of the thinghood, reality, or existence of the World,
there is no doubt that God and the Soul figure, and
figure largely, in the consciousness of the human race
as entities, differing probably in many respects from
other things, but still possessed of certain fundamental
features in common, and thus playing a part as distinct
realities amongst other realities.

Given such objects, it is natural for a reflecting mind
to attempt to make out a science of God and a science
of the Soul, just as of other 'things.* And to these
a system-loving philosopher might add a science of the
world (Cosmology)1. It was felt, indeed, that these
objects were peculiar and unique. Thus, for example,
as regards God, it was held necessary by the logician
who saw tradition in its true light to prove His 'exist
ence': and various arguments to that end were at
different times devised. With regard to the human
Soul, similarly, it was considered essential to establish
its independent reality as a thing really separate from
the bodily organism with which its phenomena were
obviously connected, — to prove, in short, its substantial
existence, and its emancipation from the bodily fate of
dissolution and decay. With reference to the World, the
problem was rather different : it was felt that the name
suggested problems for thought rather than denoted

1 Cf. Notes and Illustrations in vol. ii. 396, and chapter iii. of the
Logic.

v-] KANT'S CRITICISMS. 41

reality. How can we predicate of the whole what is
predicable of its parts? This or that may have a
beginning and a cause, may have a limit and an end :
but can the totality be presented under these aspects,
without leading to self-contradiction ? And the result
of these questions in the case of ' Cosmology * was to
shed in the long run similar doubts on 'Rational*
Theology and ' Rational * Psychology.

Practically this metaphysical science— which is so
called as dealing with a province or provinces of being
beyond the ordinary or natural (physical) realities-
treated God and the Soul by the same terms (or
categories) as it used in dealing with ' material ' objects.
God e. g. was a force, a cause, a being ; so, too, was
the Soul. The main butt of Kant's destructive Criticism
of pure Reason is to challenge the justice of including

God and the Soul among the objects of science,

among the things we can know as we may know plants
or stars. To make an object of knowledge (in the strict
sense), to make a thing, the prerequisite, Kant urges, is
perception in space and time. Without a sensation—
and that sensation, as it were, laid out in place and
duration— an object of science is impossible. No mere
demonstration will conjure it into existence. And with
that requirement the old theology and psychology, which
professed to expound the object-God and the object-
soul, were ruled out-of-order in the list of sciences, and
reduced to mere dialectical exercises. The circle of the
sciences, therefore, does not lead beyond the 'con-
ditioned,* beyond the regions of space and time. It has
nothing to say of a 'first cause* or of an ultimate end.

Such was the result that might fairly be read from
Kant's Criticism of pure Reason,— especially if read
without its supplementary sequels, and, above all, if
read by those in whom feeling was stronger than

4 2 PROLEGOMENA. [v.

thought, or who were by nature more endowed with
the craving for faith than with the mind of philosophy.
Such a personality appeared in J. H. Jacobi, the younger
brother of a poet not undistinguished in his day. Amid
the duties of public office and the cares of business, he
found time to study Spinoza, the English and Scotch
moralists, and above all to follow with interest the
development of Kant from the year 1763 onwards.
His house at Diisseldorf was the scene of many literary
reunions, and Jacobi himself maintained familiar inter
course with the leaders of the literary and intellectual
world, such as Lessing, Hamann, Goethe. His first
considerable works were two novels, in letters, — Allwill,
begun in a serial magazine in 1775, and Woldemar,
begun in another magazine in 1777; both being issued
as complete works in 1781. Both turn on a moral
antithesis, and both leave the antithesis as they found
it. Here pleads the advocate of the heart: 'it is the
heart which alone and directly tells man what is good ' :
' virtue is a fundamental instinct of human nature ' : the
true basis of morals is an immediate certainty; and
the supreme standard is an 'ethical genius 'which as
it were discovered virtue and which still is a paramount
authority in those exceptional situations in life when
the ' grammar of virtue ' fails to supply adequate rules,
and where, therefore, the immediate voice of conscience
must in a ' licence of sublime poesy l ' dare, as Burke
says, to 'suspend its own rules in favour of its own
principles.' There, on the other hand, is the champion
of reason, who declares all this sentimentalism ' a veri
table mysticism of antinomianism and a quietism of
immorality-': 'To humanity,' he says, 'and to every
man (every complete man) principles, and some system

1 Jacobi's Werke, v. 79, in, 115, 41?-

2 Ibid., i. 178.

v-] JACOB I AND LESSING. 43

of principles, are indispensable/ Woldemar concludes
with the pair of mottoes : ' Whosoever trusts to his own
heart is a fool/ and 'Trust love: it takes everything,
but it gives everything/

In 1780 Jacobi had his historic conversation with
Lessing at Wolfenbuttel l. The talk turned on Spinoza.
For many years the philosophy of Spinoza had seemed
to vanish from the world. His name was only heard
in a reference of obloquy, as if it were dangerous to be
even suspected of infection with the taint of Atheism.
But both Lessing and Jacobi had found him out. The
former saw in him an ally in that struggle for higher
light and wider views which he undertook in a spirit
and with a scope hardly surmised by those he usually
wrought with. Jacobi, on the contrary, saw in him
personified the conjunction of all those irreligious ten
dencies which all philosophy in some degree exhibited :
the tendency to veil or set aside God and personality.
'I believe/ says Jacobi, as he began the conversation
' in an intelligent personal cause of the world/ ' Then
I am going/ replied Lessing, 'to hear something quite
new': and he dryly put aside the other's rhapsody
on the 'personal extra-mundane deity 'with the remark
'Words, my dear Jacobi, words/ Jacobi's work Letters
on the doctrine of Spinoza (it appeared in 1785) was
the beginning of a controversy in which Mendelssohn
and Herder took part, and in which Goethe took an
interest under Herder's tutorship. To the exact philo
logical study of Spinoza it did not contribute much : for
the Spinoza whom Herder and Goethe saw as their
spiritual forefather was transfigured in their thought to
a figure to which Leibniz had almost an equal right
to give his name. He upheld to them the symbol of
the immanence of the divine in nature : he was the

1 Jacobi's Werke, iv. i. Abth. p. 55 seqq.

44 PROLEGOMENA. [v.

leader in the battle against ' philistine ' deism and utili
tarianism.

With the Kantian criticism of the pseudo-science of
theology Jacobi had in one way no fault to find. That
reasoning by its demonstration cannot find out God, was
to him an axiomatic belief. But the 'man of feeling*
felt uneasy at the trenchant methods of the Konigsberg
man of logic. He seemed to see the world of men and
things passing under Kant's manipulation into a mere
collection of phenomena and ideas of the mind. Still
more was he sensible to the loss of his God. That sur
rogate of an argument for theism which Kant seemed
to offer in the implications of the Moral Law did not
give what Jacobi wanted. Mere morality is a cold and
mechanical principle — he thinks — compared with that
infinite life and love which we deem we have in God.
The son of man, he felt, was, in virtue of an indwelling
genius of conscience, supreme over the moral law :
how much more, then, the Absolute and Eternal on a
higher grade of being than its mechanical regularities !

If the way of reasoning will not carry us to the
Absolute, still less (and that is whither Jacobi wishes
to reach) to God, there must be another way : for some
thing in him, which may be called Faith or Feeling,
Spiritual Sense or Reason, proclaims itself certain of
the reality both of God and Nature. There is an
objective reality — outside and beyond him— yet some
how to be reached by a daring leap, — whereby, out of
sheer force of will, he, shutting his eyes to the temporal
and the mechanical, finds himself carried over the
dividing gulf into the land of eternal life and love.
' I appeal ' he says in his latest utterances 1 'to an
imperative, an invincible feeling as the first and un-
derived ground of all philosophy and all religion, — to

1 Jacobi's Werkey iv. i, p. xxi.

v.] JACOB I ON FAITH. 45

a feeling which lets man become aware of and alive to
the fact that he has a sense for the supersensuous/
'As it is religion which makes man man/ he continues,
' and which alone lifts him above the animals, so it also
makes him a philosopher/ Such an organ for the
supersensuous is what in his later writings he calls
Vernunft (Reason) and distinguishes from Ver stand
(Understanding). 'This reason/ says Coleridge (to
whom we owe this use of the terms in English) in the
Friend, 'is an organ bearing the same relation to
spiritual objects as the eye bears to material pheno
mena.' It is 'that intuition of things which arises when
we possess ourselves as one with the whole/ and is
opposed to that 'science of the mere understanding' in
which 'transferring reality to the negations of reality
(to the ever-varying framework of the uniform life) we
think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature
in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing to
thought, death to life.' But this Reason is even more
than this. It is the direct contact with reality, which it
affirms and even is. It apprehends the me and the thee,
it apprehends above all the great Thee, God : appre
hends, and we may even say appropriates1. And it
apprehends them at one bound — in one salto mortale —
because if is really in implicit possession of them. Call
the step a miracle, if you will : you must admit, he
adds, that ' some time or other every philosophy must
have recourse to a miracle2/

And yet the asseveration rings false — it shows a
womanish wilfulness and weakness in its reiteration.
He has the reality; yet he has it not. 'Were a God
known/ he says in one place, ' He would not be God/
He yearns with passionate longing to find the living

1 Jacobi's Brief wechsel, i. 330.
3 Jacobi's Werke, iii. 53.

4 6 PROLEGOMENA. [v.

and true : he feels himself and the Eternal clasped in
one : his faith effects the reality of things hoped for.
But, he adds, 'We never see the Absolute ' : the primal
light of reason is but faint. It is but a presage— a pre
supposition—of the Everlasting. This reason, in short,
needs discipline and development, it needs the ethical
life to raise it: 'without morality no religiosity/ he
says. ' Light,' he complains, ' is in my heart/ but at the
moment I want to bring it into the understanding, the
light goes out.' And yet he knows— and Coleridge
repeats — 'the consciousness of reason and of its revela
tions is only possible in an understanding.'

There seem to be one or two motives acting upon
Jacobi. The 'plain man/ especially if he be of high
character and of ' noble ' religiosity, has a feeling that
the lust of philosophising disturbs the security of life,
and endangers things which are deservedly dear to
him. In such an one the 'enthusiasm of logic'— the
calm pursuit of truth at all costs, so characteristic
of Lessing — is inferior to the 'enthusiasm of life/-
a passion in which the terrestrial and the celestial are
inextricably blended, where one clings to God as the
stronghold of self, and sets personality — our human
personality — in the throne of the Eternal. He will be
all that is noble and good, if only he be not asked
utterly to surrender self. So, too, Jacobi's God— or
Absolute (for he leaves his 'non-philosophy' so far as
to use both names), is rather the final aim of a grand,
overpowering yearning, than a calm, self-centred, self-
expanding life which carries man along with it. It
would be, he feels, so very terrible, if at the last there
were no God to meet us— to find the throne of the
universe vacant. Avaunt philosophy, therefore ! Let
us cling to the faith of our nature and our childhood,
and refuse her treacherous consolations !

V.] JACOB I ON FAITH. 47

With the central proposition of Jacobi, Hegel, for
one, is not inclined to quarrel. He too, as he asks and
answers the question as to the issues of this and of the
better life, might say

' Question, answer presuppose
Two points : that the thing itself which questions, answers, — is, it

knows ;

As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself — a force
Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course,
Unaffected by its end, — that this thing likewise needs must be ;
Call this — God, then, call that — Soul, and both the only facts for me.
Prove them facts? that they o'erpass my power of proving proves

them such :
Fact it is, I know, I know not something which is fact as much.'

But when Jacobi goes on to say that it is the supreme
and final duty of the true sage ' to unveil reality/—
meaning thereby that, given the feeling, he has only to

'Define it well
For fear divine Philosophy
Should push beyond her mark and be
Procuress to the Lords of Hell,'

Hegel withdraws. It is the duty of philosophy to
labour to make the perception — the fleeting, uncertain,
trembling perception — of faith, a clear, sure, inwardly
consistent knowledge: to show, and not merely to
assert, that ' the path of (this world's) duty is the way
to (that world's) glory/ There is, Hegel himself has
said more than once, something opposed to ordinary
ways of thinking in the procedure of the philosopher.
To the outsider, it seems like standing on your head.
It involves something like what, in religious language,
is termed conversion— a new birth— becoming a new
man. But though such a change always seems to
culminate in a moment of sudden transformation, — as
if the continuity of old and new were disrupted, the
process has a history and a preparation. Of that

48 PROLEGOMENA. [v.

pilgrim's progress of the world-distracted soul to its
discovery of its true being in God, philosophy is the
record : a record which Hegel has written both in the
Phenomenologv of Mind, and, more methodically, in
his Encyclopaedia. The passage from nature to God
— or from man's limitations to the divine fullness — must
be made, he urged, in the open day and not in the
secret vision when sleep falls upon men. When the
aged Jacobi read these requirements of Hegel, he wrote
to a friend : ' He may be right, and I should like once
again to experiment with him all that the power of
thinking can do alone, were not the old man's head
too weak for it1.'

' For a philosophy like this,' says Hegel 2, ' individual
man and humanity are the ultimate standpoint : — as
a fixed invincible finitude of reason, not as a reflection
of the eternal beauty, or as a spiritual focus of the
universe, but as an ultimate sense-nature, which how
ever with the power of faith can daub itself over here
and there with an alien supersensible. Let us suppose
an artist restricted to portrait-painting ; he might so far
idealise as to introduce in the eye of a common
place countenance a yearning look, and on its lips a
melancholy smile, but he would be utterly debarred from
depicting the Gods, sublime over yearning and melan
choly — as if the delineation of eternal pictures were
only possible at the cost of humanity. So too Philoso
phy — on this view — must not portray the Idea of man,
but the abstraction of a humanity empirical and mingled
with short-comings, and must bear a body impaled on
the stake of the absolute antithesis ; and when it clearly
feels its limitation to the sensible, it must at the same
time bedeck itself with the surface colour of a super-

1 Jacobi's Briefwechsel, ii. 468.

2 Hegel's Werke, i. 15.

v.] PSEUDO-IDEALISM.

49

sensible, and point the finger of faith to a something
Higher.

' But the truth cannot be defrauded by such a con
secration if finitude be still left subsisting; the true
consecration must annihilate it. The artist, who fails to
give actuality the true truth by letting fall upon it the
ethereal illumination and taking it completely in that
light, and who can only depict actuality in its bare
ordinary reality and truth (a reality however which
is neither true nor real) may apply the pathetic remedy
to actuality, the remedy of tenderness and senti
mentality, everywhere putting tears on the cheeks
of the commonplace, and an O God ! in their mouth.
No doubt his figures in this way direct their look over
the actual heavenwards, but like bats they belong
neither to the race of birds nor beasts, neither to earth
nor heaven. Their beauty is not free from ugliness,
nor their morals without weakness and meanness : the
intelligence they haply may show is not without banality :
the success which enters into it is not without vulgarity,
and the misfortune not without cowardice and terror;
and both success and misfortune have something con
temptible. So too philosophy, if it takes the finite and
subjectivity as absolute truth in the logical form habitual
to her, cannot purify them by bringing them into rela
tion with an infinite : for that infinite is not itself the
true, because it is unable to consume finitude. But
where a philosophy consumes the temporal as such
and burns up reality, its action is pronounced a cruel
dissection, which does not leave man complete, and
a forcible abstraction which has no truth, above all no
truth for life. And such an abstraction is treated as
a painful amputation of an essential piece from the
completeness of the whole : that essential piece, and
absolute substantiality being believed to consist in the

50 PROLEGOMENA. [v.

temporal and empirical, and in privation. It is as if
a person, who sees only the feet of a work of art, were
to complain, should the whole work be unveiled to his
eyes, that he was deprived of the privation, that the
incomplete was decompleted.'

Jacobi has been spoken of as the leader of this
' Un-philosophy ' of faith. As such his allies lie on one
side among philosophers who hold by the deliverances
of ' common sense/ by the consciousness of the unso
phisticated man shrinking from the waywardness of an
idealism that deprives him of his solidest realities.
The type of such a philosopher has been drawn by
Hegel ' in Krug. But, on the other side, Jacobi touched
hands — though not in a sympathetic spirit— with a some
what motley band which also had set its face to go to
the everlasting gates, but had turned aside to aimless
wandering on the Hill Difficulty, or sought too soon
the repose of the Delectable Mountains, without due
sojourn in the valley of Humiliation or descent under
the Shadow of Death. Like Wordsworth, they felt
that the world is too much with us : that our true self
is frittered away into fragments and passing stages, in
which we are not ourselves, — whereby we also lose the
true perception of the essential life of nature. Gradually
we have sunk into the deadening arms of habit, reduced
ourselves to professional and conventional types, and
lost the freer and larger mobility of spiritual being.
We have grown into versldndige Leute — people of
practical sense and worldly wisdom. To such, philoso
phy would come — if it could come — as the great breath
of life — of 'reason' (Vernunft) which transcends the
separations inevitable in practical will and knowledge.
But to this band — which has been styled the Romantic
School of Germany — the liberation came in ways more

1 Hegel's Vermischte Schriften, i. 50.

v.J THE ROMANTIC IRONY. 51

analogous to that craved for by Jacobi. Their way
was the way of Romance and Imagination. The
principle of Romance is the protest against confining
man and nature to the dull round of uniformities which
custom and experience have imprisoned them in.
Boundless life, infinite spontaneity is surging within us
and the world, ready to break down the dams con
vention and inertia have established. That inner power
is an ever- fresh, ever-restless Irony, which sets up and
overthrows, which refuses to be bound or stereotyped,
which is never weary, never exhausted, — free in the
absolute sense. It is the mystic force of Nature, which
they seemed to see ever on the spring to work its magic
transformations, and burst the bulwarks of empirical
law. It is the princely jus aggratiandi, the sportive sove
reignty of the true artist, who is able at any moment to
enter into direct communion with the heart of things.

The beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany,
as well as in England, was a period of effervescence :
—there was a good deal of fire, and naturally there
was also a good deal of smoke. Genius was exultant
in its aspirations after Freedom, Truth, and Wisdom.
The Romantic School, which had grown up under the
stimulus of Fichte's resolve to enact thought, and had
for a time been closely allied with Schelling, counted
amongst its literary chiefs the names of the Schlegels,
of Tieck, Novalis, and perhaps Richter. The world,
as that generation dreamed, was to be made young
again,— first by drinking, where Wordsworth led, from
the fresh springs of nature, — afterwards when, as often
has happened, doubts arose as to where Nature was
really to be found, by an elixir distilled from the
withered flowers of medieval Catholicism and chivalry,

' Since the Mid- Age was the Heroic Time '

and even from the old roots of primeval wisdom. The

£ 2

52 PROLEGOMENA. [v.

good old times of faith and harmonious beauty were to
be brought back again by the joint labours of ideas and
poetry. —

' So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
This Duke would fain know he was without being it.'

To that period of incipient and darkling energy
Hegel stands in very much the same position
as Luther did to the pre- Reformation mystics, to
Meister Eckhart, and the unknown author of the
1 German Theology/ It was from this side, from the
school of Genius and Romance in philosophy, that
Hegel was proximately driven, not into sheer re-action,
but into system, development, and science.

To elevate philosophy from a love of wisdom into the
possession of real wisdom, into a system and a science,
is the aim which he distinctly set before himself from
the beginning. In almost every work, and every course
of lectures, whatever be their subject, he cannot let slip
the chance of an attack upon the mode of philosophising
which substituted the strength of belief or conviction
for the intervention of reasoning and argument. There
may have been a strong sympathy in him with the end
which these German contemporaries and, in some ways,
analogues to Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, and
Byron had in view. No one who reads his criticism
of Kant can miss perceiving his bent towards the
Infinite. But he utterly rejects the vision of feeling,
whether as longing faith or devout enjoyment, as an
adequate exposition of the means to this end. Whereas
these fantastic seers and sentimentalists either disparage
science as a limitation to the spirit, in the calm trust of
their life in God, or yearn throughout life for a peace
which they never quite reach, Hegel is bent upon
showing men that the Infinite is not unknowable,
as Kant would have it, and yet that man can not, as

v.J THE AGE OF GENIUS. 53

Jacob! would have it, naturally and without an effort
enjoy the things of God \ He will prove that the way
of Truth is open, and prove it by describing in detail
every step of the road. Philosophy for him must be
reasoned truth. She does not visit favoured ones in
visions of the night, but comes to all who win her by
patient study.

' For those/ he says, 'who ask for a royal road to
science, no more convenient directions can be given
than to trust to their own sound common sense, and, if
they wish to keep up with the age and with philosophy,
to read the reviews criticising philosophical works, and
perhaps even the prefaces and the first paragraphs in
these works themselves. The introductory remarks
state the general and fundamental principles ; and the
reviews, besides their historical information, contain
a critical estimate, which, from the very fact that it is
such, is beyond and above what it criticises. This is
the road of ordinary men : and it may be traversed in
a dressing-gown. The other way is the way of intuition.
It requires you to don the vestments of the high-priest.
Along that road stalks the ennobling sentiment of the
Eternal, the True, the Infinite. But it is wrong to call
this a road. These grand sentiments find themselves,
naturally and without taking a single step, centred in the
very sanctuary of truth. So mighty is genius, with its
deep original ideas and its high flashes of wit. But
a depth like this is not enough to lay bare the sources
of true being, and these rockets are not the empyrean.
True thoughts and scientific insights are only to be
gained by the labour which comprehends and grasps its
object. And that thorough grasp alone can produce
the universality of science. Contrasted with the vulgar
vagueness and scantiness of common sense, that univer-
1 Compare pages 121-142 of the Logic.

54 PROLEGOMENA. [v.

salityis a fully-formed and rounded intellect; and, con
trasted with the un- vulgar generality of the natural gift
of reason when it has been spoilt by the laziness and
self-conceit of genius, it is truth put in possession of its
native form, and thus rendered the possible property of
every self-conscious reason V

These words which were taken to heart (unnecessarily,
perhaps) by the patron of the Intellectual Intuition rung
the knell to the friendship of Hegel with his great con
temporary Schelling. Yet this hard saying is also the
keynote to the subsequent work of the philosopher. In
Hegel we need expect no brilliant aper^us of genius, no
intellectual legerdemain, but only the patient unravel
ing of the clue of thought through all knots and
intricacies : a deliberate tracing and working-out of
the contradictions and mysteries in thought, until the
contradiction and the mystery disappear. Perseverance
is the secret of Hegel.

This characteristic of patient work is seen, for ex
ample, in the incessant prosecution of hints and
glimpses, until they grew into systematic and rounded
outline. Instead of vague anticipations and guesses
at truth, fragments of insight, his years of philosophic
study are occupied with writing and re-writing, in the
endeavour to clear up and arrange the masses of his
ideas. Essay after essay, and sketch after sketch of
a system, succeed each other amongst his papers. His
first great work was not published before his 37th year,
after six years spent in university work at Jena, following
as many spent in preliminary lucubration. The notes
which he used to dictate some years afterwards to the
boys in the Gymnasium at Niirnberg bear evidence of
constant remodelling, and the same is true of his
professorial lectures.

1 Phenomenologie des Geistes, p. 54 (Werke, ii).

V0 HEGEL'S PERSEVERANCE. 55

Such insistance in tracing every suggestion of truth
to its place in the universe of thought is the peculiar
character and difficulty of Hegelian argument. Other
observers have now and again noticed, accentuated, and,
it may be, popularised some one point or some one law
in the evolution of reason. Here and there, as we
reflect, we are forced to recognise what Hegel termed
the dialectical nature in thought, — the tendency, by
which a principle, when made to be all that it implied,
when, as the phrase is, it is carried to extremes, recoils
and leaves us confronted by its antithesis. We cannot,
for example, study the history of ancient thought without
noting this phenomenon. Thus, the persistence with
which Plato and Aristotle taught and enforced the
doctrine that the community was the guide and safe
guard of the several citizens, very soon issued in the
schools of Zeno and Epicurus, teaching the rights of
self-seeking and of the independent self-realisation of the
individual. But the passing glimpse of an indwelling
discord in the terms, by which we argue, is soon for
gotten, and is set aside under the head of accidents,
instead of being referred to a general law. Most of us
take only a single step to avoid what has turned out
wrong, and when we have overcome the seeming abso
luteness of one idea, we are content and even eager to
throw ourselves under the yoke of another, not less
one-sided than its predecessor. Sometimes one feels
tempted to say that the course of human thought as
a whole, as well as that branch of it termed science,
exhibits nothing but a succession of illusions, which
enclose us in the belief that some idea is all-embracing
as the universe,— illusions, from which the mind is time
after time liberated, only in a little while to sink under
the sway of some partial correction, as if it and it only
were the complete truth.

56 PROLEGOMENA.

Or, again, the Positive Philosophy exhibits as one of
its features an emphatic and popular statement of
a fallacy much discussed in Hegel. One of the best
deeds of that school has been to protest against
a delusive belief in certain words and notions ; particu
larly by pointing out the insufficiency of what it calls
metaphysical terms, i. e. those abstract entities formed
by reflective thought, which are little else than a double
of the phenomenon they are intended to explain. To
account for the existence of insanity by an assumed
basis for it in the ' insane neurosis/ or to attribute the
sleep which follows a dose of opium to the soporific
virtues of the drug, are some exaggerated examples of
the metaphysical intellect which is so rampant in
much of our popular, and even of our esoteric science.
Positivism by its logical precepts ought at least to have
instilled general distrust of abstract talk about essences,
laws, forces and causes, whenever they claim an inhe
rent and independent value, or profess to be more
than a reflex of sensation. But all this is only a desul
tory perception, the reflection of an intelligent observer.
When we come to Hegel, the Comtian perception of
the danger lying in the terms of metaphysics is replaced
by the Second Part of Logic, the Theory of Essential
Being, where substances, causes, forces, essences,
matters, are confronted with what Mr. Bain has called
their ' suppressed correlative V

1 Practical Essays, p. 43.

CHAPTER VI.

THE SCIENCES AND PHILOSOPHY.

BY asserting the rights of philosophy against the
dogmatism of self-inspired ' unphilosophy/ and by main
taining that we must not feel the truth, with our eyes as
it were closed, but must open them full upon it, Hegel
does not reduce philosophy to the level of one of the
finite sciences. The name 'finite/ like the name 'em
pirical/ is not a title of which the sciences have any
cause to be ashamed. They are called empirical, because
it is their glory and their strength to found upon
experience. They are called finite, because they have a
fixed object, which they must expect and cannot alter ;
because they have an end and a beginning, — pre
supposing something where they begin, and leaving
something for the sciences which come after. Botany
rests upon the researches of chemistry : and astronomy
hands over the record of cosmical movements to
geology. Science is interlinked with science; and each
of them is a fragment. Nor can these fragments ever,
in the strict sense of the word, make up a whole or
total. They have broken off, sometimes by accident,
and sometimes for convenience, from one another. The
sciences have budded forth here and there upon the
tree of popular knowledge and ordinary consciousness,
as the interest and needs of the time drew attention

58 PROLEGOMENA. [vi.

closer to various points and objects in the world sur
rounding us.

Prosecute the popular knowledge about any point
far enough, substituting completeness and accuracy for
vagueness, and especially giving numerical definiteness
in weight, size, and figure, until the little drop of fact
has grown into an ocean, and the mere germ has ex
panded into a structure with complex interconnexion,
— and you will have a science. By its point of origin
this luminous body of facts is united to the great circle
of human knowledge and ignorance. Each special
science is a part, which presupposes a total of much
lower organisation, but much wider range than itself:
each branch of scientific knowledge grows out of the
already existent tree of acquaintance with things. But
the part very soon assumes an independence of its own,
and adopts a hostile or negative attitude towards the
general level of unscientific opinion. This process of
what we may, from the vulgar point of view, call ab
normal development, is repeated irregularly at various
points along the surface of ordinary consciousness. At
one time it is the celestial movements calling for the
science of astronomy: at another the problem of dividing
the soil calling for the geometrician. Each of these
outgrowths naturally re-acts and modifies the whole
range of human knowledge, or what we may call
popular science ; and thus, while keeping up its own
life, it quickens the parent stock with an infusion of
new vigour, and raises the general intelligence to a
higher level and into a higher element.

The order of the outcome of the sciences in time,
therefore, and their connexions with one another,
cannot be explained or understood, if we look only to
the sciences themselves. We must first of all descend
into the depths of natural thought, or of general culture,

VI.] THE RISE OF THE SCIENCES.

59

and trace the lines which unite science with science in
that general medium. The systematic interdependence
of the sciences must be chiefly sought for in the work
ings of thought as a whole in its popular phases, and in
the action and reaction of that general human thought
with the sciences, those definite organisations of know
ledge which form sporadically round the nuclei here and
there presented in what would superficially be described
as the inorganic mass and medium of popular know
ledge. Thus, by means of the sciences in their aggre
gate action, the material of common consciousness is
expanded and developed, at least in certain parts, though
the expansion may be neither consistent nor systematic.
But so long as this work is incomplete, so long, that is
to say, as every point in the line of popular knowledge
has not received its due elaboration and equal study,
the sciences merely succeed each other in a certain
imperfect sequence, or exist in juxtaposition : they do
not form a total. The whole of scientific knowledge
will only be formed, when science shall be as completely
rounded and unified, as in its lower sphere and more
inadequate element the ordinary consciousness of the
world is now.

Up to a certain point the method of science is but
the method of ordinary consciousness pursued know
ingly and steadily. But ere long the method acquires
a distinctive character of its own. It shakes off the
pressure of that immediate subservience in which
ordinary knowledge stands to man's needs, wishes and
interests. Knowledge is pursued — within a wide range
—for its own sake, and by a class more or less definitely
set apart by humanity for its scientific service, — which
is thus performed more systematically and continuously.
But the great step which carries ordinary knowledge
into its higher region is the discovery, due to reflection

60 PROLEGOMENA. [vi.

and comparison, that there is a double grade of reality
— a permanent, essential, uniform, substantial being,
which is contrasted with an evanescent, apparent, vary
ing and accidental. To know a thing is in all cases to
relate it to something else : to know it in the higher
sense— vere scire — is to relate it to its essence, its sub
stantial or universal form, its permanent self. Ordinary
knowledge, e. g., fixes a thing by referring to its ante
cedents : scientific knowledge refers it to its 'invariable/
'unconditional' or ' essential ' antecedent, — to something
which contains it implicitly, and necessarily, and is not
merely by accident or juxtaposition associated with it.
To discover this permanent, underlying substance or
reality comes to be the problem of science — a problem
which may be taken in the widest generality, or re
stricted to some one group of existences. What is
asked for, e.g., may be the uniformity and essence in
the appearance of the diurnal journey of the sun, or it
may be the underlying, invisible, nature which displays
itself in all the variety of minerals, and in animal
and plant life. The one-and-the-same in a diversity of
many ; the type-form in individuals : the cause which is
the key to understanding an effect that always and un
conditionally follows it ; the force which finds different
expression in actions — are what Science seeks.

In that search two points emerge as regards the
method. The first is the importance of quantitative
statements or numerical appreciations, and the general
law that variations in the qualitative are in some ratio
concomitant with variations in the quantitative. Mathe
matics, in a word, is found to be an invaluable instru
ment for recording with accuracy the minutest as well
as the most immense differences of quality. First, it is
seen that qualitative differences within a given range,
e.g. various colours or various musical notes, can be accu-

VI.] MATHEMATICAL SCIENCE. 61

rately expressed by a numerical ratio. But, secondly,
it soon appears that even greater divergences of quality,
e.g. those of colour and of chemical quality, may pos
sibly be reduced to stages on one quantitative scale. It
is not unnatural that such experiences should give rise
to a hope — and in sanguine minds, an assurance — that
all the phenomena of nature are ultimately phases of
some common nature — some elementary being — which
runs through an infinite gamut of numerically defined
adjustments.

But the numerical prepossession — as we may call it —
creates another assumption. Every number consists of
units : every cube can be regarded as an aggregation of
smaller cubes, and in measurement is (implicitly at
least) so regarded. Transferring this to the physical
world, every object is regarded as a composite — a Large,
made up by the addition and juxtaposition of many
(relatively) Littles. The essentials of the composite
are here the elements that compose it : these, by a
natural tendency, we proceed to conceive as remaining
always unchanged, and giving rise by their peculiar
juxtaposition to certain perceptions in the human being.
You whirl rapidly a blazing piece of wood, and instead
of a discontinuous series of flashes you see one orbit of
luminous matter : or, let falling rain-drops take up a
particular position in reference to your eyes and the
sun, and a rainbow is visible. In both cases there is
what may be called an illusion — the illusion, above all,
of unity and continuity. Now what is in these cases
obviously and demonstrably seen, is, as Leibniz in par
ticular has reminded us, the general law of all matter
as such. In the extended and material world there is
nowhere a real unity discoverable. The small is made
up of the smaller ad infinitum 1. But the conclusion

1 Leibniz, ed. Gerhardt, iii. 507 : ' Les atomes sont 1'effet de la

62 PROLEGOMENA. [vi.

(which Leibniz drew)— that unity belongs only to
Monads and never by any possibility to a material sub
stance, was not that commonly reached or accepted.
There are — or there must be, — said the prevalent creed,
ultimates, indivisibles, indecomposables, simples, atoms.
These are the final bricks of reality, out of which the
apparent universe is built : each with a maximum, — a ne
plus ultra— of resistibility, hardness, fullness, and un-
squeezable bulk.

Into further details of these ultimate irreducibles we
need not enter. It is sufficient to denote the general
purport of the conception, and the tendency it implies.
In these ultimates supreme reality is understood to lie;
and on them at last, and indeed always, rests whatever
reality truly exists in any object. All else is secondary
— and, comparatively speaking, illusory, — unreal. Any
phenomena that may be noted only affect the surface or
show of these reals : the inner reality continues one and
unchanged. Outside them, around them, is the void —
emptiness, non-entity. Yet null and void as it may be,
we may, in passing, reply, — this circumambient is the
source of all that gives these masses of atoms any dis
tinctive reality — any character of true being. Space
may be empty enough, — a mere spectre-shell ; and yet
it is their differences in spatial circumstance that bring
out and actualise what they implicitly are. These
' individual these units of reality, these atoms, are real
and knowable only in their relations. So too Time
may be contemptuously treated as a passive receptacle :
yet it is only by its connexions in the past and the
future that the present moment has any actuality it may
claim. And time and space are potent agencies — in

foiblesse de nostre imagination, qui aime a se reposer et a se hater
9. venir a une fin dans les sous-divisions et analyses : il n'en est pas
ainsi dans la nature qui vient de Tinfini et va a 1'infini.'

VI.] THE ATOMIC THEORY. 63

popular mode of utterance — whatever the mechanical
philosophy may say.

But all of these relations are in the realm of unreality.
The atoms alone are : and yet the void, which ought
not to be, in an unmistakable way is also. To this
mysterious vacuum which lies outside (and yet not out
side) reality, to this not-being which is, there can only
be given a half-negative and baffling name. Let it be
called Chance — or let it be called Necessity; let it be
called inexplicable Law of co-existence and sequence, —
the Force which is the beginning of motion. It is the
ultimate key to the mystery — but it is at least a key
which no human hand can use; or even lay hold of. It
is enough for science if, leaving this ultimate inexplica-
bility untouched, it trace in each separate instance the
exact equation between the sum of the constituents and
the total which they compose, — if it prove that the
several items when put together exactly give the sum
proposed. Identification — the establishment of quanti
tative equations — is the work of science. Identity is its
canon, working on the presumption or axiom that there
can be nothing in the result which was not in the ante
cedents or conditions. Ex nihilo nihil fit. The quantity
of energy must always be the same, though its phases
may vary, or temporarily avoid detection. Matter, i.e.
the ultimate reality, is indestructible. In short, the
method of analysis and synthesis, as that of addition
and subtraction, is a calculus which takes the form of
an equation.

So far the inorganic, inanimate world has been
mainly in view. If we now turn to the organisms, we
find the popular creed expressed in the adage Omne
vivum e vivo. No eye has ever seen — though fanatical
observers have sometimes so deluded themselves as
to think they saw — a living being directly emerge from

64 PROLEGOMENA. [vi.

inorganic stuff. The saner student of physiology con
tents himself with leaving for the while the crux of the
genesis of Life, and examining only the building up of
the living creature out of its constituents. Here the
atom is called the cell : every organism is a synthesis
of cells, and in the cell we have the primary element of
organic reality: Omnis cellula e cellula. In the atom
we have the ultimate element; in the cell a relative
element, — the absolute beginning of a new order of
things, — which we may, if we like, choose to treat
(though only for logical simplicity's sake) as a gradual
development from the other and more primitive, but
which, so far as experience and history teach, is equally
ultimate in its kind. But be the final constituent
(physical) atom, or (physiological) cell, the relation of
these constituents is at first conceived by science only
as composition, or mechanical synthesis. It is only
gradually that science begins to have doubts as to the
inviolability and unalterableness of the elements. When
the idea— not altogether new — of a 'latent meta-sche-
matism ' and latent process within the constituents is
entertained and carried out in earnest, science has
passed on to a new stage : from mechanical atomism to
a dynamic and organic theory of existence. And the
governing ideas of scientific logic have then ceased to
be co-existence, and sequence, correlation and compo
sition : the new category is intus-susception, develop
ment, adaptation not only external but internal.

Divide et impera is the motto of Science. To isolate
one thing or one group of facts from its context, — to
penetrate beneath the apparent simplicity, which time
and custom have taught ordinary eyes to see in the
concrete object, to the multitude of underlying simple
elements, — to leave everything extraneous out of sight,
— to abolish the teleology which imposes upon Nature

VI.] SCIENCE AS DESTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS. 65

a permanent tribute (direct or indirect) towards the
supply of human wants, — and to take, as it were, one
thing at a time and study it for itself disinterestedly ;
that is the problem of the sciences. And to accomplish
that end they do not hesitate to break the charmed
links which in common vision hold the world together,
—to disregard the spiritual harmony which the sense of
beauty finds in the scene, — to strip off the relations of
means and end, which reflection has thrown from thing
to thing, and the sensuous atmosphere of so-called
' secondary ' qualities in which human sense has en
veloped each ; and finally to sever its connexion by
which

'the whole round world is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.'

In those days when reflection had not set in, — when
humanity had not yet found itself a stranger in the
house of Nature, and had not yet dared to regard her
as a mere automatic slave, men had no doubts as to the
meaning of things. They lived sympathetically her
life.

1 Man, once descried, imprints for ever
His presence on all lifeless things : the winds
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,
A querulous mutter, or a quick gay laugh.'

To the extent of his abilities and his culture, indeed
man has in all ages read himself into the phenomena
external to him. Such readings, in times when he
feared and loved his kinsfolk of Nature, were fetichism
and anthropomorphism. Gradually, however, forget
ting his community, he claimed to be the measure and
master of all things : to decree their use and function.
But in course of time, when the sciences had eman
cipated themselves from the yoke of philosophy,
they refused to borrow any such help in reading the
riddle of the universe, and resolved to begin, ab ovo,

F

66 PROLEGOMENA. [vi.

from the atom or cell, and leave the elements to
work out their own explanation. Modern science in so
doing practises the lessons learned from Spinoza and
Hume. The former teaches that all conception of
order, i. e. of adaptation and harmony in nature, and
indeed all the methods by which nature is popularly
explained, are only modes of our emotional imagination,
betraying how imperfect has been in most of us the
emancipation of human intellect from the servitude to
the affections l. The latter points out that all connexions
between things are solely mental associations, ingrained
habits of expectation, the work of time and custom,
accredited only by experience2. There must be no
pre-suppositions allowed in the studies of science, no
help derived prematurely from the later terms in the
process to elucidate the earlier. Let man, it is said, be
explained by those laws, and by the action of those
primary elements which build up every other part of
nature : let molecules by mechanical union construct
the thinking organism, and then construct society. The
elements which we find by analysis must be all that is
required to make the synthesis. Thus in modern times
science carries out, fully and with the details of actual
knowledge in several branches, the principles of the
atom and the void, which Democritus suggested.

1 Spinoza, Ethica, i. 36. App. * Quoniam ea nobis prae ceteris grata
sunt quote facile imaginari possumus, ideo homines ordinem confusioni
praeferunt : quasi ordo aliquid in natura praeter respectum ad nostram
imaginationem esset . . . Videmus itaque omnes rationes quibus vulgus
solet naturam explicare modos esse tantummodo imaginandi? Cf. Eth.
iv. praef. : Epist. xxxii.

2 ' This transition of thought from the Cause to the Effect pro
ceeds not from Reason. It derives its origin altogether from Custom
and Experience.' Hume, Essay V. (Enquiry concerning Human
Understanding.) 'All inferences from Experience therefore are
effects of Custom.' (Ibid.)

vi.] SCIENCE AS DESTRUCTIVE ANALYSIS. 67

The scientific spirit, however, the spirit of analysis
and abstraction (or of ' Mediation' and 'Reflection '), is
not confined in its operations to the physical world.
The criticism of ordinary beliefs and conventions has
been applied — and applied at an earlier period — to
what has been called the Spiritual world, to Art,
Religion, Morality, and the institutions of human
Society. Under these names the agency of ages, acting
by their individual minds, has created organic systems,
unities which have claimed to be permanent, inviolable,
and divine. Such unities or organic structures are the
Family, the State, the works of Art, the forms, doctrines,
and systems of Religion, existing and recognised in
ordinary consciousness. But in these cases, as in
Nature, the reflective principle may come forward and
ask what right these unities have to exist. This is the
question which the 'Encyclopaedic/ the ' Aufklarung,'
the ' Rationalist ' and ' Freethinking ' theories, raise
and have raised in the last century and the present.
What is the Family, it is said, but a fiction or con
vention, which is used to give a decent, but somewhat
transparent covering to a certain animal appetite, and
its probable consequences ? What is the State, and
what is Society, but a fiction or compact, by which the
weak try to make themselves seem strong, and the
unjust seek to shelter themselves from the consequences
of their own injustice ? What is Religion, it is said,
but a delusion springing from the fears and weakness
of the crowd, and the cunning of the few, which men
have fostered until it has wrapped humanity in its
snaky coils? And Poetry, we are assured, like its
sister Arts, will perish and its illusions fade away, when
Science, now in the cradle, has become the full-grown
Hercules. As for Morality and Law, and the like, the
same condemnation has been prepared from of old.

F 2

68 PROLEGOMENA. [vi.

All of them, it is said, are but the inventions of power
and craft, or the phantoms of human imagination,
which the strength of positive science and bare facts is
destined in no long time to dispel.

When they insisted upon a severance of the elements
in the vulgarly-accepted unities of the world, Science
and Freethinking, like Epicurus in an older day, have
believed that they were liberating the world from its
various superstitions, from the bonds which instinct
and custom had fastened upon things so as to combine
them into systems more or less arbitrary. They
denied the supremacy and reality of those ideas which
insist on the essential unity and self-sameness in things
that visibly and tangibly have a separate existence of
their own, and branded these ideas comprehensively as
mysticism and metaphysics. They sought to disabuse
us of spirits, vital forces, divine right of govern
ments, final causes, et hoc genus omne. They were
exceedingly jealous for the independence of the indi
vidual, and for his right to demand satisfaction for the
questioning, ground-seeking faculty of his nature. But
while they did so they hardly realised how entirely the
spectator is the part, the product of what he surveys,
and while surveying treats as if it were but a spot or
mark on the circumference of the circle that lies — some
way off — around him. l Phenomenalism/ as this mode
of looking at things has been called, is false to life, and
would cut away the ground from philosophy '.

To some extent philosophy returns to the position
of the wider consciousness, to the general belief in
harmony and symmetry. It reverts to the unity or
connexion, which the natural presumptions of mankind
find in the picture of the world. The nolo philosophari
of the intuitivist, in reaction from the supposed excesses

1 J. Grote, Exploratio Philosophicd .

vi.] THE NEED OF RECONSTRUCTIVE THEORY. 69

of the sciences, simply reverted to the bare re-statement
of the popular creed. If science, e.g., had shown that
the perception of an external world pre-supposed for its
accomplishment an unsuspected series of intermediate
steps, the mere intuitivist simply denied the inter
mediation by appealing to Common Sense, or to the
natural instincts and primary beliefs of mankind. Con
viction and natural instinct were declared to counter
balance the abstractions of science. But philosophy
which seeks to comprehend existence cannot take the
same ground as the intuitional school, or neglect the
testimony of science. If the spiritual unity of the world
has been denied and lost to sight, mere assertion that
we feel and own its pervading power will not do much
good. It is necessary to reconcile the contrast between
the wholeness of the natural vision, and the fragmen
tary, but in its fragments elaborated, result of science.

The sciences break up the rough generalisations or
vulgar concepts of everyday use, and make their fixed
distinctions yield to analysis. They thus render con
tinuous things which were looked at as only separate.
But they tend again to substitute the results of their
analysis as a new and permanent distinction and
principle of things. They are like revolutionists who
upset and perturb an old order, and set up a new and
minuter tyranny in its place. Gradually, the general
culture, the average educated intelligence gathers up
the fruit of scientific research into the total development
of humanity: and uses the work of science to fill up the
lacunae, the gaps, which make popular consciousness so
irregular and disconnected. A sort of popular philo
sophy comes to sum up and estimate what science has
accomplished : and therein is as it were the spirit of
the world taking into his own hand the acquisitions
won by the more audacious and self-willed of his sons,

70 PROLEGOMENA. [vi.

and investing them in the common store. They are set
aside and preserved there, at first in an abstract and
technical form, but destined soon to pass into the
possession of all, and form that mass of belief and
instinctive or implanted knowledge whence a new
generation will draw its mental supplies. Each great
scientific discovery is in its turn reduced to a part of
the common stock. It leaves the technical field, and
spreads into the common life of men, becoming em
bodied in their daily beliefs, — a seed of thought, from
which, by the agency of intelligent experience, new
increments of science will one day spring.

Philosophy properly so called is also the unification
of science, but in a new sphere, a higher medium not
recognised by the sciences themselves. The recon
ciliation which the philosopher believes himself to
accomplish between ordinary consciousness and science
is identified by either side with a phase of its antagonist
error. Science will term philosophy a modified form
of the old religious superstition. The popular con
sciousness of truth, and especially religion, will see in
philosophy only a repetition or an aggravation of the
evils of science. The attempt at unity will not approve
itself to either, until they enter upon the ground which
philosophy occupies, and move in that element. And
that elevation into the philosophic ether calls for
a tension of thought which is the sternest labour im
posed upon man : so that the continuous action of
philosophising has been often styled superhuman. If
anywhere, it is in pure philosophy that proof becomes
impossible, unless for those who are willing to think for
themselves \ The philosophic lesson cannot be handed
on to a mere recipient : the result, when cut off from

1 Cf. vol. ii. p. 4.

vi.] PHILOSOPHY THE STUDY OF UNITIES. 71

the process which produced it, vanishes like the palace
in the fairy tale.

1 The whole of philosophy is nothing but the study of
the specific forms or types of unity V There are many
species and grades of this unity. They are not merely
to be enumerated and asserted in a vague way, as they
here and there force themselves upon the notice of the
popular mind. Philosophy sees in that unity neither
an ultimate and unanalysable fact, nor a deception, but
a growth (which is also a struggle), a revealing or unfold
ing, which issues in an organism or system, constructing
itself more and more completely by a force of its own.
This system formed by these types of the fundamental
unity is called the ' Idea/ of which the highest law is
development. Philosophy essays to do for this connec
tive and unifying nature, i. e. for the thought in things,
something like what the sciences have done or would
like to do for the facts of sense and matter, — to do for
the spiritual binding-element in its integrity, what is
being done for the several facts which are more or less
combined. It retraces the universe of thought from its
germinal form, where it seems, as it were, an indecom
posable point, to the fully matured system or organism,
and shows not merely that one phase of pure thought
passes into another, but how it does so, and yet is not
lost, but subsists suspended and deprived of its narrow
ness in the maturer phase.

1 Philosophic der Religion, i. p. 97 : ' Die ganze Philosophie ist nichts
Anderes als das Studium der Bestimmungen der Einheit.' See
especially Encycl, § 573 (Philosophy of Mind, pp. 192 seqq.).

CHAPTER VII.

ANTICIPATORY SKETCH OF THE SCOPE OF PHILOSOPHY.

THE psychology of the Greeks has to all appearance
given the mere intellect an undue pre-eminence, if it
has not even treated it as man's essential self. Whether
the appearance is altogether sound might be a profitable
inquiry for those who most criticise it. At any rate,
a later psychology has taught us to regard man as at
once a cognitive, an emotional, and a volitional being.
It has arrived at this conclusion as it looked at the
division that parted off the systems of science from the
sphere of conduct and social life, and both from the
inner life of sentiment, of love, admiration and rever
ence. And the inference was justifiable, in the same
way as Plato's when, as he surveyed the triple sphere
into which the outward world of his contemporary
society was divided, he concluded a triplicity of the
soul. If it was justifiable, it was also, as in his case,
somewhat misleading. In the outward manifestation,
where the letters are posted up on a gigantic scale, one
tends to forget that they only spell one word. Their
difference and distance seem increased, and we fail to
note that, though there are three aspects, yet there is
only one power or soul, which exhibits itself under one
or other of the three tones or modes. In the actual
human being, cognition is always of some emotional

ELEMENTS OF MIND. 73

interest and always leads up to some practical result.
From different points of view one or other is occasion
ally declared to be primary and original ; the others
derivative and secondary. At any rate we may say
that in the ordinary human being who is still in the
garden of preparation and has not yet stepped forth on
one of the separate routes of life, his knowledge, his
emotional and his active life are in a tolerable harmony,
and that each in its little development is constantly
followed by the other.

But with the outward differentiation an inward went
hand in hand. In some cases the intellectual or scien
tific, in others the emotional, in others the active
faculties became predominant. Human nature in order
to attain all its completeness had first of all, as it were,
to lose its life in order to gain it. The individual had
to sacrifice part of his all-sided development in order
that he might gain it again, and in a larger measure,
through the medium of society. This process is the
process of civilisation : the long and, as it often seems,
weary road by which man can only realise himself by
self-sacrifice : can only reach unity through the way of
diversity, and must die to live. It is a process in
which it is but too easy to notice only one stage and
speak of it as if it were the whole. It is possible some
times to identify civilisation with the material increase
in the means of producing 'enjoyment, or with the pro
gress of scientific teaching as to the laws of those material
phenomena on which material civilisation is largely
dependent. It is possible sometimes to take as its test
the stores of artistic works, and the extension of a lively
and delicate love of all that is beautiful and tasteful.
One may identify it with a high-toned moral life, and
with an orderly social system. Or one may maintain
that the real civilisation of a country presupposes

74 PROLEGOMENA. [VH.

a lofty conception and reverent attitude to the supreme
source of all that is good, and true, and beautiful.

The question is important as bearing on the relation
of philosophy to the special sciences. Philosophy is
sometimes identified with the sum of sciences : some
times with their complete unification. Philosophy, says
a modern, is knowledge completely unified. It is of
course to some extent a question of words in what
sense a term is to be defined. And no one will dispute
that the scientific element is in point of form the most
conspicuous aspect of philosophy. Yet if we look at
the historical use of the term, one or two considerations
suggest themselves. Philosophy, said an ancient, is
the knowledge of things human and divine. Again and
again, it has claimed for its task to be a guide and chart
of human life — to reveal the form of good and of beauty.
But to do this, it must be more than a mere science, or
than a mere system of the sciences. Again, it has been
urged by modern critics that Kant at last discovered
for philosophy her true province — the study of the
conditions and principles of human knowledge. But
though epistemology is all-important, the science of
knowledge is not identical with philosophy : nor did
Kant himself think it was. Rather his view is on the
whole in accord with what he has called the 'world's
(as opposed to the scholar's) conception of philosophy1,'
as the science of the bearing of all ascertainable truths
on the essential aims of human reason — teleologia
humanae rationis, — in accord, too, with the world's con
ception of the philosopher as no mere logician, but the
legislator of human reason.

This, it need hardly be added, is the conception of
philosophy which is implicitly the basis of Hegel's use.
Let us hear Schelling. 'A philosophy which in its

1 Kant's Kritik d. r. Vernunft : Methodenl. Architektonik d. r. Vern.

vii.] PHILOSOPHY MORE THAN SCIENTIFIC. 75

principle is not already religion is no true philosophy1/
Or again, as to the place of Ethics : ' Morality is God
like disposition, an uplifting above the influence of the
concrete into the realm of the utterly universal. Philo
sophy is a like elevation, and for that reason intimately
one with morality, not through subordination, but
through essential and inner likeness V But, again, it
has more than once been felt that philosophy is
kindred with Art. It has been said — not as a com
pliment—that philosophy is only a form of gratifying
the aesthetic instincts. Schopenhauer has suggested —
as a novelty — that the true way to philosophy was not
by science, but through Art. And Schelling before
him had — while asserting the inner identity of the two —
even gone so far as to assert 3 that ' Art is the sole, true
and eternal organon as well as the ostensible evidence of
philosophy/

Philosophy, therefore, is one of a triad in which the
human spirit has tried to raise itself above its limitations
and to become god-like. And philosophy is the climax ;
Art the lowest ; Religion in the mean. But this does
not mean that Religion supersedes Art, and that Philo
sophy supersedes religion ; or, if we retain the term
'supersede/ we must add that the superseded is not
left behind and passed aside : it is rather an integral
constituent of what takes its place. Philosophy is true
and adequate only as it has given expression to all that
religion had or aimed at. So, too, Religion is not the
destruction of Art : though here the attitude may often
seem to be more obviously negative. A religion which
has no place for art is, again, no true religion. And
thus again, Philosophy becomes a reconciler of Art and
Religion : of the visible ideal and the invisible God.

1 Schilling's Werke, v. 116. 2 Ibid. v. 276. 3 Ibid. iii. 267.

76 PROLEGOMENA. [vii.

Art, on the other hand, is a foretaste and a prophecy of
religion and philosophy.

But Art, Religion, and Philosophy, again, rest upon,
grow out of, and are the fulfilment of an ethical society
— a state of human life where an ordered common
wealth in outward visibility is animated and sustained
by the spirit of freedom and self-realisation. And that
public objective existence of social humanity in its turn
reposes on the will and intelligence of human beings,
of souls which in various relations of discipline and
interaction with their environment have become free-
agents, and have risen to be more than portions
of the physical world, sympathetic with its changes,
and become awake to themselves and their surround
ings. Such is the mental or spiritual life as it rises
to full sense of its power, recognises its kindred with
the general life, carries out that kindred .in its social
organisation, and at length through the strength social
union gives floats boldly in the empyrean of spiritual
life, in art, religion, and philosophy.

But, what about the special relationship of philosophy
to the sciences ? Undoubtedly the philosophers of the
early years of the century have used lordly language in
reference to the sciences. They have asserted — from
Fichte downwards— that the philosophical construction
of the universe must justify itself to itself— must be con
sistent, continuous, and coherent — and that it had not
to wait for experience to give it confirmation. Even
the cautious Kant ' had gone so far as to assert that
the ' understanding gives us nature ' — i. e. as he ex
plains, natura formaliter spectata, viz., the order and
regularity in the phenomena— that it is the source of
the laws of nature and of its formal unity. The so-
called proofs of natural laws are only instances and

1 Kant, Kritik d. r. Vern., Deduction of the Categories, Sect. III.

vil.] PHILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENCES. 77

exemplifications, which no more prove them, than we
prove that 6x4=24, because 6 yards of cloth at 45.
must be paid for by 24 shillings. To assert that this in
stance is no proof, is not to reject experience— still less
to refuse respect to the new discoveries of science. But
it is unquestionably to assert that there is something
prior to the sciences — prior, i. e. in the sense that Kant
speaks of the a priori, something which is fundamental
to them, and constitutes them what they are— some
thing which is assumed as real if their syntheses (and
every scientific truth is a synthesis) are to be possible.
The analysis and exhibition in its organic completeness
of this Kantian a priori is the theme of the Hegelian
Logic.

The Philosophy of Nature stands in the Hegelian
system between Logic and Mental or Spiritual Philo
sophy. Man — intelligent, moral, religious and artistic
man — rests upon the basis of natural existence :
he is the child of the earth, the offspring of natural
organisation. But Nature itself— such is the hypothesis
of the system — is only intelligible as the reflex of that
a prioriwhich has been exhibited in Logic. The whole
scheme by which the natural world is scientifically held
together, apprehended by ordinary consciousness and
elaborated by mathematical analysis, presupposes the
organism of the categories — these fundamental habits
of thought or form of conception which are the frame
work of the existence we know. Yet Nature never
shows this intelligible world — the Idea — in its purity
and entirety. In the half-literal, half-figurative phrases
of Hegel, Nature shows the Idea beside itself, out of its
mind, alienated, non compos mentis. ' It is a mad world,
my masters.' ' The impotence of nature — Ohnmachtder
Natur l — is a frequent phrase, by which he indicates the

1 Encyclopaedic, § 250.

78 PR OLE GO MEN A . [vil.

a-logical, if not illogical, character of the physical world.
Here we come across the negation of mind : chance
plays its part : contingency is everywhere. If you
expect that the physical universe will display unques
tioning obedience to the laws of reason and of the
higher logic, you will be disappointed. What you see
is fragmentary, chaotic, irregular. To the bodily sense
—even when that sense has been rendered more pene
trating by all the many material and methodical aids of
advanced civilisation — the Idea is in the natural world
presented only in traces, indications, portions, which
it requires a well-prepared mind to descry, still more
to unite. Yet at the same time the indications of that
unity are everywhere, and the hypothesis of the logical
scheme or organisation of the Idea is the only theory
which seems fully to correspond with the data. Nature \
J says Hegel, is the Idea as it shows itself in sense-per
ception, not as it shows itself in thought. In thought
a clear all-comprehending total ; in sense a baffling
fragment. The Idea— the unity of life and knowledge
— is everywhere in nature, but nowhere clearly, or
whole, or otherwise than a glimpse ; not a logical
scheme or compact theory. Nature is the sensible in
which the intelligible is bound — the reality which is the
vehicle of the ideal. But the ideal treasure is held in
rough and fragile receptacles which half disclose and
half conceal the light within. Nature in short con
tains, but disguised, the idea, in fainter and clearer
evidences : it is the function of man, by his scientific
intelligence and ethical work, building up a social
organisation, to provide the ground on which the ulti
mate significance and true foundation of the world may
be deciphered, guessed, or believed, or imaginatively pre
sented. The verification of the guess or deciphering,

1 Encycl. Sect. 244 (Logic, p. 379).

vil.] HEGEL AND SCHOPENHAUER. 79

of course, lies in its adequacy to explain and colligate
the facts. The true method and true conception
is that which needs no subsequent adjustments — no
epicycles to make it work — which is no mere hypo
thesis useful for subjective arrangement, but issues
with uncontrollable force and self-evidence from
the facts.

What Hegel has called the ' impotence of nature/
Schopenhauer has styled the irrational Will, and it
is from that end, so to speak, that Schopenhauer's
philosophy begins. Nature — the basis of all things —
the fundamental prius — is an irresistible and irregular
appetite or craving to be, to do, to live, — but an
appetitus or nisus which ascends from grade to grade
—from mere mechanical forces acting in movement
up to the highest form of animal activity. But as this
' Will * or blind lust of being and instinct of life gets
above the inorganic world, and manifests itself in the
animal organism, there emerges a new order of exist
ence — the intellect, or the ideal world. Seen from the
underside, indeed, all that has appeared now in the
animal is a brain and a nerve-system — a new species of
matter. But there is another side to the Mind which
has thus awakened out of the sleep of natural forces.
This intellect is unaware and can never be made aware
that it is a child of nature : it acknowledges no
superior, and no beginning or end in time. Its natal
day is infinitely beyond the age when the cosmic
process began its race; before stars gathered their
masses of luminosity, and the earth received the first
germs of life. As the genius of Art, it arrests the
toiling struggle of existence to produce new forms and
destroy old ones ; it sets free in typical forms of
eternal beauty the great ideas that nature vainly seeks
to embody, and as moral and religious life its aim is to

8o PROLEGOMENA. [vil.

annihilate the craving and the lust for more and ever
more being and to enter in passionless and calm union
with the One-and-All.

Thus it is, if not absurd, at least misleading, to speak
of Hegel's system as Panlogism. Strictly speaking, it
is only of the Logic that this is the proper name : there,
unquestionably, reason is all and in all. Yet to hold
that reason is the very life and centre of things is for
philosophy the cardinal article — the postulate which
must inspire her first and last steps and guide her
throughout. But the Logical Idea, if put at the begin
ning, is at first only put as a presupposition, which
it is the task of human intelligence to work out and
organise. If it be the key which is to explain nature
and render it intelligible, it is a key which has only
been gained in the process — the long process — by
which man has risen from his natural origin — never
however parting company with it — to survey and com
prehend himself and his setting. The faculty of ' pure
thinking/ which is the pre-condition of Logical study, is
the result of a gradual development in which animal
sense has grown, and metamorphosed, and worked itself
up to be a free intelligence and a good will capable of
discerning and fulfilling the universal and the eternal.
Thus in the Logic the system constructs the pure Idea
— the ideal timeless organisation of thoughts or Xoy<»i
on which all knowledge of reality rests — the diamond
net which suffers nothing to escape its meshes : in the
Philosophy of Nature it tries to put together in unity
and continuity the phases and partial aspects which the
physical universe presents in graduated exemplification
of the central truth : and in the Philosophy of Mind
it traces the steps by which a merely natural being
becomes the moral and aesthetic idealist in whom man
approaches deity.

vil.] THE REASON IN REALITY. 81

It is indeed Hegel's fundamental axiom that ac
tuality is reasonable. But the actuality is not thet/
appearance — the temporary phases — the succession of
event : it is the appearance rooted in its essence — the
succession concentrated (yet not lost) in its unity.
There is room for much so-called irrationality within
these ranges. For, when human beings pronounce
something irrational, they only mean that their practical
intelligence would have adopted other methods to
arrive at certain conclusions. They judge, in fact, by
their limited understandings and not ex ordine universi.
Hegel's doctrine is after all only another way of stating
the maintenance of the fittest ; and it is liable to the K
same misconception by those who employ their personal
aims as the standards of judgment.

So too there is reason — there is the Idea — in Nature.
But it is there only for the artist, the religious man,
and the philosopher ; and they see it respectively by the
eye of genius, by the power of faith, by the thought of
reason. They see it from the standpoint of the abso
lute — sub specie quadam adernitatis. It is therefore a
recalcitrant matter in which Nature presents the Idea :
or, if recalcitrant suggests a positive opposition, let us
say rather a realm in which the Idea fails to come
out whole and clear, where unity has to be forced
upon and read into the facts. Science, says one writer,
is an ideal construction : it implies an abstraction from
irregularities and inequalities : it smoothes and sub
limates the rough and imperfect material into a more
rounded and perfect whole. Its object, which it terms
a reality, is a non-sensible, imperceptible reality : what
one might as well call an ideality, were it not that here
again the popular imagination twists the word into a
subjective sense to mean the private and personal ideas
of the student.

82 PROLEGOMENA. [vil.

But the obvious individual reality never quite in its
obviousness equals the 'golden mediocrity* of the ideal.
Its myriad grapes must be crushed to yield the wine of
the spirit.

' It 's a lifelong toil till our lump be leavened '

— till the ore be transformed into the fine gold. But the
gold is there, and in the great laboratory of natura
naturans is the principle and agent of its own purifica
tion. ' Nature is made better by no mean, but nature
makes that mean ' — for nature is spirit in disguise.

It is on this side that a certain analogy of Hegel's and
Schelling's philosophy of nature with the Romantic
school comes out. Nature is felt, as it were, to be
spirit-haunted, to give glimpses of a solidarity, a design,
a providentiality, which runs counter to that general
outward indifference in which part seems to have
settled beside part, each utterly indifferent to the other.
Romance is the unexpected coincidence, the sudden
jumping together of what seemed set worlds apart
and utterly alien. It was the sense of this Romance
which wove its wild legends of nymph and cobold, of
faun and river-god, of imp and fairy, wielding the
powers of the elements and guiding the life of even the
so-called inanimate world. But it is no less the theme
of the fairy tale of science. Even in the austere de
monstrations of geometry, and the constructions of
mechanics, the un-looked-for slips upon us with gipsy
tread. Who has not — in his early studies of mathe
matics — been fain to marvel at the almost unexpected
consilience of property with property in a figure, sud
denly placing in almost ' eery ' relief the conjunction of
what was apparently poles asunder ? It is not a mere
form of words to speak of beautiful properties of a conic
section or a curve. Custom perhaps has blunted our

VII.] REASON AND ROMANCE. 83

sense for the symmetries of celestial dynamics, but they
are none the less admirable, because we are otherwise
engrossed. To the first generation of our century the
phenomena of chemistry, magnetism and electricity ap
pealed—as they have never since done — with a tangible
demonstration of that appetitus ad invicem, that instinct of
union Bacon speaks of; and this time in a higher form
than in mere mechanism. Polarity — the bifurcation of
reality into a pair of opposites which yet sought their
complement in each other — eternally dividing only
eternally to unite, and thus only to exist — became a
process pressed into general service. Lastly, what
more admirable than that adaptation of the individual
to the environment — and of the environment to the
individual — of the organs in him to his total, and of
his total to his organs. One in all and All in one : one
life in perpetual transformation, animals, plants, and
earth and air; one organism, developing in absolute
coherence. This was the vision which the genius of
Schelling and his contemporaries saw — the same vision
which, by accumulation of facts and pictorial history,
Darwin and his disciples have impressed in some
measure even on the dullest.

But there is a profound difference between the spirit
of a Philosophy of Nature and the aggregate of the
physical sciences. Each science takes the particular
quarry which accident or providence has assigned to it,
and does its best to 'put out' every piece of rock it
contains. But it seldom goes, unless by constraint,
and in these days of specialisation it does so less and
less, to examine the neighbouring excavation, and see
if there be any connexion between the strata. Even
within its own domain it is ashamed to put forward too
much parade of system. Its method is often like that
of the showman in the travelling menagerie: 'And

G 2

84 PROLEGOMENA. [vil.

now, please pass to the next carriage/ It respects the
compartmental arrangement into which it finds the
world broken up, and often thinks it has deserved well
if it has filled the compartment fuller than before, or
succeeded in creating a few sub-compartments within
the old bounds. Even the so-called mental and moral
sciences when they lose their philosophical character
tend to imitate these features. Yet in every science
there is an outlook and an outlet, for whosoever has the
will and the power, to emerge from his narrow domain
on the open fields and free prospect into the first
fountains and last great ocean of being. Always, and
not least in our own day, the physicist, the chemist,
the physiologist, the psychologist, the sociologist, and
the economist, have made their special field a platform
where they might discourse de omnibus rebus, and
become for the nonce philosophers and metaphysicians.
It would be a silly intolerance and a misconception of
the situation to exclaim Ne sutor ultra crepidam. In the*/
organic system of things ' each " moment " even inde
pendent of the whole is the whole ; and to see this
is to penetrate to the heart of the thing/ We need
hardly go to Hegel to be told that to know one thing
thoroughly well is to know all things. The finite, which
we inertly rest content with, would, if we were in full
sympathy with it, open up its heart and show us the
infinite. And yet if the specialist when he rises from his
shoe-making, with a heart full of the faith that ' there
is nothing like leather/ should proclaim his discovery of
it in regions where it was hitherto unsurmised, one may
smile incredulous and be no cynic.

Philosophy then keeps open eye and ear — as far as
may be no doubt for the finer shades and delicate
details — but essentially for the music of humanity
and the music of the spheres — for the general pur-

viz.] PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE. 85

pose and drift of all sciences— from mathematics to
sociology— as they help to make clear the life of nature
and further the emancipation of man. It will seem
occasionally to over-emphasise the continuity of science
and to make light of its distinctions : it will seem
occasionally more anxious as to the order than as to
the contents of the sciences : it will remind the sciences
of the hypothetical and formal character of much of
their method and some of their principles : and some
times will treat as unimportant, results on which the
mere scholar or dogmatist of science lays great weight.
From his habit of dealing with the limitations and
mutual implication of principles and conceptions, the
philosopher will often be able — and perhaps only too
willing— to point out cases where the mere specialist
has allowed himself to attribute reality to his abstrac
tion. He will tell the analyst of the astronomical
motions that he must not take the distinction of cen
trifugal and centripetal force, into which mechanics
disintegrate the planetary orbit, as if it really meant
that the planet was pulled inward by one force and sent
on spinning forward by another'. And the scientist,
proud of his mathematics, will resent and laugh at the
philosopher who lets fall a word about the planets
moving in grand independence like 'blessed gods/
The philosopher will hint to the chemist that his
formulae of composition and decomposition of bodies
are, as he uses them, somewhat mythological, picturing
water as atom of oxygen locked up with atom of
hydrogen ; and the chemist will go away muttering
something about a fool who does not believe in the

Encyclop. §§ 266, 269; cf. the lecture-note as given in Werke vii
i. p. 97. A large number of paradoxical analogies from Hegel's
Nalurphilosophie has been collected by Riehl in his Philosophischer
Criticismiis, ii. 2, 120.

86 PROLEGOMENA. [vn.

well-ascertained chemical truth that water is composed
of these two gases. If the philosopher further hints
that it is not the highest ideal of a chemical science to
be content with enumerating fifty or sixty elements, and
detecting their several properties and affinities 1 ; that it
would be well to find some principle of gradation, some
unity or law which brought meaning into meaningless
juxtaposition, the mere dogmatist, whose chemistry is his
living and who shrinks from disendowment, will scent a
propensity towards the heresy which sinks all elements
in one. And yet, even among chemists, the instinct
for law and unity begins to demand satisfaction.

A still richer store of amazing paradox and perplexing
analogies awaits anyone who will turn over the volume
in Hegel's Werke (vii. i) and select the plums which
lie thick in the lecture-notes. He will find a great deal
—and probably more, the less he really knows of any of
the subjects under discussion — that he cannot make
head or tail of: language where he cannot guess
whether it should be taken literally or figuratively. For
Hegel seriously insists on the essential unity and
identity of all the compartments of the physical uni
verse; he will not keep time and space on one level,
matter and motion on another, and senses, suns, plants,
passions, all in their proper province. Going far be
yond the theory which supposes that all the complex
difference of organisation has grown up in endless,
endless ages from a primitive indistinctness, so that the
gap of time acts as a wall to keep early and late apart,
Hegel insists upon their essential unity to-day. And
that sounds hard — the herald of anarchy, of the collapse
of the ordered polity of the scientific state. It is no
doubt probable that Hegel, like other men, made mis
takes ; that he over-estimated the supposed discoveries

1 See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. 419.

vrr.] PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE. 87

of the day: that he indulged in false analogies, and that
he was attracted by a daring paradox. All this has
nothing to do with his main thesis : which is, that the
natural realm is as it stands an a-logical realm where
reason has gone beside itself, and yet containing an
instrument — man, and that is mind — by which its ration
ality may be realised and restored. In that point at
least he and Schopenhauer are at one.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SCEPTICAL DOUBT : HUME.

WE have seen that an innate tendency leads the
human mind to connect and set in relation, — to connect,
it may be erroneously, or without proper scrutiny, or
under the influence of passions or prejudices, — but at
any rate to connect. Criticism occasionally has im
patiently banned this tendency as a mere fountain of
errors. The human mind, says Francis Bacon, always
assumes a greater uniformity in things than it finds ;
it expects symmetry, is bold in neglecting exceptional
cases, and would fain go beyond all limits in its ever
lasting cry, Why and To what end. It varies in indi
viduals between a passion for discovering similarities
and an intent acuteness to every shade of unlikeness.
But notwithstanding these warnings of the hen, the ugly
duckling Reason will go beyond what is given : it
knows no insuperable limitation. It may be guilty of
what Bacon calls ' anticipation ' — an induction on evi
dence insufficient — or it may subdue itself to the duty
of 'interpretation' of nature by proper methods: in
either case, it is an act of association, synthesis, unifi
cation. For Not* is dpxri, and knows that it is : it will
not yield to clamour or mere rebuke : it, too, cannot be
commanded, unless by first obeying it : and Bacon,
having duly objurgated the 'mind left to itself/ is obliged
to let it go to gather the grapes before they are quite

THE INITIAL DOUBT. 89

ripe, and to indulge it with a 'prerogative' of instances.
As Mr. Herbert Spencer and many others are never
weary of telling us : ' We think in relations. This is
truly the form of all thought : and if there are any other
forms they must be derived from this V Man used to
be defined as a thinking or rational animal : which
means that man is a connecting and relation-giving
animal ; and from this, Aristotle's definition, making
him out to be a ' political ' animal, is only a corollary,
most applicable in the region of Ethics. Here is the
ultimate point, -from which the natural consciousness,
and the energies of science, art, and religion equally
start upon their special missions.

In ordinary life we attach but little importance to
this machinery of cognition. We incline to let the
fact of synthesis drop out of sight, as if it required no
further study or notice, and we regard the things con
nected as exclusively worth attending to. The interest
centres on the object— on the matter: the formal ele
ment—the connective tissue — is only an instrument of no
importance, except in view of the end it helps us to. We
use general and half-explained terms, such as develop
ment, evolution, continuity, as bridges from one thing to
another, without giving any regard to the means of
locomotion on their own account. Some one thing is
the product of something else : we let the term ' product '
slip out of the proposition as unimportant : and then
read the statement so as to explain the one thing by
turning it into the other. Things, according to this

1 First Principles, p. 162. It may be as well to remark that Relation
is scarcely an adequate description of the nature of thought as
a whole. We shall see when we come to the theory of logic, that
the term is applicable — and then somewhat imperfectly — only to the
second phase of thought, the categories of reflection, which are the
favourite categories of science and popular metaphysics.

go PROLEGOMENA. [vm.

opinion, are all-important : the rest is mere words.
These relations between things are not open to further
investigation or definition : they are each sui generis, or
peculiar : and even if the logician in his analysis of
inference finds it advisable to deal with them, he will
be content, if he can classify them in some approximate
way, as a basis for his subdivision of propositions.
This is certainly one way of getting rid of Metaphysics
—for the time.

But there are epochs in life, and epochs in universal
history, when the mind withdraws from its immersion
in active life, and reflects upon its own behaviour as on
the proceedings of some strange creature, of which it is
a mere spectator. At such seasons when we stop to
reflect upon the partial scene, and close our eyes to the
totality, doubts begin to arise, whether our procedure
is justified when we unify and combine the isolated
phenomena. Have we any right to throw our own
subjectivity, the laws of our imagination and thought,
into the natural world ? Would it not be more proper
to refrain altogether from the use of such conceptions?

Philosophy, said one of the ancients l, begins in
wonder, and ends in wonder. It begins from the sur
prise that something could be what it purports to be :
it ends in the marvel of our having thought anything
else possible. Such a phrase well becomes the naive
age in which the soul goes freely forth, wandering from
one novelty to another, curious to find out all that can
be known, — like the young wanderer on the sea-shore
whom fresh pebbles and new shells tempt endlessly to
fill his basket. But as the ages roll on, and the accu
mulations of the past grow heavier in the receptacle, the
need of a re-examination of the stores becomes impera
tive. The bright colours have faded — and generally

1 Arist. Metaph. i. 2. 26.

VIIL] THE INITIAL DOUBT. 91

they fade soon : there has been much picked up in the
inexperience of youthful enthusiasm which maturer
reflection hardly can think worth carrying further.

The duty of doubt and of re-examination of what
tradition has bequeathed has been enforced by philo
sophy in all ages. For it is the cardinal principle of
philosophy to be free — to possess its soul — never to be
a mere machine or mere channel of tradition. But, in
some ages, this assertion of its freedom has had for the
soul a pre-eminently negative aspect. It has meant
only freedom from — and not also freedom in and
through — its environing, or rather constituting, sub
stance. Such an epoch was seen in the ancient world
when the New Academy, with its sceptical abstention
from all objective assertions, had to protest against the
dogmatism of the Stoic and Epicurean schoolmen. In
modern times the initial shudder before plunging
in has been a recurrent crisis. Each thinker — as
he personally resolved to thread his way through
the wilderness of current opinion to the realm of
certified truth — has had to remind himself (and his
contemporaries) that in knowledge at least no posses
sions are secured property unless they have been
earned by the sweat of their owner's brow. This is the
common theme of Bacon's aphorisms in the beginning
of the Novum Organum, of Descartes' Discourse of
Method, and of Spinoza's unfinished essay on the
Emendation of the Intellect. There is indeed a dis
crepancy in these utterances as to the measure in which
they severally think it needful to insist as preliminary on
a kind of moral and religious consecration of life to the
service of truth. But a more compelling division arises.
The maxim may be understood to say, 'Divest thy
mind of its ill-gotten gains, its evil habits, prejudices,
and system, and in childlike simplicity prepare thine eye

92 PROLEGOMENA. [viil.

and ear to receive in pure vessels the stores of truth
which are ready to stream in from the world/ Or it
may rather be held to say, ' Remember that thou art
a conscious, waking mind; and that every idea thou
hast is thine by thine own assent : insist upon thy right
of free intelligence, and give no place to any belief
which thou hast not raised into full light of conscious
ness, and found to be completely consistent with the
whole power and content of thy clearest thought/ And,
we may add, if the maxim be obeyed too exclusively in
either way, it will be obeyed amiss.

With Locke the question comes into even greater pro
minence. On what conditions can I have knowledge ?
How can I be certified that my ideas — the subjective
images in my mind — have a reference to something
objective and real ? Locke's answer is; not unnaturally
perhaps, somewhat prolix, and wanting in fundamental
precision of principles. After dismissing the view that,
even before experience, there are certain common
ideas spontaneously and by original endowment present
in all human beings, he goes on to show how we can
sufficiently account for the ideas wre actually find by
supposing in us an almost unlimited power of joining
and disjoining, of comparing, relating, and unifying
the various elementary ' ideas ' which make their
way into the empty chambers of our mind by the
senses. As to the source, the channel, and the nature
of these sense-ideas, Locke is obscure and apparently
inconsistent : though clearly it should be all important
to know how an idea can be caused by, or spring from,
a material thing. When in his fourth book he comes
to the question of what is the reality, or the meaning of
our ideas, he does not really get beyond a few -rather
dubiously reasoned-out — conclusions that, although
strictly we cannot go beyond ' the present testimony of

vni. J LOCKE. 93

our senses employed about the particular objects that
do affect them/ we may for practical purposes allow a
good deal to the presumptions of general probability.

But Locke had also begun to criticise our ideas, in
his account of their formation out of the ' simple ideas '
— (which neither Locke nor any other atomist of mind
has succeeded in making clear)— which the several
senses give, and by observing or reflecting on what
goes on or is present in our minds, we ' form,' he says,
various ideas. In a style of discussion which is on the
borderland between vulgar and philosophical analysis —
(never quite false, but nearly always inadequate, because
it almost invariably assumes what it ostensibly proposes
to explain,) Locke tells us how we get one idea by
'enlarging/ another by 'repeating,' as we please, the
bounteous data of the touch and sight. But amongst
the compounds there are some of more disputable origin.
There are some— e.g. ideas of punishable acts or legal
ised states — which are 'voluntary collections of ideas
put together in the mind independent from any original
patterns in nature.' These, though entirely subjective,
are entirely real, because they only serve as patterns by
which we may judge or designate things so and so. It
is worse with the idea of power, which we only 'collect'
or 'infer,' and that not from matter, where it is in
visible, but only in a clear light when we consider God
and spirits. Still worse, perhaps, is it with the idea of
substance, which is a 'collection' of simple ideas with
the t supposition ' of an ' incomprehensible ' something
in which the collection ' subsists.'

Hume put all this rather more pointedly. We have
' impressions,' i. e. lively perceptions by sense. We have
also 'ideas,' i.e. fainter images of these, but otherwise
identical. An idea should be a copy of an impression.
If you cannot point out any such impression, you may

94 PROLEGOMENA. [vm.

be certain you are mistaken when you imagine you
have any such idea. There is prevalent in the mental
world a kind of association ; a ' gentle force ' connects
ideas in our imagination according to certain relations
they possess. This ' mind* or this ' imagination ' is only
a bundle or collection of impressions and ideas ; but a
collection which is continually and rapidly changing in
its constituents, and in the scale of liveliness possessed
by each constituent. When an idea is particularly fresh
and forcible, it is a belief, or it is believed in : when faint,
not so. Or, otherwise put, the object of an idea is said
to exist, when the idea itself is vividly felt*. Really
there is no such thing as ' external existence ' taken
literally. ' Our universe is the universe of the imagina
tion"' : all existence is for a consciousness.

Impressions arise in certain orders of sequence or
co-existence. When two impressions frequently recur
and always in the same order, the custom binds them
so closely together, that, should one of them only be
given as impression, we cannot help having an idea of
the other, which, growing more vivid by the contagion
of the contiguous impression, creates, or is, a belief in
its reality. Between the perceptions as such, there
is no connexion ; they are distinct and independent
existences. They only get a connexion through our
feeling ; we feel a ' determination ' of our thought to pass
from one to another. The one impression has no
power to produce the other; the one thing does not
cause the other. ' We never have any impression that
contains any power or efficacy2/ Hence the power
and necessity we attribute to the so-called causal agent
and to the connexion are an illegitimate transference
from our feeling, and a mistranslation of our in-

1 Treatise of Human Nature (Understanding), iii. 7 and ii. 6.

2 Ibid. iii. 14.

viii.] HUME. 95

capacity to resist the force of habitual association into
a real bond between the two impressions themselves.
The necessity is in the mind — as a habit-caused com
pulsion — not in the objects.

As with the relation of cause and effect, so it is with
others. The identity of continued existence is only
another name — an objective transcript — of the feeling
of smooth uninterrupted succession of impressions in
which our thought glides along from one in easy tran
sition to another. And here the coherence and con
tinuity of perceptions need not be absolute. A vivid
impression of unbroken connexion in a part will, if
predominant, by association fill up the gaps and weak
points, and behind the admitted breaks in the line of
our ideas will suppose— invent — or create an imper
ceptible but real continuity in the supposed things. And
by this fiction of a continuous existence of our percep
tions, we easily lapse into the doctrine that our per
ceptions have an independent existence as objects or
things in themselves : — a doctrine which according to
Hume is contrary to the plainest experience.

But if the world is always the world of imagination —
of Vorstellung — of mental representation, Hume is
aware that we must admit two orders or grades of such
representation. We must distinguish, he remarks \
'in the imagination betwixt the principles which are
permanent, irresistible and universal (such as the
customary transition from causes to effects and from
effects to causes), and the principles which are change
able, weak and irregular. The former are the founda
tion of all our thoughts and actions.' There are, in
other words, normal and general laws of association-
such as the relation of cause and effect — which per
suade us of real existence. By its own laws, therefore,

1 Treatise of Human Nature (Understanding), iv. 4.

96 PROLEGOMENA. [vm.

within the realm of Vorstellung or Mental idea, there
grows up a permanent, objective world for all, con
trasted with the temporary, accidental perception of the
individual and of the moment ; and this serves as the
standard or the one common measure by which occa
sional perturbations are to be measured. Within the
limits of the subjective in general there arises a sub
jective of higher order, which is truly objective. This
same change of front— as it may be called — Hume
makes in morals. There the mind can modify and
control its passions according as it can feel the objects
of them near or far ; and though each of us has his
'peculiar position/ we can — so creating the ethical
basis — 'fix on some steady and general points of
view, and always in our thoughts place ourselves in
them, whatever may be our present situation * ' : we can
1 choose some common point of view/ and from the
vantage-ground of a permanent principle, however dis
tant, we have a chance of gaining the victory over our
passion, however near.

Thus far Hume had gone in the development of
idealism. Whether his theory is consistent from end
to end, need not be here discussed. But it is evident
that Hume was not lost in the quagmire of subjective
idealism. The objective and the subjective are with
him akin : the objective is the subjective, which is uni
versal, permanent, and normal. The causal relation
has, in the first instance, only a subjective necessity ; but
through that subjective necessity or its irresistible belief,
it generates an objective world. But it has been and
is the fortune of philosophers to be known in the philo
sophical world by some conspicuous red rag of their
system which first caught the eye of the bull-like leaders
of the human herd. It was so notably with Hobbes

1 Treatise of Human Nature (Morals), iii. i.

viii.] KANT AND HUME. 97

and Spinoza; and most of the thinkers whose names
appear in the pages of Kant suffer from this curtailment.
Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, are there
not the real philosophers, discoverable in their works,
but the creatures of historic reputation and of popular
simplification who do duty for them.

Kant's Hume is therefore a somewhat imaginary
being: the product, partly of imperfect knowledge of
Hume's writings, partly of prepossessions derived from
a long previous training in German rationalism. Such a
Hume was — or would have been, had he existed — a phi
losopher who 'took the objects of experience for things
in themselves/ who 'treated the conception of cause as
a false and deceptive illusion/ who did not indeed
venture to assail the certainty of mathematics, but held
— as regards all knowledge about the existence of things
— ' empiricism to be the sole source of principles/ found
ing his conclusion mainly on an examination of the
causal nexus1. This 'note of warning* sounded against
the claims of pure reason — as he calls Hume's Enquiry
— was what about 1762 broke Kant's dogmatic slumber
and forced him to give his researches in speculative
philosophy a new direction. His first step was to
generalise Hume's problem from an inquiry into the
origin of the causal idea into a general study of the
synthetic principles in knowledge. His next was to
attempt to fix the number of these concepts and syn
thetic principles. And his third was to ' deduce ' them :
i. e.; to prove the reciprocal implication between ex
perience or knowledge and the concepts or categories
of intelligence.

1 Kant, Prolegomena to Metaph. Introduction and Crit. of Practical
Reason (on the Claim of Pure Reason, Werke, viii. 167).

CHAPTER IX.

THE ATTEMPT AT A CRITICAL SOLUTION : KANT.

THE Criticism of Pure Reason has been described
by its author as a generalisation of Hume's problem.
Hume, he thought, had treated his question on the
' relations of ideas ' in their bearing upon ' matters of
fact ' mainly with reference to the isolated case of cause
and effect. Kant extended the inquiry so as to com
prise all those connective and unifying ideas which
form the subject-matter of metaphysics. In his own
technical language — which has lost its meaning for the
present day — he asked, 'Are Synthetic judgments
a priori possible ? ' — a question which in another place
he has translated into the form, ' Is the metaphysical
faith of men sound, and is a metaphysical science
possible ? ' By a metaphysics he meant in the first
instance the belief in a more than empirical reality, and
secondly the science which should give real knowledge
of God; Freedom and Immortality, — a science whose
objects would be God, the World, and the Soul.
From a comparatively early date (1762-4) Kant had
been inclined to suspect and distrust the claims of
metaphysics to replace faith, and to give knowledge of
spiritual reality ; and he had tried to vindicate for the
moral and religious life an independence of the conclu
sions and methods of the metaphysical theology and

KANT'S THEORY OF EXPERIENCE. 99

psychology of the day. But it was not till some years
later— in 1770 — that he formulated any very definite
views as to the essential conditions of scientific know
ledge : and it was not till 1781 that his theory on the
subject was put together in a provisionally complete
shape.

What then are the criteria of a science ? When is
our thought knowledge, and of objective reality? In
the first place, there must be a given something—
a sense-datum — an 'impression' as Hume might have
said. If there be no impression, therefore, there can
be no scientific idea, no real knowledge. There must
be the primary touch — the feeling— the affection — the
/£ ne sais quoi of contact with reality. Secondly, what is
given can only be received if taken up by the recipient,
and in such measure as he is able to appropriate it.
The given is received in a certain mode. In the present
case, the sensation is apprehended and perceived under
the forms of space and time. Perception, in other
words, whatever may be its special quality or its sen
suous material, is always an act of dating andJocalisa-
tipn. The distinction between the mere lump of feeling
or sensibility and the perception is that the latter
implies a field of extended and mutually excluding
parts of space, and a series of points of time, both field
and series being continuous, and, so far as inexhausti
bility goes, infinite. Thirdly, even in the reception of
the given there is a piece of action and spontaneity. If
the more passive recipiency be called Sense, this active
element in the adaptation may be termed Intellect.
Intellect is a power or process of choice, selection,
comparison, distinguishing and dividing, analysis and
synthesis, affirmation and negation, numeration, of judg
ment and doubt, of connexion and disjunction, differen
tiation and integration. Its general aspect is by Kant

H 2

ioo PROLEGOMENA. [ix.

sometimes described as Judgment — the act of thought
which correlates by distinguishing ; sometimes as Apper
ception, and the unity of apperception. It is, i. e., an
active unity and a synthetic energy ; it unifies, and
always unifies. It links perception to perception, corre
lating one with another— interpreting one by another ;
estimating the knowledge-value of one by the rest.
It thus 'ap-perceives.' It is a faculty of association and
consociation of ideas. But the association is inward
and 'ideal' union: the one idea interpenetrates and
fuses with the other, even while it remains distinct.

Kant's work may be described — in its first stage — as
an analysis and a criticism of experience. The term
Experience is an ambiguous one. It sometimes means
what has been called the ' raw material ' of experience :
the crude, indigested mass of poured-in matter-of-know-
ledge. If there be such a shapeless lump anywhere,—
which has to be considered presently — it, at any rate,
is not on Kant's view properly entitled to the name of
Experience. The Given must be felt and apprehended :
and — to put the point paradoxically — to be felt it must be
more than feJt, — it must foe perrei'vprL It must, in other
words, be projected— set in space and time : let out of
the mere dull inner subjectivity of feeling into the clear
and distinct outer subjectivity of perception. But,
again, to be perceived, it must be apperceived : to be
set in time and space, it must first of all be in the hands
of the unifying consciousness, which is the lord of time
and space. For in so far as space and time mean a place
and an order — in so far as they mean more than an
empty inconceivable receptacle for bulks of sensation,
in the same degree do they presuppose an intellectual,
synthetic genius, which is in all its perceptions one and
the same, — the fundamental, original unity of conscious
ness. And this analysis of experience is 'transcen-

IX.] KANT'S THEORY OF EXPERIENCE. 101

dental.' Beginning with the assumed datum —the
object of or in experience — it shows that this object
which is supposed to be there -to exist by itself and
wait for perception— is created by and in the very act
which apprehends it. Climbing up and rising above
its habitual absorption in the thing, consciousness (that
of the philosophic observer and analyst) sees the thing
in the act of making, and watches its growth.

We have seen that Kant made free use of the
metaphor of giving and receiving. But it is hardly
possible to use such metaphors and retain independence
of judgment. The associations customarily attached to
the figurative language carry one away easily, and often
for a long way, on the familiar paths of imagination.
The analogy is used even where — if all were looked
into— its terms become meaningless. No reader of
Locke can have failed, e. g., to notice how he is misled
by his own images of the dark room and the empty
cabinet : — images, useful and perhaps even necessary,
but requiring constant restraint in him who would ply
them wisely and to his reader's good. From what has
been said above it will be clear that the acquisition of
experience, the growth of knowledge, is a unique
species of gift and acceptance. The consciousness
which Kant describes may be the consciousness of
John Doe or Richard Roe : but as Kant describes it,
the limitations of their personality, i. e. of their in
dividual body and soul, have been neglected. It is
consciousness_in_general which_as Kant's theme, just
as it is granite in general — and not the block in yonder
field,— which is the theme of the geologist. Once get
that clear, and you will also see clearly that conscious
ness is at once giver and recipient — neither or both : at
once receptivity and spontaneity. But — you may reply
— does not the material object act (chemically, optically,

102 PROLEGOMENA. [ix.

mechanically, &c.) on the sense-organ on the periphery
of my body, does not the nerve-string convey the im
pression to the brain ; and is not perception the effect
of that process, in which the material object is the
initial caused

In this exposition — which is not unknown in vulgar
philosophy — there is a monstrous, almost inextricable,
complication of fact with inference, of truth with error.
So long as there is an uncertainty — and metaphysicians
themselves, we may be reminded, are not agreed upon
the matter — as to what we are to understand by cause,
effect, and act, what an impression is, and how brain
and intelligence mutually stand to each other, it is
hardly possible to pronounce judgment upon this mode
of statement. Yet perhaps we may go so far as to say
that while the terms quoted bear an intelligible meaning
when applied within the physiological process they are
vain when used of relations of mind to body. There is
a sense in which we may speak of the action of mind on
body, and of body on mind : but what we mean would
perhaps be more unmistakably expressed by saying
that the higher intellectual and volitional energies are
never in our experience entirely independent of the
influences of the lower sensitive and emotional nature.
In the metaphysical sense which the terms are here
made to bear, they mislead. Action and re-action can
only take place in the separateness of space, where one
is here and another there : (though, be it added, they
cannot take place even on these terms, unless the here
and the there be somehow unified in a medium which
embraces both). Mens, said Spinoza, is the idea
carports1 : he would hardly have said Corpus habet
ideam. What he meant would scarcely have been well
described by calling it a parallelism or mutual indepen-
1 Spinoza, Eth. ii. 7-13.

IX.] IDEALISM AND REALISM. 103

dence, yet with harmony or identity, of body and mind.
Apart from body, no doubt, mind is for him a nullity :
for body is what gives it reality. But, on the other
hand, Mind is the enveloping and including ' Attribute '
of the two : idealism

This was the fundamental proposition which Kant
contended for ; what he spoke of as his own Copernican
discovery : though, in reality, for the student of the
history of philosophy it was only the re-statement, in
some respects the clearer statement, of the idealism
which even Hume, not to mention Spinoza and Leibniz,
had maintained. The world of experience— the em-j
pineal, objective, and real world— is a world of ideas,'
of representations which have place only in mind, of
appearances. Space and time are subjective : the foxms
of though^ are snhjprtivf> : and vet they constitute
phenomenal or empirical or real objectivity. Such
language is— it would seem inevitably — misunderstood :
and in his second edition, Kant — besides many other
minor modifications of statement, — had to defend him
self by inserting a 'confutation of idealism/ i.e. of the
theory which holds that the existence of objects outside
us in space is doubtful, if not even impossible. But no
end of argument will ever confute the view that Kant's
doctrine is such idealism : until people can be got to
rise to a new view of whatsis subjectivity— what is an
idea — and what is existence outside us.

By 'subjective' the world is in the way of under
standing what is due to personal prepossession, void of
general acceptability, a product of individual feeling,
peculiar and inexplicable tastes. By subjective Kant
means what belongs to the subject or knowing mind as
such and in its generality : what is constitutive of
intelligence in general, what sense and intellect are
semper et ubique. Into the question how the human

104 PROLEGOMENA. [ix.

being came to have such an intellectual endowment —
the question which Nativist psychology is supposed to
settle in one way, and Evolutionism in another — Kant
does not enter; he merely says where there is know
ledge, there is a knower, — a knowing subject so con
stituted. It comes after all to the tautology that the
reality we know-is a known reality : that knowledge is
a growth in the knower, and not an accidental product
due to things otherwise unknown. The predicate (or
category) ' is ' is contained, implicit, in the predicate ' is
known/ or what 'is' puts implicitly, 'is known' puts
explicitly and truly.

By ' appearance ' the world understands a sham, or at
least somewhat short of reality. By appearance Kant
understands a reality which has appeared : or, as that
is going too far, a something which is real so far as it
goes (a prima facie fact), but only a candidate for
admission into the circle of reals. And such reality
depends on nothing more than its thorough-going
coherence with other appearances, its explaining the rest,
and being in turn explained by them, — its absolute adap
tation to its environment. And this environment all lies
in the common field of consciousness, and in the one
correlating and unifying apperceptivity of the ego, -
that Ego which is the inseparable comrade, vehicle, and
judge, of all our perceptions. It is the appearance —
but as yet not the appearance of something, — but rather
an appearance to >orfor_ something.

By an ' idea ' the world in general understands what it
is sometimes ready to call a mere idea. And by a mere
idea is meant something which is «0t_r£ality, but
a peculiarity of an individual mind, or group of minds
— a fancy, without objective truth : — something, we
may even add, which for many people is located in
their own head or brain, cut off by blank bone-walls

IX.] IDEALISM AND REALISM. 105

from the open air of real being. By idea (repre
sentation, Vorstellung) Kant meant that an object is
always and essentially the object of a mind : always
relative to a subject consciousness, and implying it,
just as a subject consciousness always implies an
object.

And by ' existence outside us ' the world probably
means— for it is imprudent to define and refine too
much in this hazy medium of words where we all drowse
— existence of things on an independent footing beyond
the limits of our personal, i. e. bodily and sentient, self.
As regards our own trunk and limbs, most of us, except
in some most strange insanity, are not likely ever to be
in doubt, and are indeed more likely, after Schopen
hauer's model, to take the knowledge of these personalia
as the one thing immediately and intuitively certain.
We talk freely enough, it is true, about existence outside
our own minds ; but it is only a drastic method of
stating the difference between a fancy and a fact. And
probably we labour under a half-unconscious hallucina
tion that our minds are localised in some material
'seat/ somewhere in our bodily limits, and more
especially in the central nerve-organs.

But, as has been said elsewhere \ the point of view
under which Mind is regarded by Kant is that of Con
sciousness, and especially perceptive consciousness.
He describes, as we have put it above, the steps or
conditions under which the single sense-observation
is elevated into the rank of an experience claiming
universality and necessity. But the whole machinery
of consciousness— the form of sensibility and the cate
gory of intellect — is originally set in motion by an

1 Encyclopaedia, §§ 415, 420. Consciousness is only as it were
the surface of the ocean of mind ; and reflects only the lights and
shadows in the sky above it.

106 PROLEGOMENA. [ix.

impetus from without : or at least the manipulating
machinery requires a raw material on which to operate.
Consciousness, or the observer who takes this point
of view, feels that it is being played upon by an unknown
performer- or that it is attempting to apprehend some
thing, which, because the act of apprehension is also to
some extent (and to what extent, who can say ?) a trans
mutation, it must for ever fail to apprehend truly.
It is haunted by the phantom of a real, — a thing in its
own right, which can only appear in forms of sense and
intellect, never in its own essential being. It is only
a short step further — and Kant, if one may judge him
by several isolated passages, has more than once crossed
the interval, — to treat, after the manner of uneducated
consciousness and of popular science, the thing in its
independent being as the cause which produces the
sensation, or as the original which the mental idea
reproduces under the distortions or modifications
rendered necessary by the sensuous-intellectual medium.
For, if under the terms of one analogy the perception is
an effect of the thing, under those of another it is an
image or copy of external reality.

If this be Kantian philosophy — and it can quote
chapter and verse in its favour — Kantian philosophy is
one version of the great dogma of the relativity of
knowledge. That unhappy phrase seems to have many
meanings, but none of absolutely catholic acceptation.
It may mean that knowledge of things states their
relations — the way they behave in reference to this or
that, in these or those circumstances ; and that of an
utterly unrelated and absolutely isolated thing, our
knowledge is and must be nil. Of a thing-in-itself we
can know nothing ; for there is nothing to know. It
may mean that knowledge is relative to the recipient or
the knower, — that it is not a product which can stand

IX.] PHENOMENA AND NOUMENA. 107

by itself, but needs a vehicle and an object in close
relation. In this way, too, knowledge is relative to
age and circumstances : grows from period to period,
and may even decay. And thirdly, the relativity of
knowledge may be taken to mean that we (and all
human beings) can never know the reality ; because
we can only know the phenomenon, i. e. the modified,
transmuted, reflected thing which has reconstituted an
image of itself after passing the interfering medium.
For, first of all, we must strip it — this ' image ' so-
called (the vulgar call it the 'thing') — of the secondary
qualities (sound, colour, taste, resistance) which it has
in the consciousness of a being dependent on his sense-
organs : and then, we must get rid also of those quanti
tative attributes (figure, number, size) which it has in
the consciousness of a spatially and temporally per
ceptive being ; — and then ; — but the prospect is too
horrible to continue further and face the Gorgon's head
in the outer darkness, where man denudes appearance
in the hope to meet reality.

The fact is, there are too many strands in the web
which Kant is weaving, for him or perhaps for any
man to keep them all well in hand and lose none of the
symmetry of the pattern he designs. To be just, we
must, in dealing with him as with any other philosopher,
try to keep in view the unity of that design instead of
insisting too minutely and too definitely upon its occa
sional defects. It is easy to work the pun that a 'critical'
philosophy must itself expect to be criticised ; it is
more important to remember that by a criticism Kant
meant an attempt to steer a course between the always
enticing extremes of dogmatism and scepticism, — an
attempt to be fair, i. e. just to both sides, and yet neither
to sink into the systematised placidity of the former, nor
to rove in a mere guerilla warfare with the latter. And it

J08 PROLEGOMENA. [ix.

is the mere privateer who in the popular sense of the
word is the mere critic.

Of Kant we must remember that he has the defects
of his qualities. He prides himself on his distinctions
of sense and intellect, of imagination and understand
ing, of understanding and reason ; and with justice :
but his distinctions are sometimes so decisive that it is
hard work both for him and for his reader to recon
stitute their unity. He is fond of utilising old classifi
cations to embody his new doctrine : and occasionally
the result is like what we have been taught to expect
from pouring new wine into old bottles. He draws
hard and fast lines, and then has to create, as it
seems, supplementary links of connexion, which, if
they operate, can only do so because they are the very
unity he began by ignoring. One gets perfectly lost in
the multitude of syntheses, in the labyrinth of categories,
schemata, and principles, of paralogisms, antinomies,
and ideals of pure reason. One part of this formalism
may be set down to the pedantry and pipeclay of the
age of the Great Frederick — pedantry, from which, as
we console ourselves, our modern souls are freed. But
it arises rather from the necessity of pursuing the
battle between truth and error through every com
plicated passage in that great fortress which ages of
scholasticism had — on various plans — gradually con
structed. Kant is always a little of the martinet and
the schoolmaster ; but it is because he knows that true
liberty cannot be secured without forms and must
capture the old before it can plant the new. The forms
as they stand in his grouping may often appear stiff
and lifeless : but a more careful study, more sym
pathetically intent, will find that there is latent life and
undisplayed connexion in the terms. Unfortunately
the classified cut-and-dried specimens are more welcome

ix.] KANT'S ALLEGED SHORTCOMINGS. 109

to the collector, and can more easily be put in evidence
in the examination-room.

Thus the original question, Are synthetic judgments
a priori possible ? is answered — somewhat piecemeal— in
a way that leads the reader to suppose it is a question
of psychology. He hears so much of sense, imagina
tion, intellect, in the discussion, that he fancies it is an
account of a process carried on by the faculties of an
individual mind. And of course nobody need suppose
these processes are ever carried on otherwise than
by individual thinkers, human beings with proper
names. But scientific investigation is concerned only
with the essential and universal. For it, really, sense,
imagination, &c. are not so many faculties in a thinking
agent : they are grades and aspects of consciousness,—
' powers ' in a process of gradual mental complication
(involution). Kant is really dealing with a 'normal'
thought with its distinguishable constituent aspects.
Only — -he fails to make this explicit and clear. The
individualism — the un-historical prepossession — of his
age is upon his phraseology, if not upon his thought :
and one hardly realises that he is really engaged on
human thought and knowledge as a substantial subject
of itself apart from its individual vehicles,— on that
thought, which lives and grows in social institutions
and products, — in language, science, literature, and
moral usage, — the common stock which one age be-
queathes to the next, but which the later-comer can
only inherit if he works for and creates it afresh. If it
be a psychology, therefore, it is a psychology which does
not assume a soul with qualities, but which expounds
the steps in the constitution of a normal intelligence.

One may note, without insisting on them too much,
the defects of his treatment of the forms of thought. It
may be said that, in the first place, the table of the

no PROLEGOMENA. [ix.

categories was incomplete. It had been borrowed, as
Kant himself tells us, from the old logical subdivision
of judgments, derived more or less directly from
Aristotle and the Schoolmen. Now many of the rela
tions occurring in ordinary thought could not be
reduced to any of the twelve forms, without doing
violence to them. But Kant expressly disclaims ex-
haustiveness in detail. He could, if he would : but that
is for another season. In the second place, the classifi
cation did not expressly put forward any principle or
reason, and gave ground for no development. That
there should be four fundamental categories, each with
three divisions, making twelve in all, seems as inex
plicable as that there should be four Athenian tribes in
early times and twelve Phratriai. The twelve patriarchs
of thought stand as if in equal authority, with little or
no bearing upon one another. We have here, in short,
what seems an artificial and not a natural classification
of the types of thought. But Kant himself has given
some explanation of the triad, and a sympathetic
interpretation has shown how the four main groups
are steps in the solution of one problem l. In the third
place, the question as taken up seems largely psycho
logical, or subjective, concerning the constitution of the
human mind as a percipient and cognitive faculty. But
this is necessary, perhaps, to the restricted nature
of Kant's problem. He is dealing with the elements
that form our objective or scientific consciousness of
I the physical world. The deeper question of the place
and work of mind in life in general, in law and morality
and religion, does not at this stage come before him.
That problem in fact only gradually emerges with the
Criticism of the Moral Faculty and the Aesthetic Judg-

1 It is not the least of the merits of the exposition in Caird's Critical
Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, vol. i. to have brought out this.

IX.] KANT'S ALLEGED SHORTCOMINGS. Ill

ment. Logic— as the doctrine of the Logos which is
the principle of all things, even of its own Other — had
to wait for its preparation till it could be matured.

In Hegel the question assumes a wider scope, and
receives a more thorough-going answer. In the first
place the question about the Categories is transferred
from what we have called the epistemological or psycho
logical, to what Hegel terms the logical, sphere. It is
transferred from the Reason subjectively considered
as a mere receptive and synthetic human conscious
ness to the Reason which is in the world and in
history, — a Reason, which our Reason, as it were,
touches, and so becomes possessed of knowledge. In
the second place, the Categories become a vast multitude.
The intellectual telescope discovers new stars behind
the constellations named in ancient lore. There is no
longer, if there ever was, any mystic virtue supposed to
inhere in the number twelve : while the triadic arrange
ment is made radical and everywhere recurs. The
modern chemist of thought vastly amplifies the number
of its elementary types and factors, and proves thai
many of the old Categories are neither simple nor
indecomposable. Thirdly, there is a systematic de
velopment or process which links the Categories to
gether, and shows how the most simple, abstract, and
inadequate, inevitably lead up to the most complex and
adequate. Each term or member in the organism of
thought has its place conditioned by all the others :
each of them is the germ, or the ripe fruit of another.

CHAPTER X.

THE CRITICAL SOLUTION, CONTINUED: KANT.

KANT'S answer to his question was briefly this. In
telligence is essentially synthetic, always supplementing
the given by something beyond, instituting relationships,
unifying the many, and thus building up concrete
totalities. In pure mathematics this is obvious: the
process of numeration shows it creating number out of
units, and geometry shows elementary propositions
leading on to complicated theorems. In abstract physics
it is hardly less obvious : there, e. g., the principle of
reason and consequent or the persistence of substance
are rational and legitimate steps beyond the mere
datum. The more important question follows. How
are these 'pure' syntheses applicable to real fact?
To that Kant replies : They apply, because in all that
we call real or objective fact there is a subjective element
or constituent. What appears to be purely given, and
independent of our perceptions, is a product of per
ceptual and conceptual conditions, — is constituted by
a synthesis in perception, imagination, conception.
Our world is a mental growth — not our individual
product, but the work of that common mind in which
we live and think, and which lives and thinks in us.
Anyhow it is not an isolated self-existing un-intelligent
world for ever materially outside us — an other world,

X.] KANT ON METAPHYSICS. 113

eternally separate from us ; but bone of our bone, flesh
of our flesh, the work realised by our great 'elder
brother/ — the Idea of human collectivity — the Reason
or Spirit in which we are all one soul. It is therefore
no unwarranted step on to a foreign property when we
apply the categories of thought and forms of sense to
determine objective reality : for objective reality has
been for ever made, and is now making, objective and
reality by the conscious or unconscious syntheses of
perception and imagination.

There remains the answer to the same question as
regards the objects of Metaphysics. These objects are
according to Kant inferences, and illegitimate inferences.
They are not necessary elements or factors in the con
stitution of experience. In order that there should be
experience, knowledge, science, there must be an end
less hold of space and time in which to stow it clearly
and distinctly away : and there must also be ties and
relations binding it part to part, links of reference
and correlation, a sort of logical elastic band that will
stretch to include infinitely copious materials. But
each real knowledge attaches to a definite assignable
perception, in a single place and time. From this point
we can travel — by means of like points — practically
without limit in any direction. But though the old
margin fades forever and forever as we move, a new
margin takes its place : the limitation and finitude
remain : and new acquisitions are always balanced in
part by the loss of the old. Yet the heart and the
imagination are clamorous, and the intellect is ready to
serve them. Such an intellect Kant has called Reason,
and its products (Platonic) 'Ideas.' The (Platonic)
Idea expresses not so much an object of knowledge as
a postulate, a problem, an act of faith. The ' Vaulting
ambition' Intelligence 'o'erleaps itself and falls on

U4 PROLEGOMENA. [x.

t'other/ Unsatisfied with a bundle of sensations and
ideas, it demands their abiding unity in a substantial
Soul. To simplify the endlessness of physical phe
nomena, it sums them up in a Universe. To gather all
mental and physical diversities and divisions into one
life, it creates the ideal of God.

Each single experience, and the collected aggregate
of these experiences, is felt to fall short of a complete
total : and yet this complete total, the ultimate unity, is
itself not an experience at all. But, if it be no object of
experience, it is still an idea on which reason is in
evitably driven : and the attempt to apprehend it, in the
absence of experience, gives rise to the theories of
Metaphysics. Everything, however, which can be in
the strict sense of the word known, must be perceived
in space and time, or, in other words, must lie open to
experience. Where experience ends, human reason
meets a barrier which checks any efficient progress, but
refuses to recognise the check as due to a natural limit
which it is really impossible to pass. The idea of com
pleteness, of a rounded system, or unconditional unity,
is still left, after the categories of the understanding
have done their best : and is not destroyed although its
realisation or explication is declared to be impossible.

There is thus left unexplained a totality which encom
passes all the single members of experience — a unity
compared to which the several categories are only a
collection of fragments — an infinite which commands
and regulates the finite concepts of the experiential
intellect. But in the region of rational thought there is
no objective and independent standard by which we can
verify the conclusions of Reason. There are no definite
objects, lying beyond the borders of experience, towards
which it might unerringly turn ; and its sole authentic
use, accordingly, is to see that the understanding is

X.] KANT ON METAPHYSICS. 115

thorough and exact, when it deals in the co-ordination
of experiences. In this want of definite objects, Reason,
whenever it acts for itself, can only fall into perpetual
contradictions and sophistries. Pure Reason, there-/
fore, the faculty of ideas, the organ of Metaphysics,)
does not of itself 'constitute' knowledge, but merely'
'regulates ' the action of the understanding.

By this rigour 'of demonstration Kant dealt a deadly
blow, as it seemed, to the dogmatic Metaphysics, and
the Deism of his time. Hume had shaken the certainty
of Metaphysics and thrown doubt upon Theology : but
Kant apparently made an end of Metaphysics, and
annihilated Deistic theology. The German philosopher,
as Hegel has said and Heine has repeated, did thoroughly
and with systematic demonstration what Voltaire did
with literary graces and not without the witticisms with
which the French executioner gives the coup de grace.
When a great Idea had been degraded into a vulgar
doctrine and travestied in common reality, the French
man met its inadequacies with graceful satire, and
showed that these half-truths were not eternal verities.
The German made a theory and a system of what was
only a sally of criticism; and rendered the criticism
wrong, by making it too consistent and too logical *.

Science — such is Kant's conclusion — is of the definite
and detailed, of the conditioned. It goes from point
to point, within the enveloping unity of what we call
experience, and which rests upon the transcendental
and original unity of consciousness. But a knowledge
of the whole — of the enveloping unity — is a contradiction
in terms. To know is to synthetise : you cannot syn-
thetise synthesis. Knowledge is of the relative : but
an absolute and unconditional totality has no relations.
We may therefore, possibly, feel, believe in, presuppose

1 Hegel's Werke, vol. i. p. 140.

I 2

1 1 6 PROLEGOMENA. [x

the absolute : but know it in the stricter sense, we
cannot. It may be the object of a rational faith. But
as for knowledge, we can get on in psychology without
the invisible and immortal soul : we can carry out
sciences of the physical universe, without troubling our
selves about the ' cosmological ' questions of ultimate
atoms or ultimate void, of first beginning and final end :
and no proofs will ever prove the existence of that
' ideal' of reason — briefly termed God — which tran
scends and completes and creates all existence. Not
that such Ideas are useless even in science. They
represent — if not without risks — the faith and the pre
supposition which underlie the spirit of scientific pro
gress, and set before it an ideal perfection which it will
do well to strive after, though it can never get beyond
approximations. What is perhaps more important :
this faith of reason science is as little competent to
disprove, as it is incompetent to prove it. Science is
not all in all : we are more than mere theoretical and
cognitive beings. The logic of science is not the sole
code of our spiritual or higher intellectual life ;

' We live by admiration, hope, and love.'

The sequel and development of the first Criticism are
found in Kant's works on ethics, aesthetics, teleology
and religion. Only in one supplementary chapter, and
in casual indications as need arises, has Kant made
any pronouncement on his view of Philosophy as
a whole and as a system. That it is and can only be
a system, when it really engages on reconstruction in
theory, was of course his fundamental insight. But in
his stage of Zetesis l, of testing and sifting the sound

1 Kant from 1762 onwards continues to insist on the necessity for
philosophy taking up an analytic and critical attitude to current con
ceptions : see especially Werke, i. 95 and 292.

x.] KANT'S ETHICS. 117

from the professed, he has confined himself to break
ing up the mass piecemeal, and leaving each result in
its turn to corroborate and correct the other. Sense
and intellect may spring from a common stem ; but let
us, he says, deal with them in their apparent separate-
ness. Reason practical must no doubt be identical at
bottom with reason theoretical : all the more convincing
will be the undesigned coincidence between the results
of an inquiry into the principles of science, and one
into the principles of morals. We have seen that
science ultimately rests — though it does not discuss it
and would indeed be incompetent to do so — on a faith,
a hope, a postulate of the ultimate supremacy of intelli
gence, — the faith of reason in its own power (not verifi
able indeed by an exhaustive list of actual results) — or
in the rationality of the world. For science — though
a kind of action and a part of conduct — is a sort of
inactive action : an enclave in the busy world, a period
of preparation for the battle of life. In the field of
conduct the ultimate presupposition, which was for the
luxury of science called a reasonable faith or faith of
reason, makes itself felt in the more forcible form of
a categorical imperative.

Or, at least, so it seems on first acquaintance. The
command of duty, addressed to the sensuously-con
ditioned nature, brooks no opposition and condescends
to no reasons in explanation or promises by way of
attraction. The moral law claims unconditional au
thority: towards its sublime aspect reverence and sheer
obeisance is due, utter loyalty to duty for duty's sake.
Nothing short of this absolute identification with the
Ought and a willingly willed self-surrender of the whole
self to it can entitle an agent to the full rank of moral
goodness. Such is the form — the synthetic link which
joins the sensuous wyill indissolubly with the will reason-

Ii8 PROLEGOMENA. [x.

able of moral law. Now for its explanation. Humanity,
though in the world of appearance and experience
always subject to sensuous conditions, is also a power
of transcending these conditions. Man is more than
he can ever show in visibly single act. He has in him
the hope, the faith, the vision of absolute perfection
and completeness : but has it not as positive attained
vision, but as the perpetual unrest of unsatisfied en
deavour, as the feeling and the anticipation of an un
achieved idea. And that perfection, that completeness
he believes himself to be ; he even in some sense is.
Lapses and ill-success cannot quench the faith : for so
long as there is life, there is hope.

As he pictures out this invisible self, it may assume
various forms more or less imaginative. At times it
may seem a far away, and yet intimately near, being of
beings, — the common father of all souls, the eternal
self-existent centre of life and love, the omnipresent
bond of nature, the omniscient heart of hearts, — on
whom he can lean in closest communion ; though he
is only too well aware how often he lives as if God
were not, and human beings were roaming specks in
chaos. At other times, he looks up to it as to an inner
and better self, his conscience, the true and permanent
being, which controls his choices and avoidances, which
approves and disapproves, commands and condemns :
his soul of soul, genius, and guardian spirit. In such
a mood to be true to his own self — to follow the very
voice of his nature — is to realise his law of life. His
Ego is the absolute ego — the reason which is all things.
And lastly, there are times when he conceives this
better self and true essence as the community of the
faithful, as the congregation of reasonable beings, of all
perfected humanity.

In Kantian phraseology, man under one visible form

X.] KANT'S ETHICS AND RELIGION. 119

is the union of an intelligence and a sensibility, of
a noumenal with a phenomenal being. He is, indeed,
says Kant, the former only in idea : it is only a stand
point which he assumes. But it is a standpoint he
always does assume, if he is to be practical, i. e. if he is
to move and modify the world he finds around him.
And what standpoint is that ? What is the law that
has to govern his action, the law of the spiritual world?
Its supreme law is the law of liberty ; and that law is
autonomy. Action— always under law— but that law
a self-imposed one. So act that thy will may be thy
law, and with thy will the law of all others whatsoever;
so act that no other human being may by thy act be
deprived of full freedom and treated merely as a thing :
so act as to respect the dignity of every human being
as implicitly a sovereign legislative. In other words,
Morality is a stage of struggle and of progress which
bears witness to something beyond. The ' I ought '
represents a transition stage towards the ' I will/ or
rather it is the translation of it into the language of
the phenomenal world. Morality, in a sense-being,
always presents itself as a contest between the good
and the evil principle : but in the transcendent and
noumenal being which such a being essentially is,
—in the reasonable or good will, the victory is already
won by the good. Good is the law which governs the
world, and which is the strength of the individual life.
To the sensuous imagination, indeed, which here is
apt to usurp the place of reason, things appear under
a somewhat different aspect. There the certainty of
self-conquest is forced by the difficulties of apparent
failure t6 veil itself under the picture of a perpetual ap
proximation through endless ages towards the standard

1 Foundation of Metaph. of Eth. (Werke, viii. 82, 89) : ' Dieses Sollen
ist eigentlich ein Wollen.'

120 PROLEGOMENA. [x.

of perfect goodness : the confidence that the world is
reasonable is presented under the conception of a God
who makes all things work together for good to the
righteous : and the autonomy of reason presents itself
as the postulate of freedom to begin afresh, absolutely
untrammeled by all that has gone before. Thus the
kingdom of reason is represented as having its times
and seasons ; as making determinate starts, and work
ing up to a consummation in the end of ages. But
implicitly Kant's idea of reason's autonomy, — of the
' I ought ' as in its supreme truth an ' I will,' — is an
eternal truth. The 'standpoint,' so to call it after
Kant, is the standpoint which explains life and conduct
and which makes conduct possible. It is the assertion
that the completeness is, and is my inmost being, the
source of my action, my chief good, and that chief good
not a gratification or satisfaction to be looked forward
to as reward, but essential life and self-realisation. And
this joy is what is hidden under the austere gravity of
the categorical imperative.

The Criticism of the Judgment-faculty is Kant's
next step towards providing a completer philosophy.
Ostensibly it owes its origin to the need of supple
menting the treatment of Understanding and Reason
by a discussion of Judgment, and of considering our
emotional as well as our cognitive and volitional appre
ciations. What it really does is to minimise still further
the gulf left between the intellect and nature — between
the natural and the spiritual world. The intellect, said
the first criticism, makes nature : it makes possible the
general outlines of our conception of the world around
us as a causally-connected system, in which a permanent
being undergoes perpetual alteration, and manifests
phenomena subject to mathematical conditions. In
tellect, in short, has staked out the world which is the

X.] KANT'S AESTHETICS. 121

object of the practical man, and of his adviser the
scientist. But there is another world — the world of
beauty and sublimity — the world which art imitates
and realises. The interpretation Kant gives to the
aesthetic world is as follows. The fact of beauty is
a witness to the presence in the mere copiousness of
sensible existence of a sub-conscious symmetry or
spirit of harmony which realises without compulsion
and as if by free grace all the proportion and coherence
which intellect requires. Nature itself has something
which does the work that intellect was charged with,
and does it with a subtle secret hand which does not
suggest the artificer. The fact of sublimity, on the
other hand, indicates the presence of an even greater
spirit. For beauty may seem — from what has been
said — to be only an unbought accrement to the com
modities of life — facilitating the task of the practical
intellect. But the sublime in nature speaks of some
thing which is greater than human utilities and prac
tical conveniences. It reveals a something which is
in sympathy with our essential and higher self, and
therefore stirs within us the keen rapture of the
traveller who sees from afar his home in 'rocky Ithaca,'
but a something which is cold to daily wants and
vulgar satisfactions, and therefore strikes upon us
a gelid awe.

Another world yet remains, which appeals neither to
our utilitarian science, nor to our higher sentiments of
artistic perfection. This is the world as the home of
organic life, and perhaps itself an organism. The
organism is apt to be a poser for the ordinary cate
gories of mechanical science. Here the part contains
the whole, not less than the whole contains the part :
the cause is an effect, as well as cause, of its effect.
One thing is in another, and the other in it : ' the

122 PROLE GOMENA . [x .

present is charged with the past, and pregnant of the
future/ — as the great founder of modern teleology often
said. In the plant and the animal the natural world
has to a certain degree reached an ideal unity which
is also real. Reason — the syllogism — is here not
merely introduced from without, as when man manipu
lates, but is the immanent law of a natural life, — the
end working out itself by its own means and act. The
fact admitted in these creatures suggests extending the
conception of organism (or teleology) to nature as a
whole. From this point of view Nature may almost be
said to have a history — because it is almost conceived
as having one abiding self which in apparent un
consciousness wonderfully simulates the purposive
adaptation of conscious life. The older vulgar tele
ology was somewhat mechanical : it regarded the
natural world outside of— or as it said, below — man
as having no end of its own, but in its series subserving
man's commodities. In the teleology of Kant the
supreme end is still in a way man, and still there is a
little of the mechanical about it : but it is not to promote
man's happiness, understood as that probably must be
in a selfish sense, but to produce in him the worthiest
agent to carry on to its highest the rational process of
development. The struggles and pains of natural
existence, the laws of life, the competition of rivals,
are all means in the hands of nature to produce an
autonomous being. Kant says, a moral agent. But a
moral agent has been already explained as an intelli
gence certified unto truth and a self-centred will whose
law is the law of the cosmos, — whose plan of life, if we
so put of it, is essentially a concentration in miniature
and in individuality of the system ordained by the all-
present God.

It is true that Kant, after all these soarings, checks

X.] KANT'S TELEOLOGY.

123

enthusiasm by the words 'not that we can know this,
or that it is so : but our nature with unmistakable
tendency bids us act as if it were so. Logic will
hardly justify it— but life seems to demand it.' And
some have replied : 'let us trust the larger hope/

CHAPTER XL

SYNTHESIS AND RECONSTRUCTION I FICHTE.

To get the full effect of a new doctrine it must be
brought into contact with a mind unshackled by those
traditional prepossessions which clung to its original
author. Kant, essentially by training a man of the
school, was by heart and character essentially a seeker
after the wider ends of the larger world. His lesson is
on one hand the scholar's disproof of pretended science,
and on another an appeal and an example to the mere
scholar to make his philosophy ample for the whole
life, and co-extensive with the -whole field of reality.
His first disciples who stand forward as teachers caught
only the first part of his message, and sought to set
theoretical philosophy on a sounder basis. Johann
Gottlieb Fichte — perhaps the least professional of great
philosophical professors — with a resolute will, a passion
for logical thoroughness, and great impulse to force
mankind to be free and to realise liberty in an institu
tion — was the first who really grappled with the search
ing questions that arose out of Kant's message to his
age. His was a Kantism, not certainly always of the
letter, nor indeed always of the spirit : yet for all that,
there was substantial justice in his claim that his
system supplied the presupposition which gives meaning
and interconnexion to Kant's utterances1. It is, says
1 Cf. notes and illustrations in vol ii. p. 399.

KANT AND FICHTE. 125

the proverb, the first step that costs. And Fichte took
that step. Before his impetuosity the cautelous clauses
which besmirched the great purpose of Criticism shrunk
away, the central truth was disengaged from its old-
fashioned swaddling clothes, and openly announced
itself as a renovating, almost a revolutionary principle.
But, as v/as to be expected, the unity and force are
paid for by a considerable surrender of catholicity. If
Kant's utterances are fused into comparative simplicity,
the unification does not embrace the whole of the
Kantian gospels. What Fichte did in his earlier stage
— the stage by which he counts in the history of
philosophy — was to emphasise and exhibit in his
systematic statement that priority or supremacy of the
' practical ' over the ' theoretical ' reason which Kant
had enunciated, and to put in the very foreground that
self or Ego which Kant had indicated, under the title
of 'transcendental unity of apperception/ as the focus
which gives coherence and objectivity to experience.
But to put the final presupposition at the head and
front of all, as a principle originating and governing
the whole line of procedure, is really to modify in a
thorough-going way the whole aspect of a doctrine and
its inner constitution. Kant's way is quiet analysis :
from the given, or what is supposed given, up re-
gressively to its final presuppositions, its latent prius.
He shows you the thing is so, apparently without
effort, by judicious application of the proper re-agent,
as it were. Fichte, on the contrary, pours forth a strong
current of deduction : Let it be assumed that so and so
is, then must, or then shall, something else be ; and so
onwards. Instead of a glance at the secret substructure
of the world, you see it, at a magician's mandate, building
itself up ; stone calling to stone, and beam to beam, to
fill up the gaps and bind the walls together. And you

126 PROLEGOMENA. [xi.

must not merely read or listen. You are summoned as
a partner in the work ; a work the author feels, only
half-consciously, he has not yet quite accomplished, and
where therefore he complains of the bystander's dullness.
This, one may say, was a new conception, certainly a
new practice, of philosophy. Kant had indeed hinted
that the pupil in philosophy must 'symphilosophise';
but practically, even his aim had been to describe or
narrate a process of thought with such quasi-historical
vividness and detail that the listener was sympathetic
ally carried through the succession of ideas which were
called up before him. What had been generally given
in philosophical literature was a sort of historical ac
count of how thoughts happened : a succession of pic
tures presented with the interposition here and there of
a little reasoning, expository of connexions. You en
listed your reader's sympathy : you set his imagination
to work by translating the logical process into a his
torical event — the Logos into a Mythos — and blending
with your narrative a little explanation as to general
drift and relations, you left him to himself to enjoy the
Theoria. The nearest approach Fichte makes to this
polite and easy method is in the ' Sun-clear Statement,'
where he, as he says, attempts to 'force the reader to
understand ' him. But probably these things cannot be
forced. And for the rest Fichte's characteristic attitude
is to request, or command, his reader (or pupil) to think
with him, to put himself in the posture required, to
perform the act of thought described. He has not
merely to be present at the lecture, but personally to
perform the experiment. It is not a mere story to be
heard and admired and forgotten. De te, O pupil !
fabula narratur. If it be a play, you are the actor
as well as the onlooker : and the play is not a play,
but the drama — the nameless drama — of the soul trans-

XI-] FICHTE'S ME THOD. 1 2 7

acted in the unseen sub-conscious depths which bear
up its visible life.

You do not therefore begin by getting a fact put
before you. Your fact, in philosophy, must be your
own act: not something done and dead, passive, a
thing, but something doing, alive, active : your intro
spection must be, let us say, an experiment in the
growing, responsive, quick life, not anatomy of the
mere cadaver. Think, therefore, and catch yourself in
the act of thinking. Get something before your mind's
eye, and see what it involves. It matters not what you
perceive or feel : only realise it fully and penetrate its
meaning and implications. It is of course the percep
tion of something here and now. And you would be,
in ordinary life, eager to get on to something else— to
associate the present fact to something perceived else
where, to draw conclusions about things yet to come.
But if you philosophise, you must check this practical-
minded impatience and concede yourself leisure to
ponder deeply all that the single perception involves.
Be content to sit awhile with Mary, by the side of
Rachel of old. Let Martha bustle about. Fichte tells
you that your perception rests,— and you, you see that
it rests, on the ' I am that I am/— on the I = I, i. e. on
the continuity, identity, and unity of the percipient self.
Make the statement of what you perceive, believe it,
that is, assert it: and you have— done what? You
have pledged your whole self—falsus in tmo, falsus in
omnibus— to its truth: its background is your whole
and one mental life. And is that all ? You have also
called the world to witness : your statement— if, as it
professes, it form an item however slight in the realm
of knowledge— requests and expects every other ' I ' to
acknowledge your perception. Your certainty of the
fact rests on the certainty of your self: and your self is

128 PROLEGOMENA. [XT.

a self certified by its ever-postulated identity with other
selves, so on ad infinitum. In affirming this (whatever
be your statement) you affirm the Absolute Infinite Ego.
Heaven and earth are at stake in every jot and tittle1.

At which plain frankness there was much cachin-
nation and even muttering among the baser sort. Even
wiser heads forgot — if they ever knew — that Leibniz
a century before had startled the world of his day by
a view that 'the Ego or something like it2 ' was, under
the name of monad, the presupposition of each and
every detail of existence in any organic total. It was
useless for Fichte to repeat3 that his philosophical Ego
was not the empirical or individual ego which he in
this every-day world had to provide clothes and com
pany for. It is hard to persuade the world that it does
not know that ' I am I/ and what that means. Later,
therefore, Fichte, going along with the movement of
contemporary speculation, and willing to avoid one
source of confusion, tended to keep off the name of
Ego from the absolute basis of all knowledge and
experienced reality. But unquestionably the absolu-
tising of the Ego is the characteristic note of his first
period in philosophy : and it rings with the spirit of the
heaven-storming Titan. It means that the cardinal
principle and foundation of man's conscious moral and
intellectual life is identical with the principle of the
Universe, even if the Universe seem not to know it.
It means that self-consciousness — the certainty that
I am I and one in all my manifestations — is the
highest word yet uttered. In, or under, the surface of
human knowledge and belief in reality, there is a tran
scendental Ego — a self identical with all other selves,—

1 Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 387.

2 Leibniz, Werke, ed. Gerhardt, iv. p. 392.

3 Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 393.

xi.] THE ABSOLUTE EGO. 129

infinite, unlimited, unconditional, absolute. The cer
tainty of human knowledge — and therefore of all reality
in consciousness — is the Absolute, — an absolute cer
tainty and knowledge — but an absolute with which
I identify myself, — which I am, and which is me. This
is the absolute thesis— the nerve and utter basis-laying—
at the ground, or rather under the ground, of all I know,
feel, and will.

This, then, is the thesis at the very foundation of all
Wissenschaft : and therefore figures at the head of
the Wissenschaftslehre, — the name Fichte gives his
fundamental philosophy. But alone it is powerless.
A foundation is only a foundation, by being built upon.
The position must be defined by counterposition : thesis
by antithesis: ego by non-ego. Ego, in fact, is first
made such, as set against you. In other words, the per
ception we assumed to start with does not merely
suppose and indeed pre-suppose the absolute Ego ; but
it sets in the absolute Ego an ego and a non-ego, —
sets against the lesser ego, something limiting and
limited, something defining it in one particular direction ;
or, if the original consciousness we started to examine
was an act of will, then, it may be said, the non-ego
appears as about to be limited and defined by the Ego.
Be our consciousness, therefore, practical or theoretical,
of action or of knowledge, its fundamental characteristic
is the conjunction (correlation with subjugation) of an
ego and a non-ego. It is always a synthesis of an
original antithesis 1 ; of self and not-self. But every

1 The antithesis has two members : the partial ego, and the non-
ego, which confronts. The synthesis is a putting together two
separate things, so as to correlate them ; but it falls short of what
would be understood in some present usage by 'synthetic unity'
which has a certain mystical ring. It is important for a student of
Schelling or Hegel to remember this distinction of synthesis from
' absolute unity ': e.g. Schelling, Werke, v. 43.

130 PROLEGOMENA. [xi.

such synthesis which brings together into one a self and
a not-self, is possible only in the original thesis of
a greater self — an absolute Ego — which includes the
not-self and the self it contrasts within its larger self.
The unity of the first principle 1 (A = A, or 1 = 1) parting
or distinguishing itself into the opposition of A versus
not- A, Ego set against non-ego, re-asserts itself again in
consciousness (perception of objects, and action upon
them by will) as synthesis, i. e. a conjunction (not a real
union). And this synthesis is either the limitation of
the Ego by the non-ego or the limitation of the non-ego
by the Ego. The former gives the formula of theo
retical, the latter that of practical consciousness.

We begin with the absolute Ego. It is absolute
activity, utter freedom. It is the source of all action,
all life. Yet if thus implicitly everything, it is actually
nothing. To be something, it must restrict itself, set up
in itself an antithesis : — by the setting up of a not-self, at
once limit and realise itself: translate itself from ideal
absoluteness and unconditionality into a reality which
is also limited and partial. All consciousness and
action exhibit this antithesis of a limited self and an
outside and adversative other-being; but'the antithesis
rests upon the medium of a larger life, a thesis which
transcends and includes the antithesis, and which leads
to that alternating adaptation of the two sides to one
another (their synthesis) which actual experience pre
sents as its recurring phase 2. The Wissenschaftslehre

1 A— A is the more purely logical formula: /— - / presents it as
a personal and metaphysical identity. The A, which is A, is to be
distinguished from the A which is opposed to not-A. But it is
Fichte's standpoint to insist on their being one Ego.

2 To give this interpretation of the larger Ego as Life and Blessed
ness is to assume that the teaching, e. g. of the Anweisung zum
Seligen Leben, is the logical deepening of the earlier language about
the Ego.

XI. J THE ABSOLUTE EGO. 131

leaving the absolute Ego in the background deals with
the play that goes on in human experience between the
correlatives to which it has reduced itself; — the antago
nism, but the moderated and overruled antagonism, of
Ego and non-ego.

Observe the contrast to the ordinary methods of
expression. Popular language — if the popular philo
sophers are to be trusted as its exponents— says 'an
impression is produced by an external object on the
senses, and causes an idea in the mind/ The 'object*
works a series of marvellous effects on a mind, which—
to begin with — is hardly describable as anything more
than an imagined point of resistance, getting reality by
being repeatedly impinged upon \ Fichte's statements
are rather interpreters of the vulgar phrases, which say
' I hear, I see ' ;— as if, forsooth, the ' I ' did it all.
According to Fichte, the 'I/— the absolute 'I,' is the
real (but secret) source of the position in which con
sciousness finds itself limited by a non-ego. But within
the finite ego and its consciousness there is no remi
niscence or awareness of this its great co-partner's — the
absolute ego's— act. For the finite consciousness, the
beginning of its activity — i. e. of all empirical conscious
ness, lies in an impulse or stimulus from without —
a mere somewhat of which we can predicate the very
minimum of attributes. It is only/<?// as opposing : and
this is the first stage or grade of theoretical conscious
ness : Sensation. But in the perpetual antithesis — in
the self-opposition which is the radical act of conscious
ness — the mere limitation of Ego by non-Ego is con
fronted by the underlying activity of the Ego which
re-asserts the limitation as its own act. Thus while we
are, as it were, impressed, we re-act against that impres
sion — we set it forth before us, as ours, and free ourselves

1 Cf. the description of mind as ' a bundle of impressions.'
K 2

132 PROLEGOMENA. [xi.

from its immediate incumbency and oppression. Instead
of mere sentiency or feeling, we have a perception (or
intuition) of it.

It would be out of place, here, to try to write the
interpretation of that marvellous and difficult piece of
dialectic — the Wissenschaftslehre ; — a theme to which
Fichte returned again and again up to his death, ever
modifying details, selecting new modes of exposition,
and gradually, perhaps, changing the centre of gravity
of his system. It will be sufficient to note the two
purposes which it keeps in view. On the one hand it
is a systematic theory of the categories. It begins,
as we have seen, with the three co-ordinates of all
reflection, — identity, difference, and reason why ; it pro
ceeds to the co-relative principles of activity and
passivity ; to condition, quantity, &c. And its work
is to show how these forms naturally emerge in the
recurrent antithesis which arises in consciousness, and
how again they are brought together by the over
mastering Absolute thesis into a synthesis, from which
the same process re-appears. How much this corre
sponds in general conception to the Hegelian Logic is
obvious, and Fichte has the merit of the original
suggestion. With this however he conjoins — what
Hegel has relegated to his Psychology — an evolutional
or developmental theory of the mental powers. We
have already seen how sensation is forced by the latent
intelligence to rise into perception (Anschauung) : the
line of psychological development is carried on by
Fichte through imagination to understanding and
reason. Hegel's work is far more complete, definite,
and detailed : but that need not keep us from giving
due homage to the suggestive sketch of the originator
of the conception '.

1 Especially given in the Grundriss des Eigenthiimlichen der Wiss.

XI.] FICHTE AND HEGEL. 133

But the theoretical consciousness is not all ; and as
we already know, the practical Ego is supreme over it.
In it lies the key to the mystery of the stimulus — the
shock from the unknown — which awakened the activity
of the Ego. The non-ego is only a mass of resistance
created by the Ego so that it may be active; only
a stepping-stone on which it may walk ; a spring-board
from which it may bound. Only so much reality has
the non-ego; the reality of something which may be
shaped, made, made use of. Call the something which
the stimulus (Anstoss] pre-supposes, the thing-in-itself
(after Kant) : and if you ask How are things-in-them-
selves constituted, you get from the Wissenschaftslehre
the answer: 'They are as we should make them1.'
Or, as it is said in another place : ' My world is — object
and sphere of my duties and absolutely nothing else2 : '
if you ask whether there is really such a world, the
only sound reply I can give is : ' I have certainly and
truthfully these definite duties, which take the form of
duties towards such, and in such, objects ; and it is only
in a world such as I there represent and not elsewhere
that I can perform these duties which I cannot conceive
otherwise/

This is a grand word : and yet we feel that, in the
intensity of intellectual consecutiveness and moral in-
flexibleness, we have lost some elements to which Kant
had given their place in the philosophy of life. The
third of Kant's three Criticisms is conspicuous by its
absence from the Fichtean field of view, and has no
recognition in this scheme of the universe : and the

(Werke, i. 331). Of course Fichte goes through a corresponding
'deduction' of the emotional or moral nature. Schelling .System des
transcend. Idealismus] works out the ' deduction ' still more at length.

1 Fichte, Werke, i. 286.

2 Ibid. ii. 261.

134 PROLEGOMENA. [xi.

great conception of the natural world as an organism,
in which natural man is only a part, and all is con
trolled by an autonomous principle of life, has been for
the while allowed to drop. Even more than in Kant
religion tends to be an epilogue or appendix to morality :
and God is identified with the moral order of the
world. It is customary to speak of Fichte's idealism as
ethical, or as subjective : and so long as these words
are understood, no harm is done. But to call it sub
jective does not mean that Fichte was so far beside
himself as to believe the world was only a picture or
a function of his individual brain. It means that he
throws the weight too much on the side of subjectivity.
The Absolute is, for him in his first stage, described as
an Absolute Ego—and thereby the natural world seems
to be left without God : and subjective duty has too ex
clusively thrown on it the weight of certifying objective
existence. The world, as we shall see, and have indeed
indirectly gathered from Kant, is too good and worthy
to be the mere block of stone out of which our duties are
to be hewn. And similarly, to call Fichte an ethical
idealist is only to name him right, when we add that
his were idealist ethics. The world is not here merely
that social decorum may be maintained, and that puri
tanical virtue may pronounce that all is so well, that
thenceforth there shall be no cakes and ale, nor ginger
be hot in the mouth. The friend of the two brothers
Schlegel, and their remarkable wives, Dorothea and
Caroline, touched hands with a social group *, which, for
good and for ill, had emancipated itself from all codes
except that which bids

' To thine own self be true :
Thou canst not then be false to any man.'

1 It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that the state of affairs
alluded to, which has its literary memorials in F. Schlegel's Lucinde,

XI.] IDEALIST ETHICS. 135

To him, as to Kant, morality presented itself as
autonomy, as the dignity and grace of human nature in
freest development; but to him, more than to Kant,
there commended itself the ideal of a city of reason,
a thoroughly socialised community1, in which the
welfare of each would be an obligation on all, and the
machinery of government would be so marvellously
self-corrective that all would do right and all fare well.
Fichte's place in the annals of philosophy depends
on his academic treatises of 1794-98, and on his more
popular works from the first date down to 1808. In
a study of the philosopher as a whole it would be
necessary to go beyond these dates, and take account
of the displacement which a development of thought,
which there is no good reason to suppose other than
gradual, made in the scale of his earlier views. But for
our purposes that is out of the question. In justice,
however, it must be added that some things that seem
inadequately treated, some shortcomings in catholicity
of mind, would appear in another light if the later
writings— not published till after Hegel's death— were
duly taken into account. But even at the close of the
century the advancing thought of Germany was seeking
other leaders.

and in the warm defence of that book by Schleiermacher, was only
a passing experiment in which a high-strung idealism amid a lax
society sought for truth at all costs and dared a noble lie.

1 In the Geschlossener Handelstaat (of 1800), the 'classical' docu
ment of characteristic German Socialism in its earlier and idealist
phase.

CHAPTER XII.

THE BEGINNINGS OF SCHELLING.

SCHELLING and Hegel had been fellow-students at
Tiibingen; where, besides the ostensible lessons of the
class-room, they had drunk gladly of the springs of
thought Lessing had set running, had felt the hopes
and the fears of the struggle republican France
waged against the German powers, and had seen that
Kantian criticism contained within it a fire which
would burn up the hay and stubble of old theology.
Hegel, five years the elder of the two, had passed
through his college career in a very creditable but by
no means brilliant way. Among his fellows he had
gained the reputation of a quiet, and rather reflective
mind, which, however, under an old-fashioned exterior,
breathed a deep impassioned zeal for that higher life
of which the nobler spirits among the young then, as
now, longed to accelerate the advent. Schelling,
singularly gifted with speculative ability, literary art,
and the receptivity of genius to catch and string
together the theories that rose to the top in science and
letters, had already made his mark as a philosophic
writer, while his senior compatriot, leading the in
conspicuous life of a private tutor, was only working up
and widening his ideas. Schelling's first essays in
metaphysics trod the same lines as Fichte; but in 1797

SC HE LUNG. 137

(when he was aged 22) appeared his Ideas towards
a Philosophy of Nature. A year later he was lecturing
at Jena, in friendly association with the Schlegels, and
with Fichte, who, however, soon quitted the place. In
1800 appeared the System of Transcendental Idealism,
and in 1801 the Exposition of my System ; followed in
1802 by Bruno, and in 1803 by the Lectures on
University Studies. Brief periods of academic teaching
at Wurzburg, Erlangen, and Munich, and after 1841 at
Berlin, broke the silence which set in after his Inquiries
into the nature of human liberty in 1809 ; but little
certain was known to the outside public of the final
standpoint till the publication of his collected works
(1856-61).

An involuntary touch of sadness falls upon the
historian as he surveys Schelling's career. Seldom
had a thinker's life begun with better promise, and
more distinguished performance ; seldom had a nobler
inspiration, a more liberal catholicity of mood, guided
and propelled the intellectual interest ; seldom had
expectation of greater things yet to come followed
a writer's traces than was the lot of Schelling. On
one hand, a lively and active appropriation of the
results of scientific discovery, at least in its more sug
gestive advances: on the other, a mastery of words and
style which fitted him to hold his own amongst the
literary leaders ; and, again, a sympathy, that seemed
to be religious, with the movement which sought lucem
ex oriente, and wisdom from the treasures of the world's
purer youth. And yet — in the main — the net result,
oblivion more complete than has ever befallen a great
thinker. At first, one is inclined to pass on with the
remark that even books and thinkers have their fates,
and that some momentary forgetfulness let the tide slip
unused. But it is possible to be less oracularly-

138 PROLEGOMENA. [xil.

obscure : and without detracting from the splendid
faculty and great achievement of Schelling to note
some of the causes of his lapse into a mere episode.

In the first place, though his conception is of a system,
his performance is only a succession of fragments. The
nearest approach to an encyclopaedic exposition of his
ideas is found in his popular Lectures on the Studies of
a University. More than once he starts on the task of
exposition, but lets it break off about the middle.
Again, at each new occasion, the features of his scheme
of thought have slightly altered, and not merely does
his philosophy profess at first to present two distinct
sides, but these two sides of the shield vary. Thirdly,
the interest in scientific novelties, always disposed to
seek the curious, the far-reaching and suggestive, more
than the sounder generalisations, tends as time goes
on to fasten too greedily on the miraculous and
mysterious night-side of nature, on magic powers and
mystic discernments — a path which descends to the
abyss of a 'positive/ i.e. a quasi-materialistic, theosophy.
The matter-of-fact rationalists (both the Catholics in
Bavaria, and the Protestant theologian Paulus, once
a friend, but latterly his bitterest foe) regard him as
a crypto-catholic, the advocate of medieval obscurantism
so hateful to true enlightenment. Even his literary art
renders him suspected : for there is an old quarrel
between philosophy and fiction; and grave-eyed wisdom
is jealous of her gipsy rival. Ill-advised indications of
a sense of lofty superiority to the average teacher
increased the numbers and the venom of his opponents.
Nor is it perhaps beneath the dignity of history to
suggest that his first wife, Caroline, with all her
wonderful attractions of intellect and character, and
notwithstanding all that she had been to Schelling in
encouragement and counsel, was too clever and too

XII.J SCHELLING. 139

critical not to sow many jealousies, and to add through
the female line to the ranks of those with whom he
stood suspect.

But perhaps the real reason of Schelling's failure was
a certain excess of objectivity. Fichte had drawn
attacks down by an abnormal subjectivity which would
fain reform the surroundings wherever he went.
Schelling stood more apart — animated by an immense
curiosity, a boundless interest in all the expanse of
objective existence ; but withal he seemed not to have
his heart deeply set and pledged to a distinctively
human interest. His first love is the Romance in
nature ; and when he turns to history it is by preference
to ages far remote. His ideal of philosophy is to see it
achieve its work by the instrumentality of Art. Religion
seems to culminate for him in a mythology. Reflection
and speculation are to him always somewhat of a disease
--whence philosophy is to carry us— almost magically
if possible — to rest again in the primeval unity of life.
It is only an instrument towards a great end — and that
end a godlike, even if you like a religious, Epicurean
life. From such a standpoint it would be easy, in youth,
to relapse into naturalism ; it would be equally easy, in
later life, to fall into supernaturalism. Philosophy — at
least as Hegel understood it— is merely neither : but
the life, which never can quite cease to be an effort, of
idealism. And so Schelling could not earn the con
fidence which only goes to those who are felt to be
fellow-fighters with those they lead.

With Schelling occurs the confluence, into the main
current of philosophy, of streams of idea and research
which had already exercised a stimulative effect on the
tone and products of the higher literature of Germany.
As early as 1763 (at the very date Kant let the
English and Scotch ' empiricists ' shake him out of his

140 PROLEGOMENA. [xii.

' rationalist ' dogmatism) Lessing — in a couple of pages
On the reality of things outside God — threw doubts on
the tenability of the ordinary deistic arrangement of his
day, which set God there and man and his surroundings
here, each side, for the time at least, undisturbedly
enjoying his own. Lessing read Leibniz by the light of
Spinoza, and Spinoza by the light of Leibniz : and, if
he emphasised the absolute right to the completest
individual self-development on one hand, he no less
declared on the other that 'nothing in the world is
insulated, nothing without consequences, nothing without
eternal consequences.' ' I thank the Creator that I must,
—must the best,' he adds (1774). Of his conversations
on these high topics with Jacobi, we have already
spoken. While Spinoza and Leibniz were either de
cried, or — what is worse — misunderstood, by the estab
lished masters of instruction, they were welcomed by
a more sympathetic and, with all its drawbacks, more
appreciative study from the non-academic leaders of
thought.

Amongst these one of the most interesting and in
fluential was Herder. Herder, who had been amongst
Kant's students in 1763, and who has expressed his
admiration of his then teacher, came as years passed by
to consider himself the appointed antagonist of the
Kantian system. The two men were mentally and
morally of different types : and in Herder's case, a sense
of injury, in the end, positively blinded him to the
meaning no less than to the merits of a doctrine he had
decreed to be pernicious. In Herder's opinion, the
Kantian system laboured throughout from the fault of
a dead logical formalism and abstractness : it inhabited
a sort of limbo, cut off alike from the fresh breath of
nature and the growing life of history, and from the
eternal spirit of divine truth : it undermined (so his

xii.] HERDER. 141

experience at Weimar1 indicated) the traditional faith,
and inspired its ' adepts ' with a revolutionary super
ciliousness to all dogma. Its cut-and-dried logicality,
its trenchant divisions and analyses were obnoxious to
his poetically-fervid, largely-enthusiastic, and essentially-
historical soul. Man — in his concrete completeness, in
his physical surroundings and his corporeal structure,
in his social organisation, in his literary and artistic
life, above all in his poetry and traditions of religion-
was the theme of his studies ; and he looked with dis
trust on every attempt to analyse and disintegrate the
total unity of humanity by a criticism first of this, and
then a criticism of that side of it, carried on separ
ately. Ossian had been an early favourite of his ; and
the twilight that hovers with the haze of pensive myth
around the figures of that visionary world hangs with
a charm and a confusion around the ultimate horizon of
Herder's ideas.

In 1774 and 1775 Herder wrote and wrote again an
essay (published 1778) for a prize offered by the Berlin
Academy on the subject of ' Sensation and Cognition
in the human Soul/ Its fundamental points are that
' no psychology is possible, which is not at every step
a distinct physiology ' : that ' cognition and volition are
only one energy of the soul ' : that 'all our thought has
arisen out of and through sensation, and in spite of all
distillation still contains copious traces of it * : that there
are not separate faculties of thought, but one divine
power, which unifies all the broad stream of inflowing
sensation, — ' one energy, and elasticity of the soul,
which reaches its height through the medium of
language.' 'What is material, what non-material in

1 He held posts of large general superintendence over church and
school affairs at Weimar.

142 PROLEGOMENA, [xii.

man, I know not/ he says ; 'but I am in the faith that
nature has not fastened iron plates between them/
* Man is a slave of mechanism (but a mechanism dis
guised in the garb of a lucid celestial reason) and fancies
himself free/ ' Self-feeling and fellow-feeling (a new
phase of expansion and contraction) are the two ex
pressions of the elasticity of our will ' : they vary directly
with each other : and ' love therefore is the highest
reason ' — a proposition, adds Herder, for which 'if we
will not trust St. John, we may trust the undoubtedly
more divine Spinoza, whose philosophy and ethics turn
wholly upon this axis/

Herder's great work, however, — which, side by side
with Lessing's Education of the Human Race, and with
Kant's Idea for a Universal History, helped to constitute
that conception of history, as philosophy in concrete
form, which appears in Schelling, Schlegel, and Hegel,
— was the Ideas for a Philosophy of History. It is the
pendant and contrast to Kant's three Criticisms, with
which it is nearly contemporaneous (1784-91). Even
in history Kant emphasises the work of intelligence, of
reason : and puts the intelligently-organised state — if
possible, the world-commonwealth, when war shall be
transformed into merely stimulating competition, — as the
final triumph of the reason. To Herder, while on the
one hand the nature-basis is all-essential, and must
form the foundation of any genetic explanation of
spiritual phenomena, the ideal of humanity presents
itself rather as a free development of the many-sided
individual — a development tempered by the association
of the family and the claims of friendship. In Kant's
view of civilisation, natural reason by its indwelling pre
suppositions works out the end of culture: Herder, on
the contrary, allows himself to introduce — but only in
and from the dim background— a supernatural aid to

XII.] HERDER. 143

actualise the germs of rationality latent in man's nature.
Yet, though at the first step into history the Godhead
appears, and a deified humanity looms ahead as the
consummation of the process of evolution, the develop
ment between these two extreme poles is homogeneous
and indeed one. The same law governs it throughout :
' Ethics is only a higher physics of the imind.' Man is
from the first endowed with tendencies which, through
the medium of society and tradition, carry him on to the
double end, so hard to combine, of ' humanity and happi
ness/ 'humanity and religion/ But, for this training
of the spirit he is prepared by a special natural endow
ment of the body : and Herder can go so far as to say
that ' in order to delineate the duties of man, we need
only delineate his form.' Developing under the in
fluence of cosmic and geographical conditions, and
formed of the same protoplasm and on the same type
as other animals, man possesses an unique organisation,
a definitely proportioned mechanism, which is his dis
tinctive and permanent specific character. General
identity of plan and condition prevails for man and
animals ; but Herder keeps back from the Darwinian
inference which interprets the graduated diversity of
type as indicating that man is the phase reached pro
tempore in the gradual slide along which the contin
uous change of environment carries the unstable types
which earlier environments have helped to form. For
Herder's conception of nature there are fixed differences
beyond which research cannot go ; and we shall see that
both Schelling and Hegel accept this reservation.

Herder, finally, struck a blow in the war that was
waged after Lessing's death between the friends and foes
of Spinozism. H is little book God ( 1 787) is a vindication
of Spinoza against Jacobi's attack. Antiquarian accuracy
it can lay no claim to : the picture of Spinozism, one-

144 PROLEGOMENA. [xil.

sided at the best, is further vitiated by an interpretation
of the doctrine which leavens it to indistinctness with the
ideas of Leibniz and Shaftesbury. It was a grand — but
it was also an audacious — vision of Spinozism which
found it not inconsistent with a fundamental theism on
one side and with the poetry of nature on the other.
Yet Herder had the merit of being perhaps the first to
pierce the hard logical shell of rationalism under which
Spinoza had lain hidden, and to reveal the mystic
passion for God which so quaintly called itself amor
erga rem infinitam et aeternam. 'Spinoza/ says Herder,
'was an enthusiast for the being of God/ Even where
he translates Spinoza's terms into too ample equivalents,
he does service by teaching men that the vapid inanities
they associate with terms like substance, mode, cause, are
inadequate to interpret the intensity of meaning they
had for the philosopher. To remove the seals which
rendered both Leibniz and Spinoza a mystery for the
world was to prepare the way for Schelling and
Hegel \

It is under the aegis of Spinoza and Leibniz that
Schelling begins his first characteristic work, — the Ideas
towards a philosophy of Nature. In these thinkers he
found first proclaimed as the fundamental standpoint of
philosophy the unity of the finite and the infinite, of the
real and the ideal, of the absolutely active and the
absolutely passive. They differed indeed in this, that
whereas this unity is pre-supposed by Spinoza as in
finite and absolute substance, of which all separate
existence, body or mind, is only a modus, it is taken by
Leibniz as the universal characteristic of every in
dividual being. Every monad — and the human soul is
the typical monad — is at once finite and infinite, real
and ideal, active and passive. But — whether as under-
1 See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 420.

XII.] FICHTE AND SC HELLING. 145

lying substance, or as unity of reality— both hold the
cardinal doctrine that the absolute (the ' Object ' of
philosophy) is the unity and unification — the identity —
of what outside it appears as two sides or orders of
being, the real and the ideal. To philosophise, there
fore — or to see things in the absolute — is (not as Hegel's
malicious joke puts it1, to look at them 'in the night
when all cows are dark,' — but) to see them in the intense
light that proceeds from the identity of the Spirit within
us with the Nature without us.

Fichte had caught hold of this standpoint. He had
seen that the original antithesis which confronts us, and
the conjunction (synthesis) of its members, presupposed
a still more fundamental and indeed absolute thesis, —
an aboriginal and active unity. That antithesis is the
opposition of ego and not-ego ; that synthesis is every
act of knowledge and will, by which each of these
powers is in turn limited by the other. Such a synthesis
(volition or cognition) would be impossible unless on
the fundamental thesis (or hypothesis) of a unity, or
identity, which gives rise to the antithesis and has the
power of overcoming it. Such an original unity is what
he calls the absolute Ego. I am what I know and will,
and what I know and will is Me. Such is the equation
(briefly written, 1 = 1) which identifies subject and
object (of knowledge and will). But the associations
clinging to the terms Fichte used gave this thought
a one-sided direction. The '/'is opposed to the 'Thee/
and the ' Them,' and the ' //.' The 'thing'— or non-
ego— is depreciated as compared with the thinker and
wilier. It is postulated ad majorent gloriam of the Ego :
in order that I may work out the full fruition of my
being. It is what I ought to make out of it. It is
nothing but what it will be — or will be if I do what

1 Hegel, Werke, ii. 13.
L

146 PROLEGOMENA.

I ought to do. The identity of the two sides therefore
is left as * the object of an endless task, an absolute
imperative/ The Absolute is not yet : — it is only the
forecast of a postulated result.

If this be what Fichte teaches, and be called sub
jective idealism, then for Schelling the first thing is to
quit the house of bondage. Let us leave out of view
the Ego, with its misleading associations, and begin
with the two fields which are known to us, the fields of
Nature and Spirit. Nature — not Matter — is the one
side: Mind or Spirit the other. Each of them furnishes
the object of one branch of philosophy — a philosophy
of Nature, on one hand, and a transcendental idealism
on the other. The former is new, and more especially
Schelling's own proper continuation of Kant : the other
partly a continuation of Fichte's work. But as they are
both philosophy, they must coincide or meet. The whole
philosophy may therefore call itself a philosophy of
Identity ; but, for the while, it will present itself under
the two aspects of a philosophy of Nature, conceived as
the blind and unconscious, a philosophy of Mind and
history, as the free and conscious product of intelli
gence ].

1 See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 392.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE AND IDEALISM.

WHAT is meant by a ' philosophy of Nature ' ? 'To
philosophise on Nature/ says Schelling, 'means to lift
it up out of the dead mechanism in which it appears
immersed,— to inspire it, so to speak, with liberty, and to
set it in free process of evolution : it means, in other
words, to tear ourselves away from the vulgar view
which sees in Nature only occurrences, or at the best
sees the action as a fact, not the action itself in the
action V There is in short a process in nature parallel
in character to what Fichte had exhibited for conscious
ness. The natural world is no longer subordinated, but
to appearance co-ordinate : and evolution or develop
ment, exhibited under the logical title of a ' deduction/
is the common law of both. The real order and the
ideal order of the world are equally the work of an
infinite and unconditioned activity, ' which never quite
exhausts itself in any finite product, and of which every
thing individual is only as it were a particular expres
sion/ The nature which we see broken up in groups
and masses, and individual objects, is to be explained as
a series of steps in a process of development : the steps
in a single continuous product which has been arrested

1 Schelling, Werke, iii. 13. (References always to the first
series.)

L 2

148 PROLEGOMENA. [xm.

at several stages, — which presents distinct epochs, but
nevertheless all approximations, with divergences, to
a single original ideal.

In Nature, as in Mind, the most typical phenomenon
is an original heterogeneity, duplicity, or difference,
which, however, points back to a still more fundamental
homogeneity, unity, or identity. This primary unity or
ground of unification does not indeed appear to sight ;
the 'soul of Nature/ the anima mundi, nowhere presents
itself as such in its undivided simplicity ; but only as
the perpetually recurring re-union of what has been
divided. But though unapparent, the absolute identity
is the necessary presupposition of all life and existence,
as of all knowledge and action. It is the link or
' copula ' which perpetually reduces the antithesis to
unity, and the heterogeneity to homogeneity, and the
different to redintegration. To this fact of antithesis,
presupposing and continually reverting to an original
unity, Schelling gives the name ' Polarity/ ' It is impos
sible to construe the main physical phenomena without
such a conflict of opposite principles. But this conflict
only exists at the instant of the phenomenon itself. Each
natural force awakes its opposite. But that force has no
independent existence : it only exists in this contest,
and it is only this contest which gives it for the moment
a separate existence. As soon as this contest ceases,
the force vanishes, by retreating into the sphere of
homogeneous forces V Polarity, therefore, is a general
law of the cosmos.

A ceaseless, limitless activity, therefore, as the basis
or groundwork of ail, for ever crossing, arresting, and
limiting itself: an eternal war, which, however, is
always being led back to peace, — a process of differenti
ation which rests upon, is the product of, and is for ever

1 Schelling, Werke, ii. 409.

xill.] ORGANIC NATURE. 149

forced back to integration, is the perpetual rhythm of
the natural universe. It is a process in which can be
traced three grades, stages, or ' powers * (first, second,
and third, &c.). By its more generally descriptive name
it is called Organisation. ' Organism/ says Schelling,
' is the principle of things. It is not a property of
single natural objects; but, on the contrary, single
natural objects are so many limitations, or single modes
of apprehending the universal organism V ' The world
is an organisation ; and a universal organism itself
is the condition (and to that extent the positive) of
mechanism2.' 'Mechanism is to be explained from
organism : not organism from mechanism/ 'The essen
tial of all things is life : the accidental is only the kind
of their life : and even the dead in Nature is not utterly
dead, — it is only extinct life.*

But if the conception of an organism be thus the
adequate or complete idea of Nature as a whole, that idea
is only realised as a third 'power' supervening on, and
by means of two subordinate or inferior ranges or
'powers.' The first stage is that occupied by the
mathematical and mechanical conception of the world,—
the bare skeleton or framework which has to be clothed
upon and informed with life and growth. This first
'power' in the world-process of antithetical forces,
under the control of, and on the basis supplied by, the
original thetic unity ,/hich synthetises them, is Matter.
In Matter we have the equilibrium and statical indiffer
ence of two opposing forces — one centrifugal, accele
rating, repulsive, the other contripetal, retarding,
attractive — which, working under the synthetising unity
supplied by the force of universal gravitation, build up
in their momentary arrests or epochs the various
material forms. In this first 'power' we have as it

1 Schelling, Werke, ii. 500. 2 Ibid. ii. 350.

150 PROLEGOMENA. [xill.

were the scheme or machinery through which organisa
tion will work: the outward and 'abstract' organism.
And the essential feature of this ' construction ' or
' deduction ' of matter is that it does not take material
atoms and build them into a world, but ' deduces ' the
properties of matter as issuing from the play of opposing
forces, and as due to the temporary syntheses resulting
from the presence of unity making itself felt in the
opposites.

A second and higher ' power ' is seen in the physical
universe as it presents itself to the sciences of electricity,
magnetism, and chemistry. If the former briefly be
denominated the mechanical, this is the chemical world.
The law of polarity is here especially prominent : the
neutrality or indifference of parts is replaced by an
intenser antithesis and affinity : and the return from
heterogeneity to homogeneity takes place with more
striking and even sudden effect. Here, matter, even as
inorganised, has a certain simulacrum of life and sensi
bility : there is in it the trace of a spirit which emerges
above the mere contiguity and juxtaposition of mechan
ical atoms. The atomic theory shows itself less and less
adequate as an attempt to represent the whole pheno
mena of inanimate matter, and the material universe is
already charged with sympathies and antipathies which
are full of the promise and the potency of the organic
world.

The mechanical theory of the universe, in the ordinary
sense, which deals with the mathematical formulation of
the laws of planetary movement, had been the work of
the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century had
seen attempts to explain the status quo of the planetary
system as a resultant from the evolution of an ele
mentary molecular state of the cosmic mass. With the
close of the eighteenth century there appeared a group

xin.] THE EVOLUTION THEORY. 151

of new sciences dealing with subtler energies of matter,
—with electricity, galvanism, and above all with the
connexions of chemical, electric, and magnetic science.
The ideas thus suggested — embraced with some gener
ality under the title Polarity — threw light backward
upon the old mechanical conceptions, and gave them
a decidedly dynamic character. Even the tranquil rest
of geometrical figures came to be explained as a meeting
point and transition moment of opposite forces. But
these ideas produced an even greater effect on biology.
Here, too, the need of a special 'vital force ' to explain
life and organisation disappeared : organism was but
a higher stage, a completer truth of mechanism : and
both found their explanation in the antithesis and syn
thesis of forces, or in differentiation and integration of
what has recently been termed an ' idee-force.' In this
direction, so far as Schellingwas concerned, the obvious
stimulus came from the programme sketched by Kiel-
meyer at Stuttgart in 1793, in a lecture 'on the
proportions of organic forces.' According to Kielmeyer
there are three types of force in the animal organisa
tion, sensibility, irritability and reproduction *. The
last of these is the basic force which builds up and
propagates the animal system. With irritability, or
contraction in response to external stimuli — material
adaptation to environment — a higher level of animal
life is reached. But the highest of all forces in the
living being is sensibility. In this same order may we
reasonably conceive that the 'plan of nature ' proceeds.
Her first products show little beyond that reproductive
power which makes broad and high the pyramid of life.
But as the creature acquires increasing heterogeneity
and a comparatively independent position, it plays the
part of a re-agent against stimuli, and a source of move-

1 Compare vol. ii. 360 and 429.

! 5 2 Pff 0 LEG OMEN A. [xill.

ments. Lastly, it not merely responds to, but assimi
lates and appropriates the impression into a sensation :
it internalises the external, and carries within itself by
means of the sensibility an ever-increasing picture of
the world around it.

The idea of Evolution or Development, thus intro
duced by Schelling into philosophy as a governing
principle in the study of matter and of mind, is not to
be confused either with the oilier use of these terms
or with their current applications to-day 1. By evolu
tion (or development) and involution (or envelopment)
the earlier speculation on biology had denoted the
view that the organic germ contained in parvo all that
the matured organism showed in large. As the mature
bulb of the healthy hyacinth shows, when cut open,
to the naked eye, the stem and flowers that will issue
from it next spring; so in general the seed can be
treated as a miniature organism needing only an increase
of bulk to make it fully visible in details. Growth is
thus not accretion, but explication and enlargement of
a microscopic organism subsisting in the germ.

Evolution, in the present time, and especially since
Darwin, means something more than this. It implies
a theory of descent of the variety of existing organisms
from other organisms of a previous age, less individual
ised in forms and functions. From comparatively
simple and homogeneous creatures there have issued
in the course of ages creatures of more complex, more
highly differentiated structure; and this process of
gradual differentiation may be conceived as going on
through an all but infinite period. At one end we may
conceive matter, just endowed with the faculties of life
and organisation, but in a minimal degree ; at the
other end of the developmental process, creatures which
1 See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 424.

XIII.] THE EVOLUTION THEORY. 153

have organised within themselves powers, maximal
both in range and variety. The result (so far as we
at present go) is a genealogy of organism which, to
quote Darwin, pictures before us a ' great tree of life
which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust
of the earth and covers the surface with its ever
branching and beautiful ramifications/

Even Buffon, seeing how naturally he could regard
' the wolf, the fox, and the jackal ' as ' degenerate
species of a single family/ concluded we could not go
wrong in supposing that ' nature could have with time
drawn from a single being all other organised beings/
Erasmus Darwin (1794) had insisted on the power of
' appetency ' in the organs of a living creature to create
and acquire new structures which it handed down to
its posterity. G. R. Treviranus1 in his Biology (1802-5)
had noted the influence of environment, and Jean
Lamarck in his Philosophic Zoologique (1809) had
— after assuming that ' nature created none but the
lowest organisms ' — maintained that need and use (or
disuse) can so effectively modify a creature that it may
even produce new organs, and give rise by imper
ceptible degrees to a variety of creatures as widely
divergent as they now appear. E. g. ' The giraffe owes
its long neck to its continued habit of browsing upon
trees.' And gradually it had become recognised by
speculators on this subject that, as Mr. H. Spencer wrote
in 1852, 'by small increments of modification any amount
of modification may in time be generated/ Finally, in
1859, Darwin, with an ample resource of illustrative ex
amples, enforced the doctrine that the existing fauna and

1 ' Every inquiry into the influence of general nature on living
beings/ says Treviranus, ' must start from the principle that all living
forms are products of physical influences which still go on at the
present time and are altered only in degree and direction.'

154 PROLEGOMENA. [xin.

flora of the earth represent the result of a struggle for
existence, protracted during vast ages, in which those
creatures have been preserved (selected to live) which,
among all the variously-endowed offspring of any kind,
were best fitted to appropriate the means of subsistence
in the circumstances in which they for the time found
themselves placed. The circumstances of life on the
globe are perpetually varying from place to place and
time to time : progeny never exactly reproduce their
parents, and diverge widely from each other : hence each
form of life is perpetually sliding on from phase to phase,
and only those survive which are best adapted to the
new conditions of life.

So far as Darwinism is an attempt to show that the
classes of plants and animals are not a mere juxta
position and aggregation, but are to be explained by
reference to a single genetic principle, it is in harmony
with the Evolution taught by Schelling and Hegel.
Both alike overthrow the hard and fast lines of divi
sion which semi-popular science insists upon, and
restore the continuity of existence. Both regard
Nature as an organic realm, developing by action and
re-action within itself, living a common life in thorough
sympathy and solidarity, and not a mere machine in
which the several parts retain without change the
features and functions impressed upon them at creation
by some supernal architect. But they differ in other
points. Ordinary Darwinism, at least, talks as if cir
cumstances and organism were independent originally,
and only brought as it were, incidentally, in contact
and correlation. It fails to keep hold of the fact — of
which it is abstractly aware — that the two act upon
and modify each other because they are members of
a larger organism. It forgets, in short, what Schelling
so thoroughly realised, that the organic and inorganic,

xiil.] THE EVOLUTION THEORY. 155

ordinarily so called, are both in a wider sense organic.
It wants the courage of recognising its own tacit pre
suppositions.

But the characteristic difference between the evolution
theory of to-day and that meant by the philosophers
is different from this, though connected with it. ' The
assertion/ says Schelling, ' that the various organisms
have formed themselves by gradual development from
one another, is a misconception of an Idea which really
lies in reason Y And Hegel no less decidedly asserts
that ' Metamorphosis ' (as the term was then applied,
e. g. by Goethe, to what we now call Evolution) really
exists as a fact only in the case of the living individual,
—not in the supposed or theoretical continuity of the
species. 'It is an awkward way both ancient and
modern speculative biology have had of presenting the
development and transition of one physical form and
sphere into a higher one as an outwardly-actual produc
tion, — which, however, in order to make it clearer, has
been thrown back into the darkness of the past V Yet
notwithstanding these and even later protests, there is
a great charm for many minds in the evolutionist
picture, e.g., of the horse of to-day as the literal
descendant through nearly fifty great stages (called
species) from some creature of the eocene age, which
gradually transformed itself in consequence of innate
instability or variability of construction and in obedience
to changes in its environment. But whatever value
there may be in these as yet hypothetical aids to the
imagination in grasping and unifying the variety of
organic life, they run on another line from the philo
sophical evolution. That evolution is in the Idea, the
Notion. It is the ' fluidity ' of terms of thought that is

1 Schelling, Werke, iii. 63.
8 Hegel, Encyclopaedic, § 249.

156 PROLEGOMENA. [xm.

here sought, not of the kinds of things, — except in
a secondary way. And above all, philosophy does not
deal with a problem in time, with a mere sequence ;
if it deals with a history of nature, the agents of that
history are powers and forces — and powers which are
ideal no less than real.

A nearer approach to the philosophic conception is
to be found in the views which modern physiology
takes of the nature of organic structure and function l.
In the simplest phases of protoplasm, the apparently
homogeneous mass is really undergoing a series of
changes, and indeed only exists as such, because it is the
ever- renewed resultant of two correlated processes, — a
movement up (anabolic change) by which dead matter
is assimilated and built into it, and a movement down
(katabolic changes) by which its composing elements
are disintegrated and left behind, with accompanying
liberation of energy. Protoplasm or ' living matter ' is
the incessantly formed and re-formed thin line on
which these two currents for the moment converge, —
a temporary crest of white foam, as it were, raising
itself on the Heraclitean wave of vicissitude, where all
things flow on and nothing abides. But wherever
protoplasm arises and maintains itself on this border
line of ascending and descending states, it exhibits the
three well-known properties of assimilation, contrac
tility, and sensitiveness. Protoplasm, placed as it were
in the mean between these two processes, is or has the
synthetic power which governs them and keeps them
in one. It is no mere chemical substance, undergoing
composition and decomposition, but rather, if looked at
from the somewhat speculative standpoint of molecular
physics, a kind of intricate movement or dance of

1 See e. g. Professor Michael Foster's article on Physiology in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.

XIII.] MIND IN NATURE. 157

particles, a shape or 'form* instinct with the power
of producing and reproducing itself, and, ultimately,
in some highly differentiated phases (nerve-system),
with a power of producing and reproducing a world of
imagination.

A philosophy of Nature is only half a philosophy.
Its purport is to set free the spirit in nature, to release
intelligence from its imprisonment in material encase
ments which hide it from the ordinary view, and to
gather together the disjecta membra of the divine into
the outlines of one continuous organisation. It seeks
to spiritualise nature, i.e. to present the inner idea,\
unity, and genetic interdependence of all its pheno
mena : to delineate natura formaliter spectata not as
a logical skeleton of abstract categories, but in its
organisation and continuous life. There remains the
problem of what Schelling calls ' Transcendental
Idealism': — called 'transcendental' to avoid confusion
with the vulgar idealism which supposes the world to
be what it calls a mere ' idea ' or phantom of the mind.
Schelling's is on the contrary an 'Ideal-Realism': it
'materialises the laws of intelligence to laws of nature1.'

We need not in details consider the genesis of
Reality from the action of the Ego. Substantially it
is the same as that given by Fichte. An activity,
which is at once self-limiting and superior to all limit,
rises through stage to stage, from sensation and intuition,
to reflection and intelligence, till it becomes the con
sciousness of a world of objective reality. 'Give me,' says
the transcendental philosopher, ' a nature with opposing
activities, of which the one goes to infinity, and the
other endeavours to behold itself in this infinity, — and
from that I will show you intelligence arising with the
whole system of its ideas2.' In the first phase the

1 Schelling, iii. 352, 386. 2 Ibid. iii. 427.

158 PROLEGOMENA. [xill.

' ideal-real ' world arises by the synthetic action of the
'productive intuition/ Ideas, as it were, live and
move : they grow and build up : causality is neither
a category nor a schema, but an intelligent ' form '
which is also a force— an ' idee-force/ They are (in
the Hegelian sense) ' Ideas/ i.e. neither merely ob
jective nor merely subjective, but both at once. But
such an ideal world is outside and beyond conscious
ness : it belongs to the same region as that higher Ego
where there is no distinction between the Ego I am
and the Ego I know. To follow the movement in this
region needs a combination of mental vision and visual
intellect, which Schelling has called the 'Intellectual
Intuition/ It is a power which rising above the
materialism of sense yet retains its realism ; which,
while intellectual, is free from abstractness. It is
synthetic, and widely different from mere logical
analysis. It is, in short, analogous to the artistic
genius : it creates a quasi-objectivity, an ideal-reality,
without which the mere words of the speculator are
meaningless. By means of this 'organ/ philosophy
can 'freely imitate and repeat the original series of
actions in which the one " act " of self-consciousness is
evolved V

But the 'productive intuition* is, as Kant would
say, blind : it is unconscious in its operation : and it
is only after an arrest, a Sabbath when it surveys and
judges its work, that it begins to realise itself through
a process of analysis and reflection which elicits and
fixes the categories that have been operative in it. By
this abstraction intelligence rises out of mere pro
duction to intelligent and conscious production, i.e. to
volition, where it has an ideal and realises it. With
volition and voluntary action, objectivity is to appear-

1 Schelling, iii. 397.

XIII.] NATURE AND HISTORY. 159

ance further certified and fortified. It is as active, i. e.
as free, and even moral, agents, that we set forward
categorically the reality of the world. So, too, Fichte
had declared. But, as Schelling reminds us, with this
intensified assertion of a law and an ideal to which the
real must and shall correspond, — with the declaration
that the realm of absolute consistency and ideal truth
of reason is the true and real for ever and ever — we
come across the fundamental antithesis of the ' Is ' and
the 'Ought/ of the objective and subjective, of uncon
scious necessity and self-conscious freedom. With an
attempt to get a philosophy of history, — i. e. of man and
mind as the culminating truth of things, we see our
selves confronted with the opposition of fatalism and
chance. On one hand history is only possible for
beings who have an ideal in view, — one persistent aim
and principle which their work and will is the means
of realising. And yet it is an ideal which only the
series of generations, only the whole race, can realise.
Man's license to do or to refrain rests upon a larger,
latent, divine necessity which constrains it. What
human agents by their free choice determine and carry
out, is carried out, in the long run, by the force of an
everlasting and unchanging order, to which their
wills seem but a mere plaything. But that man's free
agency should thus harmonise with the constrained
uniformities of nature is only possible on the assump
tion that both are phenomena of a common ground, or
basis of identity, of an 'absolute identity, in which
there is no duplication, and which for that reason,
because the condition of all consciousness is duplica
tion, can never reach consciousness. This ever- Un
conscious, which, as it were the everlasting Sun in the
spirit-kingdom, is hidden in its own undimmed light, and
which, though it is never an object, still impresses its

160 PROLEGOMENA. [xm.

identity on all free objects, is simultaneously the same
for all intelligences, the invisible " root " of which all
intelligences are only the "powers/' and the everlasting
mediator between the self-determining subjective in us
and the objective or percipient, — simultaneously the
ground of the uniformity in freedom, and of the free
dom in uniformity of the objective1.' To rise to the
sense of this Absolute Identity, as common basis of
harmony between the 'Ought' and the 'Is/ is to
recognise Providence : it is Religion.

But this 'Absolute' is never in history completely
revealed — we cannot see free action coincide with
predetermination. Thus if History as a whole be
conceived as a 'continuous and gradual self- revelation
of the Absolute/ 'God never t's, if ts means exhibition
in the objective world : if God were, we should not be2/
Nor is the Absolute so revealed in Nature. Yet, even
as the apparent contingency of human action throws
us back on an everlasting necessity which is yet
freedom, so the apparent uniformity of natural order
shows us in organic life the traces of a free self-
regulating development. To apprehend the truth at
which both seem to point we want an organ of intelli
gence which shall unite in itself the conscious activity
of free production with the unconscious instinct of
natural creation. Such an organ is found in the
aesthetic power of genius, in the Artist. The artistic
product is the work of two intimately-conjoined prin
ciples : — of the art (in the narrower sense) which can
be taught and learned, and is exercised consciously
and with reflection, and of that 'poesy in Art/ the
unconscious grace of genius which can neither be
handed down nor acquired, but can only be inborn
by free gift of nature. In the work thus brought to
1 Schelling, iii. 600. * Ibid. iii. 603.

xm.] PHILOSOPHY AS ART. 161

birth there is something definite, precise, and capable
of exposition in finite formulae: there is also something
which no ' prose ' can ever explicate, something which
tells us of the infinite and eternal, which ever reveals
and yet conceals the Absolute and Perfect. Art, thus
springing from 'imagination, the one sole power by
which we can think and conjoin even the contradictory/
gives objectivity and outward shape to that 'intellectual
intuition ' by which the philosopher subjectively (in his
own consciousness) sought to realise to himself the
unity of thought and existence.

'To the philosopher/ Schelling concludes, 'Art is
supreme, because it as it were opens to him the Holy
of Holies, where in everlasting and original unity there
burns, as it were in one flame, what is parted asunder
in nature and history, and what in life and conduct,
no less than in thinking, must for ever flee apart. The
view the philosopher artificially makes for himself of
nature is for Art the original and natural. What we
call nature is a poem which is locked up in strange and
secret characters. Yet could the riddle be disclosed,
we should recognise in it the Odyssey of the mind,
which, strangely deceived, in seeking itself, flees from
itself: for through the sense-world there is a glimpse,
only as through words of the meaning, only as through
half-transparent mist of the land of imagination, after
which we yearn. That splendid picture emerges, as it
were, by the removal of the invisible partition-wall
which sunders the actual and the ideal world, and is
only the opening by which those figures and regions
of the world of imagination, that but imperfectly
glimmer through the actual, come forward in all
their fulness. Nature is to the artist no more than
it is to the philosopher, viz. the ideal world as it
appears under constant limitations, or only the im-

M

1 62 PROLEGOMENA.

perfect reflex of a world which does not exist outside
him, but within him/

' If it is Art alone, then, which can succeed in making
objective and universally accepted what the philosopher
can only exhibit subjectively, it may also be expected
that philosophy, as it was in the infancy of science born
and nourished by poetry, and with it all those sciences
which were by it carried on towards perfection, will
after their completion flow back as so many single
streams into the universal ocean of poetry from which
they issued. Nor is it in general hard to say what will
be the means for the return of science to poetry: for
such a means has existed in mythology before this,
as it now seems, irrevocable separation took place.
But as to how a new mythology, — which cannot be the
invention of the single poet, but of a new generation,
as it were representing only a single poet, — can itself
arise, is a problem, the solution of which is to be
expected only from the future destinies of the world
and the further course of history1.'

1 Schelling, iii. 628.

CHAPTER XIV.

TRANSITION TO HEGEL.

THUS far Schelling (aetat. 25) had gone in 1800. Two
sides of philosophy had been alternately presented as
complementary to each other ; and now the task lay
before him to publish the System itself which formed
the basis of those complementary views. To that task
Schelling set himself in 1801 (in his Journal for Specu
lative Physics) : but the Darstellung meines Systems
remained a torso. The Absolute was abruptly ' shot
from the pistol ' : but little followed save a restatement
in new terms of the Philosophy of Nature. Meanwhile
Hegel, who had inherited some little means by his
father's death, began to think that the hour had struck
for his entrance into the literary and philosophical arena,
and wrote in the end of 1800 to Schelling asking his
aid in finding a suitable place and desirable surround
ings from which to launch himself into action. What
answer or advice he received is unknown : at any rate
in the early days of 1801 he took up his quarters at
Jena, and in the autumn he gave his first lectures at the
University. Gossip suggested that Schelling, left alone
(since Fichte's departure) to sustain the onset of respecta
bility and orthodoxy upon the extravagances of the new
Transcendentalism, had summoned his countryman and
old friend to bear a part in the fray. And the rumour

M 2

1 64 PROLEGOMENA. [xiv.

seemed to receive corroboration. The two friends
issued conjointly a Critical Journal of Philosophy, which
ran through two years. So closely were the two editors
associated that in one article it seems as if the younger
had supplied his more fluent pen to expound the ideas
of his senior.

The influence of Hegel is to be seen in the Bruno, or on
the Divine and Natural Principle of Things, published in
1802. It is a dialogue, in form closely modelled after
the Timaeus of Plato, dealing with the old theme of the
relation of art (poesy) and philosophy, and with the
eternal creation of the universe. It presents philosophy
as a higher than Art ; for while Art achieves only an
individual truth and beauty, philosophy cognises truth
and beauty in its essence and actuality (an undfur sich).
Philosophy itself Bruno (the chief speaker of the
dialogue) does not profess to set forth, but 'only the
ground and soil on which it must be built up and
carried out ' : and that soil is ' the Idea of something
in which all antitheses are not so much combined, as
rather one, and not so much superseded, as rather not
at all parted/ — 'a unity, in which unity and antithesis,
the self-similar with the dissimilar, are one1.' From
such a standpoint it is not wonderful that ' in the finite
understanding (Verstand}, compared with the supreme
Idea and the way in which all things are in it, every
thing seems reversed, and as if standing on its head,
exactly like the things we see mirrored on the surface of
water V

This supreme Unity is essentially a trinity : an
Eternal, embracing infinite and finite; an eternal and
invisible father of all things, who, never issuing forth
from his eternity, comprehends infinite and finite in one

1 Schelling, iv. 231, 235, 236. 2 Ibid. 244.

XIV.] SC HE LUNG'S BRUNO. 165

and the same act of divine knowledge. The infinite, again,
is the Spirit, who is the unity of all things ; while the
finite, though potentially equal to the infinite *, is by its
own will a God suffering and made subject to the con
ditions of time2. This trinity in unity (which is the
Absolute) is by logic— a mere science of understanding
— rent asunder : and the one Subject-object of philo
sophy becomes for reflection and understanding the
three independent objects which such a 'logical ' philo
sophy calls respectively the Soul (erewhile the infinite),
the world (once the finite), and God (the eternal unity).
' Opposing and separating the world of intelligence from
the world of nature, men have learned to see nature
outside God, and God outside nature, and withdrawing
nature from the holy necessity, have subordinated it to
the unholy which they name mechanical, while by the
same act they have made the ideal world the scene of
a lawless liberty. At the same time as they defined
nature as a merely passive entity, theysupposed they had
gained the right of defining God, whom they elevated
above nature, as pure activity, utter " actuosity," as if the
one of these concepts did not stand and fall with the
other, and none had truth by itself3.'

The problem therefore of philosophy is on one hand
to ' find the expression for an activity which is as repose
ful as the deepest repose, for a rest which is as active as

1 ' In things thou seest nought but the misplaced images of that
absolute unity ; and even in knowledge, so far as it is a relative
unity, thou seest nought but an image — only drawn amiss in another
direction — of that absolute cognition, in which being is as little
determined by thought as thought by being.'

2 Schelling, iv. 252. See further, iv. 327 : ' The pure subject,
that absolute knowledge, the absolute Ego, the form of all forms,
is the only-begotten Son of the Absolute, equally eternal with him,
not diverse from his Essence, but one with it.'

3 Schelling, iv. 306. Cp. for actuosity, notes in vol. ii. 396.
Spinoza, Cogit. Met. ii. ii, speaks of the actuosa essentia of God.

1 66 PROLEGOMENA. [xiv.

the highest activity1/ On the other hand ; 'to find the
point of unity is not the greatest thing, but from it also to
develop its opposite, this is the proper and deepest secret
of art V The world as it first presents itself labours
under a radical antithesis : it offers a double face, body
and soul, finite and infinite. But to an absolute philo
sophy, or that high idealism which sees all things in the
light of the Eternal, the two sides are not so separate
as they first appeared. Each is also the whole and one,
but under a phase, a ' Differ enz* a preponderating aspect
which disguises the essential identity of both. Behind
mind, as it were, looms body : through body shines
mind. The ideal is but a co-aspect with the real. The
difference of nature and spirit presupposes and leads
back to the indifference of the Absolute One. 'Wherever
in a thing soul and body are equated, in that thing is an
imprint of the Idea, and as the Idea in the Absolute is
also itself being and essence, so in that thing, its copy,
the form is also the substance and the substance the
form8.'

' Thus/ so Bruno concludes, ' we shall, first in the
absolute equality of essence and form, know how both
finite and infinite stream forth from its heart, and how
the one is necessarily and for ever with the other, and
comprehend how that simple ray, which issues from the
Absolute and is the very Absolute, appears parted into
difference and indifference, finite and infinite. We
shall precisely define the mode of parting and of unity
for each point of the universe, and prosecute the universe
to that place where that absolute point of unity appears
parted into two relative unities. We shall recognise in
the one the source whence springs the real and natural
world ; in the other, of the ideal and divine world.

1 Schelling, iv. 305. 2 Ibid. iv. 328.

3 Ibid. iv. 306.

XIV.] SCHELLING' S BRUNO. 167

With the former we shall celebrate the incarnation of
God from all eternity ; with the latter the necessary
deification of man. And while we move freely and
without resistance up and down on this spiritual ladder,
we shall, now, as we descend, see the unity of the divine
and natural principle parted, now, as we ascend and
again dissolve everything into one, see nature in God
and God in nature V Such was the programme which
Schelling offered. Hegel accepting it, — or perhaps
helping to frame it — made two not unimportant changes.
He attempted in his Phenomenology to lead up step by
step to, and so warrant, that strange position of idealism
which claims to be the image of the Absolute. He tried
in his Logic to give for this point of view a systematic
basis and a filling out of the bare Idea of a Unity,
neither objective nor subjective, neither form nor
substance, neither real nor ideal, but including and
absorbing these. He tried, in short, to trace in the
Absolute itself the inherent difference which issued
in two different worlds, and to show its unity and
identity there.

A System of philosophy, and a philosophy of the
Absolute! The project to the sober judgment of
common sense stands self-condemned, palpably beyond
the tether of humanity. For if there be anything agreed
upon, it is that the knowledge of finite beings like us
can never be more than a — comparatively poor — collec
tion of fragments, and can never reach to that which —
and such is the supposed character of the Absolute— is
utterly un-related, rank non-relativity. But in the first
place, let us not be the slaves of words, and let us not
be terrified by unfamiliar terms. After all, a System
is only our old friend the unity of knowledge, and the
Absolute is not something let quite loose, but the

1 Schelling, iv. 328.

1 68 PROLEGOMENA. [xiv.

consummation and inter-connexion of all ties. It is no
doubt an audacious enterprise to set forth on the quest
of the unity of knowledge, and the completion of all
definition and characterisation. But, on the other hand,
it may perhaps claim to be more truly modest than the
self-complacent modesty of its critics. For ordinary
belief and knowledge rest upon presuppositions which
they dare not or will not subject to revision. They too
are sure that things on the whole, or that the system
of things, or that nature and history, are a realm of
uniformity, subject to unvarying law, in thorough inter
dependence. They are good enough, occasionally, to
urge that they hold these beliefs on the warranty of
experience, and not as, what they are pleased to call,
intuitions, a priori ideas, and what not. But to base
a truth on experience is a loose manner of talking :
not one whit better than the alleged Indian foundation
of the earth on the elephant, and the elephant erected
on the tortoise. For by Experience it means experi
ences ; and these rest one upon another, one upon
another, till at length, if this be all that holds them
together, the last hangs unsupported, (and with its
superincumbent load), ready to drop in the abyss of
Nought.

This 'transcendental/ ' absolutist,' l a priori* philo
sophy, which stands so strange and menacing on the
threshold of the nineteenth century, is after all only,
as Kant sometimes called it, an essay to comprehend
and see the true measures and dimensions of this much-
quoted Experience. All knowledge rests in (not on)
the unity of Experience. All the several experiences
rest in the totality of one experience, — ultimate, all-
embracing, absolute, infinite, unconditioned ; universal
and yet individual, necessary and yet free, — eternal, and
yet filling all the nooks of time, — ideal, and yet the

xiv.] THE ABSOLUTE. 169

mother of all reality, — unextended, and yet spread
through the spaces of the universe. Call it, if you like,
the experience of the race, but remember that that
apparently more realistic and scientific phrase connotes
neither more nor less (if rightly understood) than normal,
ideal, universal, infinite, absolute experience. This is
the Unconditioned, which is the basis and the builder
of all conditions : the Absolute, which is the home and
the parent of all relations. Experience is no doubt
yours and mine, but it is also much more than either
yours or mine. He who builds on and in Experience,
builds on and in the Absolute, in the System — a system
which is not merely his. In his every utterance he
claims to speak as the mouth-piece of the Absolute,
the Unconditioned ; his words expect and require
assent, belief, acceptance ;— they are candidates (not
necessarily, or always successful) for the rank of
universal and necessary truth : they are dogmatic
assertions, and even in their humblest tones, none
the less infected with the fervour of certainty. For,
indeed, otherwise, it would be a shame and an insult
to let them cross the lips.

It is the aim of the Absolute a priori philosophy to
raise this certainty to truth : or, as one may rather say,
to reduce this certainty to its kernel of truth. It seeks
to determine the limits — not of this absolute and basic
experience (for it has no external limits) — but in this
experience : the anatomy and physiology of the Abso
lute, — the correlations and inclusions, the distinctions
and syntheses in the unconditioned field. It examines
the foundation of all knowledge. But — if this be the
phrase — we must be on our guard against a misappre
hension of its terms. The foundations are also know
ledge : they are in all knowledge and experience, its
synthetic link and its analytic distinctions. We must

170 PROLEGOMENA. [xiv.

not shrink from paradoxes in expression. The house
of knowledge, the world of experience, is as self-centred
and self-sustaining, and even more so, than the planetary
system. It is a totality in which each part hangs upon
and helps to hold up the others, but which needs no
external help, resting and yet moving, self-poised and
free.

We may be spared, therefore, verbal criticism on
the Absolute and Unconditioned. The Absolute, and
Infinite, and Eternal is no mere negation : — the only
pure negation is NOT, and even that has a flaw in its
claim. It is perfectly true — and it can only be babes
and sucklings that need to be reminded of the fact —
that none of us realises and attains the ne plus ultra
of knowledge and that all our systems have their day, —
have their day and cease to be. 'The coasts of the
Happy Isles of philosophy where we would fain arrive
are covered only with fragments of shattered ships, and
we behold no intact vessel in their bays V So too the
whole earth is full of graves ; and yet humanity lives
on, charged with the attainments of the past and full
of the promise of the future. Let us by all means be
critical and not dogmatic : let us never entirely forget
that each utterance, each science, each system of ours
falls short of what it wanted to be, and for a moment
at least thought it was. But let us not carry our critical
abstinence into dogmatic non-intervention : or, if so,
let us silently accept the great renunciation of all
utterance henceforth. System we all presuppose in
our words and deeds, and should be much hurt if our
defect in it were seriously alleged : the Absolute we
all rest in, though amid so many self-imposed and other
distractions we feel and see it not. The philosopher

1 Hegel, Werke, i. 166.

XIV.] THE ABSOLUTE. 171

proposes for his task — or rather the philosopher is one
on whom this task forces itself as for him the one
thing inevitable — to determine what is that system and
what that Absolute, or, if the phrase be preferred, the
philosopher traces to its unity, and retraces into its
differences that Experience — that felt, known, and
willed synthesis of Reality, — that realised ideal world —
on which and in which we live and move. He does
not make the system, nor does he set up the Absolute.
He only tries to discover the system, and to construe
the Absolute.

It may be said that the best of philosophers can do
no more than give us a System and an Absolute. Un
doubtedly that is so. Each philosophy is from one
point of view a strictly individualist performance. It
is not, in one way, the Absolute truth, which it promises
or hopes to disclose. The truth is seen through one
being's eyes; and his 'measure/ as Protagoras might
have said, is upon it. Yet it is still the Absolute, as
seen through those eyes ; it is still in a marvellous
measure that truth, that absolute truth, 'which the
actual generations garble/ For both the artist and
the philosopher, if they create, only re-create or imitate ;
if they are makers, they are still more seers : and their
power of ' imitation J and of 'vision ' rests on their capa
city to de-individualise themselves of their eccentricities
and idiosyncrasies, and to bring out only that in them
which is the common truth of all essential thought
and vision. In proportion as they purge themselves of
this evil subjectivity are they true artists and philoso
phers. They are both — and so, too, is the religious
genius— idealists : but the test of the value of their
idealism is its power of including and synthetising
reality. That is their verification : that, and not their
concord with this or that opinion, this or that theory of

172 PR OLE G OMEN A .

individuals or of groups. Not that the views either of
groups or individuals are unimportant. But often
they are but frozen lumps in the stream, temporary
islands which have lost their fluidity, and which imagine
themselves continental and permanent.

Truth, then, reasoned truth, harmonious experience,
abs"olute system7~is~the themejrf philosophy. Or, in
Hegelian language, its theme is the Truth, and that
Truth, God. Not a sum, an aggregate, or even what
is ordinarily styled a system, of truths : but the one
and yet diverse pulse of truth, which beats through all :
the supreme point of view in which all the parts and
differences, occasionally standing out as if independent,
sink into their due relation and are seen in their right
proportion.

PROLEGOMENA

BOOK II
JN THE PORCHES OF PHILOSOPHY

PROLEGOMENA

CHAPTER XV.

THE TWO AGES OF REASON.

THE eighteenth century— it has been often said— was
a rationalising, unhistorical, age : and, in contrast, the
nineteenth has been declared to be par excellence the
founder and the patron of the historical method. In
the one, the tendency governing the main movement
of European civilisation was towards cosmopolitan and
universal enlightenment. A common ideal, and, because
common, necessarily rather general and abstract, perhaps
even somewhat vulgarly utilitarian, pervaded Western
Europe, and threw its influence for good and evil on
literature and art, on religion and polity. It grew out
of a revulsion, in many ways natural, from the religious
extravagances of the century-and-a-half preceding,
which had led prudent thinkers to reduce religion to
a 'reasonable' minimum, and to reject all things that
savoured of or suggested enthusiasm, fanaticism, and
superstition. In politics the same one type or system
of government and laws was aimed at, more or less,
in all advancing states. National peculiarities and
patriotism were looked at askance, as unworthy of the
free 'humanity' which was set forward as the end of
all training. To simplify, to level, to render intelligible,
and self-consistent was the task of enlightenment in

176 PROLEGOMENA. [xv.

dealing with all institutions. To remove all anomalies
and inequalities, to give security for liberty and to
facilitate the right to pursue happiness :, was the chief
watchword of this movement. Its questions were — Is
religion, Is art and science, Is political organisation,
a source of happiness? Are poetry, and a belief in
divine things, and abstruse knowledge, upon the whole
for human advantage and benefit? Only such civili
sation can be justified as, taken all in all, is a blessing ;
if not (cried some) we may as well cling to the happiness
of the barbarian.

That these are important questions, and that the
purposes above-mentioned are in many ways good, is
clear. But before we can answer the questions, or
decide as to the feasibility of the aims, there are some
things to be brought and to be kept in view. And
these things were not as a rule brought and kept in
view. It was assumed that the standard of adjudication
was found in the averagely educated and generally
cultured individual among the class of more or less
' advanced thinkers' who asked the questions and set
up the aims. That class, already denationalised by
function, forming a commonwealth or rather a friendly
fraternity throughout the capitals of Europe, had cut
itself off from the narrower and the deeper sympathies
of the national life. Forming a sort of mean or middle
stratum in the social organisation, they tended to ignore
or despise equally the depths below them and the
heights above. They took themselves as the types of
humanity, and what their understandings found accept
able they dubbed rational : all else was a survival

1 'We hold,' says the American Declaration of Independence (1776),
' these truths to be self-evident ; that all men are created equal : that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights :
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,' &c.

xv-] THE AUFKLARUNG. 177

from the ages of darkness. They forgot utterly that
they were only a part, a class, a member in the social
body : and that they could only be and do what they
were and did, because what they were not and did not
do was otherwise supplied. It takes all sorts of people
to make a world: but each class— and the order of
literature and intelligence is no exception— tends to
set itself up as the corner-stone (if not something more)
of the social edifice. What is more : in such a loose
aggregate as the intelligent upper-middle class, the
individual tends more and more to count as something,
detached and by himself, to be an equal and free unit
of judgment and choice, to be emancipated from all the
bonds which hold in close affinity members of a group
whose functions are unlike each other's, and yet de
cidedly complementary. Such a class, again- though
there are of course conspicuous exceptions— is, by the
stress of special interests, removed from direct contact
with nature and reality, and lives what in the main may
be styled an artificial life.

When such a class asked what were the benefits of art
or religion, it thought first of itself; and it looked upon
art and religion— and the same would be true of philo
sophy and science, or of political sanctions— as merely
objective and outward entities, foreign to the individual,
yet by some mechanical influences brought into con
nexion with him,- as one might apply to him a drug
or a viand. But clearly to a person of practical aims,
bent on conveying information and enlightenment, bent
on making all men as like each other as possible in the
medium range of cultivation which he thinks desirable,
the utility of some of these things is questionable and
limited. It is only a little modicum of religion, of art
and of science, which can be justified by its obvious
pleasure-giving power; and it is easy to point the thesis

1 7 8 PROLEGOMENA. [xv.

against enthusiasm in these regions, by reference to the
disastrous wars fanned by religion, to the license that
has followed the steps of art, and to the lives wasted
in the zeal for increasing knowledge. In his ideal of
human life such a practical reformer will tend to sup
press all that bears too clear a trace of natural, infra-
rational, non-intelligent kindred, — all that ties us too
closely to mother earth and universal nature.

But if this was the dominant tone of the literary
teachers who had chief audience from the public ear,
there was no lack of dissentient voices who appealed
to nature, who loved the past, who set sentiment and
imagination above intellect, and who never bowed the
knee to the great idols of enlightened middle-class utili
tarianism. Even in the leaders of the enlightening
host — amongst the chiefs of the Aufkldrung — there is
a breadth and a depth of human interest which sets
them far above their average followers, and which should
prevent us from joining without discrimination in the
depreciatory judgments so often passed on the eighteenth
century. The pioneers in the great emancipatory move
ment of modern times should not be allowed to suffer
from the exaggerations and haste of their more vulgar
imitators— still less refused the meed of gratitude we
owe them. But when their ideas were violently trans
lated into reality, when the levelling, unshackling process
was set at work by vulgar hands, the shortcomings of
their theories were made to show even greater than
they were : and inevitable reaction set in. Even the
revolutionist himself has come to admit that fraternity
at that time came badly off in comparison with liberty
and equality1. But these drawbacks were accentuated
when the cosmopolitan reform-movement, by its haste
and intolerance, awakened the spirit of national jealousy.
1 Louis Blanc, History of the Revolution^ vol. i.

XV.] THE AUFKLARUNG. 179

The deeper instincts of life rose in protest against the
supposed superiority of intellect : the heart claimed its
rights against the head : the man of nature and feeling
was roused up to meet the man of reasoning and criti
cism. The spirit of war evoked those energies of
human nature — some of them not its least valuable —
which had slumbered in times of easy-going peace.
The days of adversity and humiliation taught men that
the march of literary culture is not the all-in-all of life
and history.

It was made apparent, practically at least, that intel
ligence, with its hard and fast formulae, its logical
principles, its keen analysis, was not deep enough or
wide enough to justify its claim to the august title of
reason. To be reasonable implies a more comprehensive,
patient, many-sided observation than is necessary to
prove the claim to mere intelligence. To be intelligent
is to seize the right means to execute a given or
accepted end — it is to be quick and correct in the
practice of life, to carry out in detail what has been
determined on in general. Understanding plays upon
the surface of life and deals with the momentary case :
and its greatest praise is to be fleet in the application
of principles, apt to detect the point on which to direct
action, correct in its estimate of means to ends. Clear
sighted, prudent, and direct, it is the supreme virtue
in a given sphere : but the sphere must be given, and
its end constituted in the measured round of practical
life, its system complete : or, understanding is bewildered
before a hopeless puzzle. Understanding is — the im
provident cynic might say — a certain animal-like saga
city — (such cynical philosophers were perhaps Hobbes
and Schopenhauer1) — a mere power of carrying out a

1 Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I. chaps. 2 and 3; and elsewhere.
Schopenhauer, Welt als Wills, Book I. § 6.

N 2

i8o PROLEGOMENA. [xv.

given rule in a new but similar case, and of doing so,
perhaps, through a long chain of intermediate links
and means.

But there are more things in heaven and earth than
are heard of in the philosophy of the logical intellect.
The subtilitas naturae1 far surpasses the refinements
of the practical intellect : and if the latter is ever to
overcome or be equal to the former, it must, so to
speak, wait patiently upon it, as a handmaiden upon the
hands of her mistress. Such a trained and disciplined
intellect which has conquered nature by obedience is
what the philosophers at the beginning of this century
called reason*. It is in life as much as in our mind.
It comes not by self-assertion, by the attempt to force
our ends and views on nature, but by feeling and
thinking ourselves in and along with nature. Or, briefly,
it breaks down the middle wall of partition by which
man had treated nature as a mere world of objects —
things to be used and to minister to his pleasure-
but always alien to him, always mere matter to be
manipulated ab extra. Yet even to get full use and
enjoyment out of a thing it is well to be in closer
community with it, and on terms of friendly acquaint
ance. The function of this fuller reason cannot be
performed without something analogous to sympathy
and imagination. Sympathy, which realises the inner
unity of the so-called 'thing' with ourselves: imagi
nation, which sets it in the full circumstances of those
relationships which the practical intelligence is inclined
to abstract from and to neglect. Yet only something
analogous to sympathy and imagination : if, as may
well be the case, we attach to these terms any association
of irregular or mere emotional operation. The imagi-

1 Bacon, Novum Organum, i. 10.

2 See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 400.

XV.] THE PHILOSOPHIC REASON. 181

nation in question is the 'scientific' imagination — the
power of wide large vision which sets the object fully
in reality, and is not content with a mere name or
abstract face of a fact — a name which represents a fact
no doubt, but represents it, as many such 'agents' or
deputies do, in a hard and wooden spirit. The sym
pathy in question is the transcending of the antithesis
between subjective and objective; not a fantastic or
fortuitous choice of one or a few out of many on whom
to lavish locked-up stores of affection, but the full
recognition of unity as pervading differences, and re
ducing them to no more than aspects in correlation.

What has been said of sympathy and imagination, as
the allies and ministers of reason, might be extended and
applied to humour, to wit, to irony. These also it may
be said — and with the same qualifications — are essential
to a philosopher in the highest sense. The humour,
viz., which strides over the barriers set up by institu
tion and convention between the high and the humble,
and sees man's superficial distinctions overpowered by
a half-grim, half-jubilant Ananke, — which notes how
human proposal is overcome, not without grace, by
divine and natural disposal, how the deep inner identity
in all estates breaks triumphantly through the fences
of custom and deliberate intention. The wit, which
upsets the hardened fixity of classes and groups, flits
from one to another, shows glimpses of affinity between
remote provinces of idea, and all this, without laboured
and artificial search for analogies, though to the slower-
following practical mind, hampered by its solid limits,
these leaps from province to province seem paradoxical
and whimsical. The irony, which notes the tragi
comedy of life under its apparent regularity of prose, —
which detects the vanity of all efforts to check the
flux of vitality and make the volatile permanent ; which

1 8 2 PRO LEG OMEN A . [x v.

contrasts the apparent with the real, the obviously and
officiously meant with the truly desired and willed,
and shows how diplomatically-close design is dissipated
in a jest, or the soul bent on many years of enjoyment
is plunged into torment. Thus, in a way, imagination,
sympathy, wit, humour, irony and paradox are elements
that go to the making of a philosopher : but in the
serenity of reasoned wisdom they lose their frolic
some and fantastic mood, and fill their minor place
with sober cheer. Wedded to the lord of wisdom, the
Muse of poesy and wit loses her sprightly laugh and
her dancing step, becoming a subdued, yet gracious
matron, who, with her offspring, sheds gleams of bright
ness and warmth and colour in the somewhat austere
household. Yet still the free maiden of poesy, in the
open fields where the shadow of reflective thought has
not yet fallen, has the greater charm ; and a certain
jealousy not unfrequently reigns between the married
sister and the virgin yet untamed.

But though poetry and the allied arts of words were
very helpful to philosophy — witness the services which,
though in widely different ways, Goethe and Schiller
rendered to the higher thinking of Germany — even
more stimulative and fruitful was the research into
nature and history. Nature and history : but they lie
closer together than the conjunction suggests. It is
true that in recent times we have been forcibly taught
to separate civil from natural history, if we have not
even been further taught that the latter is an improper
application of the term. But when Aristotle said that
'Poetry is more philosophical than History' he was
probably not restricting his remark to the story of
nations and states ; even as when Bacon set history
as the field of memory beside the fields of imagination
and reasoning, he was not solely referring to the records

THE PHILOSOPHIC REASON. 183

of the human past. The distinction between natural
and civil history is no doubt for practical education
a distinction of supreme importance. But it is so,
because in this scholastic phase the conception of both]
under these comprehensive names, was superficial and
abstract. Natural history meant only the classificatory
description of animals, plants, and minerals: civil
history the tale composed to string together the succes
sion of human actions on the public and national field
of life.

We have seen in an earlier chapter the advances which
Lessing, Kant, and above all Herder, made in this
direction \ Emphasising in their several ways the great
dictum of Spinoza that human passions, and the whole
scheme of human life, are res natumles, quae communes
naturae leges sequuntur, they gave to history a higher,
more philosophical, more scientific scope than what
the name used to connote. Neither in Spinoza himself,
nor in these his followers, did this insistence on the
unity of nature at all lead them to neglect the difference
—almost equivalent, it may be said, in the end to an
imperium in imperio—by which rational man marks
himself off to a special kindred with the divine2. We
have seen too what Schelling did to show that history,
if in one aspect it be the product of free human volitions,
is, in another and as he thought a superior aspect, the
realm subject to a divine or natural necessity. The
whole tendency of this epoch of thought— the tendency
which entitles it above all to the name of speculative— is
its impulse to over-ride this distinction between Nature
and History; to over-ride it, however, not in the sense of
simply ignoring or denying it, but of carrying it up into a

1 See Chapter XII.

Ct. Ethica, iv. 37, Schol. I. contrasting renttn externarum com-
munis constitutio with ipsa hominis natura, in se sola considerata.

j84 PROLEGOMENA. [xv.

unity which would do justice to both, without exclusively
favouring either, and hardly without clipping both of any
extravagant claims. The distinction remains,— no longer
an abrupt division, but now tempered and mellowed
by the presence of a paramount unity. Nature now has
a real history : no longer a mere factitious aggregate
of classified facts, it is the phenomenon of a ' latent
process/ due to a 'latent schematism/ and a 'form'
or principle of organisation. Classification does not
cease : but it ceases to be an end in itself, and becomes
only subordinate or auxiliary to a higher scientific end.
The main theme is to construe the complete cycle of
life-change and the complete organisation of life-state
from the evidence pieced out and put together from
the various orders, classes, and species of living
creatures. And on the other side the mere tale or
narrative of history, with its gossip of personalities,
and its accidents of war and intrigue, tends to become
insignificant in the presence of the great popular life,
in its deep and subtle connexion with agencies of
nature hitherto unsurmised, in its dependence upon
necessities arid uniformities which envelope or rather
permeate and constitute the human will. It is not
indeed that the force of great personalities has come
to be treated as a quantity we may neglect. The force
of the great leader, of the genius, of the hero, is not
less admirable to the wise philosophical historian
to-day than it ever was to his story-telling predecessor.
But he flatters himself that he understands better, and
can better take account of, the conditions which make
the genius and the hero possible. Achilles still counts
for more than a thousand common soldiers, and Homer
himself is not merely the composite image by which
a long tradition has fused into a dim pictorial unity the
countless bards who sang for ages on the isles of

XV0 NATURE AND HISTORY. 185

Greece and the coasts of Ionia. Yet we feel sure that
Achilles did what he did, because of the race he sprang
from, the inspiration he felt around him, the companion
ship in body and spirit of his peers. We feel that the
hero derives his strength from earth and air, from the
spiritual and material substance in which he draws his
breath. True, we cannot explain him, as if he and
his heroisms were a mere product of mathematical and
mechanical forces. But where we once recognise that
behind the single visible deed and agent there is a
spiritual nature— an underlying agency— which, unper-
ceived, keeps the hearth-fire of public life burning in
the celestial temple of Vesta, we can at least see that
though genius is a marvel and a mystery, yet it is
according to law, and no mere will-o'-the-wisp.

But when we say that the actions and sayings even
of the foremost individuals are to be comprehended only
in the light of universal forces and laws, there is an
error which is only too ready to substitute itself for the
truth. It soon appears for example that, among the
general causes which control the development of civili
sation and the acts of individuals, the economical con
dition is of great and prominent effect. And, above all,
it is easily measurable, and subject to palpable standards
(such as statistics of exports and imports, &c.). It was
natural therefore that a school of historico-social philo
sophers should arise who maintained that the economical
state of a given society was the fundamental principle
or form of its life, of which all other phases of its civili
sation, religious, aesthetic, &c., were only variable
dependent functions. This view, which comes out in
the socialist theory of Marx, is clearly the exaggeration
or abstract statement of a partial truth into a pseudo-
complete theory. The truth is one which found ex
pression as early as Plato. It is this: that in the

1 86 PROLEGOMENA. [xv.

economical system of a society we find the first and
somewhat external or mechanical suggestion of the
organism to which the state is yet to grow. In the
economic law of reciprocity there is a 'certain faint
image ' of the principle of social organisation or political
life. But when we go beyond, and interpret this first
phase to mean the original foundation, we are stating
a figment which has a plausibility only when by the
economic state we mean a great deal more than abstractly
economic facts include. And this again arises because it
is really impossible to carry out thoroughly the abstrac
tion of one aspect of social life from the others. There
are no purely economic facts which are independent
of other social influences, — of ideals, e.g. moral or
aesthetic, — ideals which nobody would call economic,
though they never quite part company from economical
conditions.

So again there is occasionally a tendency to magnify
the influence of what in the narrowest sense may be
termed political systems. Forms of government, and
titles of sovereignty are regarded as forces to which
individuals — even the highest — must bow. But here
again the exaggeration of a principle need not tempt
us to rush with Tom Paine into the opposite extravagance
that government and state-power are superfluities, or
quasi-ornamental additions to a social fabric, which can
do without them and, like other beasts of low organ
isation, can, when shorn of them, reproduce them with
ease. And thus though we may dissent from the view
that laws and constitutions are omnipotent, we may
admit that in them the central unity and controlling
principle of social life finds its dominant expression
in great outlines. We shall not agree with him who
said ' Let who will make the laws of a nation if I may
make its ballads ' : because we know that the nation

XV.] THE PHILOSOPHIC REASON.

187

will in the end have the chief voice in determining
what are to be its ballads no less than its laws. We
shall not quite accept the dictum that the intellectual
class which formulates ideas and sets up programmes
of ideals gives the real lead to the process of civilisation ;
for we shall remember that real ideas are not formed
by individuals, but are the slow work of concrete
experience in the so-called inorganic masses, finding at
length utterance through the lips of those appointed
to that end by the natural and divine order. Yet we
shall, on the other hand, see that the high things of
the world are dependent on the lowly: that a song-
maker is sometimes not less potent than a legislature :
that pecuniary conditions are effective in the sanctuaries
of religion and the high places of art : and that the
noblest ideas of great thinkers draw their strength and
life through roots that run unseen through very humble
ground.

La Raison, says Leibniz, est V enchainement des verite's1.
Truth linked into truth, and so made truer : truth, with
which all things harmonise and nothing cries dissent :
truth, which is neither the prerogative of the mere
demos, nor of the intellectual aristocracy, but of that
rarer unity which, when they can exercise several and
mutually-tendered self-abnegation, is the real spirit of
both : truth, thus conceived, is that king of life, that
sun of Reason which lighteth every man. Truth— to
use again the language of Leibniz,— which is not merely
the^ aggregate of monads,— but the monad of monads,
their mutual penetration and corrective completion, in
that Idea-reality where they retain their individuality,
but retain it in the fullness and fruition of the absolute
which each essentially or implicitly is. This kingdom
of suffering and yet triumphant truth is the true age of
1 See the Discours preliminaire to the The'odicJe.

1 8 8 PR OLE GOME N A .

Reason — not outwardly-critical, individualistically-re-
forming, mere intellectual and abstract intelligence,—
but intelligence, charged with emotion, full of reverence,
reverent above all to the majesty of that divinity which,
much disguised, and weather-beaten, like Glaucus of
the sea, resides in common and natural humanity. This
is the Reason of German idealism at the commencement
of the century. To the clear-cut dogmas of the abstract
intellect it savours of mysticism. If it is friendly to
distinctions and constantly makes them, it is the pro
nounced enemy of hard and fast separations. Begin
where you like, the reason of things, if you allow it
to work, carries you round till you also see identity
where you only saw difference, or effects where you
only looked for causes. You begin, as the inductive
logician, with the belief that the process is from the
known to the unknown. You start with your basis
of fact, as you called it. The nemesis of things forces
you to admit that your facts were partly fictions which
waited for the unknown to give them a truer and fuller
reality. You talk at first of induction, as if it were a
single and simple process, which out of facts builds
up generalities and uniformities. You learn as you
go on that the only induction that operates, except in
cases which have been artificially simplified by supposing
half the task done before you apply your experimental
methods, is an induction of which the major part is
deductive, and where your conclusion will be recurrently
made your premiss. Your induction only works on
the basis of a hypothesis, and must itself be linked in
the 'concatenation of truths,' — a concatenation which is
also a criticism and a correction.

CHAPTER XVI.

THE NEW IDEALISM.

THIS new idealism which conjures by the name of
Reason is a different thing from the pseudo-idealism
of Jacobi, as it is from the 'rationalism/ so-called, of
the mere intellectualist. Its ideal is not a desperate
refuge from the hard and bitter reality, only to be
reached by the plunge of faith,— which seems rather the
leap of despair : not a mere other- world,— always other,
longed for, presaged, beheld in dreamy vision, but
unperceived by the clear light of intelligence : clutched
at, but elusive of every effort. It is not won by turning
the back on reality and flying on the wings of morning
faith to the better land and the presence of the divine :
but by persistence in unfolding, expanding, adjusting,
re-combining, and fortifying those parliaLglimpses of
the unseen which occur in every vision of the seen.
It is true the ideal is, in a way, always an other world :
but not a mere other world ; it is another, and yet not
another, but the same, seen, if you like to say, trans
figured, idealised. But idealisation, if so applied, means
not an addition here and a subtraction there made in
reality, from some source outside— from some indeter
minable Whence (Whence indeed should such additions
come?). It does not mean a correction of faults and
failures in the real, at the will of an artist who is
dissatisfied with his subject-model and would mend it

I9o PROLEGOMENA. [*vi.

out of other faces and forms stored up in memory or
sketch-book. This idealism does not in that sense
idealise (so as to falsify). It means complete reality;
absolute, systematic, unconditioned reality: nowhere
fragmentary, nowhere referring outside, but completing
itself in all its members. It means — to quote the
Hegelian term-seeing all things in the Idea— their
notion (or ideality), i. e. their unifying 'grip/ reflecting
itself in their objectivity, and their reality completing
itself in art, religion, and philosophy to that ideal which
to the non-artistic, non-religious, non-philosophic mood
is only dimly suggested and partially supposed. Still
less is it an idealism which, as popularly understood,
turns reality and historic fact into mere ideas.

But, as perhaps may have been apparent, to call
this way of thought idealism need not keep us from
acknowledging that the same philosophy is also realism.
If it insists, so to say, on the idealism of— what we
sometimes call material— nature, it no less insists on the
realism of— what is supposed immaterial— mind. The
mental or spiritual world loses its unsubstantial intangi-
bleness, its mere supposedness, its 'ideal' or merely-
ideal character. To the older, and we may say vulgar,
view the mind or soul was a mere 'thought,' something
of which all that could be seen were certain acts or
phenomena. It was a mere idea, which one could
pretty well get on without— so long as he kept, as the
phrase was, to the phenomena— phenomena without
reality. How vague and aery again was the subject-matter
of morals ! A few virtues and vices, confessedly general
descriptive titles, a talk about will and conscience,— all
of them merely several predicates of an unknown,
spoken of, postulated, but unproducible. Compared
with this mere supposedness the spiritual world in
Schelling and Hegel acquires the reality of a quasi-

xvi.] IDEAS AND IDEALISM. 191

organism (really supra-organic), growing and constituting
itself, and making room in it for a host of human
relationships. The abstract faculties of mind get reality
(not indeed sensible) : the intangible notions of morals
become almost palpable : the kingdom of mind becomes
a real pendant to the kingdom of nature. And, on the
other hand, the kingdom of nature gets its ideality
recognised : its unity and continuity made effective in
an Idea which embraces, co-ordinated and systematised,
its disparate and unconnected portions.

This new Idealism, if it led men back from the
historical world to nature, was yet hardly in all respects
a pupil of Rousseau. Not ' Back from civilisation and
artificiality to nature and the freedom of the woodland/
was its cry : but rather ' Remember that man always
rests on and grows out of nature, always has his ideals
made directly or indirectly visible in physical (sensible)
structures; and that, when culture turns away from
sense and nature to some supposed higher, it is really
entering on a path which leads to abysses.' Its voice,
in fact, was much like the longing expressed in Schiller's
Gods of Greece ; it wished man more godlike and the
divine more human. But instead of backward, — its
motto was forward : or back to nature, only to resume
the true starting-point, and retreat from a path of
civilisation whose end is perdition. Man also was
nature1 — if he is never mere nature, i. e. the nature
unexalted to its truth — but he brought to expression,
and might bring to ever clearer and fuller expression,
a something which was in infra-human nature, but
which nature elsewhere had failed adequately to present.

1 Cf. Spinoza's remark on Body, Eth. III. pr. 2 Schol. : ' Etenim
quod corpus possit, nemo hucusque determinavit ; hoc est neminem
hucusque experientia docuit quid corpus ex solis legibus naturae
quatenus corporea tantum consideratur possit agere,' &c.

I92 PROLEGOMENA. [xvi.

Thus the relation of Man to Nature was apparently two
fold. On one hand, the physical world was essentially
a world of reason and intelligence— though of intel
ligence petrified1. So far Hegel agreed with Schelling.
But, on the other hand (and here Hegel took up the
great paradox of Fichte), man's place in the universe
is to fulfil the promise and implication of Nature to the
full reality of Spirit, to fulfil it by law and morality ;
but (here he completes Fichte by the help of Schelling)
also in higher measure, by art, religion, and science. The
world of intelligence and reason which man constructs
as an ethical, artistic, and religious being, is the full
truth of the natural world,— the higher meaning, and
fuller, more consistent, and complete reality of the
sensible: and it is so, because the lord of Nature is
one with the lord of the human soul. The new way
of philosophy therefore, if it could be ever charged with
saying that the so-called real things of ordinary life
were only ideas, or mental images, meant that, as taken
by the unthinking or imperfectly thinking perception,
they were something of which all that could be said
was to describe their relations to something else, of
which in turn the same remark might be made; so
that— as far as they went— reality was never with us,
but only an assurance (soon to be proved vain) that
it was next door 2. On the contrary— in its use of the
term Idea— what this idealism asserted rather was that
the objects of Nature in their prima facie apprehension
were not yet an Idea : if, i. e., an Idea is a mental or
spiritual reality which explains and completes itself,
instead of sending us on endless fool's errands else-

1 See vol. ii, notes and illustrations, p. 392.

2 Schopenhauer's well-known description of this recurrent throw
ing back of the responsibility of reality on something else is here
suggested (' World as Will and Idea,' § 17).

XVI.] IDEALISM AND REALISM. 193

where, — is a concept which is exactly adequate to
reality, and has gathered in it the power of reality.

The new idealism is not subversive of realism, but
includes it and makes it the reality it professed to be.
It may therefore, as Schelling proposed l, be called
an ideal-realism, or a real-idealism. If any body likes,
he may even, if he is no Greek scholar, call it Monism ;
but in that case he had better begin by admitting to
himself that any Monism, _which_can^_stand its ground
and serve for an explanation of .the universe, will not
exclude Dualism. All is indeed one life, one being,
one tRolughTjn&ut a life, a being, a thought, which only
exists as it opposes itself within itself, sets itself apart
from itself, projects its meaning and relations outwards
and upwards, and yet retains and carries out the power
of reuniting itself. The Absolute may be called One :
but it is also the All; iFljTaTOrie which makes and
overcomes difference : it is, and it essentially is, in the
antithesis of Nature and Spirit, Object and Subject,
Matter and Mind ; but under and over the antithesis
it is fundamental and completed unity. Monism, literally
understood, is absurd — for it ignores, what cannot be
ignored, the many : and Dualism, which is offered
sometimes as a competitive scheme, is not much better ;
unless we understand the Dualism to be no fixed
bisection, but an ever-appearing and ever-superseded
antithesis which is the witness to the power and the
freedom of the One, — which is not alone, but One and
All, One in All, and All in One.

The central or cardinal point of Idealism is its refusal
to be kept standing at a fixed disruption between Subject
and Object, between Spirit and Nature. Its Idea is
the identity or unity (not without the difference) of

1 See p. 157 (chap. xiii).
O

194 PROLEGOMENA. [xvi.

both. In its purely logical or epistemological aspect
one can easily see that, as Schopenhauer was so fond
of repeating, There is no Object without a Subject and
no Subject without an Object1. The difficulty arises
in remembering these excellent truisms when one of
the correlatives is out of sight, and the other seems to
be independent and to come before us with a title to
recognition apparently all its own. When the Subject
figures as the individual consciousness, encased, it may
perhaps be added, in an individual body, and the Object
as a thing apparently out there in a world beyond all
by itself, then the lapse from this rudimentary idealism
becomes easy. In the practice of life and business,
each of us, self-conscious and autonomous subject as
he may be, comes to rank in the estimate of others,
and ere long to some extent in his own, as also a part
of the aggregate of objects. All reality and substance
seem as it were to slide over into the object-side. The
conscious subject counts as a mere onlooker or the
passive spectator of a performance that goes on in
an outside field of event, — yet that outside is his own
object-mind ; his mind counts as a mere idea, or rather
as a succession of ideas, i. e. of mental pictures with a
certain meaning in them. A little step more and the
very subject-mind itself is turned into an object. There
stands indeed — according to the ordinary introspective
psychology — as it were in one corner, or at one loop
hole of vision, a mind looking on, observing and
criticising another thing which is also called a mind ;
but the mind observing can only reflect or register,
and the mind which is observed is very much thing-like,
apparently acted upon by other things, and acting upon
them in turn. This object-mind, a real among other

1 Satz vom Gntnde, § 16 : Welt als Willc und Vorstellung : Ergan-
zungen. Cap. i.

XVI.] SUBJECT AND OBJECT. 195

reals, in relations of cause and effect with them, does
not, if we can trust the words of those who tell about
it, see itself, but lies open to the inspection of this
other mind, represented by the psychological observer,
who is good enough to report to us something of its
blind and dark estate. Its re-actions, he informs us,
exhibit a remarkable peculiarity. They are equivalent
to states of consciousness : and even to acts of will
and knowledge. As when a violin is touched in certain
ways by the bow, you get a musical note, so when
certain agents come in contact with this peculiar real,
they elicit a re-action, termed sense or idea.

To distinguish in this manner between mental
passivity and activity is natural and right. The basis
of all consciousness and mental activity is an original
division, a 'judgment' or dijudication of self from self.
But, once the dijudication made for such ends, it is
a mistake to forget its initiation and lose sight entirely
of the fact that the observing mind is also the active,
and that the object-self is not merely in relation to the
subject-self, but in a higher unity is identifiable there
with. Still the thing is done, habitually done. We
all profess this faith of ordinary realism in our first
reflections upon ourselves. And the effect of the
oblivion is that we seek elsewhere for the initial activity,
which we have abstracted from and lost sight of. The
receptive passive mind, — called subject still, but now
become a subject in the sense of the anatomist, — has
to be set in motion, to be impinged upon or impressed.
The psychical event which you call knowledge, and
which no doubt means knowledge, — the mental 'state*
which you observe — or, it may even, if your authority
is a particularly obstinate and intransigeant realist, be
the molecular change in brain cells, — requires an ante
cedent event to account for it. The origin of the

O 2

196 PROLEGOMENA. [xvi.

movement which issued in the given psychical or
molecular change is sought in a self-subsistent thing
which out there gives rise to a series of movements
which in here result in a sensation. Or, a thing some
how produces an attenuated image of itself in the
brain, or in the mind ; for, in this mythological tale of
psychical occurrence, accuracy is unattainable, and one
must not seek to be too precise. In any case the
relationship between thing and idea is conceived after
the analogy of the nexus of cause and effect, or original
and copy ; and the verbal imagination of the analogical
reasoner is satisfied. What Hegel, after Schelling,
teaches, on the other side, is that the process of sense-
impression and the manipulations to which it is subjected
by intellect presuppose, for their existence and their
objective truth, a Reason which is the unity of subject
and object, an original identity uniting knowledge to
being.

But the same defect of unphilosophic consciousness
has another phase which philosophy has to remember.
Popular language speaks of things, — of things here and
things there, which act upon each other and upon the
so-called mind : i. e. on this imagined and supposed
passive mind. For things, a more 'scientific' concep
tion has been substituted — that of forces ; which,
whether attached to atoms or not, are asserted to
be the real sources of the change and event which
fill the world of our experience. And as, according to
some psychologists, the mind is only a vacant ground
or space with more or less narrow limits of room, on
which the entities called ideas are for that reason
forced into more or less close relationships, without
any nearer or more essential tie ; so, too, the mind is
apt to be treated by others only as a battle-field or
wrestling-ground of opposing forces. Here the atom-

xvi.] THINGS AND FORCES. 197

forces, as in the other case the atom-ideas, are, it is
assumed, merely and purely independent : and yet such
is the force of a limited environment— shall we say,
in more popular language, the force of space and
time ? — that they must meet with one another, must,
as it were, form associations, connexions, relationships.
Great, verily, is the force of juxtaposition. Space and
time, because they are essentially limiting, correlating,
defining, weld links which the great prophet of this
empirical school has not scrupled to call insoluble,
ineradicable, inseparable. Space and time, says his
great successor, are infinite. But they are infinite only
in the sense that they can never be exhausted: they are
everywhere, and for ever : but as real they are only
here and now. Time can precede time, and space fade
away into remoter space : but every space and every
time is finite, defining, limiting, relative, and synthetic.
And, if we look closer, space and time may come to
seem the visible, ghostly, abstract outline — on one
hand stiffening and bodying-out the ideal synthesis of
thought and intelligence, on the other, faintly repro
ducing or fore-casting the real synthesis of organisation
and living nature.

In saying this we give the reasonable interpretation of
' association* : — so far at least as association is supposed
to be brought about by juxtaposition in time and space.
Time and space, as Kant might say, give the schema—
the sensible and visible reflex of the eternal and
universal thought-relation : they are a priori because
they are in the physical world the primitive, the first
phase and the lowest manifestation of that unity which as
we know it in nature and mind always blends with sense,
or displays itself in sensible forms. They are the first
stamp of reality, of real Nature : with them we are in
Nature, but it is an abstract shadowy nature. They mark

198 PROLEGOMENA. [xvi.

the ascent (which only from the mere logician's stand
point shall we call the descent) of the abstract (pure)
idea into the element of multiplicity, of opposition, of life
and consciousness. In the psychical and intellectual
world, again, as it rises to more perfect ideality (as it
elicits more meaning from crude fact) they lose their
prominence ; they sink into the powers of memory and
imagination, which build up past and future into the
unity of the ever present, until in their consummation
they leave as their residual product the abstract element
of pure thought : a thought which claims the attributes
of universality and eternity, which claims, i. e., to merge
or submerge in it all space and all time ].

It is evident therefore that if an associationist theory,
like that of Hume, proposes to explain the actual field
of mental life by elements given in it, and by no other,
it can only do so on certain assumptions, which may
be summed up in the proposition that the mind — the
real mental space and time even (and not its supposed
' image ') — is at once subjective and objective, at once
real and ideal, at once the field of operation, the force
which directs operations, and the mind which is aware
of itself and its acts. To say, as Hume appears to do,
that an unintermittent long-established custom breeds in
us certain irresistible and essential habits of thought,
can only refer to an unexplained and unnoticed duplica
tion of the self. There is here one self, which is only
a bundle of fragments, of ideas intrinsically separate
and only incidentally connected by outside pressure,
which enter into ties, peradventure necessary or indis
soluble, though not due to inner affinity. And there is
another self which is a self-same unity, dividing and
growing, or assimilating, acted upon but only because
it solicits action, and in a way controlling the process
1 See later, chapter xxvi.

XVI.] THINGS AND FORCES. 199

going on within it. The difficulty for the investigator
is to realise that these two selves are one. No amount
of ingenuity will ever succeed in honestly showing
unity to be the mere resultant — even should it be
a fictitious or phenomenal unity — of the collisions and
fortuitous attachments or detachments of different and
independent reals. The reals which behave in such
a way as to engender unities, to cause syntheses, are
reals in a mind ; and the mind must not merely, as it
were, flow around them, but have them fluid members
of itself. If they are reals, they are ideal-reals. You
must begin with an ideal-unity which is also a real-
unity, in which variety can play and by which it is
controlled.

' Forces/ no less than ' things/ are terms of thought,
names of reality indeed, but inadequate because due to
an abstraction and leaving their correlatives out of
sight — names of momentary elements seized in the flux,
and made with more or less success to indicate 'moments'
and ' factors ' or ' aspects ' in the total sum and power of
reality. Explanation by permanent and separate forces
labours under the same disadvantages as that by things.
Science, grown more self-critical, begins to see that in
forces, &c., it has names and formulae which are not
the full reality, but only useful (if useful) abstractions.
Neither things nor forces, though called real, are so in
the full sense. Hume said,— and said not untruly,
though with some relish of paradox, — that we never
had any real impression or idea of power and force.
The statement should be taken along with another
that what we mistake for power in things is only our
own want of power to overcome a suggested association,
or to break a customary train of ideas. Lotze, again,
has remarked that the supposed consciousness of power
exerted in voluntary movement is confused with a feeling

200 PROLEGOMENA. [xvi.

of work done, or inertia overcome. Whatever may
be the truth about the psychological experience, there
can be no doubt for the epistemologist that the so-
called perception of force is an interpretation of one
aspect of experience which, with a certain amount of
arbitrary arrest and simplification, renders it intelligible
and real by means of an antithesis and correlation.
Force in fact only exists, or arises, in relation or oppo
sition to a counter- force : action and re-action are
always equal and opposite, says the mathematical
formula. Two forces are as little independent as an
up and a down, or as a west and a north ; force solicits
force, and force only is in so far as it is solicited. The
soliciting can only solicit because it is solicited. In
other words, it is not enough to say that the forces
which thus confront each other are correlatives. The
relationship must be carried up a stage higher : the
forces themselves get their pseudo-real character, only
so long as they are kept apart forcibly or by inertia.
Carry out their implications : and they re-unite (not
however to the loss of all distinction) in a higher idea,
an intelligible unity which, by its division and return to
unity, makes possible and real their contention. It is this
carrying-out of implications to their explicit truth which
is at the root of Schopenhauer's playing fast and loose
with the distinction between force and will. But with him
the two terms are taken up vague and indefinite, in the
haze of popular conception or want of conception, and
are without effort or justification identified : whereas
in Hegel, there is, on the lowest estimate, an attempt
made to trace the somewhat intricate steps which
mediate the metamorphosis.

The new idealism thus maintains the organic and
even supra-organic nature of thought and being. The
world of experience, when taken in its reality and

xvi.] ABSOLUTE IDEALISM. 201

fullness, is an organism which lives and knows and wills,
and which is life, action, knowledge ; its own means
and its own end. The subject acting, living, knowing
is action, knowledge, life. In the ordinary organism
there is a subject of functions, a being in relation to an
inorganic world. In the world-organism (if the in
adequate name is still to be retained) there is no outside
world, no inorganic or extra-organic thing. In the
world-organism the organ and its environment is com
bined in one, re-united : the plant or animal is not
without its place, and its place is not without plant or
animal. They are not merely in correlation, but
essentially and actually one. Quid prosunt leges sine
moribus ? asks the moralist : but in the Absolute or
the supra-organic Idea, law and morality are not apart :
the necessity is also freedom : the law is not severed
from its phenomenon. Such an organism which is
life, thinking, will, is what Hegel calls the Idea : an
organism which is completely organic, with no mere
matter : and that Idea is the foundation of his Idealism.
Conceived under its conditions, the forces which are
sometimes represented as struggling with each other on
the field of man's life, are no longer independent ;
still less completely separable forces. They are the
inner division by which the spirit re-establishes and
makes secure its unity : their antagonisms are the
breath of life. And they have their relations in their
common service, building up one life. They form a
certain hierarchy of organisation ; in which however
the higher or more developed does not merely super
vene upon the cruder, but in a way supersedes it, and
yet contrives to retain its worth and its real truth.

CHAPTER XVII.

METHODS, ARTIFICIAL AND NATURAL.

WHEN modern philosophy took its first steps, it was
disdainful and depreciatory to the past, both Medieval
and Old-Greek. Bacon and Hobbes, Descartes and
Spinoza, — be their other differences what they may —
all echo the same disparagement. Like Wordsworth's
Rob Roy, they cry—

' What need of books ?
Burn all the statutes and their shelves.

We'll show that we can help to frame
A world of other stuff.'

On this iconoclastic age supervenes the attempt of
Leibniz to combine in one all that was good in the new
corpuscular philosophy with all that was precious in
the old Platonic idealism as expanded by Aristotle. So,
at the later philosophic crisis towards the close of the
eighteenth century, the somewhat destructive and revo
lutionary tendencies of Kant and Fichte lead up by a
natural revulsion and complement to the reconstructive
systems of Schelling and Hegel. In them the conser
vative instinct comes to supplement the defects of the
radical go-ahead. Instead of tossing the past away to
the winds, and crying out Ecrasez rinfdme, — instead of
throwingmedievalism behind, breaking all the restrictions
on individual liberty which feudal Europe had created
to secure and safeguard the communities that housed its

THE HISTORICAL METHOD. 203

early freedom, the new spirit of the time saw that the
problems of modern life were not solved by merely
throwing overboard as encumbrances and refuse all
checks and forms. On the contrary, the reflective
mind saw that forms and checks so-called there must
be, and that the art of statesmanship, though it could
not entirely consist in copying the old, had still to work
in some way after the analogy of the old methods : i. e.
to do under new circumstances what would solve the
same requisites, as the old constitution had done for its
time. The change is well illustrated by the attitude
towards state organisation shown by William von Hum-
boldt at different epochs of his life.

People talk glibly of the Historical Method, and
what it has done for us. To hear what is sometimes
said it might be supposed that this was the method that
had been always habitual in history, but which in these
latter days had been applied to other topics, and had
proved its value on the new ground by achieving
results that had hitherto been mere desiderata. This
however is pretty nearly to reverse the true state of the
case. It was long till history came to have any method
worthy of the name. In most of those who figure as
great historians the object had been to tell a good tale,
to keep the thread of events distinct, to subordinate
incidents to the main issue, to portray personal and
public character and its influence on events. History
was practised — we may even say — more as an art than
as a science. If it dealt with causes, it dealt with
individual, concrete, living causes, not with cold, dead
abstractions of forces, laws, or tendencies. If it did
not altogether ignore the suggestions of a quest for
principles to be found in Thucydides and Polybius, it
was much more enamoured of the art of Livy and
Tacitus, or even of the naivete" of Herodotus. Of such

204 PROLEGOMENA. [xvn.

history who has not felt the power ; who has not
admired the genius that reconstructs the men and
circumstances of the past, and makes them live over
again their deeds, and again in the end yield the palm
to inevitable fate ! But it was not from such history
that the historical method arose.

The historical method was the product of the new
conception of nature and mind in their mutual relations
which has been already noted. To estimate the labours
of thinkers towards this view of history would be an
interesting but complex inquiry. Leibniz in particular
by his principles of development, of continuity, of
s general analogy, should have made two things for ever
clear. And these two results that might have been
supposed secure were, first, that the present existence
(which at first seems to be alone real) is only a narrow
transition line between a past and a future, — a line of
points intersecting a complex movement or development;
and secondly, that all development is of something
which is essentially infinite, which requires nothing
external, no fillip from circumstances or from an
external providence, to set it going, but is in itself
a synthesis of active and passive force in a something
at least analogous to an Ego. The first principle is
embalmed in Leibniz's maxim : ' The present is laden
with the past, and full of the future ' : and the second, in
the maxim ' the Monads have no doors or windows.' In
virtue of the first, the existent (of this instant) is only
a stage or grade, rooted in what has been, and insignifi
cant unless in reference to what is to come. In virtue
of the second, all development is from within, and pre
supposes therefore that the developing individual in
cludes within it a great deal which a cursory view
would at first sight assume to be without it, and only
accidentally in contact with it. It might indeed be well

XVIL] LEIBNIZ. 205

to add a third principle — what Leibniz has sometimes
called the Law of Continuity — the law that, as he says,
distinct and noticeable perceptions are the resultants of
an infinite* number of insensible or little perceptions.
But continuity proper is not this : continuity proper or
identity is a pure idea. The visible or sensible dis
continuity reposes on, and is to be explained by, an
invisible or ideal continuity. Each body, for instance,
in nature, appearing to have a separate existence of
its own, is only a stage isolated or insulated in a con
tinuing process : and that process, binding, as it does,
past to future, is the process of a Mind. Onine Corpus,
wrote Leibniz in 1671, est mens momentanea seu carens
recordatione. Every physical and material object is an
intelligence, but an intelligence which neither looks
before nor after, but is limited for itself to the mere
instant : an intelligence which has no history. Yet to
the intelligent observer it has a past, — it has a memory,
it bears in it the traces of its antecedent. Yet to read
that book of memory, to decipher the 'insensible per
ceptions' which are buried beneath the momentary
present, beneath its unspiritual reality, and to knit
present with past and future, is the work of an intelli
gence, in and to whom the material discloses its store
of meaning, or in whom it is re-spiritualised. In other
words, the presupposition of this historical method is
the ideal continuity of being, transcending and absorb
ing the differences of time.

But the teaching of Leibniz — even more perhaps
than that of Spinoza— fell on an evil age : if it was not
actually choked with thorns, it found a soil with little
depth, and its brief verdure was soon followed by
a fearful withering. Anxious as Leibniz was to com
mend his theories to all men, — and not least perhaps to
win the suffrages of some illustrious and intelligent

206 PROLEGOMENA. [xvil.

women — he was led to present them under forms and
phrases which were to each correspondent specially
familiar. And the natural consequence was not absent.
The forms of accommodation were what told : they
stuck, and the truth they were meant to convey slipped
away : the Leibnitian theory was re-interpreted into the
doctrines it had been meant to supersede. As with
Spinoza, so with Leibniz, a keen apprehension of his
meaning came first to the thinkers on the border-land
of literature and philosophy, to Lessing and Herder,
and found an appreciative welcome in the more academic
systems first from Schelling and Hegel. Above all,
this theory of ' petites perceptions' so closely bound up
(as was to be expected) with his mathematical discoveries
in the Calculus, is what marks him as having a finer ear
for the secret harmonies and principles of existence
than the coarser organs of popular philosophy could
catch up or appreciate.

'In order/ says Leibniz, 'to get a clearer idea of the
little perceptions which we cannot distinguish in the
crowd, I am accustomed to employ the example of the
roar or noise of the sea which strikes us upon the shore.
To hear this sound, as we do hear it, we must hear the
parts which compose this total, i.e. the sounds of each
wave, though each of these little sounds only makes
itself perceptible in the confused assemblage of all the
others together, (that is to say, in that same roar,) and
would not be noticed if this wave which causes it were
alone. For we must be a little affected by the move
ment of that wave, and we must have some perception
of each of these sounds, however small they may be ;
otherwise we should never have the perception of
a hundred thousand waves, since a hundred thousand
zeros would never make anything. . . . These little
perceptions are of greater efficiency by their conse-

XVII.] LEIBNIZ. 207

quences than we suppose. It is they which form that
Je ne sais quoi, those tastes, those images of sensible
qualities, clear in the assemblage, but confused in the
parts ; those impressions made upon us by surrounding
bodies which envelop the infinite, that nexus which each
being has with all the rest of the universe. It may
even be said that in virtue of these little perceptions the
present is big with the future and laden with the past,
that everything conspires together: and that in the
least of substances, eyes as piercing as those of God
could read the whole sequel of the things of the
universe.

'These insensible perceptions, further, mark and
constitute the same individual, who is characterised by
the traces or expressions which they preserve of the
preceding states of that individual, thus forming the con
nexion with his present state. These may be known
by a superior spirit, though that individual himself
should not feel them, i. e. though express memory
should no longer be there. But these perceptions also
supply the means of rediscovering that memory, at
need, by periodic developments, which may one day
happen. ... It is also by these insensible perceptions
that I explain that admirable pre-established harmony
of mind and body, and even of all monads or simple
substances, — which takes the place of the impossible
influence of one upon another. . . . After this, I should
add but little if I said that it is these small perceptions
which determine us in many conjunctures without our
thinking of it, and which deceive the vulgar by the
appearance of an indifference of equilibrium, as if we
were entirely indifferent whether we turned, e. g., to
right or to left.

' I have remarked also that in virtue of insensible
variations two individual things could never be per-

208 PROLEGOMENA. [xvil.

fectly alike, and that they ought always to differ more
than numero. And with this we have done once for all
with the empty tablets of the mind, a soul without
thought, a substance without action, the void of space,
the atoms, and even parcels not actually divided in
matter; we have done with pure repose, entire uni
formity in a portion of time, of place or of matter, . . .
and a thousand other fictions of philosophers which
come from their incomplete notions, fictions which the
nature of things does not suffer, and which our ignorance
and the little attention we have for the insensible lets
pass, but which could never be rendered tolerable,
unless we confine them to abstractions of the mind
which protests that it does not deny what it puts aside
and considers out of place in any present consideration.
Otherwise, if we took it quite in earnest, to mean that
things which we do not perceive do not exist in the soul
or body, we should fail in philosophy as in politics by
neglecting TO nu<p6vf insensible steps of progress : —
whereas an abstraction is not an error provided we
know that what we put out of sight is still there.'

This was the conception which Bacon had shadowed
out, which Leibniz had presented under many names
and with many applications, as the olive-branch between
Plato and Democritus ; it now became through philo
sophical and extra-philosophic acceptance a current
maxim in the general field of knowledge. Nature
assimilated to history, and history assimilated to nature:
freedom built upon necessity, and efficient causes'rounded
off, though not entirely merged, in final. It is the
recognition of law, order, causality in the psychical
world, yet not of mere so-called natural law ; and there
fore without reducing it to a merely physical and
material world. It is in fact the new method which
is inevitable and necessary, as soon as it is manifest

XVIL] MECHANICAL METHOD. 209

that life, organisation, development is the underlying
truth and central notion of things. You look at the
world at first, let us say, as a mere collection of separate
things in varying degrees of juxtaposition : and all that
you think of doing to them, either by way of theory
or practice, is to put them together, to link them closer,
or separate them more widely. You do so from outside
by an arranging force; for they are assumed to be
purely passive, waiting to be touched, each set in its
place — from which it can only be moved by a push
or a pull. This is the method of mathematics or
mechanics. It shows the dexterity of the agent or of
the expositor : but you feel that it is artificial, and
arbitrary. 1 1 is analytic or synthetic — but not auto-analysis
or auto-synthesis. The director of the movement (we
may call it 'construction') may no doubt have the real
secret : he may work the things well and fairly, and
unite or divide them according to inner affinities ; but
we cannot, as matters stand, be sure of this. The
things, in fact, he deals with have been already emptied
of all life and peculiarity of their own : they are alike
in quality, only differing by a more or less, — a difference
which at any moment may be altered by an act of
subtraction or addition. No doubt you can build up
what are called systems — compounds of a kind — in this
way : but they do not really hang and grow together ;
they are only prevented from breaking up by the
absence of any empty place to which the parts may
withdraw. Bit holds up bit ; but how all the bits have
found themselves so caged up without exit is a mystery.
Absolute neutrality or indifference of each part to
others, and yet absolute equilibrium * in the total
composite, — such is the situation.

1 Of course the term 'equilibrium' may be used loosely to mean
a great deal more than this, — how much will depend on the context.

P

210 PROLEGOMENA. [xvil.

The chemical method (taking chemistry as a type of
the sciences like optics, electricity, &c.) is a revelation
of a different state of affairs. The elements of things
are here seen to be unique and incomparable ; yet in
each there is a latent sympathy ready to break out
when the proper occasion arrives. Bring two things
together, and their affinity suddenly, in the proper
circumstances, leads to their complete fusion : a product
arises which, when formed, hardly betrays its origin and
composition. In a way this is the converse of the
mechanical or mathematical method. In it was no
fusion, no inner mixture : each part after composition
lay beside the other, and their union was only in the
ideas of the onlooker. It was mere juxtaposition
still, — though now closer: an abnormally keen eye
would still have been able to descry the dividing lines
and measure the gaps. At least mere mechanical physics
tends so to conceive it. Here, on the contrary, there
is union — but only at the moment of fusion : once that
is accomplished, the result is apparently simple, and
bears no suggestion of being a compound. In the
mechanical union the result is exactly equal to the
sum of the elements which go to make it : in the
chemical there is something positively new, something,
i. e., of which the premises gave no indication and made
no promise.

Either of these methods, — of these conceptions of
existence — works well in a certain region. But both
of them only do their work on a certain hypothesis,
or with a certain abstraction. The mechanical method
supposes that objects are all qualitatively alike, differing
only in quantity or weight : all therefore entirely com
parable with each other, and capable of being substituted

These quasi-mathematical analyses have great fascination : their
apparent simplicity imposes upon us.

xvil.] CHEMICAL METHOD. 2H

for each other in an equation. Where this assumption
holds good, the method of addition and division, the
method of the calculus does its work '. The chemical
method works on another assumption, — the assumption
of a number of qualitatively-differenced elements, of
elements which also are, so to speak, set on edge against
some, and ready to leap into the arms of others. If
the observer in the first case had the game entirely
in his own hand, — could build up and separate at his
pleasure, could determine results a priori-, he is here
baffled by the unexpected, and can only wait and
watch to learn a posteriori the behaviour of the bodies
possessed of this occult and non-predictable affinity. At
the best he can only formulate what he observes, try
to classify it, ascertain any common principles running
through it, any serial recurrences, or the like : and that
is all that chemical philosophy can achieve. Chemical
affinity— the fact that certain elements combine in certain
ways, and refuse to enter into certain alliances — is a
great fact : but to a priori reasoning or abstract syllo
gising it is an entire inexplicability, one of the accidents
in the universe which must be reckoned with, but
cannot be understood.

It is probably evident that, if we want to get a
comprehension of the life and concrete reality of things,
neither of these methods will quite answer the purpose.
With the first alone, if it could be universally carried
out, the universe would be thoroughly explained : every-

1 The distinction, it will be observed, lies between the method of
mathematical physics and that of physics which has learned some
thing from the researches of electricity or chemistry. If the method
or principles of chemistry are thus said to be reduced to those of
physics, this is because the conceptions of physics have been re
volutionised from the side of chemistry, &c., and even of biology.
This tendency of modern science is precisely in the line indicated
by Schelling and Hegel.

P 2

212 PROLEGOMENA, [xvil.

thing would be exactly equivalent to some sum or
multiple of every other : there would be no mystery,
nothing unique, and strictly individual. Given time,
we could find a formula for every reality, and a predicate
exactly fitted to any subject. Yet even mathematics
has to confess the existence of irrationals, surds, infinite
series, and the like. For our unities and standards
are always arbitrary, artificial, and one-sided, and fall
short of the subtlety of nature. Even our simpler
types of surfaces — the circle and the square — remain
irreducible to each other: and we only avoid the collision
by the remark that practically and with any required
amount of exactness the discrepancy between the two
can be adjusted. If we turn to the chemical method,
again, there is a nearer approach to actuality in the
recognition of the presence of something more than
mere composition and juxtaposition. It is not that
there is something which is not juxtaposition : but rather
it is much more than mere juxtaposition. There may
be degrees of this something more : but it is only to
a gross or abstract view that it is not present at all.
Mere cohesion even shows a unity in things juxta-posed.
Mere contact is contagious : it infects. 'When a violin
has been played on frequently by a tyro/ says G. H.
Lewes, ' its tone deteriorates, its molecules become
re-arranged, so that one mode of vibration is more
ready than another1.' 'Toute impression/ he quotes
from Delbceuf, ' laisse une certaine trace ineffacable/
So-called chemical composition is only a conspicuous
instance, with peculiarities, of this alteration in state
produced by what, from the mechanical standpoint, are
called inner molecular displacements. But to recognise
a fact is one thing : to give its explanation is another.
Yet, on the other hand, to recognise the fact is to note

1 Problems of Life and Mind, iii. p. 58.

xvii.] MECHANICAL AND CHEMICAL. 213

an important point which had been omitted by the
mechanical construction of things. There the result
could hardly be called new : it was exactly equal to its
constituent elements : and the equation was transparent.
And it was transparent because the whole process,
analysis and synthesis, was not a work or process of the
observed thing, but the work of the observing mind :
it makes the (artificial) unities, numbers them, and adds
them or subtracts. But with the chemical result, though
it also is equal to its elements, there is something
new. Water, no doubt, is oxygen and hydrogen, but
here, at least, there is no doubt that the plus sign
unduly simplifies the relationship, and rather indicates
or represents a nexus than accurately defines it. And
yet, there is nothing in water which was not, in some —
shall we say mysterious ? — way, in the oxygen and the
hydrogen. Chemical physics, therefore, brings out
clearly, or comparatively clearly, something which the
ordinary and coarser simplicity-loving theory is obliged
and is able to neglect : it realises the virtue that lies
in juxtaposition, and shows that the mere outer change
of quantity goes with a deeper inward and qualitative
one. The result does more than sum up and condense
what was spread out in extension and dispersed in
parts before : it brings out or reveals something which
previously was unsurmised. Always, in a liberal
interpretation of the maxim, it is true that Ex nihilo
nihil fit: but here, especially, the effect actually dis
closes what was — but was latent or unperceived — in the
premises. The maxim, to be fairly treated, must be
read backwards as well as forwards.

But we must go a step further if we wish the full
explanation. If the premises are to be adequate to
support the conclusion, they must be restated in terms
which hint at the conclusion — which in a way contain

214 PROLEGOMENA. [xvil.

it, but contain it in potentiality and promise, not in
act. This is the method of development, which is the
method that is applicable to full concrete reality, not
like the others to parts abstracted from or insulated
in reality. So long as you deal with these selected
bits of fact — abstracted from their surroundings, subject
to strict observation or strict experiment, you can apply
a comparatively simple and straightforward method.
You are dealing with abstracted, mutilated, prepared
fact. You are guided in these cases by the canons
of identity and difference : you add and subtract, or
subtract and add ; and that is all. You use what are
called the rules of experimental method. But these
canons do not directly apply — except by happy acci
dent — to the real world, where antecedent and con
sequents are not separate and tabulated, as the logical
canons, the rules of formal logic, require. In dealing
with this concrete reality, a much more complex method
is needed, a method which has to blend induction with
deduction, and to start from both ends in the series
of causation at once. You can apply observation or
experiment, only when the issues have already been
extremely simplified and narrowed down : when the
question has been rendered so definite that it is next-door
to the answer, and the removal of a slight partition-wall
will as it were make the two one clear space. Where
observation and experiment are available, indeed, is
where the general outlines and principles of the subject
are settled, where the scheme of reality is defined in
large, but a variety of minor issues still remains to
be settled. Unless this general framework is fixed,
neither observation nor experiment, with their canon
of identity and difference, are of any avail. These
methods, therefore, only apply in sciences which are
in principle or substantially complete, though admitting

XVII.] INDUCTION AND DEDUCTION. 215

of possibly infinite extension in details and particulars.
Where the science is yet to constitute, i. e. in dealing
with the kinds of real things in their completeness,
and not as viewed in some definite aspect, induction
and deduction must go hand in hand and help each
other at every step : and if they, as they must, have
recourse to experiment and observation, it will be at
first in a very unsatisfactory and tentative way.

Such is the way the contrast between the simplicity
belonging to an artificial method dealing with picked
instances, and the complexity that real concrete organic
nature demands, presented itself to J. S. Mill as he
advanced in his inquiry. The only complete method
for the investigation of unsophisticated nature, not yet
mapped out and defined in general departments, is the
deductive-inductive method in which induction and
deduction separately have a subordinate place, — using
induction in the narrow sense the term has been
hitherto allowed to bear. And that sense, it may be
added, is, as in some passages of Aristotle, little else
than a reverse of syllogism, or to speak more accu
rately, it is a syllogism which goes up to generals instead
of descending from them. It is like the syllogistic
deduction formal and abstract in character. The
(deductive) syllogism assumes the existence of major
premises — of general propositions which in the last
resort, if they are real bases, must be primary and true,
or self-evident facts. But a critic, like Mill, had little
difficulty in showing that a general truth rests upon
and presupposes the very particular conclusions which
it is used to establish. Unless every singular is true,
the universal which embraces or unifies them cannot
really be true. Therefore the conclusion is really im
plied and presupposed in the principles of its premises.
But, unfortunately for the application and supposed

2 1 6 PR OLE GO MEN A . [xvil.

sequel of this not unjust remark, a similar remark may
be made on the ordinary exposition of the inductive
method. Induction, it is said, infers from or on a basis
of single facts. But if a single truth is really, i. e.
unconditionally true, it is indistinguishable from the
universal. If it is really true once, it is true for ever.
The assertion of the individual proposition as true, if it
can be supported — (and unless it be true, what basis
can it afford for the general conclusion ?) — implies the
truth of the universal it is sometimes used to establish.
The inductive logician tells us to build on singular and
definite facts, on truths of definite and individual expe
rience: but a definite or determinate truth rests upon
universality (indeed is a universal), and cannot be
found unless we have already found the special total
or organism of truth in which it forms a part. Indi
viduals and universals presuppose each other, and do
not, as the first impression leads us to think, stand
apart as two unconnected termini, from either of which,
if we happen to be so located, we can without road or
railway make a legitimate passage to the other.

If it be urged, as it may naturally be, that on this
showing there is no solid or ' absolute* starting-point at
all, the contention may be conceded. The only fixed
and steady points in knowledge are points hypotheti-
cally fixed, — certified, that is, for the time and in the
circumstances we employ them. But in the open field
—or rather in the wilderness — of knowledge, where
the ground of fact is not staked off, and the unexpected
may always turn up, the only test of truth is the
corroboration given by the consilience of paths initiated
from different points : it is only by an undesigned
coincidence in the results of independent operations
that you can succeed in orienting yourself. You begin
your road at two ends, and you meet: you locate or

xvii.] INDUCTION AND DEDUCTION. 217

fix your point by drawing its co-ordinates to two direc
tion-lines taken anyhow at first, and only in formed
science diverging at a fixed angle. And in the abso
lute your direction-lines cannot be supposed fixed : you
can only gradually adjust them to each other as you
proceed. Intelligence, says Aristotle, is a principle,
a beginning ; and intelligence, he says again, supplies
beginnings1. Science, in the technical sense, only
comes into operation, — or, in other words, deduction
and (in the narrower sense used by Mill, and proceed
ing by pure observation and experiment) induction only
find a way, — where beginnings and principles have been
set up, where an approximate order or provisional
system has been established. And if logic, in its
stricter sense, is the method of sciences already made
and in their essentials constituted, then logic can be
asked to do no more than to provide a theory of such
formal processes. If it traces the path which leads
' from the known to the unknown/ if it always proceeds
on the hypothesis of a given knowledge, then such
induction or deduction (from certain and approved
singular facts, or from certain and approved general
truths) fully satisfies the practical need of the scientific
reasoner. But if Logic be, as it sometimes is, and may
very reasonably be, taken in the wider sense of an
epistemology, — a theory of the nature and origin of
knowledge as a whole, and not of mere inference or
syllogism ; — if it does not merely ask how we can satis
factorily get from one piece of knowledge (we are
supposed to have) to another (not yet supposed to be),
but how we come to have knowledge at all ; then its
problem must go behind the rudiments of vulgar induc
tion and deduction. It must ask — what, so far as one
can see, Mill and his mere followers have never seriously

1 Eth. vii. 7 o vovs apxn '• 6. 6 vovs kar>. ru

218 PROLEGOMENA. [xvn.

asked at all — what induction is, what are its relations
with deduction, and what is the place of either in the
process of knowledge. And as the process of know
ledge is the path to reality, it must also ask about the
nature of this goal, — reality and truth. It is all very
well for the narrower Logic to formulate in terms the
methods actually employed in sciences : to state in
abstract canons what is there seen in life and action.
But a Science of Logic — an epistemology — (and a genuine
epistemology cannot claim to be anything short of an
ontology) must face the fact of science itself— must
ask how the ideas of the knower must — or otherwise
they are not knowledge — embrace and contain the
reality of the known. The other and narrower Logic
is and will remain a theory of forms of reasoning—
a transcript in fainter terms of the procedure of science
in any given step it takes upward to generals or down
ward to particulars : but the logic which deals with
knowledge as such, in its systematic entirety, — the
transcendental Logic, in short, must have a real value,
an invincible relation to reality. The formal Logic —
the logic of Mill and Hamilton — must be carried back
to its principles, to its first step : and that first step
which will also be the last step, and the inspiring
principle of every intermediate step, is that of Intelli
gence (Aristotle's Nous), of which the products or
manifestations are Xo'yot, i. e. definite conceptions, cate
gories, formulations of rules and principles of definite
range, — determinations or special types of unity.

Mill really faced the problem of method to better
effect when he came to deal with a class of questions in
which he was really interested, and which moreover
have for epistemological purposes the advantage of
being as yet unreduced into the rank and file of dis
ciplined science. These questions are those dealing

xvii.] SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD. 219

with man, his mental and moral nature, and history.
Even its advocates or patrons occasionally admit that
there is no accepted idea of what Sociology is or does.
Its name at least expresses a longing towards a unity,
or a presentiment that there is some underlying unity
and common method in the group of what are loosely
called the moral, or the historical, or the social and
political sciences. But sociology is, as most people
will allow, the name of a science unrealised — the felt
and consciously-apprehended need of a science, and
the dissatisfaction with the existing state of knowledge
in certain departments. And undoubtedly it was with
problems of social science, — problems of politico-
economic and socio-ethical or socio-religious matters,
that Mill's interests were mainly engaged. Like his
master in this department, Auguste Comte, he wanted
to carry into the topics which he was chiefly bent upon
that ' scientific ' precision which they by pretty general
admission lacked, and which revolutionary movements
had shown they greatly needed. But he could not
help seeing that the 'induction* of dynamics and
physics was not exactly the instrument he was in search
of. Theory and hypothesis here demanded a much
larger share in the process than in the more mathe
matical sciences. Causes and effects in reality here
rolled round into each other, instead of remaining
calmly fixed, one set here, and the other there. Of
course even here — i. e. in organic and concrete sciences
— it is possible to introduce observation and experi
ment, — no doubt, with greater effort and constraint, but
still not altogether impracticable. But the artificial
and mutilative character of such experimentation is
felt here in a way different from its pressure in other
cases. And what is more important, to institute an
experiment or set on foot a scientific observation (and

220 PROLEGOMENA. [xvn.

to observe means to watch a definitely restricted natural
process with a view to answer some question about it),
presupposes — as we have already seen— a tolerably
definite provisional theory as to the general lie of the
country to be investigated. Only when the country
has been reasonably well mapped out in provinces and
provided with some system of roads, can these problems
of detail — questions to be answered Yes or No — be
profitably put. And it is — in some parts of the historical
sciences at least — somewhat premature to put questions
requiring a categorical reply. There is only the vague
malaise of felt difficulty to guide us. We do not, in
many cases, know what it is that we want to know ; for,
it demands a good deal of wisdom and trained art to
put the proper or reasonable question, — so much so,
indeed, that to succeed in formulating your question
fully is equivalent or nearly equivalent to being able to
answer it. The value of observations and experiments
— which are ways of putting nature to the question and
it may be to the torture— depends entirely upon the
knowledge and the command of general ideas possessed
by the observer and experimenter. And the same may
be said of the reduced and tabulated conspectuses of
the results of many observations and experiments which
are called Statistics. Their value depends on the truth
and breadth of view which presided at their collection
and arrangement '.

The historical or genetic method is the method of

1 Statistics only define — and primarily for the imagination — the
general laws and principles on which they rest. The clear-cut
mathematical form strikes and 'catches on,' where a more universal
statement sounds vague and glides off. Hence, as one says, they
may prove anything. The fact is, they prove nothing. They only
illustrate in diagrammatic form the theory which presided at their
collection. To emphasise the fundamental nature of ethics for human
development you need only say that conduct is three-fourths or

XVII.] THE METHOD OF DEVELOPMENT. 221

Science in general, but considered and employed under
a limited aspect. And under its more comprehensive
aspect it may be called — though no name is unimpeach
able—the method of development. Now the essence
of the idea of development — as was clearly shown by
Leibniz — is the refusal to admit external interference,
and the resolve to let a thing explain itself by itself.
It does not, like the mechanical method, manipulate
the thing from outside— try to add it up out of factors
or items fashioned and fabricated after some external
standard. Nor does it, like the chemical, look at the
result as an inexplicable alteration, due apparently to
a mere stroke of combination or disintegration — yet not
obviously reducible to a mere equivalent of its ele
ments. On the contrary, it recognises in the object
a certain independence or originality, yet also the
presence of an immanent law which does not wait for
the outsider to put it together, but constructs itself,
as it were, after a plan of its own. There is in the
so-called object, though we do not at first sight recog
nise it, the same originative principle both analytic and
synthetic, as we own in thought. The object is — in
a true logic — a process, a self-completing process, and
not merely an object, mechanical, or other object. It
changes, grows or decays, while we observe, unless for
brief instants we cut it off from its connexions and
arrest its development. And our observation, if truly
scientific, must be sympathetic with its process of
change. It is neither a mere thing to be explained and
construed ab extra : nor a mystery of sudden trans
formation to be passively accepted ; but a growth,
a history, to be sympathetically watched and under
stood, — understood, because it follows the same order

(as to some minds the precision rises with the denominator of the
fraction) £$ of human life.

222 PROLEGOMENA. [xvil.

as the movement of our own thought in the process of
knowledge. Similia similibus cognoscuntur^ .

One sometimes hears it asked by paradoxical critics
at which end a history should begin. And to ordinary
dogmatic recklessness, paradoxical the question may
well seem. Begin at the beginning, no doubt, is the
vulgar reply ; which in this case is understood to mean
from the earliest point in date (that, of course, being
easily ascertained, and a thing known to all men).
But, — so Plato long ago well raised the difficulty which
will always confront us, — are we to go from the begin
nings, or towards the beginnings ? And it does not
quite solve the question to say that we are to begin
with what is known : for under that word the same
difficulty re-appears. Can you really know one end
without the other ? To the vulgar partisan of historical
method, its precept means Go to the earlier, if you wish
to understand the meaning, the value, and the elements
constitutive of the later and subsequent. Begin with
origins, with the earliest elements, the phases that first
appear ; and thus you will get light to see the later as
they really stand. That this is a common interpretation
of the historical method is notorious. To explain
Homo sapiens, one is told to study the ape, — the
nearest analogue of his lost or missing progenitor : to
understand the contemporary horse, go to eohippus,
or hipparion, or however his early prototype may be

1 The resolute misinterpretation — as it often seems — of the maxim
that like is known by like, — is a curious chapter in the history of
Logic. All knowledge is based upon, — or, to speak more simply, is
— the identity of differents : of differents, which in knowledge are
identified, — of identity which in knowledge is put under difference.
And yet the ordinary meaningless talk on this matter seems to
assimilate knower and known to two separate things (or persons^,
who casually and, we may add, inexplicably know each other : which
is mythology, perhaps, but not epistemology.

XVIL] FACTS AND PROBLEMS. 223

at present named and recognised. And in all this there
is a truth — or least a half-truth. But let us equally
recognise the other half of the truth. If past throws
light on present, present throws not less light on past.
You propose, let us say, to write a history of Greece.
A wordy philosophy, wise in its own conceit and in fine
phrases, will advise you to approach the subject without
prepossession or prejudice. So far, good. But what
is meant by the absence of prepossession or prejudice ?
Not a blank openness to impression, not a mere pas
sivity ; but if passivity at all, a wise passivity : if open
ness, the openness of the trained judge.

The advice, so often associated with Francis Bacon,
to get rid of all false pre-conceptions, of all idola, is one
which it is easy to mistake in an over-zeal to follow it.
That mere negation of prejudices which we call childish
innocence is no match for the craft by which Nature
seeks to keep or disguise her secrets. The free con
sciousness, the unbiassed mind, is not the easy result
of one great act of renunciation, but the work of con
tinued self-discipline, self-conquest, self-realisation. If
you are not to impose upon the thing a pre-conception
alien to it, neither must you rashly give yourself away
to the thing, or to the first whims which accident puts
upon you as the thing. What seems a fact or thing is
only a candidate for the post of thing or fact : and its
credentials need to be examined, and compared with
other evidences. To detect a fact, therefore, is only
possible for a tried and tested consciousness which by
patience and self-mastery has won the key of interpre
tation. What Bacon apparently meant— though, as
often happens, in his eagerness to combat a prevailing
folly, he sometimes overshot himself in statement — was
to insist on the eternal wedlock of the mind and things,
of things and the mind, as the sole and sufficient

224 PROLEGOMENA. [xvil.

condition for the reality of knowledge and truth. The
mind may not presume to do without things, or things
to domineer the mind ; — or the result is a windy and
frothy vanity. And the wedlock is eternal : in his own
eloquent words, ' the mind itself is but an accident to
knowledge1/ and he might have added, so also are
things : for, as he says, ' the truth of being and the truth
of knowing is all one ' : only in the bond of knowledge
are things true and real, — being otherwise only ' perma
nent possibilities/ or possibilities barely even permanent
— or not even possibilities. Yet he scarcely realised that
his ' due rejections and exclusions ' and negations were
a fundamental constitutive element in those facts of
which he habitually emphasises only the positive side.

He therefore who would understand — or would write
— the history of Greece must really in his studies
begin at both ends— both at the Greece of to-day, and
at the Greece of Solon, or what earlier period may be
taken as the start of Greek history. With perhaps the
least qualified dogmatism, one may assert that he will
begin with the Greece of to-day ; or if he deals solely
with Ancient Greece he will begin with the full blaze of
Hellenic civilisation which still has a pale reflection in
the modern world, and gradually work back to the
beginnings. It is no doubt customary to begin Greek
history, say, with the Homeric Age, and work down
wards, as it is customary to begin a formal treatise on
geography with the general features of the earth's
shape and surface. But that beginning represents
really the temporarily accredited and accepted result
of a process which, starting from the other end,
has worked backwards to commencements or origins.

1 Bacon : ' In Praise of Knowledge ' (a mere leaflet of much sig
nificance towards estimating his true grandeur). On the Conjugium
of Mens and Universus see Novum Orgcinum, distrib. op.

xvil.] THE METHOD OF HISTORY. 225

And the teacher, in particular, will do well not to
imitate too slavishly the method of the formal treatise.
A day may come — or may have come — for example,
for Greek history to start from periods long anterior
to the supposed or traditional date of the wars around
the wall of Troy. But when it does so, it will have
done so by more thoroughly ransacking the Greece of
to-day : and so disclosing the secrets of what is termed
pre-historic Greece. Then, conversely, when modern
diggings on Greek soil reveal the features of an earlier
than what was erewhile to older historians its earliest
past, the reconstruction of that early people's life
reflects a new light on the directions and the limitations
of its subsequent civilisation. We see better into the
reality of Homer, and even of Demosthenes — into their
ideal glory and their historical limitations, when we
explore the cradle in which their race's life was erst
fostered, and the rock out of which they and nature
hewed them. And this is no peculiarity of Greece.
The deepest research into the social institutions which
control the England of to-day is the best propaedeutic
for the study of Anglo-Saxon times ; and the same is
true vice versa.

Nor, again, is the truth of the proposition confined
to what we ordinarily mean by history. The Greek
poet has said 'Art had to wait on and welcome chance,
and chance to wait on Art ' : or as we may paraphrase
it, if every invention and discovery is in a measure
a lucky chance, it is a luck that only falls to the wisely
prepared head and hand. The casual event falls as
a germ of new construction or theory only on an intelli
gence ready to welcome it, — prepared with its complement
in the spirit of an idea, eager to take shape. The means
again, in the arts and crafts, is not only a means to
something else ; it is also a means to its own end,

Q

226 PROLEGOMENA. [xvil.

to realise or perfect itself. The rude tool of the savage,
for instance, is not merely a means to supply his wants :
it is also a means towards completing and improving
itself, and towards perfecting itself by constructing an
ampler tool, which supersedes it, because it can do all
and more than all the work of the earlier, or can do it
more economically. All progress that deserves the
name is an incessant and continuous revision of a first
step : a re-adaptation of an old instrument : a repeated
and unending self-correction. It is only a partially-
true symbol of human advance to speak of it as a line :
unless we add, by another piece of symbolism, that the
line is only the protracted or extended phase in which
the form of time drags out for us the magnified and
organised point-nucleus. It is a truth — which we are
only too ready to forget or discount — that the savage
(and he bears with justice both epithets, 'the noble
savage/ and ' the brute barbarian ') is not something
left happily behind us, in the onward march of civilisa
tion ; but that he is, however much we may fancy him
suppressed and superseded, still present, at least
' ideally ' in the finest products of humanity, and may
hap only too likely — as the Russian is said, when
scratched, to betray his original Tartar breed — to burst
out on provocation into a grim reality. The Pullman
car of to-day retains within it for the archaeologically-
trained eye the rudiments of the primitive wain of the
primitive nomade : and the careful study of either end
of the scale will not merely throw a marvellous light on
the excellencies or the defects of the other, but will
probably also tend in the impartial observer to moderate
the self-gratulations of modern advance. For it is only
those whose view ranges within narrow limits that are
over-impressed by the magnitude of the advance made
in the ' last new thing.'

xvn.] PROGRESS TRUE AND FALSE. 227

If progress were but the addition of bit to bit, of new
bits to what is already there, or if we could change
this, and leave that unchanged, — as the word perhaps
verbally means, and as many people at any rate seem
to understand it, progress might indeed seem an easy
thing, and to be undertaken with a light heart. For, it
would appear as if we could lose nothing, and might
probably (indeed, as enthusiasm and forgetfulness of
the merits of the past are in certain periods ready to
urge, must certainly) gain. But it is a more serious
matter when we realise that we must move altogether,
if we really are to move at all ; i. e. really are to make
progress, and not merely change, so to speak, from one
foot to rest on another. For progress, — if it be what it is
expected to be, and what it must be if it does what it is
expected to do— is an organic, and not merely a me
chanical or chemical change. A mechanical change is
only a nominal or formal change : a chemical is more
than change ; but in organic change, that which changes
also abides, and the new is not merely other than the
old, and not merely a re-arrangement of the old, but the
old transmuted, — the same yet not the mere same1.
Progress in short is always the unity of differentiation
and integration. It must not be an externality, nor
a mere dead product of a transformation scene, but
a continuous growth, inwardly digested, made part and
parcel of the collective life, which it has thereby
rendered more full, real, and not merely made less
intense at the cost of some extension. In true progress,
which is only another name for true growth, nothing is
quite lost, but only changed, retained in a richer shape
and a fuller reality. How far such progress is possible,

1 The said mere same is not really the same at all. Nobody in his
senses predicates sameness except where he also sees differences :
or, the term always implies relation.

Q 2

228 PROLEGOMENA. [xvil.

except in limited and finite spheres : how far progress
in one involves necessarily deterioration in another
and how, therefore, progress is not attributable to the
Absolute, are questions we need not here discuss.
But so far at least we may go as to say that a progress
which does not follow the natural law of development
and carry on into the future the worth and substance
of the past, is not a progress which any general en
thusiasm ought to be spent upon.

Development then has two faces, one to the future
and another to the past. And what is called the
historical method is apt to emphasise only one of the
two aspects, just as, it may be added, practical con
siderations are often likely to produce an opposite
but equally partial bias in favour of the future. The
historical method in incapable hands is liable to lead to
unprofitable sighs,— not unaccompanied by a certain
luxury of tears — over the lowly hole of the pit — it may
even be the filth and brutishness, out of which so much
of noble humanity (for thither the interest of develop
ment always reverts) has been dug ; and in empty heads
the practical, the vulgarly-utilitarian satisfaction is liable
to equally vain fits of self-applause on our magnificent
progress. But both the self-depreciation of him who
loiters regretfully round the beggarly rudiments, and
the self-laudation of glorious 'improvements' looking
derisively on less glorious days, are unworthy of the
reasonable and scientific spirit. The philosophical
method does not allow itself to be imposed upon by the
lapse of time, and insists that in a sense the past
contained the present — that, as the poet says, the child
is father of the man. Not indeed contained in any
grosser or more delicate mechanical way. The coming
development does not necessarily lie prefigured — if we
had the proper microscope to see it— as a germ in the

XVIL] DEVELOPMENT. 229

first and original state. That may be, or may not be.
Yet prefigured it is by the law of its structure, or in
the intelligible unity by which only can its existence
be understood and construed.

But if this be the method of real development, in the
growth of nature, and the progress of history, it is also
the method of that supreme product of historical pro
gress, the spirit and system of philosophy. Thought,
also, the culminating stage in which the spirit of man
becomes conscious of itself and of its universe, will
move or grow on the same lines as that of which it is
the comprehension and theory. It will begin at the two
ends, and each beginning will complete and presuppose
the other. Nature will suppose and yet lead up to
Spirit or Mind : Spirit or Mind will throw light on the
mystery of Nature : Being will point to knowledge or
Idea ; and Idea show itself the basis of Being. Or,
if we consider the triple division of the philosophic
system, as it runs in Hegel's Encyclopaedia, we can
see how misleading it may be to take that one order as
absolute. To understand it thoroughly we must begin
with each of the three in turn : so as thus to realise
that each does not except figuratively succeed the other,
but that in each an aspect of the whole truth is pre
sented which had been put by the other parts somewhat
in the background. In each part there is a definition
and a revelation of the Absolute. But each is also, as it
were, a projection, a perspective view, a condensed or
expanded image of the other. In each the Absolute is
one and whole, in some more veiled, more restricted,
and more meagre than in others ; but the veil, and the
restriction, and the emptying, are self-imposed : and for
that reason the veil is really transparent, the restriction is
negatived, and the emptying is not only a self-humilia
ting but a self-ennobling irony — the irony of the Absolute

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE RANGE OF PERSONALITY.

THE difference between the conceptions of reality
held by Aristotle and Plato respectively is that where
Plato said Being, Essence or Substance (<>vaia\ Aristotle
said Activity (eWpytia). To be is to act, to be active.
To the outsider — the plain man of philosophic legend,
it seems at first that a thing must be before it can do :
that you must have an agent before you get an action.
And, in a way, Aristotle admits this not quite satisfac
tory criticism. Every activity presupposes, he allows,
a power to act, a potentiality : every actual presupposes
an implicit or a mere possibility. Existence seems,
as it were, to be doubled ; or the mere surface-being is
turned into a subject which has a predicate. But if
the existence is to be real, it has to include both
elements, and with the latter or the actuality, as its
crown. Nor is this all. The possibility which issues
forth in action may be fairly called self-realisation.
That is to say: A — the hypothetical agent — acts, does
sor" ?thing : and in so doing, seems to go forth and
beyond itself, to externalise itself. Or, A is acted upon,
and thus seems to be diminished. But what it ex
ternalises, or puts forth, is after all what it ts : it puts
forth itself: and, on the other hand, if it be a patient,
it is no less an agent and self-limitative. What a

REALITY AND SELF-REALISA TION. 2 3 1

thing really is, is what it makes itself be : what it allows
itself to be made, that it really is. Yet further, if the
word self-realisation be taken in its fullness of meaning,
—if there be really a self, and it be realised, then this
self-realisation, which is the truth or more developed
conception of being, seems to imply or postulate in it a
self-consciousness, an awareness of the process of com
pleted being,— completed in its return from utterance of
possibility to self-fruition or in its re-assumption of itself.
To us, of course, as beings aware of what we do and
achieve, this is simple enough : but it is also true of
things, that we only understand them, in so far as we
put them in, or invest them with, the same activity and
apperception of activity as we are familiar with in our
own experience. The veriest materialist cannot help
speaking of things as agents, as behaving, as having
a function. He would, no doubt, if he were to be
cross-examined, refuse to identify himself with the
primitive anthropomorphism, or at least zoomorphism of
the natural man who sees the river run and the clouds
sweep the sky; and he would probably mutter some
thing referring to people who cannot see when they
ride a metaphor to death. Still less, perhaps, would he
be inclined to adopt the spiritualistic or animistic hypo
thesis of philosophising physicists, like Fechner, who
would accredit even the plants at our feet, and the stars
in the sky, with souls, or soul-like centres of their life.
But, however he may shrink from what we may call
the ontological consequences of his language, there is
no doubt that for him the meaning of the world -its
reality and truth, is obtained by an interpretation in
terms which, rigidly employed, imply their environment
by a self-consciousness to which they are relative.
Take from him the tacit assumption (which he often
finds it difficult to realise just because it is the founda-

232 PROLEGOMENA. [xvin.

tion of all his language) that reality is in the last resort
a self-conscious reality, and his words become meaning
less, or what he might think worse, metaphorical.

To Bacon, who, though not without a strong specu
lative impulse, approached philosophic dicta from the
standpoint of an average intelligent Englishman (and
it is on that account that his remarks are often so
instructive), it seemed a grave fault of the Stagirite to
define the soul, that ' most noble substance/ by words
of the second intention. Without substance — a solid
something as basis of act and event — the reality of the
soul seemed likely to fare badly. Behind conscious
ness he, like many others, felt there must be a some
thing of which consciousness is the state, act, or pre
dicate and attribute. The thinking must come from
a thinker. There must be a permanent subject of
thought — a persistent substance which does not dis
appear when thinking for the nonce stops. And think
ing is according to common experience very liable to
stops and interruptions. Both Bacon and Locke felt
that without this refuge to fall back upon, personal
identity was in a bad way, or personality itself little
better than a delusion. And therefore when Aristotle,
and his modern followers, treated soul and mind as
essentially definable by the terms activity, self-realisa
tion, it has been freely urged against them that they
are tampering with the pearl of great price which
all our hopes and aspirations fondly guard.

And this is a subject on which there is inevitably
a good deal of misunderstanding. And the misunder
standing will probably last so long as one set of writers
flaunts over it that blessed word Personality as a
holy, a sacrosanct thing, like the visionary cross with
its inscription In hoc signo vinces : and as another set
treats it as a mere fetish, under which is hidden nothing

xvili.] PERSONALITY. 233

better than stock or stone, or a heap of old bones.
Perhaps some concessions might well be made on
both sides. And the first of them would be to try to
come to some clearer understanding what the term
in question means. And, on that point, if we follow
the example of Aristotle and examine popular usage,
to see if it can help us to any consistent use of the term,
we shall find that by personal as opposed to real we
mean something peculiarly attached to the individual,
of which he cannot divest himself as of other outward
things, though it also is an outward thing1. The person
in this narrowest sense means the body ; and if the
epithet is further extended it still expresses what is
directly manipulated through the members of the living
agent, and is more or less closely attached to it. Yet
if it means the body, we must be careful to add that
it is the body, regarded not as such but as the
representative, the outward manifestation, the insepar
able sign or symbol of a spirit, an intelligence and
a will. The person is the visible or tangible pheno-
menon of something inward, — the phase or function
by which an individual agent takes his place in the
common world of human intercourse and interaction —
his peculiar and definite part in the general or universal
world and field.

Personality thus mingles or unifies in it an universal
and an individual aspect or element : it hints that the
universal work always has in reality an individually-
determinate tone, — that nothing in the world, even if
it be called the same, is really and actively the same.
Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem quod faciunt. Thus,

1 The legal use of the distinction between ' real ' and ' personal ' is
only partly ' logical/ and largely retains traces of the larger logic of
life and history. Yet, roughly speaking, personal property is what
we can, so to speak, carry on our backs or in our pockets.

234 PROLEGOMENA. [xviil.

what separates personality from individuality is simply
that in the narrower or abstracter use of the latter term
there is an absence of the due subordination of all
individuality to universality, and of all universality to
individuality. Personality, in short, is an individuality
which is not a mere freak, not merely different from
other things, but also in itself charged with a universal
meaning or function. Yet even this is not enough
to describe it. It is the individuality of an intelligence :
the flesh and blood, and, in a secondary degree, the
outward things, stamped with intelligence. Every
member of a kind, every natural existence, has this
double character; this convergence or union of universal
and individual. In being this individual object, it is at
the same time a universal, and vice versa. But in the
attribution of personality there is involved something
beyond what is common to all creatures. And that
something, we may first of all say, is this. Whereas in
the case of other things the individuality is distinctly
subordinate, and each is reckoned primarily by its kind,
in the case of persons we can almost declare that the
universality is subordinate to the individuality. This
union of individuality and universality in a single
manifestation, with the implication that the individuality
is the essential and permanent element' to which the
universality is almost in the nature of an accident, is
what forms the cardinal point in Personality. And one
can understand, when the distinction is thus put, the
obvious and palpable antagonism in which the view
stands to the central principles of Spinoza '.

1 See Spinoza, Cogitata Metaph., Pars II. cap. 8: 'Nee fugit nos
vocabulum (Personalitatis scilicet) quod theologi passim usurpant ad
rem explicandam : verum quamvis vocabulum ncn ignoremus eius
tamen significationem ignoramus : quamvis constanter credamus, in
visione Dei beatissima Deum hoc suis revelaturum.' For Hegel, it

xvill.] PERSONALITY. 235

We speak of a man as a Personality when we wish
to note the fact that he is no mere manufactured article,
the representative of a common type, with nothing to
choose between him and a thousand others, but that he
is, as it were, one of a thousand, one ' Whom nature
printed and then broke the type,' that he has in the
highest sense ' distinction/ the nobility of nature's own
patent. Other things exist, so to speak, for the sake of
their kind, and for the sake of other things ; a person,
in the strictest sense, is never a mere means to some
thing beyond, but always at the same time an end in
itself or himself. Other things are mere examples in
illustration of a law that rides superior to them and over
rules them : the person is a law unto himself. He has
the royal and divine right of creating law — of starting
by his exception a new law which shall henceforth
be a canon and a standard. For in such a personality
when he claims his full rights there is the visible
immanence of the divine and universal— or there is
the visible unity of the eternal and the temporal. He
rules as the natural king, the great ruler whose judg
ment and authority are better than the complex code
of common laws : he guides as the artistic genius who
sees truth steadily in a single intuition and in that
single picture sees it whole l.

But when we ask if such a personality is found in the
field of actual experience and history, there arises a

may be noted, Person, so far as he uses the term at all, bears its
restricted legal and juridical sense. A person is a free intelligence,
which realises that independence by appropriating an external thing
as its sign and property. It probably belongs therefore to a world
in which people count rather by what they have than by what they
are ; the world of law where rights and duties tend to oppose each
other. This is not the highest kind of world for human beings.

1 This one may call the Platonic ideal of the State, where Equity
rules supreme in the incarnate spirit of wisdom, — a guide adapting

236 PROLEGOMENA. [xviil.

divergence of opinions. It is at any rate matter of
common experience that there is a good deal of unjusti
fied identification of the self with the universal — identi
fication in which the universal suffers violence and is
taken by force. There are only too often cases where
the personal interest is allowed to disguise itself under
a semblance of zeal for the common good, and that
even without conscious intent or act of deception. No
good and noble deed, Hegel has said, can ever be done
without faith in its goodness, and zeal for its attain
ment : without a holy passion and fervour of devotion,
which exceeds the cold service of duty rendered for
duty's sake \ But it is equally true and equally to be
remembered that this interference of personal passion
and disinterested interest has defaced the noblest causes
and made flow endless torrents of fanaticism and per
secution. A personality in which the universal was
perfectly incarnated in the individual would be in truth
a God amongst men. And it is probably a more likely
occurrence that where the individual as such arrogates
to himself the privilege of the universal, there should be
seen not the deeds of the god, but the ebullitions of the
beast that is in man.

A personality, then, in popular language, and per
haps also in popular philosophy, is the living and
conscious individual in whom general forces, truths, or
ideas become real, active, efficient forces, truths, and
ideas. And the importance of the conception resides
in the safeguard thus supposed to arise, which will
prevent the realities of the world from being dissipated

its measures to circumstances, not tied«down to the inflexible letter
of one law in an incoherent and imperfect code. See the Politicus,
p. 294 ; Phacdrus, p. 275 ; and compare Aristotle's Wise man whose
conduct is not Kara \6yov, but ficra \6yov.
1 See e. g. Encyclopaedia, § 475.

xvili.] PHILOSOPHY ON PERSONALITY. 237

away into the endless and restless flux of the terms
of thought,

'La bufera infernal che mai non resta.'

To such a common frame of mind ideas, truths, forces
are vacant, ghostly forms, devoid of true life and
reality : to get such they need blood and flesh to clothe
them, to give them substance and power. Now Hegel,
no less than those who offer this criticism, regards
ideas (in the ordinary sense of that term), truths and
forces, also as abstractions which need something to
make them powers in the real world of nature and the
ideal world of mind. Hegel, like Schelling, has a
sublime contempt for mere universals. But as to the
something else, there is a divergence of view. Two
well-known answers are given by the popular philo
sophy known as materialism or spiritualism : two
systems which are probably not so wide apart as the
contrast of their names might imply. According to the
former, thinking, ideas, truths, goodness and beauty
are special functions (the grosser materialists say
secretions) of a special kind of matter— of something
which is accessible to ordinary mechanical and chemical
tests, but which exhibits also, in certain cases, the
exceptional phenomena of consciousness. Here the
essential reality is a something, permanent and essen
tially indestructible, — something which no man has
seen, nor indeed can see, — but which is called Matter.
The spiritualistic philosopher (as distinguished from
the idealist] regards as the essential realities in the
universe what he calls spirits. What these are, also,
nobody has as yet (any more than in Kant's time1)
given any very authoritative account, but so far as the
quasi-scientific expositions in regard to them throw

1 See his ' Dreams of a Spirit-seer, illustrated by Dreams of Meta
physics.' (JVerke, ed. Ros. und Schub. Bd. VII. p. 38 sqq.)

238 PROLEGOMENA. [xvui.

any general light on the subject, we may say that they
suggest only a differently-constituted matter, a matter
e. g. of less or more dimensions than that we are most
familiar with.

Now the advocate of spiritual reality, who protests
most strongly against the injury done to personality by
reducing it to something fluid and not fixed, something
in process and not in persistent substance, seems mostly
to lean to a quasi-spiritualistic hypothesis, or to the — so-
called — higher materialism. He is an advocate of what
we may describe as the soul-thing, of a permanent, (he
would even hold, an absolutely permanent) substance
or substratum of psychical reality which, no doubt,
exhibits certain properties, but is always more than any
one, or any mere series of its phenomena. It has been
said, indeed, by one who spoke with authority that he
that will save his soul shall lose it, and he that will
lose it shall find it. But this has always been a hard
saying, which has been as far as possible explained
away by exegesis. Yet its moral import is not so very
far removed from its philosophical equivalent. The
true life is not that of self-seeking pleasure, but the life
spent in the service of truth and love, the life dedicated
to impersonal interests, and ideal good. So also the
reality of the human soul as we first know it lies not in
itself, but in its transfiguration, its purification, and
liberation to higher forms of being. The Soul, in its
first avatar in each of us, is after all of the earth,
earthy, unless it continue on that path of growth and
development on which it has entered. It is as Aris
totle said, and said well, the first actualisation J — the

1 It is perilous and misleading (said the ancient Graiae, who dwell
on the way to the Hesperides of philosophy) to interpret an old
system by the language of modern (and especially German) idealism.
It is much worse, replied Perseus, not to interpret it at all, but to

xvm.] TnE PERSONAL SOUL. 239

proximate ideality of an organic body. In soul organic
body carries out its promise : in soul we, the observers,
or untrained psychologists, note our first awareness of
mental life in its organic environment. But there are
other grades, other heights of achievement, yet set
before the principle of life, which is more than mere
life and mere soul: or soul contains a germ which
must bear higher fruit. To be itself, or to become all
that it in promise and potency contains, it must dis
possess itself of what clings to it and possess itself of
what is its own ; and so transmute its first phase into
one more adequate. The soul is, as Hegel has said,
the awakening of mind from the sleep of nature1 : it is
nature gathering itself out of its absorption in its dis
persion, the breath of life and feeling striving through
the scattered members of the material world, and find
ing itself at first half-asleep, a pervading, unifying
current that flows through and makes continuous the
various portions of the universe. It is the earliest real,
felt unity in which the logical or synthetic pulse— as
yet purely potential in Nature, and only surmised by
science— re-appears in the actual concrete world. And
as the earliest, it is, like first loves, what one clings to
hardest as our prime and fundamental differentia.
Here at least we are something— a centre of being, and
not a mere centreless expanse of extension : something
emerging from the world of silence and of night-
something in which each feels

' I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch.'

And that something we would not lose, at any cost.—
But the only way not to lose it, is to use it as a stepping-

repeat its magic ipsissima verba,— carefully Latinised, as if they
belonged to a cabinet of fossils.
1 Encyclopaedia, §§ 387, 389.

240 PROLEGOMENA. [xvili.

stone to higher things. The metaphor, indeed, like
metaphors in general, must not be pressed too far.
For it is more than a stepping-stone and it is never
left behind as a mere dead self: there is

' Nothing of it that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.'

And that richer result into which it is transformed is
the consciousness of a self, and the intelligence which
wills and knows.

If it be asked in what respects the result is richer,
the answer is as follows. The soul, — this 'first ente-
lechy ' — is exclusive, and it is immersed in its natural
limits of organic life. It has yet to go through the
school of self-detachment, the process of 'erecting itself
above itself* ; and of thus extending its view and its
range of control over a wider field of objects. Gradu
ally it attains to the rank of a consciousness before
which is unrolled the spectacle of a world of objects
set over against it, and even of a world within it ; itself
as an object deposed to the rank of something to be
surveyed. As such, it seems almost to have left all
immersion in corporeity completely behind, and to
have completely divested itself of any limitation. It
floats freely above the real psychical life out of which
it emerged — a detached but somewhat shadowy self,
not burdened by any restrictions of nature or circum
stance. As such a mere Ego, or logical self— as the
mere theatre on which the play of ideas takes place, it
surveys its real psychical self far below ; it finds itself
as a strange sort of thing, and says This was me (which
however is not exactly the same as / am I, 1 = I).
Yet it was a great step to have thus ceased to be
absorbed in its qualities, to be the mere breath of life
and feeling, stirring in its several affections and modifi-

XVIII.] SUBJECTIVE PERSONALITY. 241

cations. In order to get forward, it was necessary to
recoil a little : to save itself— and that must mean to get
itself in fuller and richer being — the mind had, as it were,
to measure and realise the full depth of its nonentity,
and to surrender all that it had hitherto clung to as its
own. In an attitude of reflection upon itself it fancies
that it is the empty room, the tabula rasa, on which
experience is to write itself: but in its secret heart it
retains the faith and acts upon it, that it is the power of
intelligent and intelligible unity which makes the writing
intelligible, if it does not even itself play the writer.
What it now seems to find — what fills up its conscious
ness, presumed empty and merely receptive, — it gradu
ally recognises to be its very and original own.
Through labour and experiment it fills up the vacant
form (the passive half of itself to which it deposed
itself) of consciousness ; and thus, as an intelligent
self, a true mind, it has for itself and realises as in
itself all the life and reality which in its earlier stage
of soul it only was and felt itself naturally to be. But
on this stage of free intelligence it is no longer bound
up with its natural being in such a way as to feel itself
a fixed and restricted centre, sunk in the living
environment so as to see no further, and to deem itself
in its seclusion the permanent reality, the exclusive
fact. It is no longer exclusive and self-concentrated,
but inclusive and all-embracing. It is no longer a mere
consciousness — a mere receptive and synthetic unity of
apperception — but a reason and a mind. And a reason
and a mind already refuse to be narrowed and con
fined by the same limits as seem appropriate to the
soul. In the province of free self-realised intelligence
we at least seem to occupy a ground on which others
can equally come, — to have nothing peculiar or merely
individual. In Knowledge, which is reasoned percep-

242 PROLEGOMENA. [xviil.

tion, and in Will, which is reasoned impulse, there is
a king's highway, a public forum, where souls meet
and converse and perform a collective work ; — and in
both mere, i. e. essentially restricted, individuality is at
a discount1.

Such would be the course of development if we
looked at it only in the inwardness or subjectivity of
psychical, conscious, and intelligent life. But an analo
gous or parallel development may be observed if we
look at man as an active, i. e. a practical and moral
being, a being who makes Nature his own, stamps it
with his title of possession, and who gives to his fellow
ship with other souls an objective, outward existence in
the forms and institutions of social life. Here too his
first achievement is the affirmation of his individuality,
the distinction in outward and tangible shape of the
Mine from the Thine : the creation of property, and
the projection of himself in a world of mutually- recog
nised personalities. As the individual soul in the inner
life, so the personal being with its property is the
solid, insoluble basis of the life in public — the field of
social ethics. The same instinct, which in its dread of
dissolution clings to the perpetuity of the inner nucleus
of soul, upholds the other as containing the stable and
eternal security of all social well-being. The immor
tality of soul in the inner world : the sacro-sanctity of
property in the outer. But if these postulates are to
be permitted, if individuality and personality are to
abide, they must, in the one case as in the other, bow
to the law of development, the law of history and of
life. They must correct themselves, re-adjust them
selves,— include what they excluded, and re-combine
their elements, transmute themselves into what we

1 The above is an attempt to give a very condensed synopsis of
Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (Encyclopaedia).

XVIII.] OBJECTIVE PERSONALITY. 243

have, after Hegel, called their truth : must redintegrate
themselves with suppressed correlatives, and carry out
their implications of larger unity. The soul, exclusive
and fast-clad in its mere organic vestment, in which it
is as yet only the name and form of intellectual life, has
first of all to retract itself into the bare abstract con
sciousness, or mere self, on which the masses of reality
stream, to fill its vacant rooms and empty forms up with
ideas. So too the person — that close concretion or
coalescence of mind with material — that identification
of self with its 'clothes/ its property and all it can
vulgarly be said to own, is only an aspect of truth
which tends to be over-estimated when it is reflected
upon, and must notwithstanding be over-ridden and
merged. Withdrawing itself from its clothing of earth
and water, and even perhaps from its inner mansion of
flesh and bone, personality floats in the free air as the
impersonal personality of conscience, — the ethereal
realm where pure practical reason rules. In that
ether where morals reign absolutely is the home of
the categorical imperative, of the Stoical law of duty,
of the conscience which, here at least, has might as it
has right. It too, like its parallel, consciousness, in
the inner mental life, has, or seems to have, all its
fulfilment from without. As even Kant admits, it is
itself a vacant form ; yet a form of such influence as to
impress on whatever comes within its range an obliga
tion to be universal and to be uniform. Here too, as
in the parallel stage, it was of inestimable importance
that mind should, in the socio-ethical sphere, see itself
supreme in its innermost dignity and personality,—
the personality which lies within, — even though that
supremacy were at first no better than as a law, a form,
a category, recognised as authoritative and imperative.
For conscience, like the field of consciousness, is after

R 2

244 PROLEGOMENA. [xvm.

all only a quasi-passive self— a remarkable property or
endowment, a sort of innate principle or idea by which
the mind was seen to be distinguished in a unique way
from all things else. To realise once for all the fact
that consciousness and conscience form an absolute
tribunal from which there can be no appeal : that the
' synthetic unity of apperception ' in the theoretical, and
the 'autonomy of the rational wilP in the practical
sphere, are the ultimate and final a priori', this is a
great thing to do, — even though it only expands and
defines the Cartesian principle of clear and distinct
ideas, and will remain as Kant's title of honour in the
history of philosophy. He thus fenced off or conse
crated the sanctuary of the mental and moral life.

But it was not enough to set apart the sacred prin
ciple, the central hearth-fire of truth and goodness. If
at an earlier stage, — earlier, i.e. in this logical analysis, —
the formal was wholly sunk in the material, if i. e. the
mere series of legal formulae in their hard and brittle
outlines were absolutely identified — without doubt or
hesitation — with the morally and socially good ; the
formal side, or mere spirit and will of good, the abstract
principle of morality, is now invested with an equally
undue prominence. The actual or concrete ethical
community — be it family or state, or other social organ
isation — is animated and maintained by a spirit which
transcends and includes alike the outward shell of
civil law and the inward law of conscience. For,
curiously enough, as it may seem at first, both conscience
and civil legislation assume the form of imperative
and definite commands — laws political or civil, and
laws moral. Both fall therefore into an inflexibility,
a rigorous and mechanical hardness in their enounce-
ments. Both worship the idol of what men call logic,
i. e. of formal consistency and formal uniformity, to

XVIII.] MORAL PERSONALITY. 245

an excess which sometimes issues in fantastic irregu
larities. Their several maxims of legal conformity and
of duty for duty's sake are in first appearance excellent:
but a further reflection shows that the Law covers a
good many inconsistent or at least unrelated laws
within its code, and Duty is often sadly to seek in
presence of the collisions between what offer themselves
as prima facie duties in any given case. The amplest
code of laws that ever existed will always leave lots of
loop-holes for negligence and villainy, and would never
work for an instant, were it not for ever supplemented
by the spirit of faith and love, by social piety and
political loyalty, by the thousand ties of sentiment and
feeling which really vivify its dry bones. So too the
abstractions of the conscientious imperative, of the law
of duty, of the moral tribunal, of the man within the
breast, and of the dignity and beauty of human nature,
would effect nothing unless they could always tacitly
count on the support of recognised and authoritative
social law and usage. Outward rests upon inward ;
and rules direct feelings.

Here, again, as in the purely intellectual or cognitive
sphere, it is evident that the spirit of man has its
source of life neither in its abstract self-hood (in
consciousness and conscience) nor in its mere natural
environment and organic endowment (in sense-affections,
and social law and usage), but in the unity of both, —
a unity which transcends either. Both individual and
society live and grow, because they are continuous
and one : because they presuppose an ideal unity or
a living Idea at the root of their being, as their inner
and essential guiding-principle, at once constitutive
and regulative of their action. The machinery of
language supplies to the intellectual sphere a sort of
sensible meeting-ground and common field in which

246 PROLEGOMENA. [xvm.

the development of knowledge becomes possible : and
the same purpose is subserved in the social sphere
by the machinery of ethical and political forms and
institutions. These are the field, the home of freedom,
as the other are of knowledge. It is in these collective
and objective structures that we get the expression
of the law of human development : the visible sign,
viz. of the essentially universal nature of the individual.
The individual in these attains his relative truth : for
they show the weakness of the individuality of the mere
individual. They show that his exclusiveness, his
quasi-originality, is only an appearance : — confronted,
no doubt, by an appearance of an opposite character,
as if the originality and the reality lay in the environ
ment and the collective body. They point therefore
beyond and behind both foci to a common centre or
inclusive unity of life.

But they do not destroy personality and individuality :
they only transform it and made it a more adequate
and consistent representation of reality, by giving in
it a place to factors or 'moments' which, though always
effective, were not recognised as constitutive elements,
and treated only as externally interfering agencies.
It may be a question, of course, how far it is wise to
retain the term after its meaning has thus been altered
by expansion and redistribution of elements. On the
whole it seems impracticable — and it would be unde
sirable, perhaps, even if it were more feasible — to be
too hard and fast in our use of denotations. It is hardly
the province of philosophy to coin new terms in which
to deposit the results of her researches. A term no
doubt — particularly if, as the phrase runs, it be luckily
discovered, or judiciously selected — may save the ex
penditure of thought. But it is hardly the business
of philosophy to encourage economy in this direction.

xvm.] FORMAL AND REAL. 247

Much more is it the perpetual task of philosophy to
counteract the ossification that sets in in terms,— to
re-interpret the meaning which is absorbed in these
'counters of thought/ and make them once more
sterling money for the market of life. What, for
instance, is the work of Aristotle's Ethics, but to set
free the genii which the black magic of every-day
intercourse has incarcerated in the non-significant
Greek term Ew&u/iow'a ? Like our own Happiness, it
flits from lip to lip, little better than a mere name,
which is still prized, but— except for a few synonyms
that are equally vague with itself— is attached to things
which a little reflection shows it cannot truly denote.
Aristotle seeks— we may say — to define it. But the
phrase 'definition* seems barely applicable to the
complex process thus implied,— a process of which
definition, as ordinarily understood, is only one small
portion. For to define happiness, is to reconstruct
the conception. Or, to be more accurate, it is really
to construct it or reproduce in consciousness its con
struction. As it stands, the thing to be defined is a
name and a thing, of which certain relations to other
things soon begin to show themselves, which is more
or less similar to one thing, and more or less to be
distinguished from another. To mark it off from these
co-terminous things, and to show how they are related
to it on different sides,— this would be what we may
perhaps call strict, or formal, or nominal, or mere
definition.

Now whatever be the other uses of such definitions—
and they are serviceable at the outgoing in any branch
of enquiry,— they are not precisely the work we expect
a philosopher to do for us. And assuredly it is not
Aristotle who would stop short at that sort of defi
nitions. We find accordingly that for the purpose of

248

PR OLE G OMEN A. [xvn I .

realising what happiness— the common name for human
good_means, he is obliged to bring into the field
the whole system of his thought in its cardinal notions
of Energy, Soul, &c. Aristotle here as elsewhere re
traces the path of thought which carries us from mere,
vulgar, inadequately-apprehended happiness (he follows
the same process in his treatment of pleasure, friend
ship £c.— to take only ethical examples) to true, essential
and completely-apprehended happiness, — or, to use
Hegel's technical phrases, from happiness as it is
an-sich (in or at itself) or as it is fur-sich (for or to
itself), to happiness as it is an-und- -fur-sick. In so
'defining' happiness Aristotle is thus obliged to bring
in his conceptions of man and of society, of human life
and its powers, of natural and acquired faculty, of mind
in its relations to nature ; and if not to expound, at
least to employ, his fundamental categories of philo
sophical thought. Such a machinery can hardly be
called less than a construction, i.e. a re-construction
by conscious effort of the latent but actual concatenation
of the elements in the fact.

In this case we traverse the distance which separates
mere happiness from true happiness, from happiness
imperfectly or abstractly conceived to happiness ade
quately and concretely conceived. Of course when
we say real or true happiness, we use these terms
as they are used within the ordinary range of human
speech. An ultimate and absolute in truth and reality
is for us at any given time only a comparatively or
relatively ultimate and absolute. It is that which, so
far as we can see and think (all philosophising pre
sumably goes on under this stipulation, tacit or express),
gives an expression, an interpretation, a meaning and
a construction to reality which leaves no feature un
recognised, no contradiction unsolved, no discord

XVIII.] FORMAL AND REAL. 249

unreconciled, which leaves nothing outside and alien
to it, and suppresses without acknowledgment nothing
that has ever been recognised within it. It is, if you
like so to call it, the completest, or (if you are really
in earnest with your philosophising and have carried
it on to what for you is the end) the complete formula
of the Absolute — of that which in a transcendent sense
is, is all, is the infinite and eternal one. Yet, after all,
it is a formula. But here that undying adversary of
all thought steps in and says A mere formula. And
to that we must here as elsewhere rejoin : No, not a
mere formula. A mere formula would be not even
a formula, — a formula only in name — and with no
reality which it served to formulate. It is a real and
true formula, if it be a formula at all, and not some
thing which merely swaggers about under that title.
Nay more, if it be a true and real formula, it is the
truth and the reality in its day and generation, until
at least a truer truth and a more real reality shall have
been discovered. Let us by all means be modest :
but there is a false humility which becomes no man
and is the guise of hypocrisy or insincere sincerity.
Let us — in other words — never assume that 'we are
the men, and that wisdom will die with us' : but equally
let us hold fast the faith of reason that what we know
as true and real can never be false, i. e. utterly false,
however much it may turn out one day to be sur
mounted. And, on the other hand, let us equally
remember that in the mere and abstract commence
ment — the unreal and the untrue, as we must perforce
style it by contrast with the (pro tempore) truth and
reality — there is no utter and sheer error or unreality.
It has always been felt to be one of the most loveable
sides of Aristotelianism — this recognition of the reason
ableness of all actual fact, or of the truth latent in

250 PROLEGOMENA. [xvin.

the honest, though narrow and ill-defined judgments
of the mass.

Thus, coming back to personality, let us admit that
the mere personality which at first sight seemed only
worth rejecting, is an element, at least, in true person
ality, — or is a part which, because an organic member
and no mere mechanical part, is full of traces and indi
cations which involve and postulate the whole. The
true personality and the true individuality of being is
something which presupposes for its completeness the
social state — the organic community. It is no doubt
familiar to us that, according to an old but never quite
dormant view, the collective community is but the aggre
gate or congeries of individuals. But the individuals
whose aggregation makes the community are themselves
products of the social union. Complete, all-round, har
monious personality, it is sometimes said, is the highest
fruit to be yielded by social development. Or, as the
last century would have preferred to put it, the main or
sole aim of the State is furtherance towards Humanity
—to the stature of the perfect man. And these are true
sayings, — but perhaps only half true. If all must grow
so that one and each may grow, so and not less must
each one grow so that the all— the commonwealth of
reason and the kingdom of God — may be more and
more present, ' may come.' And that kingdom only
comes when All is in Each, and Each is in All : and
when, without loss or diminution, each is each and all is
all. Then and not till then does personality become
true and infinite, free and harmonious individuality,
which is in the same instant universality. The monad
— to use the language of the great Idealist who did not
find individuality at all incompatible with universality
—never ceases to be a monad : it is eternal and in
destructible, an absolute centre of being. The monad

XVIII.] LEIBNIZ ON INDIVIDUALITY. 251

in its individual measure ' expresses ' or ' envelops ' the
Infinite or Absolute: it is, i.e. under a subjective limi
tation, identical with the absolute, a concentration or
condensation of it into an impenetrable, i. e. literally an
individual, point,— but a point which is in the psychical
or intellectual world never entirely carens recordatione,
or oblivious of its essential totality. But if the monad
' expresses ' the Absolute, it no less concords or sym
pathises in harmonious development with all its con
geners, the other monads : so that while it neither
interferes with them, nor suffers violence from them, it
yet exists and acts in an ideal identity, that is, in a real
fellowship, with them. Again, the monad has what may
be called its side of passivity, but passivity here does not
mean mere passivity, but rather the essential limitation
due to its special and peculiar stand-point — a limitation
which in the higher orders of being becomes transparent
or is transcended. How far Leibniz succeeds in recon
ciling this apparent contradiction — how far even any one
can reveal the mystic indwelling of universal and indi
vidual in each other, this is a serious question in its
place : but it is only bare justice to Leibniz to say that
he at least never failed to emphasise both aspects of
reality, and that if one ' moment ' is predominant and
fundamental in his work it is not the monad, but the
Monad of Monads. If necessity be the right word
to express the relation of the Universal Law to the
individual being and to affirm that the individual is not
a loose self-supporting unit (and Leibniz, far from think
ing so, always uses in its stead the phrase inclinat, non
nccessitat1 , to emphasise the immanence of law, or the
autonomy of every completed being), then Leibniz is not

1 See especially in the Theodicee, part I. § 43 seqq. Cf. Nouv. Ess.
II. § 9, incline sans necessiter: I. § 13, La ntccssite ne doit pas etre con-
fondue avec la determination.

252 PROLEGOMENA. [xvm.

less, but more necessitarian than Spinoza. His differ
ence from Spinoza, in fact, lies mainly, if not solely, in
his clearer recognition of the transcendence, no less
than the immanence, of the Absolute, which Spinoza
has somewhat veiled under the apparent insignificance
of the difference between natura naturans and natura
naturata. Yet the Monad of Monads is no supra-
mundane, or merely transcendent God.

But if we further ask whether such personality is
attainable in the world of experience and describable in
terms of thought — whether there be any actual and
visible agent possessed of this true personality, as we
have agreed to call it, we are in face with a higher stage
of the problem of personality. And that question in other
words brings us back to where we began. A true and
real personality, a complete individuality is something
which so transmutes all that we are most accustomed
to call by that name that it is hardly any use clinging to
it, unless to protest against the danger of mistaking
such expansion and transmutation to be only a blank
negation. Yet to cling to it too much involves a danger
for the true recognition of that transcendent's univer
sality. All human personality, all natural individuality
is, as Lotze has eloquently pointed out l, something
which falls far short of what it professes to be. But in
the general failure to unite the universal with the
particular, or the fact with the idea, there are degrees ;
and we can at least affirm so much as this that the truest
individuality and the most real personality is not that
which is least permeated by thought, but that in which
thought has had the largest share. Individuality is
something more than a mere sum of general qualities; —
that is certainly the fact ; but it is not less the fact, that
for us an individuality and personality is more perfect
1 Microcosmus, Book IX. chap. 4.

xvill.] LIMITS OF PERSONALITY. 253

and true in proportion as more general function and
universal character coalesce into harmony and power
in it. Assert then the initial presence and virtue of
individuality and personality in the human soul : but
remember that it has this virtue, not for what it is, but for
what it promises and may reasonably be expected to be,
and that, to realise the promise, it has to behave inclu
sively, rather than exclusively, gather up into itself and
make its own all content, rather than set itself up in
reserve and isolation.

We have seen that the social organisation, animated
as it is by the moral idea, is rather the arena on
which the true union of mind and matter, of idea and
nature, of thought and fact may be worked for, than
itself the fruition of such an effort. All-important is the
State ; all-important the ethical idea which pervades it.
But the world of freedom — the ideal world so far made
actual — is not what it promised to be. ' Is it not/ said
Plato, ' the nature of things that the actual should always
lack the perfection of theory ? ' In the visible world
the State, indeed, rules supreme : ' it is/ as Hegel might
say in the words of his great predecessor in political
theory, ' that Leviathan or mortal God to whom under
the immortal God we owe our welfare and safety.' But
there is something in the State which the State in its
palpable reality cannot adequately express. If it is
highest in the hierarchy of this world, the lowest in the
ideal kingdom of the Absolute is higher than it. Above
the State as the embodiment and the guarantee of the
moral life, there is the realm of Art, Religion, and
Philosophy. In them man's craving for individuality
and personality finds a satisfaction it could never hope
for below them : they at least restore the truth and
reality of man's life and of the universe in a measure far
exceeding what even morality could do.

254 PROLEGOMENA. [xvin.

If we ask then what Art, Religion, and Science have
to show of Personality or true realised individuality, the
answer is briefly as follows. Had it not been that
august names have spoken of imitation as the essence of
Art-work, we should hardly have deemed it possible that
men should speak of Realistic Art. Yet here, as in
Religion and in Science, the epithet is introduced to
guard against a misconception of the province of
Idealism. All Art, all Religion, all Science, are and
must be idealistic : but they can never be — as the
familiar phrase puts it — merely idealistic, i. e. visionary,
fantastic, unreal. All of them, in other words, may be
said to show us ' the light that never was on sea or
land ' — the heavenly city — the eternal truth of things.
But they must, on their peril, show it here and now, and
not in a pretended or other world. They must — no less
than law and morality — work in terrestrial materials, and
not with superfine celestialities. Mentem mortalia tan-
gunt. It is out of the oldest and commonest realities of
life and death that the poet and the painter make the
melodies of heaven sound in our ears, and gladden us
with the rays of the empyrean. It is out of the hard rock
of the real that the artist's rod must strike the well-
spring of the ideal. So too, in like manner, a religion
must show the Divine, but show Him immanent : an
immanence which, on one hand, shall not drag Godhead
down to the level of casual reality, nor on the other set
Him far off in lonely transcendence.

The aesthetic faculty, awakened as it is by the
natural response of man's perceptions to the harmonies
of existence, to the spontaneous coherency of its many
parts in a united whole, and stimulated by the creative
work of human art, which moulds even the naturally
discordant or unconnected into a concordant expression
(sometimes it may be, as in handicraft, only to satisfy

XVIII.] PERSONALITY IN ART. 255

human needs), lifts us above the imperfections and
fragmentariness of things, above our selfish interest in
them, into a frame of mind where they are seen whole
and perfect, and yet one and veritably individual. In
its supreme or comprehensive phase it does not deal
merely with the beautiful, nor merely with the beautiful
and sublime. All true art, whether it awakes awe or
admiration, laughter or tears, whether it melts the soul,
or steels it to endurance, has a common characteristic ;
and that is to raise the single instance, the prosaic or
commonplace fact, into its universal, eternal, infinite
significance. It frees the fact from the limitations which
our distractions, our practicality, our temporary hopes
and fears, have deeply stamped upon it. It is still,
after art has dealt with it, to all appearance a single fact :
but it now has the universe behind it and within it. It
carries us away from the incompleteness, the pressure
of externals, the solicitude for the future and the regrets
for the past, into a self-contained, self-satisfying totality,
into freedom and leisure, rest which is not stolid, and
action which involves no toil. Such a result is partly, as
was said, the gift of common nature, which speaks peace,
comfort, joy, self-possessed fruition for all her children
when their sense is open and free : partly it comes
through those select ones among these children who
have a larger perception of the meaning and inner
truth of her works, and who can by a sensible recon
struction, which if it is fair and successful will only
bring out more clearly the unity and harmony which
deeper insight detects, help others to see and enjoy
what they have felt and rejoiced over. Such are the
poets — in the widest sense — the makers, the seers, who
in verse, in music, in picture and sculpture — who, in
human lives, it may be even in the conduct of their
own, show us how divine a thing is nature and

256 PROLEGOMENA. [xvm.

humanity : show "us the secret and unheard harmonies
that to the full-opened ear absorb and transmute the
lower discords of life and vulgar reality. It is they
who give immortality and divinity, who make heroes
and demigods *. Or, if they may not be said to make
them, they half-reveal and half-construct the ideal figures
which stand high and beneficent in the history of the
world. And by those who thus half-construct, and half-
reveal, are meant not merely the single artists in whom
the process culminates to final outline and publicity, but
the many-voiced poesy of the collective human heart
which out of its myriad elemental springs constitutes the
total figure, the august image of the hero, and the saint,
lending him from its plenitude all that his abstract self
seemed to want. It is on the tide of national and
human enthusiasm that the individual artist is lifted up
to realise the full significance of his ideal figure, and
his imaginative craft can only be inspired by the vigour
and warmth of the collective passion for noble ends and
high action.

Nowhere it would seem is the ideal of personality
and many-sided individuality more adequately realised.
Here, at last, the whole truth of life, the indwelling of
individual and universal in one body, seems to be
realised. But it is realised in an ideal. It is — if we
analyse it — a synthesis of three elements ; partly in the
material reality which serves as bodily vehicle ; partly
in the conception and technique of the artist ; partly in
the general mind which inspires both the material and
the form with its own larger life. It is — as its name
implies — an artificial product — a synthesis of elements
which tend to fall apart. Technique varies, conceptions
lose their interest, the tone of general culture alters,

1 See the well-known passage in Wilhelm Meistjrs Lehrjahre, Book
II. chap. 2.

XVIIL] IDEAL PERSONALITY. 257

and materials are dependent on locality. When that
happens, the work of art is left high and dry : no longer
a living God, but a dead idol, still wondrous, but speak
ing no more its human language.

So it is with the heroic figures who rise into the
purer air of universal history. They also— so far as
they live with a personal power — are works of art :
works of real-idealism. For all history which deserves
the name, and is not mere abstract dry-as-dust
chronicle (as to the possibility of which utter aridity
there may be legitimate doubts), is a work of fiction or
invention, of reconstruction. It seeks to understand
its characters. But to understand them it is not (and as
historical art cannot be) content with a mere reference
to motives acting on them from outside. It seeks to
understand them with and in their times — to see in
them the full measure of contemporary life and thought
which elsewhere has found so meagre expression. Such
is the artistic completion of personality in the ideal, —
whether in what is called history, or what is called art.
It exaggerates a truth, because it loses sight of the
background. And that background, which helps to con
stitute such ideal personality, is no constant element.
The centuries and generations as they roll contribute
their varying quota to set, as they say, the historical
character in its true light, in its fulness and truth of
reality. And thus this personality of the great leaders
of human life is only an image and a sign— a fruit
of development, no bare fact which remains unchanged
and always the same. It is rather a personification
than a personality. It incarnates the living spirit who
is universal and eternal in the limits of a sensuously-
defined individual, and indeed incarnates there only so
much as the generation it speaks to can see of complete
truth. It is only after all a vehicle of truth ; though

s

258 PROLEGOMENA. [xvill.

a nobler vehicle than social and personal ethics can
afford.

As it is felt that the treasure of the idea— that the full
power of spiritual life — cannot be adequately stored in
the earthen vessels of mortality, the consummation of
personality is forced to recede into the invisible if it
would be still conceived as attainable. ' True person
ality/ says Lotze, Ms with the Infinite.' What here is
fragmentary, is there a rounded total, a perfect unity :
He alone is absolutely self-determining, self-explain
ing : is all that He means to be, and means all that He
is. In a sense, philosophy does not hesitate to counter
sign all this. But, in adopting it, philosophy must
reserve the right of noting the danger and the am
biguity of such language. Religion does well, philo
sophy may say, in thus insisting upon the dependence
of all appearance on one Absolute reality ; but it is well
also not to forget that all appearance is also the appear
ance of that reality or Absolute. And in so saying, be
it added, philosophy assumes no essential superiority to
religion. Religion in its fulness, and apart from any
theories that may grow up under its wing, is more than
theory, more than mere philosophy: it is the consum
mating unity of life — the enthusiasm and supreme
power of life, its consecration and divinisation by its
assured immanence in the eternal and universal. It is,
in short, as was long ago said of it, the true life, the
light which is the light and life of men ; and its inspiring
principles are faith, hope, and love. But when unas
sisted religion proceeds to set before itself the meaning
and lesson of its life, when it proceeds to formulate a
theory of the world and set out a scheme of world-
history, it trespasses on the field of knowledge, and
is amenable to the criticisms of the reflective spirit — the
spirit of philosophy. And that criticism briefly is to the

xvm.] DIVINE PERSONALITY. 259

effect that the religious theory in its ordinary form is
an imperfect interpretation of the religious experience.
Nor is this to derogate from the prerogative of the
friends of God. It is only to criticise the formulae and
phrases of dogmatic theology — a theology, however,
which is as old as religion itself, and which takes
different forms from age to age, and from one level of
thought to another, always in its measure translating
religious reality, truth, or experience into the categories,
na'ive or artificial, simple or complex, of the science (it
may be the pseudo-science) of the time. Philosophy,
therefore, is the criticism of the science of God — that is
of theology — as it is the criticism of other sciences.
For criticism philosophy always is : always the reflec
tion upon fixed dogma, and the discussion of it till
it becomes sensible of its defects, and stands upon
another and higher plane. And to some it may seem
that this is the sole function which philosophy can
legitimately undertake. 'Yet,' as Aristotle remarked,
'the good critic must know what he criticises/ He
must not merely reflect upon it from outside, but deal
with it from the plenitude of experience, from the
abundance of the heart. If he be a critic then, he
cannot be a mere critic, but also an agent in the work
of reconstruction. Or, if we put the thing otherwise;
though, as Fichte said (p. 28), philosophy is a different
thing from life, the true philosopher can never be
a mere philosopher, but must, if he is to reach the
height of his vocation, have also entered into the full
experience of reality, into the whole truth of life. His
philosophy will then not be outside of religion and
aesthetic perception. In its comprehension of all grades
and forms of reality and truth, goodness, holiness,
beauty, will have their place. He also will be among
the theologians.

s 2

260 PROLEGOMENA.

And when the philosopher deals with personality in
this high, this supreme sphere, he will submit that the
truth of personality is subordinate to the truth of spiri
tuality. He will argue that by sticking too closely and
fixedly to personality we are running a risk of bringing
down the divine to the level of the human. If, with
Dante, he can say that in its very heart the Light
Eternal

' Mi parve pinta della nostra effige ;'

he will undoubtedly add with Dante

' Oh quanto e corto '1 dire e come fioco
Al mio concetto ;'

or, with the first philosophical theologian who inter
preted the experience of Christian life, he will rise
from the historical Jesus to the inward witness of
the Spirit.

CHAPTER XIX.

GENESIS IN MENTAL LIFE.

ARISTOTLE, who saw into the nature of abstract
entities, remarked that the mind was nothing before
it exercised itself1. The mind,— and the same will
turn out true of many things else where it is at first
unsurmised;— is not a fixed thing, a sort of exceedingly
refined substance, which we can lay hold of without
further trouble. It is what it has become, or what
it makes itself to be. This point, that 'To be'^'To
have become,' or rather to have made itself, is an axiom
never to be lost sight of in dealing with the mind. It
is easy to talk of and about conscience and freewill, as
if these were existing things in a sort of mental space,
as hard to miss or mistake as a stone and an orange, or
as if they were palpable organs of mind, as separately
observable as the eye or ear. One asks if the will is
free or not, as glibly as one might ask whether an
orange is sweet; and the answer can be given with
equal ease, affirmatively or negatively, in both cases.
Everything in these cases depends on whether the will
has made itself free or not, whether indeed we are
speaking of the will at all, and on what we mean by
freedom. To ask the question in an abstract way,
taking no account of circumstances, is one of those

1 De Anima, iii. 4.

262 PROLEGOMENA.

temptations which lead the intellect astray and pro
duce only confusion and wordy war — as a good deal
of so-called popular metaphysics has done. The mind
and its phenomena, as they are called, cannot be dis
sected with the same calmness of analysis as other
substances which adapt themselves to the scalpel : nor
is dissection after all more than a part of the scientific
process, subject to the control of the synthesis in
physiology.

The ordinary metaphysician makes his own task easy
and his thoughtful reader's a burden, by plunging too
lightly in medias res. He wants patience— often, per
haps, because he thinks too much of his reader's
impatience at analysis — to unravel the tangled mass
which human experience, when first looked at, presents.
He is apt to catch at any end which promises to effect
a temporary clearance. True philosophy, on the con
trary, must show that it has got hold of what it means
to discuss : it has to construct its subject-matter : and
it constructs it by tracing every step and movement in
its construction shown in actual history. The mind is
what it has been made and has made itself; and to see
what it is we must consider it not as an Alpha and
Omega of research, as popular conception and language
tend to represent it, but in the stages constituting
its process, in the fluidity of its development, in the
elements out of which it results. We must penetrate
the apparent fixity and simplicity under which it comes
forward, and see through it into the process which
bears it into being. For, otherwise, the object of our
investigation is taken, as if it were the most unmis
takable thing of sense and fancy, — as if everybody
were agreed that this and no other were the point in
question.

But in this matter of stability and the reverse, there

xix.] NATURAL AND MENTAL EVOLUTION. 263

is a broad distinction between the natural and the
spiritual world. In Nature every step in the organisa
tion, by which the Cosmos is developed, has an inde
pendent existence of its own : and the lowest formation
confronts the highest, each standing by itself beside
the other. Matter and motion, for example, are not
merely found as subordinate elements entering into the
making of a plant or an animal. They have a free
existence of their own : and the free existence of matter
in motion is seen in the shape of the planetary system.
So, too, chemical or electrical phenomena can be
observed by themselves, operating in spheres where
they are untrammeled by the influence of biological
conditions. It seems, at least at first sight, to be
different in the case of mind. There the specific types
or several stages in the integrating process of mental
development seem to have no substantive existence in
the earlier part of the range, and to appear only as
states or factors entering into, and merged in, the
higher grades of development. This causes a peculiar
difficulty in the study of mind. We cannot seize
a formation in an independent shape of its own : we
must trace it in the growth of the whole. Mental
fusion and coalescence of elements is peculiarly close,
and hardly leaves any traces of its constituent factors \

1 A philological parallel may make this clearer. 'The Indo-
German,' says Misteli (Typen des Spmchbaucs, p. 363), 'embraces or
condenses several categories in a single idea in a way which though
less logical is more fruitful ; for in this way he procures graspable
totals with which he can work further, and not patch-work which
would crumble away in his hands. Our He includes four grammatical
categories, which work not separately, but as a whole :— third
person, masculine gender, singular, nominative ; whereas the Magyar
o is the vehicle only of one category, the third person, which
is either determined as singular by the context, or as plural by the
addition of k: gender in these languages does not exist : and as sub
ject again o is specially interpreted from the context. The unification

264 PROLEGOMENA. [xix.

Sensation, for instance, in its purity, as mere sensation,
is apparently something which we can never study in
isolation. All the sensation which we can, in the
strictly psychological (as opposed to the physiological)
mode of study, examine, i. e. which we can reproduce
in ourselves, is more than mere sensation : it includes
elements of thought, and probably of desire and will.
This, of course, makes the difficulties of so-called intro
spection : difficulties so great and real that they have
provoked in natural reaction a set against introspection
altogether, and the adoption of the external observation
(physiological or so-called psycho-physical) employed
in the ' objective ' sciences. And hence when we accept
the name, such as intellect, conscience, will, &c., as if
it expressed something specially existent in a detached
shape of its own, we make an assumption which it is
impossible to justify. We are reckoning with paper-
money which belongs to no recognised currency, and
may be stamped as the dealer wills. The consequence
is that the thing with which we begin our examination
is an opaque point, — a mere terminus a quo, from which
we start on our journey of explication, leaving the
terminus itself behind us unexplained.

The constituents of mind do not lie side by side
tranquilly co-existent, like the sheep beside the herbage
on which it browses. Their existence is maintained in
an inward movement, by which, while they differentiate
themselves, they still keep up an identity. In our
investigations we cannot begin with what is to be
defined. The botanist, if he is to give us a science of
the plant, must begin with something whose indwelling
aim it is to be itself and to realise its own possibility.

of the four categories makes He an individual and a word ; the
generality and isolation of one category makes o an abstract and a
stem.'

XI*-] MIND AS A GROWTH. 265

He must begin with what is not the plant, and end with
what is ; begin, let us say, with the germ which has the
tendency to pass into the plant. The speculative science
of biology begins with a cell, and builds these cells up
into the tissues and structures out of which vegetables
and animals are constituted. The object of the science
appears as the result of the scientific process: or,
a science is the ideal construction of its object. As in
these cases, so in the case of thought. We must see it
grow up from its simplest element, from the bare point
of being, the mere speck of being which, if actually no
better than nothing, is yet a germ which in the air of
thought will grow and spread ; and see it appear as
a result due to the ingrowing and outgrowing union of
many elements, none of which satisfies by itself, but
leads onward from abstractions to the meeting of
abstractions in what is more and more concrete. The
will and conscience, understanding and reason, of man
are not matter-of-fact units to be picked up and exam
ined. You must, first of all, make sure what you have
in hand : and to be sure of that is to see that the mind
is the necessary outcome of a course of development.
The mind is not an immediate datum, with nothing
behind it, coming upon the field of mental vision with
a divinely-bestowed array of faculties ; but a mediated
unity, i. e. a unity which has grown up through a com
plex interaction of forces, and which lives in differences
through comprehending and reconciling antagonisms.

If the mind be not thus exhibited in its process, in
the sum and context of its relations, we may mean
what we like with each mental object that comes under
our observation: but with as much right another
observer may mean something else. We may, of
course, define as we please : we may build up succes
sive definitions into a consistent total : but such a

266 PROLEGOMENA. [xix.

successful arrangement is not a real science. Unless
we show how this special form of mind is constituted,
we are dealing with abstractions, with names which we
may analyse, but which remain as they were when our
analysis is over, and which seem like unsubstantial
ghosts defying our coarse engines of dissection. They
are not destroyed : like immaterial and aery beings
they elude the sword which smites them, and part but
to re-unite. The name, and the conception bodied
forth in it, is indeed stagnant, and will to all appear
ance become the ready prey of analysis : but there is
something behind this materialised and solidified con
ception, this worn-out counter or sign, which mere
analysis cannot even reach. And that underlying
nature is a process or movement, a meeting of ele
ments, which it is the business of philosophy to unfold.
The analyst in this case has dealt with ideas as if they
were a finer sort of material product, a fixed and assail
able point : and this is perhaps the character of the
generalised images, which take the place of thoughts in
our customary habits of mind. But ideas, when they
have real force and life, are not hard and solid, but, as
it were, fluid and transparent, and can easily escape
the divisions and lines which the analytical intellect
would impose. Perhaps some may think that it is
unwise to fight with ghosts like these, and that the best
plan would be to disregard this war of words alto
gether. But, on the other hand, it may be urged that
such unsubstantial forms have a decided reality in life :
that men will talk of them and conjure by their
means, with or without intelligence ; and that the best
course is to understand them. It will then be seen
that it is our proper work as philosophers to watch the
process, by which the spiritual unity divides and yet
retains its divided members in unity.

XIX.] ANALYSIS AND SYNTHESIS. 267

Even in the first steps we take to get a real hold of
an object we see this. To understand it, we must
deprive it of its seeming independence. Every indi
vidual object is declared by the logician to be the
meeting of two currents, the coincidence of two move
ments. It concentrates into an undecompounded unit,
—at least such it appears to representative or material
thought,— two elements, each of which it is in turn
identifiable with. The one of these elements has been
called the self-same (or identity), the universal, the
genus, the whole : while the second is called the differ
ence, the particular, the part. And by these two points
of reference it is fixed,— by two points which are for
the moment accepted as stationary. What has thus
"been stated in the technical language of Logic is often
repeated in the scientific parlance of the day, but with
more materialised conceptions and in more concrete
cases. The dynamic theory of matter represents it as
a unity of attraction and repulsion. A distinguished
Darwinian remarks that 'all the various forms of
organisms are the necessary products of the uncon
scious action and reaction between the two properties
of adaptability and heredity, reducible as these are to
the functions of nutrition and reproduction V The
terms ' action and reaction ' are hardly sufficient, it may
be, to express the sort of unity which is called for : but
the statement at least shows the reduction of an actual
fact to the interaction of two forces, the meeting of two
currents. The one of these is the power of the kind,
or universal, which tends to keep things always the
same : the other the power of localised circumstances
and particular conditions, which tends to render things
more and more diversified. The one may be called
a centripetal, the other a centrifugal force. If the one
1 Hackel, Nattirliche Schopfungs-Geschichtc, p. 157.

268 PROLEGOMENA. [xix.

be synthetic, the other is analytic. But such names are
of little value, save for temporary distinction, and must
never be treated as permanent differences which
explain themselves. The centre is relative, and so is
the totality.

Thus it is that the so-called Evolutionist explains the
origin of natural kinds. They are what they severally
are by reason of a process, a struggle, by alliances and
divisions, by re-unions and selections. They are not
independent of the inorganic world around them : it has
entered into their blood and structure, and made them
what they are. To understand them we must learn all
we can of the simpler and earlier forms, which have left
traces in their structure : traces which, without the
existence of such more primitive forms, we might have
misunderstood, or have passed by unperceived. And,
again, we learn that our hard and fast distinctions are
barely justified by Nature. There, kind in its extreme
examples seems to run into kind, and we do not find the
logically-exact type accurately embodied anywhere. Our
classifications into genera and species turn out to be in
the first instance prompted by a practical need to
embrace the variety in a simple shape. But though
perfectly valid, so far as we use them for such ends,
they tend to lead us false, if we press them too far.

And when we have seen so much, we may learn the
further lesson that the variety of organisation, animal
and vegetable, is only the exhibition in an endless detail
by single pictures, more or less complementary, more or
less inclusive of each other, of that one vital organisa
tion in principle and construction which we could not
otherwise have had presented to us. In a million lessons
from the vast ranges of contemporary and of extinct
life there is impressed upon the biological observer the
idea of that system of life-function and life-structure

XIX.] MENTAL AND NATURAL EVOLUTION. 269

which is the goal of biological science. The interest in
the mere variety whether of modern or of primeval
forms of life is as such merely historical ; its truer use
is to enable the scientific imagination to rise above local
or temporary limitations. And thus in the end the
records and guesses of evolution in time and place serve
to build up a theory of the timeless universal nature of
life and organisation.

And what is true of Nature is equally true of the
Mind. For these two, as we have already seen, are not
isolable from each other. Neither the mind nor the
so-called external world are either of them self-subsistent
existences, issuing at once and ready-made out of
nothing. The mind does not come forth, either
equipped or un-equipped, to conquer the world : the
world is not a prey prepared for the spider, waiting for
the mind to comprehend and appropriate it. The mind
and the world, the so-called 'subject' and so-called
'object/ are equally the results of a process: and it is
only when we isolate the terminal aspects of that
process, and in the practical business of life forget the
higher theoretical point of view, that we lose sight of
their origin, and have two worlds facing each other.
As the one side or aspect of the process gathers feature
and form, so does the other. As the depth and inten
sity of the intellect increases, the limits of the external
world extend also. For the psychical life is just the
power which maintains a continuing correlation between
the body and its environment, and between the various
elements in that environment. It is the unity in which
that correlation lives and is aware of itself. It is
the subject-object, which sets one element against
another, and gives it quasi-independence. The mind of
the savage is exactly measured by the world he has
around him. The dull, almost animal, sensation and

270 PROLEGOMENA. [xix.

feeling, which is what we may call his mental action, is
just the obverse of the narrow circumference that girdles
his external world. The beauty and interest of the
grander phenomena of terrestrial nature, and of the
celestial movements, are ideally non-existent for a being,
whose whole soul is swallowed up in the craving for
food, the fear of attack, and the lower enjoyments of
sense. In the course of history we can see the intellect
growing deeper and broader, and the limits of the
world recede simultaneously with the advance of the
mmd. This process or movement of culture takes
place in the sequence of generations, and in the variety
of races and civilisations spread over the face of the
world. But here too, the higher science, not resting in
the merely historical inquiry, takes no interest in the
medium of time, and merely uses it to supply material
for the rational sequence of ideas *.

The objective world of knowledge is really at one
with the subjective world : they spring from a common
source, what Kant called the 'original synthetic unity
of apperception/ The distinction between them flows
from abstraction, from failure to keep in view the whole
round of life and experience. The subjective world —
the mind of man — is really constituted by the same
force as the objective world of nature : the latter has
been translated from the world of extension, with its
externality of parts in time and space, into an inner
world of thought where unity, the fusion or coalescence
of all types and forms, is the leading feature. The
difficulty of passing from the world of being to the
world of thoughts, from notion to thing, from subject
to object, from Ego to Non-ego, is a difficulty which
men have unduly allowed to grow upon them. It grows
by talking of and analysing mere being, mere thought,

1 See above, pp. 155, 198.

XIX.] BEING AND THOUGHT. 271

mere notion, or mere thing. And it will be dispelled
when it is seen that there is no mere being, and no
mere thought : that these two halves of the unity of ex
perience — the unity we divide and the division we unify
in every judgment we make— are continually leaning
out of themselves, each towards the other. But men,
beginning as they must from themselves, and failing to
revise and correct their stand-point till it became an
dpxf) ai/uTro&Tor, argued from a belief that the individual
mind was a fixed and absolute centre, from which the
universe had to be evaluated. In Hegel's words, they
made man and not God the object of their philosophy1.
So that Kant really showed the outcome of a system
which acted on the hypothesis that man in his indi
vidual capacity was all in all. Hegel, on his own
showing, came to prove that the real scope of philo
sophy was God ;— that the Absolute is the ' original
synthetic unity' from which the external world and the
Ego have issued by differentiation, and in which they
return to unity.

If this be so, then there is behind the external world
and behind the mind an organism of pure types or
forms of thought, — an organism which presents itself, in
a long array of fragments, to the senses in the world of
nature, where all things lie outside of one another, and
which then is, as it were, reflected back into itself so as
to constitute the mind, or spiritual world, where all
parts tend to coalesce in a more than organic unity.
The deepest craving of thought, and the fundamental
problem of philosophy, will accordingly be to discover
the nature and law of that totality or primeval unity,—
the totality which we see appearing in the double
aspect of nature and mind, and which we first become
acquainted with as it is manifested in this state of dis-

1 Hegel's Werke, vol. i. p. 15.

272 PROLEGOMENA. [xix.

union. To satisfy this want is what the Logic of Hegel
seeks. It lays bare the kingdom of those potent shades,
— the phases of the Idea — which embodies itself more
concretely in the external world of body, and the inward
world of mind. The psychological or individualist con
ditions, which even in the Kantian criticism sometimes
seem to set up mind as an entity parallel to the objects of
nature, and antithetic to nature as a whole, have fallen
away. Reason has to be taken in the whole of its actuali-
sation as a world of reason, not in its bare possibility, not
in the narrow ground of an individual's level of develop
ment, but in the realised formations of reasonable know
ledge and action, as shown in Art and Life, Science
and Religion. In this way we come to a reason which
might be in us or in the world, but which, being to
a certain extent different from either, was the focus of
two orders of manifestations.

To ascertain that ultimate basis of the world and mind
was the chief thing philosophy had to see to. But in
order to do this, a good deal of preliminary work was
necessary. The work of Logic, as understood by Hegel,
involves a stand-point which is not that of every-day
life or reflection on experience. It presupposes the
whole process from the provisional starting-point which
seems at first sight simplest and universally acceptable,
upwards to the unhypothetical principle which — though
at a long distance — it involves and leads up to, or pre
supposes. We all know Aristotle's dictum 'Ei/ rots

alaOrjTo'is ra I'orjrd e'orif : Nihil IH intcllectu quod HOH priUS 111

sensu. The fact of sense and feeling is the fact of ex
perience : or rather the fact and reality of experience
is the underlying truth which the expression of it in
terms of sense and perception inadequately interprets.
Even in the principles of sensation there is judgment,
thought, reasoning : but it needs eliciting, re-statement,

xix.] HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY, 273

opening up, and explanation. The Phenomenology of
Mind is, as Hegel himself has said, his voyage of dis
covery. It traces the path, and justifies the work of
traversing it, from the ill-founded and imperfect cer
tainties of sense and common-sense, up through various
scientific, moral, and religious modes of interpreting
experience and expressing its net sum of reality, till it
culminates in the stand-point of 'pure thought/ of
supreme or ' absolute ' consciousness. It is certainly
not a history of the individual mind : and equally little is
it a history of the process of the intellectual development
of the race. In a way it mixes up both. For its main
interest is not on the purely historical side. It indulges in
bold transitions, in sudden changes of scene from ancient
Greece and Rome to modern Germany, from public facts
and phases of national life to works of fiction (compare
its use of Goethe's Faust and his version of Rameau's
Nephew}. It lingers — for historical accuracy and pro
portion unduly— over the period of Kant and Fichte,
and reads Seneca by the light of the Sorrows of Wcrther.
For its aim is to gather from the inspection of all ways
in which men have attempted to reach reality the
indication of their several content of truth, and of the
several defects from it, so as to show the one necessary
path on which even all their errors converge and which
they serve to set out in clearer light.

Hegel's philosophy is undoubtedly the outcome of
a vast amount of historical experience, particularly in
the ancient world, and implies a somewhat exhaustive
study of the products of art, science, politics, and re
ligion. By experience he was led to his philosophy,
not by what is called a priori reasoning. It is curious
indeed to observe the prevalent delusion that German
philosophy is the ' high priori road,' — to hear its pro
fundity admired, but its audacity and neglect of obvious

274 PROLEGOMENA. [xix.

facts deplored. The fact is that without experience
neither Hegel nor anybody else will come to anything.
But, on the other hand, experience is in one sense only
the yet undeciphered mass of feeling and reality, the yet
unexpounded psychical content of his life ; or, taken in
another acceptation, it is only a form which in one
man's case means a certain power of vision, and in
another a different degree. One man sees the idea
which explains and unifies experience as actuality : to
the other man it is only a subjective notion. And even
when it is seen, there are differences in the subsequent
development. One man sees it, asserts it on all hands,
and then closes. Another sees it, and asks if this is all,
or if it is only part of a system. An appeal to 'my ex
perience ' is very much like an appeal to 4 my senti
ments ' or ' my feelings ' : it may prove as much or as
little as can be imagined : in other words, it can prove
nothing. The same is true of the appeal to conscious
ness, that oracle on whose dicta it has sometimes been
proposed to found a system of philosophy. By that
name seems meant the deliverances of some primal and
unerring nucleus of mind, some real and central self,
whose voice can be clearly distinguished from the mere
divergent cries of self-interest and casual opinion.
That such discernment is possible no philosophy will
seek to deny : but it is a discernment which involves
comparison, examination, and reasoning. And in that
case the appeal to consciousness is the exhortation to
clear and deliberate thinking. While, on another
side, it hints that philosophy does not — in the end-
deal with mere abstractions, but with the real concrete
life of mind. And if an appeal to other people's experi
ence is meant, that is only an argument from authority.
What other people experience is their business, not
mine. Experience means a great deal for which it is

XIX.] HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY. 275

not the right name : and to give an explanation of what
it is, and what it does, would render a great service to
English methodologists.

There are, however, two modes in which these
studies to discover the truth may appear. In the one
case they are reproduced in all their fragmentary and
patch-work character. They are supposed to possess
a value of their own, and are enunciated with all the
detail of historic incident. The common-place books of
a man are, as it were, published to instruct the world
and give some hint of the extent of his reading. But,
in the other case, the scaffolding of incident and
externality may be removed. The single facts, which
gave the persuasion of the idea, are dismissed, as in
teresting only for the individual student on his way to
truth : or, if the historical vehicle of truth be retained at
all, it is translated into another and intellectual medium.
Such a history, the quintessence of extensive and deep
research, is presented in the Phenomenology. The
names of persons and places have faded from the
record, as if they had been written in evanescent inks,—
dates are wanting, — individualities and their biographies
yield up their place to universal and timeless principles.
Such typical forms are the concentrated essence of end
less histories. They remind one of the descriptions
which Plato in his Republic gives of the several forms
of temporal government. Or, to take a modern instance,
the Hegelian panorama of thought which presents only
the universal evolution of thought, — that evolution in
which the whole mind of the world takes the place of all
his children, whether they belong to the common level,
or stand amongst representative heroes, — may be
paralleled to English readers by Browning's poem
of Sordello. There can be no question that such
a method is exposed to criticism, and likely to excite

T 2

276 PROLEGOMENA.

misconception. If it tend to give artistic completeness
to the work, it also tantalises the outsider who has
a desire to reach his familiar standing-ground. He
wishes a background of time and space, where the forms
of the abstract ideas may be embodied to his mind's eye.
In most ages, and with good ground, the world has
been sceptical, when it perceived no reference to
authorities, no foot-notes, no details of experiments
made : nor is it better disposed to accept provisorily,
and find, as the process goes on, that it verifies itself to
intelligence.

CHAPTER XX.

GENERAL LAW OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.

' THE order and concatenation of ideas/ says Spinoza,
' is the same as the order and concatenation of things V
The objective world at least of acts and institutions
develops parallel with the growth and system of men's
ideas. In the tangled skein which human life and
reality present to the observer, the only promising clue
is to be found in the process by which in histor^he
past throws light on the present and gets light in
return. There in the stream of time and in the
expanses of space the condensed results, the hard
knots, which present life offers for explanation, are
broken up into a vast number of problems, each pre
senting a different aspect, and one helping towards
a fairer and clearer appreciation of another.

The present medium of general intelligence and
theory in which we live embraces in a way the results
of all that has preceded it, 01 all the steps of culture
through which '.'-e world has rLen. But in this body
of intellectual be* ofs and ideas with which our single
soul is clad,— in ihis common soil of thought,— the
several contributions of the past have been half or even
wholly obliterated, and are only the shadows of their
old selves. What in a former day was a question of
all-engrossing interest has left but a trace : the complete
1 Eth. ii 7.

278 PROLEGOMENA. [xx.

and detailed formations of ancient thought have lost
their distinctness of outline, and have shrunk into
mere shadings in the contour of our intellectual
world. Questions, from which the ancient philoso
phers could never shake themselves loose, are now
only a barely perceptible nuance in the complex questions
of the present day. Discussions about the bearings of
the 'one' and the 'many/ puzzles like those of Zeno,
and the casuistry of statesmanship such as is found in
the Politics of Aristotle, have for most people little
else than an antiquarian interest. We scarcely detect
the faint traces they have left in the 'burning questions'
of our own age. We are too ready to forget that the
past is never altogether annihilated, and that every
step, however slight it may seem, which has once been
taken in the movement of intellect, must be traversed
again in order to understand the constitution of our pre
sent intellectual world. To outward appearance the life
and work of past generations have so completely lost
their organic nature, with its unified and vital variety,
that in their present phase they have turned into hard
and opaque atoms of thought. The living forces of
growth, as geologists tell us, which pulsed through the
vegetables of one period are suspended and put in
abeyance : and these vegetables turn into what we call
the inorganic and inanimate strata of the earth.
Similarly, when all vitality has been quenched or
rendered torpid in the structures of thought, they sink
into the material from which individuals draw their
means of intellectual support. This inorganic material
of thought stands to the mind, almost in the same way
as the earth and its products stand to the body of a man.
If the one is our material, the other is our spiritual
substance. In the one our mind, as in the other our
body, lives, moves, and has its being.

XX.] THE SUBSTANCE OF HISTORICAL LIFE. 279

But in each case besides the practical need; which
bids us consume the substance as dead matter, and
apply it to use, there is the theoretical bent which seeks
to reproduce ideally the past as a living and fully deve
loped organism. 'This past/ says Hegel, ' is traversed
by the individual, in the same way as one who begins
to study a more advanced science repeats the preliminary
lessons with which he had long been acquainted, in
order to bring their information once more before his
mind. He recalls them : but his interest and study
are devoted to other things. In the same way the
individual must go through all that is contained in the
several stages in the growth of the universal mind :
but all the while he feels that they are forms of which
the mind has divested itself,— that they are steps on
a road which has been long ago completed and levelled.
Thus, points of learning, which in former times tasked
the mature intellects of men, are now reduced to the
level of exercises, lessons, and even games of boyhood :
and in the progress of the schoolroom we may recognise
the course of the education of the world, drawn, as it
were, in shadowy outline1.'

The scope of historical investigation therefore is this.
It shows how every shading in the present world of
thought, which makes our spiritual environment, has
been once living and actual with an independent being
of its own. But it also reveals the presence of shades
and elements in the present which if our eyes had
looked on the present alone we should scarcely have
suspected : and it thus enables us to interpolate stages
in development of which the result preserves only rudi
mentary traces. And, when carried out in a philo
sophical spirit, it shows further, that in those formations,
which are produced in each period of the structural
1 Phenomenologie des Geistcs, p. 22.

28o PROLEGOMENA. [xx.

development of reason, the universe of thought, or the
Idea, is always whole and complete, but characterised
in some special mode which for that period seems
absolute and final. Each form or 'dimension' of
thought, in which the totality is grasped and unified,
is therefore not so simple or elementary as it may
seem to casual observers regarding only the simplicity
of language : it is a total, embracing more or less of
simpler elements, each of which was once an inferior
total, though in this larger sphere they are reduced
to unity. Thus each term or period in the process
is really an individualised whole, with a complex inter
connexion and contrast included in it: it is concrete.
No single word or phrase explains it : yet it is one
totality,— a rounded life, from which its several spheres
of life must be explained. But when that period is
passing away, the form of its idea is separated, and re
tained, apart frpm the life and mass of the elements which
constituted it a real totality ; and then the mere shading
or shell, with only part of its context of thought, is left
abstract. When that time has come, a special form,
a whole act in the drama, of humanity has been trans
formed into an empty husk, and is only a name.

The sensuous reality of life, as it is limited in space
and time, and made palpable in matter and motion, is
however the earliest cradle of humanity. The environ
ment of sense is prior in the order of time to the
environment of thought. Who, it may be asked, first
wrought their way out of that atmosphere of sense into
an ether of pure thought ? Who first saw that in sense
there was yet present something more than sensation, —
that the deliverances of sense-perception rest upon and
involve relations, ties, distinctions, which contradict its
self-confidence and carry us beyond its simple indi
cations ? Who laid the first foundations of that world

XX.] THE BEGINNINGS OF THOUGHT. 281

of reason in which the civilised nations of the modern
period live and move ? The answer is, the Greek
philosophers : and in the first place the philosophers
of Elea. For Hegel the history of thought begins with
Greece. All that preceded the beginnings of Greek
speculation, and most that lies outside it, has only a
secondary interest for the culture of the West.

But 'many heroes lived before the days of Aga
memnon/ The records of culture no longer begin with
Greece. Even in Hegel's own day, voices, like those
of the poet Riickert (in his 'habitation '-exercise),
were heard declaring that the true fountain of European
thought, the real philosophy, was to be sought in the
remoter East. Since the time of Hegel, the study of
primitive life, and of the rise of primitive ideas in
morals and religion, has enabled us to some extent
to trace the early gropings of barbarian fancy and
reason. The comparative study of languages has, on
the other hand, partly revealed the contrivances by
which human reason has risen from one grade of
consciousness to another. The sciences of language
and of primitive culture have revealed new depths in
the development of thought, where thought is still
enveloped in nature and sense and symbols, — depths
which were scarcely dreamed of in the earlier part of
the present century. Here and there, investigators
have even supposed that they had found the cradle of
some elements in art, religion, and society, or, it may
be, of humanity itself.

These researches have accomplished much, and they
promise to accomplish more. They help us perhaps
to take a juster view of the early Greek thinkers, and
show how much they still laboured under conditions
of thought and speech from which their struggles have
partly freed us. But for the present, and with certain

282 PROLEGOMENA. [xx

explanations to be given later, it may still be said that
the birthday of our modern world is the moment when
the Greek sages began to construe the facts of the
universe. Before their time the world lay, as it were,
in a dream-life. Unconsciously in the womb of time
the spirit of the world was growing, — its faculties
forming in secresy and silence, — until the day of birth
when the preparations were completed, and the young
spirit drew its first breath in the air of thought. A
new and to us all-important epoch in the history of
thought begins with the Greeks : and the utterances
of Parmenides mark the first hard, and still somewhat
material, outlines of the spiritual world in which we
live. Other nations of an older day had gathered the
materials : in their languages, customs, religions, &c.,
there was an unconscious deposit of reason. It was
reserved for the Greeks to recognise that reason : and
thus in them reason became conscious.

For us, then, it was the Greek philosophers who
distinctly drew the distinction between sense and
thought, and who first translated the actual forms of
our natural life into their abbreviated equivalents in
terms of logic. The struggle to carry through this
transition, this elevation into pure thought, is what
gives the dramatic interest to the Dialogues of Plato
and keeps the sympathy of his readers always fresh.
Socrates, we are told, first taught men to seek a general
definition : not to be content with having — like Pytha
goreans — their meaning wrapped up inseparably in
psychical images and quasi-material symbols. He
taught them to refer word to fellow word, to elicit the
underlying idea by the collision and comparison of
instances, to get at the 'content' which was identical
in all the multiplicity of forms. He taught them, in
brief, to think : and Plato carried out widely and deeply

XX.] EARLY GREEK THOUGHT. 283

the lesson. The endeavour to create an ideal world,
which, at its very creation, seems often to be trans
formed into a refined and attenuated copy of the
sense-world, meets us in almost every page of his
Dialogues. In Aristotle this effort, with its concomitant
tendency to give 'sensible* form to the ideal, is so far
over and past; and some sort of intellectual world,
perhaps narrow and inadequate, is reached,— the
logical scheme in which immediate experience was
expressed and codified. What these thinkers began,
succeeding ages have inherited and promoted.

In the environment of reason, therefore, which en
compasses the consciousness of our age, are contained
under a generalised form and with elimination of all
the particular circumstances, the results won in the
development of mind and morals. These results now
constitute the familiar joints and supports in the frame
work of ordinary thought: around and upon them
cluster our beliefs and imaginations. During each
epoch of history, the consciousness of the world, at
first by the moutlj of its great men, its illustrious
statesmen, artists, and philosophers, has explicitly re
cognised, and translated into terms of thought,— into
logical language,— that synthesis of the world which
the period had practically secured by the action of its
children. That activity went on, as is the way of
natural activities, spontaneously, through the pressure
of need, by an immanent adaptation of means to ends,
not in conscious straining after a result. For the con
scious or reflective effort of large bodies of men is
often in a direction contrary to the Spirit of the
Time. This Spirit of the Time, the absolute mind,
which is neither religious nor irreligious, but infinite
and absolute in its season, is the real motive principle
of the world. But that Spirit of the Time is not always

284 PROLEGOMENA. [xx.

the voice that is most effective at the poll, or rings
loudest in public rhetoric. It is often a still small
voice, which only the wise, the self-restrained, the
unselfish hear. And he who hears it and obeys it,
not he who follows the blatant crowd, is the hero.
It is only to a mistaken or an exaggerated hero-worship,
therefore, that Hegel can be said to be a foe. Great
men are great : but the Spirit of the Time is greater :
their greatness lies in understanding it and bringing
it to consciousness. The man, who would act inde
pendently of his time and in antagonism to it, is only the
exponent of its latent tendencies. Nor need the syn
thesis be always formulated by a philosopher in order
to leaven the minds of the next generation. The
whole system of thought,— the theory of the time,—
its world, in short, influences minds, although it is not
explicitly formulated and stated : it becomes the nursery
of future thought and speculation. Philosophy in its
articulate utterances only gives expression to the silent
and half-conscious grasp of reason over its objects.
But when the adaptation is not merely reached but
seen and felt, when the synthesis or world of that
time is made an object of self-consciousness, the ex
position has made an advance upon the period which
preceded. For that period started in its growth from
the last exposition, the preceding system of philosophy,
after it had become the common property of the age,
and taken its place in their mental equipment.

Each exposition or perception of the synthesis by
the philosopher restores or re-affirms the unity which
in the divided energies of the period, in its progressive,
reforming, and reactionary aspects, in its differentia
ting time, had to a great extent been lost. By the
reforming, progressive, and scientific movement of
which each period is full, the unity or totality with

XX.] DIFFERENTIATION AND REDINTEGRATION. 285

which it began is shown to be defective. The value of
the initial synthesis is impaired ; its formula is found
inadequate to comprehend the totality : and the differ
ences which that unity involved, or which were im
plicitly in it, are now explicitly affirmed. But the
bent towards unity is a natural law making itself felt
even in the period of differentiation. And it makes
itself felt in the pain of contradiction, of discord, of
broken harmony. And that pain — which is the sign
of an ever-present life that refuses to succumb to the
encroaching elements — is the stimulus to re-construction.
Only so far as pain ceases to be pain, as it benumbs,
and deadens, does it involve stagnation : as pain proper,
felt as resistance to an inner implicitly victorious
principle, it stimulates and quickens to efforts to make
life whole again. The integrating principle is present
and active. There is then an effort, a re-action; the
feeling has to do something to make itself outwardly
felt: the implicit has to be actually put in its place,
forced as it were into action and set forth * : and the
existing contrasts and differences which the re-forming
agency has called into vigorous life are lifted from their
isolation and show of independence, and kept, as it
were, suspended in the unity2. The differences are
not lost or annihilated : but they come back to a centre,
they find themselves, as it were, at home: they lose
their unfair prominence and self-assertion, and sink
into their places as constituents in the embracing or
ganism 3. The unity which comes is not however the
same as the unity which disappeared, however much
it may seem so. The mere notion — the inner sense
and inner unity — has put itself forward into the real
world : it is no longer a mere subjective principle, but
as moulded into actuality, into the objective world,
1 Gesetzt. 2 Aufgehoben. 3 Idee: Ideeller Weise.

286 PROLEGOMENA. [xx.

it has become an Idea. (Begriff is now Idee.} For
the Idea is always more than a notion : it is a notion
translated into objectivity, and yet in objectivity not
sinking into a mere congeries of independent parts,
but retaining them 'ideally' — united by links of thought
and service — in its larger ideal-reality. It is all that
the object ought to be (and which in a sense it must
be, if it is at all), and all that the subject sought to
be and looked forward to.

The mind of the world moves, as it were, in cycles,
but with each new cycle a difference supervenes, a
new tone is perceptible. History, which reflects the
changing aspects of reality, does and does not repeat
itself. The distinctions and the unity are neither of
them the same after each step as they were before
it : they have both suffered a change : it is a new scene
that comes above the horizon, however like the last it
may seem to the casual observer. Thus when the
process of differentiation is repeated anew, it is repeated
in higher terms, multiplied, and with a higher power
or wider range of meaning1. Each unification however
is a perfect world, a complete whole : it is the same
sum of being ; but in each successive level of advance
it receives a fuller expression, and a more complexly-
grouped type of features 2. Such is the rhythmic
movement, — the ebb and flow of the world, always
recurring with the same burden but, as we cannot but
hope, with richer variety of tones, and fuller sense of
itself. The sum of actuality, the Absolute, is neither
increased nor diminished. The world, the ultimate

1 Potenz.

2 ' Nicht nur die Einsicht in die Abhangigkeit des Einzelnen vom
Ganzen ist allein das Wesentliche ; ebenso dass jedes Moment selbst
unabhangig vom Ganzen das Ganze ist, und dies ist das Vertiefen in
die Sache.' (Hegel's Leben, p. 548.)

XX.] THE RHYTHM OF HISTORY. 287

reality of experience and life, was as much a rounded
total to the Hebrew Patriarchs as it is to us : without
advancing, it has been, we may say, in its expression
deepened, developed, and organised. In one part of
the sway of thought, however, there is a harder, narrower,
insistance (by practical and business minds) on the
sufficiency of a definite principle to satisfy all wants
and to make all mysteries plain, and a disposition to
ignore all other elements of life : at another, there is
a fuller recognition of the differences, gaps, and con
tradictions, involved in the last synthesis,— which
recognition it is the tendency of scientific inquiry, of
reforming efforts, of innovation, to produce: and in
the last period of the sway, there is a stronger and
more extended grasp taken by the unity pervading
these differences,— which is the work appointed to
philosophy gathering up the results of science and
practical amendments.

To this rhythmical movement Hegel has appropriated
the name of pialectic^ The name came in the first
instance from Kant, but ultimately from Plato, where
it denotes the process which brings the ' many ' under
the ' one/ and divides the 'one* into the 'many/ But
how, it may be asked, does difference spring up, if we
begin with unity, and how do the differences return
into the unity? In other words, given a universal, how
are we ever to get at particulars, and how will these
particulars ever give rise to a real individual ? Such is
the problem, in the technical language of the Logic of
the ' Notion/ And we may answer, that the unity or
universal in question is either a true and adequate or
an imperfect unity. In the latter case it is a mere
unit, amid other units, bound to them and serving to
recall them by relations of contrast, complement, simi
larity. It is one of many,— a subordinate member in

288 PROLEGOMENA.

a congeries, and not the One. If, on the contrary, it be
a true Unity, it is a concrete universal, — the parent
of perpetual variety. The unity, if it be its genuine
shape which is formulated by philosophers, is not mere
monotony without differences. If it is a living and
real Idea, containing a complex inter-action of prin
ciples : it is not a single line of action, but the organic
confluence of several. No one single principle by
itself is enough to state a life, a character, or a period.
But as the unity comes before the eye of the single
thinker, it is seldom or never grasped with all its
fulness of life and difference. The whole synthesis,
although it is implicitly present and underlies experi
ence and life as its essential basis, is not consciously
apprehended, but for the most part taken on one side
only, one emphatic aspect into which it has concentrated
itself. And even if the master could grasp the whole,
could see the unity of actuality in all its differences,
(and we may doubt whether any man or any philoso
pher can thus incarnate the prerogative of reason,)
his followers and the popular mind would not imitate
him. While his grasp of comprehension may possibly
have been thorough, though he may have seen life
whole through all its differences, inequalities, and
schisms, and with all these reduced or idealised to their
due proportions, into the unity beyond, the crowd who
follow him are soon compelled to lay exclusive stress
on some one side of his theory. Some of them see the
totality from one aspect, some from another. It is
indeed the whole which in a certain sense they see :
but it is the whole narrowed down to a point. While
his theory was a comprehensive and concrete grasp,
including and harmonising many things which seem
otherwise wide apart, theirs is abstract and inadequate :
it fixes on a single point, which is thus withdrawn from

XX.] THE RHYTHM OF HISTORY. 289

its living and meaning-giving context, and left as an
empty name. Now it is the very nature of popular
reasoning to tend to abstractions, in this sense of the
word. Popular thought wants the time and persever
ance necessary to retain a whole truth, and so is con
tented with a partial image. It seeks for simple and
sharp precision : it likes to have something distinctly
before it, visible to the eye of imagination, and capable
of being stated in a clear and unambiguous formula for
the intellect. And popular thought — the dogmatic
insistence on one-sided truth— is not confined to the
so-called non-philosophic world : just as, on the other
hand, the inclusive and comprehensive unity of life and
reality is seen and felt and recognised by many— and
felt by them first— who have no claim to the technical
rank of philosophers. Popular thought is the thought
which skims the surface of reality, which addresses
itself to the level of opinion prevalent in all members
of the mass as such, and does not go beyond that into
the ultimate and complex depths of experience.

Thus it comes about that the concrete or adequate
synthesis which should have appeared in the self-
conscious, thought of the period, when it reflected upon
what it was, has been replaced by a narrow and
one-sided formula, an abstract and formal universal,
a universal which does not express all the particulars.
One predominant side of the synthesis steals the place
of the total : what should have been a comprehensive uni
versal has lowered itself into a particular. Not indeed
the same particular as existed before the union : because
it has been influenced by the synthesis, so as to issue
with a new colouring, as if it had been steeped in a fresh
liquid. But still it is really a particular : and as such,
it evokes a new particular in antagonism to it and ex
hibiting an element latent in the synthesis. If the first

290 PROLEGOMENA. [xx.

side of the antithesis which claims unduly to be the
total, or universal, be called Conservative, the second
must be called Reforming or Progressive. If the first
step is Dogmatic, the second is Sceptical. If the one
side assumes to be the whole, the other practically
refutes the assumption. If the one agency clings
blindly to the unity, — as when pious men rally round
the central idea of religion, the other as tenaciously
and narrowly holds to the difference, — as when science
displays the struggle for existence and the empire of
chance among the myriads of aimless organisms.
They are two warring abstractions, each in a different
direction. But as they are the offspring of one parent,
— as they have each in their own way narrowed the
whole down to a point, it cannot but be that when
they evolve or develop all that is in them, they will
ultimately coincide, and complete each other. The
contradiction will not disappear until it has been
persistently worked out, — when each opposing member
which was potentially a total has become what it was
by its own nature destined to be. And this disappear
ance of the antithesis is the reappearance of the unity
in all its strength, reinforced with all the wealth of new
distinctions.

Thus on a large scale we have seen the law of
growth, of development, of life. It may be called
growth by antagonism. But the antagonism here is
over-ruled, and subject to the guidance of an indwelling
unity. Mere antagonism — if there be such a thing-
would lead to nothing. A mere positive or affirmative
point of being would lead to no antithesis, were it not,
so to speak, a point floating in an ether of larger life
and being, whence it draws an outside element which
it overcomes, assimilates and absorbs. A bare national
mind only grows to richer culture, because it lives in

XX.] PROGRESS BY ANTAGONISM. 291

a universal human life, and can say Nihil humani a me
alienum puto. So too the mere unit is always tainted
with a dependence on outside : or it is always implicitly
more than a mere unit : and what seems to come upon
it from outside, is really an enemy from within, and it
falls because there is treason within its walls. The
revolution succeeds because the party of conservative
order is not so hard and homogeneous as it appears.
So, too, it is the immanent presence of the complete
thought, of the Idea, which is the heart and moving
spring that sets going the pulse of the universal move
ment of thought, and which reappears in every one of
these categories to which the actualised thought of an
age has been reduced. In every term of thought there
are three stages or elements : the original narrow
definiteness, claiming to be self-sufficient, — the antagon
ism and criticism to which this gives rise, — and the
union which results when the two supplement and
modify each other. In the full life and organic unity
of every notion there is a definite kernel, with rigid
outlines as if it were immovable : there is a revulsion
against such exclusiveness, a questioning and critical
attitude : and there is the complete notion, where the
two first stages interpenetrate.

U 2

CHAPTER XXI.

ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE I AND THE ORDINARY LOGIC.

THE ordinary logic-books have made us all familiar
with the popular distinction between Abstract and
Concrete. By a concrete term they mean the name of
an existence or reality which is obvious to the senses,
and is found in time and place ; — or they mean the
name of an attribute when we expressly or tacitly
recognise its dependence upon such a thing of the
senses. When, on the contrary, the attribute is forcibly
withdrawn from its context and made an independent
entity in the mind, the term expressing it becomes in
the usual phraseology abstract. Any term therefore
which denotes a non-sensible or intelligible object
would probably be called abstract. And there is some
thing to be said for the distinction, which, though
unsuccessful in its expression, has some feeling of the
radical antithesis between mere being and mere thought.
It is true, that in the totality of sense and feeling, in
the full sense-experience, there is a concrete fulness,
as it were, an infinite store of features and phases
waiting for subsequent analysis to detect. In the real
kind of actual nature there is an inexhaustible mine
of properties, which no artificial classification and
description can ever come to the end of. Every quality

ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE. 293

which we state, every relation which we predicate, is
a partial and incomplete element in this presupposed
reality, this implicit concrete ; and as such is abstract,
and comparatively unreal. It is something forcibly
torn out of and held apart from its context. But on
the other hand the concrete reality is not at first real,
but implicit : it becomes really concrete only as it re-
embraces, and re-constitutes in its totality the elements
detected by analysis. But the popular distinction
forgets this, and gives the title and rank of concrete to
what very poorly deserves the name, viz. to the yet
undiscerned reality denoted by a substantive name. Yet
there can be little doubt that the popular use of these
terms, or the^ popular apprehension of what constitutes
reality,— for that is what it comes to,— is sufficiently
represented by the ordinary logic-books. So that, if
the whole business of the logician lies in formulating
the distinctions prevalent in popular thought, the
ordinary logic is correct.

Now the popular logic of the day,— the logic which

has long been taught in our schools and universities

has three sources.— In the first place, but in a slight
degree, it trenches upon the province of psychology,
and gives some account of the operation by which
concepts or general ideas are supposed to be formed,
and of the errors or fallacies which naturally creep into
the process of reasoning. This is the more strictly
modern, the descriptive part of our logic-books.— But,
secondly, the logic of our youth rests in a much higher
degree upon the venerable authority of Aristotle. That
logic, within its own compass, was a masterpiece of
analysis, and for many centuries maintained an ascen
dency over the minds of men, which it well deserved.
But it was not an analysis of thought or knowledge as
a whole, and it treated its subject in fragments. It

294 PROLEGOMENA. [xxi.

gave in one place an analysis of science and in another
an analysis of certain methods, which could be observed
in popular discussions and practical oratory. As Lord
Bacon remarked, it did little else than state and, it
may be, exaggerate the rationale of argumentation. A
high level of popular thought it unquestionably was,
which Aristotle had to investigate, — a level which
many generations of less favoured races were unable to
reach. But there were defects in this Logic which
fatally marred its general usefulness, when the limited
scope of its original intention had been lost sight of.
The thoughts of Greece, it has been said, were greatest
and most active in the line of popular action for the
city and the public interest, in the discussions, the
quibbles, the fallacies, and rhetorical arts of the
barber's shop and the 'agora/ The aim of such
exercises was to convince, to demonstrate, to persuade,
to overcome ; — it might be for good and truth, but also
it might not. And accordingly the Logic of Aristotle
has been said to have for its end and canon the power
to convince and to give demonstrative certainty. There
is some ground, it may be, for this charge. The ancient
logician seems to luxuriate in a rank growth of forms of
sophism, and in an almost childlike fondness for variety
of argumentative method. He seems resolved to trace
the wayward tricks of thought and its phases through
every nook and cranny, to exhaust all the permutations
and complications of its elements. But let us be just,
and remember that all this was in the main a specula
tive inquiry — for the sake of theory. It developed the
powers of judgment and inference, just as the modern
research for new metals, new plants, or new planets,
develops the powers of observation. Both have some
value in the material results they discover : but, after
all, the mental culture they give is the main thing. And

xxi.] ARISTOTLE'S LOGIC.

295

the talents quickened by deductive research are no whit
less valuable than those owed to the other. Forms
are essential, even if it be possible to make the terrible
mistake of regarding them as all-important to the ex
clusion of matter.

And then, this is not the whole truth. There is a per
fectly serious Greek science— Mathematics— a science
of many branches : a science which, from Plato down
wards, always stood in alliance with the studies of
philosophy. Now, it might be said, perhaps with
ground, that the conception of mathematical method
too much dominated all attempts to get at the rationale
of science, and led to the supremacy of syllogism. It
would be fairer perhaps to put this objection in another
shape. We should then say that the logic of Aristotle,
—the Analytics— is too much restricted to dealing
with the most general and elementary principles of
reasoning. But this is not in itself a fault. It becomes
a fault only where there is no growth in philosophy —
when it is merely handed on from master to pupil ;
and where there is a tendency to put philosophic
doctrine to immediate use. To expend the whole energy
of intellect in laying bare the general principles, the
fundamental method, of knowledge and inference, is
precisely what the founder of a science has a duty to
do. But the beginning thus made requires development
—and development which is fruitful must proceed by cor
rection and antithesis, no less than by positive additions.
It was not given to Aristotle's logic to be so carried on.
His logic, like his system in general, had no real suc
cessor to carry it on in the following generation : and
when in the less original ages of early Byzantine rule
it again found students, it had become a quasi-sacred
text which could only be commented on, not modified
and developed. From the great Exegetai of Greece it

296 PROLEGOMENA. [xxi.

passed westward to Boethius and eastward to the
Syrian and Persian commentators in the early centuries
of the Caliphate. From these, and from other inter
mediaries, it may be, it finally culminated in the work
of the Latin Schoolmen of the later Middle Ages. But
the very reverence which all these expositors felt for
the text of the Philosopher rendered true development
impossible.

Then; on the other hand, the lust of practical utility
caused a grave misconception of what logic can do.
For Aristotle, logic is a scientific analysis of the modes
of inference ; its uses are those which follow intrinsi
cally from all noble activity freely and zealously prose
cuted. But with the death of Aristotle the great days
of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and divine
wisdom were over. The Stoics into whose hands the
chief sceptre of philosophy, directly or indirectly, passed
never rose above the conception of life as a task and
a duty, and of all other things, literature, science, and
art, as subservient to the performance of that task. The
conception is an ennobling one : but only with a relative
or comparative nobility. It ennobles, if it is set beside
and against the view that life is a frivolous play, a sport
of caprice and selfishness. But it darkens and narrows
the outlook of humanity, when it loses sight of life as
a j°y> a self-enlarging and self-realising freedom, of
life as in its supreme phase e^copta — or the enjoyment
of God. To the Stoic, therefore, — and to the dominant
Christian theory which entered to some extent on the
Stoic inheritance — logic, like the rest of philosophy, was
something only valuable because ultimately it helped
to save the soul.

It thus sunk into the position of an Organon or instru
ment. To the Stoic, — for instance to Epictetus— its
value was its use to establish the doctrines of the Stoic

XXI.] ARISTOTL&S LOGIC. 297

faith, by confuting the ill-arranged and futile inferences
on which were founded the aims and approvals of
ordinary worldly life. To the Christian, again, it
served as a method for putting into systematic shape
(under the guidance of certain supreme categories or
principles also borrowed from Greek thought) the
variety of fundamental and derivative aspects which suc
cessive minds, pondering on the power and mystery of
the Christian faith, had set forward as its essential
dogmas. It thus helped to build up (out of the leading
ideas of Greek metaphysics, and the principles emerging
in the earliest attempts to formulate the law of Christ)
that amalgam of the power of a divine life with the
reflective thought of the teachers of successive genera
tions, which constitutes the dogmatic creed of Christen
dom. Such a reconstruction in thought of the reality
which underlies experience — (in this case the experi
ence of the Christian life), is inevitable if man is to be
man, a free intelligence, and not a mere animal-like
feeling. But its success is largely, if not entirely,
dependent on the value of the logic and metaphysics
which it employs : and it would be a bold thing to say
that the subtle, abstract, and unreal system of Neo-
Platonist and Nee-Aristotelian thought was an organon
adequate to cope with the breadth and depth, latent
if not very explicit, in the fulness and reality of the
religious life.

Yet even as an Organon, Logic had to sink to a lower
rank. As traditionalism grew supreme, and religion
ossified into a stereotyped form of belief and practice,
logic had less to do as an organiser of dogma. It
sank, or seemed to sink (for it would be rash to
speak too categorically of an epoch of thought so far
removed from modern sympathy and understanding
as the age of the Schoolmen), into a futile (and as it seems

298 PROLEGOMENA. [xxi.

occasionally almost a viciously-despairing) play with
pro and contra, — into a lust of argumentation which in
masters like Ockam comes perilously close to scepticism
or agnosticism. More and more, Scholastic thought,
which, at one time, had been in the centre of such
intellectual life as there was, came to be stranded on
the shore, while the onward-flowing tide spread in
other directions. These were the great days of logical
sway, when it seemed as if logic could create new
truth : as if forms could beget matter. So at least ran
an outside rumour, which was probably based on some
amount of real folly. But the more important point
was that the old logic had lost touch with reality.
New problems were arising, which it was — without
a profound reconstruction — quite incapable of solving.
Of these there were obviously two — not unconnected
perhaps, but arising in different spheres of life. There
was the revival of religious experience, growing especi
ally since the thirteenth century with an ever-swelling
stream in the souls of men and women, till it burst
through all bounds of outward organisation in the
catastrophe of the Reformation. Luther may have
been historically unjust (as Bacon afterwards was) to
the 'blind heathen master/ as he called Aristotle : but he
was governed by a true instinct when (unlike the com
promise-loving Melanchthon) he found the traditional
system of logic and metaphysics no proper organon for
the new phase of faith and theory. So, too, the new
attempts at an inception and instauration of the sciences
grew up outside the walls of old tradition, and were
at first perhaps discouraged and persecuted as infidel and
heretical, and were, even without that burden, pursued
at much hap-hazard and with much ignorance both in
aims and methods. Intelligent onlookers, — especially
if inspired by an enthusiasm for the signs of an age

XXL] MODERN LOGIC. 299

happier for human welfare — could not but see how
needful it was to come to some understanding on the
aims and methods of the rising sciences.

This want, which he keenly felt, Francis Bacon tried
to satisfy. He pointed out, vaguely, but zealously
and in a noble spirit, the end which that new logic had
to accomplish. Bacon, however, could not do more
than state these bold suggestions : he had not the
power to execute them. He imagined indeed that he
could display a method, by which science would make
incredible advances, and the kingdom of truth in a
few years come into the world. But this is a sort of
thing which no man can do. Plato, if we take his
Republic for a political pamphlet, had tried to do it
for the social life of Athens. What Plato could not do
for the political world of Greece, Bacon could not do
for the intellectual world in his time : for as the
Athenian worked under the shadow of his own state,
over-mastered even without his knowledge by the
ordinances of Athens, so the Englishman was evidently
enthralled by the medieval conceptions and by the
logic which he condemned. What Aristotle had for
ages been supposed to do, no philosopher could do
for the new spirit of inquiry which had risen in and
before the days of Bacon. That spirit, as exhibited in
his great contemporaries, Bacon, as he has himself
shown, could not rightly understand or appreciate. He
failed, above all, to recognise the self-corrective, tenta
tive, and hypothetical nature, of all open inquiry. But
one need not for this disparage his work. It showed
a new sense of the magnitude of the modern problem :
it set prominently forward the comprehensive aim of
human welfare : and by its conception of the ' forma * it
kept science pledged to a high ideal. But Bacon could
only play the part of the guide-post : he could not

300 PROLEGOMENA. [xxi.

himself lay down the road. And negatively he could
warn against the belief that mathematics could generate
or do more indeed than define the sciences. The spirit
of free science, of critical investigation, of inductive
inquiry, must and did constitute its forms, legislation,
and methods for itself. For no philosopher can lay
down laws or methods beforehand which the sciences
must follow. The logician only comes after, and,
appreciating and discovering the not always con
spicuous methods of knowledge, endeavours to gather
them up and give them their proper place in the grand
total of human thought, correcting its inadequacies by
their aid, and completing their divisions by its larger
unities. Or rather this is a picture of what English
logic might have done. But it does not do so in the
ordinary and accepted text-books on the subject. What
it does do, is rather as follows. To the second and
fundamental part which it subjects to a few unimportant
alterations, — i. e. to the doctrine of terms, propositions,
and reasonings, — it subjoins an enumeration of the
methods used in the sciences.

To the rude minds of the Teutonic peoples the
logical system of Aristotle had seemed almost a divine
revelation. From the brilliant intellect of Greece
a hand was stretched to help them in the arrangement
of their religious beliefs. The Church accepted the
aid of logic, foreign though logic was to its natural
bent, as eagerly as the young society tried for a while
to draw support from the ancient forms of the Roman
Empire. So with the advance of the Sciences in
modern times some hopeful spirits looked upon the
Inductive Logic of Mill in the light of a new revelation.
The vigorous action of the sciences hailed a systematic
account of its methods almost as eagerly as the strong,
but untaught intellect of the barbarian world welcomed

XXI.] MODERN LOGIC.

301

the lessons of ancient philosophy. For the first time
the sciences, which had been working blindly or in
stinctively, but with excellent success, found their
procedure stated clearly and definitely, yet without any
attempt to reduce their varied life to the Procrustean
bed of mathematics, which had once been held to
possess a monopoly of method. The enormous influ
ence of the physical sciences saw itself reflected in
a distinct logical outline: and the new logic became
the dominant philosophy. Such for a while was the
proud position of the Inductive Logic. Enthusiastic
students of science in all countries, who were not
inaccessible to wider culture, used quotations from Mill
to adorn and authorise their attempts at generalisation
and theory. A period of speculation in the scientific
world succeeded the period .of experiment, in which
facts had been collected and registered. A chapter on
Method became a necessary introduction to all higher
scientific treatises. In our universities methodology
was prodigally applied to the study of ancient philo
sophy. And so long as the scientific epoch lasts in its
one-sided prominence, so long the theory of inductive
and experimental methods may dominate the intellec
tual world.

But the Inductive Logic hardly rose to the due sense
of its situation. It has not held to the same high ideal
as Bacon set before it. It has planted itself beside
what it was good enough to call the Deductive Logic,
and given the latter a certain toleration as a harmless
lunatic, or an old pauper who had seen better days.
Retaining the latter with certain modifications, although
it has now lost its meaning in the changed outlines of
the intellectual world, Inductive Logic adds a method
ology of the sciences, without however founding this
methodology upon a comprehensive analysis of know-

302 PROLEGOMENA. [xxi.

ledge as a whole, when enlarged and enlightened by
the work of the sciences. Hence the two portions,—
the old logic, mutilated and severed from the Greek
world it grew out of, and the new Inductive or specially-
scientific logic, not g6ing beyond a mere classification
of methods, — can never combine, any more than oil
and water. And the little psychology, which is some
times added, does not facilitate the harmony.

But Inductive Logic should have adopted a more
thorough policy. There can only be one Logic, which
must be both inductive and deductive, but exclusively,
and in parts, neither. To achieve that task however
Logic must not turn its back indifferently on what it
calls metaphysics, and it must rise to a higher con
ception of the problems of what it calls psychology.

In these circumstances the ordinary logic, in its
fundamental terms, is more on the level of popular
thought, than in a strictly scientific region, and does
not attempt to unite the two regions, and examine the
fundamental basis of thought on which scientific methods
rest. The case of Concrete and Abstract will illustrate
what has been said. To popular thought the sense-
world is concrete : the intellectual world abstract. And
so it is in the ordinary logic. To Hegel, on the con
trary, the intellectual interpretation of the world of
reality and experience is a truer and thus a more
concrete description of it than that contained in a series
of sense-terms. Now the difference between the two
uses of the term is not a mere arbitrary change of
names. When the philosopher denies the concreteness
of the sense-world, and declares that it, as merely sen
sible, is only a mass of excluding elements, a 'manifold/
and in the second instance a series of abstractions,
drawn out of this congeries by perception, the change of
language marks the total change of position between

xxi.] ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE. 303

the philosophic and the popular consciousness. Reality
and concreteness as estimated by the one line of thought
are the very reverse of those of the other. A mere
sense-world to the philosopher is a world which wants
unity, which is made up of bits imperfectly adjusted to
each other, and always leading us to look for an ex
planation of them in sources outside them. The single
things we say we perceive,— the here and the now
we perceive them in— are found, upon reflection and
analysis, to depend upon general laws, on relations
that go beyond the single,— on what is neither here nor
now, but everywhere and timeless. The reality of the
thing is found to imply a general system of relations
which make it what it is. Sense-perception in short is
the beginning of knowledge : and it begins by taking up
its task piecemeal. It rests upon a felt totality : and to
raise this to an intelligible totality, it must at first only
isolate one attribute at a time.

The apprehension of a thing from one side or aspect,
—the apprehension of one thing apart from its con
nexions,— the retention of a term or formula apart
from its context, — is what Hegel terms 'abstract/
Ordinary terms are essentially abstract. They spring
from the analysis of something which would, in the first
stage of the process, in strictness be described not as
concrete, but as chaos :— as the indefinite or 'manifold'
of sensation. But the first conceptions, which spring
from this group when it is analysed, are abstract : they
are each severed from the continuity of their reality.
To interpret our feeling, our experience as felt, we
must break it up. But the first face that presents
itself is apt to impress us unduly, and seems more real,
because nearer feeling : on the other it is more unreal,
because less adequate as a total expression of the felt
unity. In the same sense we call Political Economy

304 PROLEGOMENA. [xxi.

an abstract science, because it looks upon man as
a money-making and money-distributing creature, and
keeps out of sight his other qualities. Our notions in
this way are more abstract or more concrete, according
as our grasp of thought extends to less or more of the
relations which are necessarily pre-supposed by them.
On the other hand, when a term of thought owns and
emphasises its solidarity with others, when it is not
circumscribed to a single relation, but becomes a focus
in which a variety of relations converge, when it is
placed in its right post in the organism of thought, its
limits and qualifications as it were recognised and its
degree ascertained, — then that thought is rendered ' con
crete.' A concrete notion is a notion in its totality,
looking before and after, connected indissolubly with
others : a unity of elements, a meeting-point of opposites.
An abstract notion is one withdrawn from everything
that naturally goes along with it, and enters into its
constitution. All this is no disparagement of abstrac
tion. To abstract is a necessary stage in the process
of knowledge. But it is equally necessary to insist on
the danger of clinging, as to an ultimate truth, to the
pseudo-simplicity of abstraction, which forgets alto
gether what it is in certain situations desirable for a
time to overlook.

In a short essay, with much grim humour and quaint
illustrations, Hegel tried to show what was meant by
the name ' abstract/ which in his use of it denotes the
cardinal vice of the ' practical ' habit of mind. From
this essay, entitled ' Who is the Abstract Thinker l ? '
it may be interesting to quote a few lines. 'A murderer
is, we may suppose, led to the scaffold. In the eyes
of the multitude he is a murderer and nothing more.
The ladies perhaps may make the remark that he is

1 ' Wer denkt abstrakt?' (l^ermischte Schriften, vol. ii. p. 402.)

XXL] ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE, 305

a strong, handsome, and interesting man. At such
a remark the populace is horrified. " What ! a murderer
handsome ? Can anybody's mind be so low as to call
a murderer handsome? You must be little better your
selves." And perhaps a priest who sees into the heart,
and knows the reasons of things, will point to this
remark, as evidence of the corruption of morals pre
vailing among the upper classes. A student of character,
again, inquires into the antecedents of the criminal's
up-bringing : he finds that he owes his existence to ill-
assorted parents ; or he discovers that this man has
suffered severely for some trifling offence, and that
under the bitter feelings thus produced he has spurned
the rules of society, and cannot support himself other
wise than by crime. No doubt there will be people
who when they hear this explanation will say " Does
this person then mean to excuse the murderer ? " In
my youth I remember hearing a city magistrate com
plain that book-writers were going too far, and trying
to root out Christianity and good morals altogether.
Some one, it appeared, had written a defence of suicide.
It was horrible ! too horrible ! On further inquiry it
turned out that the book in question was the Sorrows of
Werther.

'By abstract thinking, then, is meant that in the
murderer we see nothing but the simple fact that he is
a murderer, and by this single quality annihilate all the
human nature which is in him. The polished and
sentimental world of Leipsic thought otherwise. They
threw their bouquets, and twined their flowers round
the wheel and the criminal who was fastened to it. —
But this also is the opposite pole of abstraction. — It
was in a different strain that I once heard a poor old
woman, an inmate of the workhouse, rise above the
abstraction of the murderer. The sun shone, as the

x

3o6 PROLEGOMENA.

severed head was laid upon the scaffold. " How
finely," said the woman, " does God's gracious sun
lighten up Binder's head ! " We often say of a poor
creature who excites our anger that he is not worth
the sun shining on him. That woman saw that the
murderer's head was in the sunlight, and that it had
not become quite worthless. She raised him from the
punishment of the scaffold into the sunlit grace of God.
It was not by wreaths of violets or by sentimental
fancies that she brought about the reconciliation : she
saw him in the sun above received into grace.'

CHAPTER XXII.

FROM SENSE TO THOUGHT.

INDUCTION and Experience are names to which is
often assigned the honour of being the source of all our
knowledge. But what induction and experience consist
in, is what we are supposed to be already aware of; and
that is— it may be briefly said— the concentration of the
felt and sense-given fragments into an intimate unity.
The accidents and fortunes that have befallen us in
lapses of time, the scenes that have been set before and
around us in breadths of space, are condensed into
a mood of mind, a habitual shading of judgment,
or frame of thought. The details of fact re-arrange
themselves into a general concept ; their essence gets
distilled into a concentrated form. Their meaning
disengages itself from its embodiment, and floats as
a self-sustaining form in an ideal world. Thus if we
look at the larger process of history, we see every
period trying to translate the sensuous fact of its life
into a formula of thought, and to fix it in definite
characters. The various parts of existence, and exist
ence as a whole, are stripped of their sensible or factual
nature, in which we originally feel and come into
contact with them, and are reduced to their simple
equivalents in terms of thought. From sense and
immediate feeling there is, in the first place, generated
an image or idea which at least represents and stands
for reality ; and from that, in the second place, comes

X 2

308 PROLEGOMENA. [xxn.

a thought or notion proper, which holds the facts in
unity.

The phenomenon may, perhaps, be illustrated by the
case of numbers. To the adult European, numbers and
numbering are an obvious and essential part of our
scheme of things that seems to need no special ex
planation. But the experience of children suggests
its artificiality, and the evidence from the history of
language corroborates that surmise. If number be in
a way describable as part of the sense-experience, or
total impression, it certainly does not come upon us
with the same passivity on our part as the perception of
taste or colour, or even of shape. It postulates a higher
grade of activity. As Plato says, it ' awakes the intelli
gence ' : it implies a question and looks forward to an
answer : it is thus the first appearance of what in its
later fullness will be called ' Dialectic/ To put it
otherwise : Numbering can only proceed where there is
a unit, and an identity : it implies a one, and it implies
an infinite repetibility of that one \ It thus postulates
the double mental act, first of reducing the various to its
basis of identity, and, secondly, of performing a synthesis
of the identical units thus created. In the highly artificial
world in which we live all this seems simple enough.
The products of machinery, articles of furniture, dress,
&c., &c., are already uniform items : and the strokes
of a clock seem almost to invite summation. But in
free nature this similarity is much less obviously
stamped on things : and the products of primitive art —
of literal manu-facture — display an individuality, an
element of personal taste, even, which is necessarily
lacking in things turned out by machinery. Thus it
was necessary, before we could number, to reduce the
qualitatively different to a quantitative equality or com-
1 See vol. ii. p. 190, (Logic, § 102).

XXI1-] NUMBER. 309

parability. There are indeed some instances, in that
nearest of things to us, the human body, which might
help. There is the obvious similarity of organs and
limbs which go in pairs, and which might easily suggest
a dual, as, so to speak, a sensuous fact amongst other
facts. Again, there is the hand and its five fingers, or
the two hands and the ten fingers. The five or ten, as
a whole naturally given, suggest a grouping of numbers
in natural aggregates. The fingers, again, (and here
we may keep at first to the fingers proper, minus the
thumb,) may be without much ingenuity said to give us
a set of four, naturally distinct, yet naturally alike, and
needing, so to speak, the minimum of intelligence to
create the numerical scale from one to four. It is by
them, indeed, that Plato, it may be unconsciously,
illustrates the genesis of number. Here in short you
have the natural abacus of the nations, but one re
stricted, first, perhaps to the group 1-4, secondly to the
group i-io.

We have seen how the dual was, in certain instances,
almost a natural perceptive fact. But when it is so
envisaged, it is hardly recognised as number strictly so
called. It is only a fresh and peculiar sensuous at
tribute of things : a thing which has the quality of
duplication, not a thought which is the synthesis of
two identical units. It is a sort of accident, not part
of a regular system or series. So again with the plural,
which may appear in several shapes before it is as
signed to its proper place as a systematic function of
the singular. If the Malay, in order to say 'the king
of all apes ' has to enumerate one after another the
several sub-species of ape, or if to express 'houses' he
has to reduplicate the singular, to insert a word mean
ing 'all ' or 'many,' we can see that the conception of
number is for him still in the bonds of sense. It is not

310 PROLEGOMENA. [xxil.

a synthetic category, but only a material multitude.
But in other cases the plural proper is almost con
founded with the so-called ' collective/ It is not an
unfamiliar fact in Greek and Latin that the plural has
acquired a meaning of its own, — not the mere multiple
of its singular; as also that the collective term is
occasionally used as an abstract, occasionally as the
more or less indeterminate collection of the individuals.
Such plurals and such collectives represent a stage of
language and conception when the aggregate of singu
lars form a uniquely-qualified case of the object. And
the peculiarity of them is seen in the way the plurality
is immersed in and restricted to the special class of
objects : as e. g. when in English the plurality of
a number of ships is verbally stereotyped as against the
plurality of a number of sheep, or of partridges (fleet,
flock, covey). In such instances the category of
number is completely pervaded and modified by the
quality of the objects it is applied to. So, in the
Semitic languages, the so-called ' broken plural ' is
a quasi-collective, which grammatically counts as a
feminine singular (like so many Latin and Greek
collectives) : and whereas the more regular plural is
generally shown by separable affix, this quasi-collective
plural enters the very body of the word by vowel-
change, indicating as it were by this absorption the
constitution of a specifically new view of things. On the
other hand, it may be said, there is in this collective
a trace of the emergence of the universal and identical
element through the generalisation due to the con
junction of several similars all acting as one l.

In a true plural, on the contrary, it is required that the
sign of number be clearly eliminated from any peculiari
ties of its special object, and be distinctly separated

1 See Max Miiller in Mind, vol. i. 345.

XXII.] DUAL AND PLURAL. 311

from the collective. And similarly the true numeral
has to be realised in its abstractness, as a category
per se. And to do this requires some amount of
abstraction. In Greek, for example, we meet the dis
tinction between numbers in the abstract, pure numbers
(such as four and six), and bodily or physical numbers
(such as four men, six trees) \ The geometrical aspect
under which numbers were regarded by the Greeks,
e. g. as oblong or square numbers, bears in the same
direction. But another phenomenon in language tells
the tale more distinctly 2. Abundantly in Sanscrit and
Greek, more rarely in Zend and Teutonic, and here
and there in the Semitic languages, we meet with what
is known as the dual number, a special grammatical
form intended to express a pair of objects. The witty
remark of Du Ponceau 3 concerning the Greek dual,
that it had apparently been invented only for lovers
and married people, may illustrate its uses, but hardly
suffices to explain its existence in language. But
a comparison of barbarian dialects serves to show that
the dual is, as it were, a prelude to the plural, — a first
attempt to grasp the notion of plurality in a definite
way, which served its turn in primitive society, but
afterwards disappeared, when the plural had been
developed, and the numerals had attained a form of

1 Pure number is apiOpos ftovaSitcos : applied number is apiOfios
<pvaiKos or acu/KiTi/foy. Aristotle, Metaph. N. 5, speaks of dptOftds
irvpivos jj "yfjivos. But this is only Greek idiom : as we say ' Greek
history ' instead of ' History of Greece/ or vice versa, when we
translate Populus Romanus by ' people of Rome.' Aristotle is
speaking of 'proportions' or 'amounts' of fire or earth in the
compounds of these elements.

3 See L. Geiger, Ursprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen
Sprache und Vernunft (vol. i. p. 380). And Gabelenz (' Die me-
lanesischen Sprachen ') in the Abhandlungen der Sachsischen Gesell-
schaft der Wissenschaften (VIII), 1861, pp. 89-91.

3 Memoire sur le systeme grammatical, &c. p. 155.

312 PROLEGOMENA. [xxil.

their own. If this be so, the dual is what physiologists
call a rudimentary organ, and tells the same story as
these organs do of the processes of nature.

The language of the Melanesian island of Annatom,
one of the New Hebrides, may be taken as an instance
of a state of speech in which the dual is natural. That
language possesses a fourfold distinction of number in
its personal pronouns, a different form to mark the
singular, dual, trial, and plural : and the pronoun of the
first person plural distinguishes in addition whether the
person addressed is or is not included in the ' we-two/
'we-three,' or 'we-many ' of the speaker1. The same
language however possesses only the first three numerals,
and in the translation of the Bible into this dialect it
was necessary to introduce the English words, four,
five, &c. The two facts must be taken together : the
luxuriance of the personal pronouns and the scanty
development of numerals in such languages are two
phenomena of the same law. The numeral ' four ' to
these tribes is said to bear the meaning of ' many ' or
'several.' Another fact points in the same direction.
In many languages, such as those of China, Further
India and Mexico, it is customary in numbering to use
what W. von Humboldt has called class-words. Here
it is felt that an artificial unity has to be created,
a common denominator found, and all reduced to it,
before any summation can be carried out. Scholars
and officials, in Chinese, can only be classed under the
rubric of 'jewel ' or dignity : and animals or fish by
'tails/ as if thereby only could one get a handle to hold

1 Cf. nous and nous autres. The same distinction is found in some
American languages. There is a dual in the language of the Green-
landers ; but it is not, however, used when a natural duality seems to
call for it, but in cases when, though there might have been several
things, only two are actually found.

XXII.] NUMBER AND NUMERALS. 313

them and count them. (The idiom still lingers in
western languages : as in English, heads of cabbage, or of
cattle : or German, seeks Mann Soldaten.) So in Malay,
instead of 'five boys' the phrase used is 'boy five-man':
in other words, the numerals are supposed to inhere as
yet in objects of a special kind or common occurrence1.
And among the South Sea Islanders the consciousness
of number is decidedly personal : that is to say, the
distinction between one and two is first conceived as
a distinction between ' I ' and ' we two/ Even this
amount of simplification surpasses what is found
amongst some Australian tribes. There we find four
duals : one for brothers and sisters : one for parents
and children : one for husbands and wives : and one
between brothers-in-law2. Each pair has a different
form. We thus seem to see to what early language is
applied : not to designate the objects of nature, but the
members of the primitive family and their interests.
The consciousness of numbers was first awakened by
the need of distinguishing and combining the things
that belonged to and specially interested men and
women in the narrow circle of barbarian life3. It is
not altogether imaginative in principle, though it may
be occasionally surmise in details, to connect the rise
of grammatical forms with the temperament and char
acter of the people, and therefore with its social
organisation. If the Bantoo or Caflfir languages of
Southern Africa instead of a single third personal

1 W. von Humboldt, Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues,
p. 423 (ed. 1841); Misteli, Typen des Sprachbaues (1893).

2 Capt. Grey, Vocabulary of the dialects of S. W. Australia, pp. xxi
and 104 (1840).

3 The sharp distinction between the first and second personal
pronouns and the third : the want of any apparent connexion in
the Indo-Germanic languages between the first and second persons
singular and the plural form seems to point in the same direction.

314 PROLEGOMENA. [xxn.

pronoun and third personal termination to the verb
use the separate forms corresponding to the ten class-
prefixes of the nouns, it must be in accordance with the
general spirit and system of these tribes. The various
plural forms, if they persist, will reflect contemporary
modes of life.

Numbers were at first immersed in the persons, and
then, as things came to be considered also, in the
things numbered. The mind seems to have proceeded
slowly from the vague one to definite numbers. And
the first decided step was taken towards an appre
hension of numbers when two was distinguished from
one, and the distinction was made part of the personal
terminations. The plural was a further step in the
same direction : the real value of which, however, did
not become apparent until the numerals had been sepa
rately established in forms of their own. When that
was accomplished, the special form of the dual became
useless : it had outlived its purpose, and henceforth it
ceased to have any but that poetical beauty of old asso
ciation which often adorns the once natural, but now
obsolete growths of the past. When the numerals were
thus emancipated from their material and sensuous
environment, quantity was translated from outward
being in its embodiments into a form of thought. At
first, indeed, it was placed in an ethereal or imagi
native space, the counterpart as it were of the sensuous
space in which it had been previously immersed. It
became a denizen of the mental region, as it had been
before a habitant of the sense-world.

The mind was informed with quantity in the shape of
number : but it does not follow from this, that the new
product was comprehended, or the process of its pro
duction kept in view. Like all new inventions (and
numeration may fairly be classed under that head), it

XXII.] NUMBER AS A THOUGHT. 315

was laid hold of, and all its consequences, results, and
uses estimated and realised by the practical and defining
intellect. In one direction, it became, like many new
inventions in the early days of society, a magic charm,
and was invested with mystery, sacredness, and mar
vellous powers. But the intelligent mind, — the under
standing, — resolved to make better use of the new
instrument : and that in two ways, in practical work
and in theory. On the one hand it was applied prac
tically in the dealings of life, — in commerce, contracts,
legislation, and religion. On the other hand, the new
conception of number, which common sense and the
instinctive action of men had evolved, was carried out
in all its theory : it was analysed in all directions, and
its elements combined in all possible ways. The result
was the science of arithmetic, and mathematics in
general. Such consequences did the reflective under
standing derive from the analysis of its datum, — the
fact of quantity freed from its sensuous envelope.

The general action of understanding, and of practical
thought, is of this kind. It accepts the representative
images which have emerged from sensation, as they
occur : and tries to appreciate them, to give them
precision, to carry them into details, and to analyse
them until their utmost limits of meaning are explored.
Where they have come from, and where they lead to,—
the process out of which they spring, and which fixes
the extent of their validity, — are questions of no interest
to the understanding1. It takes its objects, as given in
popular conception, as fixed and ultimate entities to be
expounded in detail.

We have taken number as one example of the trans
ference of a sensible or sense-immersed fact into a form
of thought: but a form which is still placed in a supe-

1 Cf. vol. ii. Notes and Illustrations, p. 400.

316 PROLEGOMENA. [xxil.

rior or mental space. One advantage of taking number
as illustration, is that numbered things are distinguished
from numbers in an emphatic and recognised way.
Nobody will dispute that the abstraction, as it is called,
has an existence of its own, and can be made a legiti
mate object of independent investigation. But if the
process be more obvious in the case of the numerals,
there must have been a similar course of development
leading to the pronouns, the prepositions, and the
auxiliary verbs — to what has been called the ' formal '
or 'pronominal' or 'demonstrative* element, the con
nective and constructive tissue of language. Whether
these pronominal ' roots ' form a special and originally-
distinct class of their own, or are derived from a trans
mutation of more material or substantial elements, is
a question on which linguistic research casts as yet no
very certain light. It is true that on the one hand
etymology is mainly silent on the origin of pronouns,
numerals, and the more fundamental prepositions (i. e. can
not refer them to roots significant of qualitative being) :
and one need not lay much stress on remarks, like that
of Gabelenz l, that in the Indo-Chinese languages the
words for /, five, fish have a like sound, as do those for
thou, two, ear, or that / am, originally means / breathe.
In all languages — though with immense diversities of
degree, this formal element has attained a certain inde
pendence. And in many instances we can more or less
trace the process by which there grew up in language
an independent world of thought : we can see the
natural existence passing out of the range of the senses
into spiritual relations. Before our eyes a world of
reason is slowly constituting itself in the history of
culture : and we, who live now, enter upon the inherit
ance which past ages have laid up for us.

1 Die Sprachwissenschaft, p. 168.

XXII.] LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT. 317

There is, however, a difference between the way in
which these results look to us now, and the way in
which they originally organised themselves. The child
who begins to learn a language in the lesson-books and
the grammars finds the members of it all, as it were,
upon one level : adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and
verbs confront him with the same authority and rank.
This appearance is deceptive : it may easily suggest
that the words are not members in an organism, in and
out of which they have developed. And this organism
of thought has its individual types, expressed in the
great families of human speech. Its generic form (as
drawn out in a logical system) appears in different
grades, with different degrees of fullness, in Altaic and
Dravidian from what it does in Malay, or in Chinese,
and these again have their own predominant categories
as compared with those used in the American or
African languages, or in Indo-Germanic and Semitic.
If the Altaic languages e.g. are wanting in the verb
proper, and manage with possessive suffixes and nouns ;
if the Semitic tenses display a poverty which contrasts
with their wealth in Greek ; and yet each group per
forms its function, we may infer that each speech has
a complete organism, though it does not bring all its
parts to adequate expression. All this distinction of
'parts of speech/ of forms, prefixes and suffixes, &c., is
part of the life of language, embodying in more or less
distinct organs the organisation of thought in the indi
vidual form it reached in that speech-type. Thus in
Chinese there are strictly speaking no isolated words,
nouns, or verbs: there are only abstract parts of
a concrete sentence; and grammar in Chinese there
fore has no accidence (no declensions, conjugations,
&c.) but only syntax. Yet it is these abstract frag
ments which exist and seem to have independence and

31 8 PROLEGOMENA. [xxil.

inherent meaning: whereas the unity in which they
cohere to form a concrete context is the fleeting
sentence of the moment. At the opposite extreme,
again, the Mexican family 'of languages tend to incor
porate relations to subject and object with the verb, in
such a degree that the word almost becomes a sentence.
Facts like these suggest that a science of the forms of
language, in proportion as it generalises, tends to
approach logic; and that logic will have a converse
tendency to elevate to an unduly typical position the
grammatical form of the languages with which the
logician is best acquainted.

If these points were remembered, there would be
less absurd employment of the grammatical categories
of one group of languages to systematise another.
Greek and Sanscrit grammar plays sad havoc with the
organism of a Semitic tongue, and it is not less out of
place as a schema for delineating e.g. South African
dialect. Isolated words even in an Indo-Germanic
language — even, we may say, in such a language as
English — are still fractional, and do not get life and
individuality except in their context. And it needs but
a little experience to show how various that individuality
may be. It needs perhaps still more meditation to
realise that it is in this individuality that the real life of
language lies : in the words said and written to express
the thought of a personality. But, first, because lan
guage has its material and mechanical side, and
secondly, because in civilised countries it further
acquires a more stereotyped mechanism in written and
printed language, its parts tend to gain a pseudo-
independence. It is one aim of a philosophical dic
tionary to restore the organic interconnexion which in
the mere sequence of vocables in juxtaposition is apt
to be lost. What we call the meaning of a word is

xxil.] LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT. 319

something which carries us beyond that mere word,—
which restores the connexions which have been broken
off and forgotten. In the form of a dictionary, of
course, this can only be done piece-meal : but if each
piece is done thoroughly, it can hardly fail to bring
out certain comprehensive connexions. The mere
word seems a simple thing; and one is at first dis
posed to get rid of its difficulty by substituting a so-
called synonym. But a deeper study reveals the fact
that an exact synonym is a thing one can no more
find than two peas which are absolutely indistinguish
able. A synonym is only a practical pis alter. But
every word is really as it were a point in an infinitely
complex organic life, with its essence or meaning
determined by the currents to and fro which meet
in it.

Words as we see them prima facie in a printed page
do look separate entities. They stand, one here and
another there, in a quasi-extension, with marks of
direction and connexion pointing from one to another,
but of connexion apparently extraneous to the more
solid points which are represented by nouns and verbs,
or names of substances, actions, and attributes. Results,
as they are, of that practical analysis which the need of
writing down language has led to, they are treated as
complete wholes, which by the speaker are forced into
certain temporary connexions. But this is an illu
sion which, because a thing changes its relationships,
assumes that it can exist out of all relationships what
ever. Every word of Language is such an abstraction,
isolated from its context. But amid these contexts
there are certain similarities : identical elements are
detected : and these identical elements are the common
names of language, the terms of general significance.
In all cases, however, what an utterance of language

3 20 PROLEGOMENA. [xxil.

describes or expresses is a definite individual event
or scene, conceived as a concrete of several parts.
Each separate vocable is a contribution to the total :
a step towards the real redintegration of the whole
out of its several parts. But the total itself— the
content of fact in any single sentence— is only an
abstraction, — a part of the universe which human inter
est and need have isolated from the comprehensive
scope of things. Thus, in two degrees, we may say,
the picture produced in the sentence falls short of the
truth of things. Each statement is an arbitrary or
accidental cutting out of the totality: each element of
the cutting is dependent on that abstraction, and rela
tive to it. But— as in a given group of speech, the
same sets of circumstances will naturally be selected,
and tend to recur again and again, — the terms which
describe them will acquire a certain association with
the objects, and will come to be called the common
names of these agents, acts, and qualities. They denote
or 'represent' the things and acts, conceived however
in certain aspects and relations, and not in their entirety
and totality of nature.

In this product of intellectual movement above the
limits of sensation we have the 'representation1' as
Hegel calls it, on which the Understanding turns its
forces. We have one product of the organic whole of
thought taken by itself as if it were independent, set
forth as a settled nucleus for further acquaintance : and
this one point discussed fully and with precision,
elaborated in all detail and consequence, to the neglect
of its context, and the necessary limitations involved in
the notion. The process of name-giving may illustrate
this tendency in human thought to touch its objects
only in one point. The names given to objects do not

1 ' Vorstellung,' as distinguished from ' Begriff.*

xxii.] THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 321

embrace the whole nature of these objects, but give
expression only to one striking feature in them. Thus
the name of the horse points it out as ' the strong ' or
' the swift ' : the moon is ' the measurer ' or ' the shining
one ' ; and so in all cases. The object as expressed
in these names is viewed from one aspect, or in one
point: and the name, which originally at least corre
sponds to the conception, meets the object, properly
speaking, on that side only, or in that relation. The
object is not studied in its own nature, and in its total
world, but as it specially enters the range of human
interest, and serves human utilities. One can at least
guess why it should be so : why a name should, in
logical language, express an 'accidens' and not the
'essentia' of the object. For the investigation of primi
tive language seems to show that words, as we know
them in separate existence, are a secondary formation :
and that the first significant speech was an utterance
intended to describe a scene, an action, a phenomenon,
or complex of event. In point of time, the primary
fact of language is an agglomeration or aggregate, — we
may call it either word or clause (Xdyo$-, in short) —
which describes in one breath a highly individualised
action or phenomenon. The spirit or unifying prin
ciple in this group might be the accent. Such a word-
group denotes a highly specialised form of being : and
if we call it a word, we may say that the earliest words,
and the words of barbarous tribes, are ingeniously
special \ But it would be more correct to say, that in
such a group the elements of the scene enter only from

1 Thus in Malay, there are about twenty words for strike, according
as it is done with thick or thin wood, downwards, horizontally, or
upwards, with the hand, with the fist, with the ilat hand, with a club,
with the sharp edge, with a hammer, &c. (^See Misteli, Typen des
Sprachbaues, p. 265.)

322 PROLEGOMENA.

a single aspect or in a single relation. Accordingly
when disintegration begins, the result is as follows.
The elements of the group, having now become inde
pendent words held together by the syntax of the
sentence, are adopted to denote the several objects
which entered into the total phenomenon. But these
words, or fragments of the word-group, ' represent '
the objects in question from a certain point of view,
and not in their integrity. The names of things there
fore touch them only in one point, and express only
one aspect. And thus, although different names will
arise for the same thing, as it enters into different
groups, in each case the name will connote only
a general attribute and not the nature of the thing.
These names are in the Hegelian sense of the term
'abstract/ In popular phraseology, they are only
' signs ' of things : i. e. not ' symbols ' (though they may
have been in some cases symbolic in origin), for in
a symbol there is a natural correspondence or sensible
analogy to the thing symbolised, but something ' insti
tuted/ due to an 'understanding' or convention.

CHAPTER XXIII.

FIGURATE OR REPRESENTATIVE THOUGHT.

THE compensating dialectic whereby reason, under
the guise of imagination, overthrows the narrowness of
popular estimates, makes itself observed even in the
popular use of the terms abstract and concrete. Terms
like state, mind, wealth, may from one point of view be
called abstract, from another concrete. At a certain
pitch these abstractions cease to be abstract, and become
even to popular sense very concrete realities. In the
tendency to personification in language we see the same
change from abstract to concrete : as when Virtue is
called a goddess, or Fashion surnamed the despot of
womankind. In such instances, imagination, more or
less in the service of art and religion, upsets the narrow
vulgar estimates of reality. But it upsets them, so to
speak, by giving to the abstraction (through its creative
power) that sensuous concreteness which the mere
abstract lacks arid which the ordinary mind alone
recognises as real. It 'stoops to conquer.' Such
a representation is, as Hegel says1, ' the synthetic com
bination of the Universal and Individual': 'synthetic/
because not their free, spontaneous, and essential unity,
but the supreme product of the artistic will and hand,
which, rather than let the universal perish by neglect,

1 Werke, ii. 529, 555.

Y 2

324 PROLEGOMENA. [xxill.

build for it, the eternal and omnipresent, 'a temple
made with hands/ In mythology we can see the
same process : by which, as it is phrased, an abstract
term becomes concrete : by which, as we may more cor
rectly say, a thought is transformed into, or rather stops
short at, a representative picture. The many gods of
polytheism are the fixed and solidified shapes in which
the several degrees of religious growth have taken
' a local habitation and a name ' : or they bear witness
to the failure of the greater part of the world to grasp
the idea of Deity in its unity and totality apart from
certain local and temporary conditions. So, too, terms
like force, law, matter,— the abstractions of the mere
popular mind— are by certain periods reduced to the
level of sensuous things, and spoken of as real entities,
somewhere and somehow existent, apart from the think
ing medium to which they belong. Such terms, again,
as property, wealth, truth, are popularly identified
with the objects in which they are for the time and
place manifested or embodied.

In these ways the abstract, in the ordinary meaning,
becomes in the ordinary meaning concrete. The dis
tinction between abstract and concrete is turned into
a distinction between understanding and sense, instead
of, as Hegel makes it, a distinction in the adequacy and
completeness of thought itself. Thought (the Idea), as
has been more than once pointed out, is the principle
of unification or unification itself: it is organisation
plus the consciousness of organisation : it is the unifier,
the unity, and the unified,— subject as well as object,
and eternal copula of both. An attempt is at first made
in two degrees to represent the thought in terms of the
senses as a sort of superior or higher-class sensible.
When the impossibility of that attempt is seen, common
sense ends by denying what it has learned to call the

XXIIL] THE MATERIALISATION OF THOUGHT. 325

super-sensible altogether. These three plans may be
called respectively the mythological, the metaphysical,
and the positive or nominalist fallacies of thought. In
the mythological, or strictly anthropomorphic fallacy,
thought is conceived under the bodily shape and the
physical qualities of humanity, as a separate unifying,
controlling, synthetic agent, through whose interference
the several things, otherwise dead and motionless,
acquire a semblance of life and action, though in reality
but puppets or marionettes : that is to say, it is identi
fied with a subject of like passions with ourselves, a
repetition of the particular human personality, with its
narrowness and weakness. The action of the Idea
is here replaced by the agency of supposed living
beings, invested with superhuman powers. In the
metaphysical or realist fallacy we have a feeble ghostly
reproduction of the mythological. The living personal
deity is replaced by a faint scare-crow of abstract deity.
The cause of the changes that go on in nature is now
attributed to indwelling sympathies and animosities, to
the abhorrence of a vacuum, to selection, affinity, and
the like : to essences and laws conceived of as somehow
existent in a mystic space and time. In the positive
or nominalist fallacy, the failure of these two theories
begins to be felt : and the mind, which had only heard
of unifying reason under these two phases and is mean
while sure of its sense-perceptions, treats the objective
synthesis as a dream and a delusion. Or, at best, it
regards the synthesis as essentially subjective — as a com
plementary idealising activity of ours which ekes out the
defects of reality, and brings continuity into the discon
tinuous. Our thought — (it is only our thought) — is but
an instrument, distinct from us and from the reality :
yet acting as a bridge to connect these two opposing
shores — a bridge however which does not really reach

326 PROLEGOMENA. [xxm.

the other side, but only an artificial image, which simu
lates to us, and will for ever simulate, the inaccessible
reality. This last view is the utterance of the popular
matter-of-fact reason, when in weariness and tedium it
turns from the attempt to grasp thought pure and simple,
and instead of reducing the metaphysical antitheses to
the transparent unity of comprehension, relapses into
mere acceptance of a given reality.

In some of these cases the full step into pure thought
is never made. The creations of mythology, for example,
display an unfinished and baffled attempt to rise from
the separation of sense to the unity and organisation of
thought. The gods of heathenism are only individuals—
and individuals only meant to be, and by the act of faith
and devotion set forth as reality before the worshipper :
but they are individuals in which imagination embodies
a unified and centralised system of forces or princi
ples. They mean the powers of nature and of mind,
but the sceptre in their hands is only a sign of power
attributed by the believer ; and far away, encompassing
alike them and him, is the great relentless necessity.
In other cases there is a relapse : when the higher stage
of thought has been attained, it is instantaneously lost.
Terms which are really thoughts are again reduced to
the level of the things of sense, individualised in some
object, which, though it is only a representation or sign,
is allowed to usurp the place of the thought which it
but partially and by extraneous institution embodies.
The intuition of the sensuous imagination at every step
throws its spells on the products of thought, and turns
them into a representative picture, which in popular use
and wont occupies the place of the notion. Instead of
being retained in their native timelessness, the terms of
the Idea are brought under the laws of Sense-perception,
under the conditions of space and time.

xxiii . J RRPRESENTA TIONS. 327

The term ' representation/ which Hegel employs to
name these picture-thoughts or figurate conceptions,
corresponds to the facts of their nature. A ' represen
tation ' is one of two things : either a particular thing
sent out accredited with general functions, or a universal
narrowed down into a particular thing. Thus, as it has
been seen, a general name implies or connotes a uni
versal relation or attribute, but confines it to denote
a particular object or class. ' Swift/ for example, was
an epithet tied down to express the horse. In the first
instance we may suppose the name to be a sort of
metaphor : differing only by its simplicity and frequency
of suggestion from those endless epithets, which in
Norse or Arabic poetry veil and adorn the object which
they are meant to designate. That is, we conceive the
object as an embodiment or representation of the quality,
as an eagle is the emblem of strength : only in the
latter case we distinguish between the object and its
metaphorical signification. In the second place, how
ever, the object of experience is allowed completely to
coincide with the aspect discriminated by the selective
epithet, and we can no longer in ordinary thought
separate the imaging object from the general relation
which it images forth. This is the level of thought to
which Hegel appropriates the term 'representation/
It includes under it the three fallacies of thought
already noted :— and saves the trouble of compre
hending the reality. In the Hegelian sense, a repre
sentation is abstract ; because it solidifies, hardens, and
isolates the term of thought, makes it a particular, and
never rises above the single case to the general notion
embodied in it.

The world of representative thought is a world of
independent points in juxtaposition, which we arrange
as seems best to us. It lies in an undefinable border-

328 PROLEGOMENA. [xxin.

land between us and things. It is a would-be, but not
an actual, reality. It is not like a true Idea— the unity
of subjective and objective : but only a make-believe.
We have put it there, and yet we credit it with an
effective existence. When our mind moves amongst
these picture-thoughts, it can only institute external
relations between the terms. A judgment, in that case,
is interpreted to mean the conjunction of two terms,
which at once step into the rank of subject and predicate
by means of the copula. A sentence is an arrangement
of words ab extra in conscious or unconscious con
formity with the rules of grammar. The world of
knowledge, or the Idea, as a whole is turned into
a plane surface with its typical terms, — the members
of the organism of reason, — like dots put in co-ordina
tion and juxtaposition, not spontaneously affected
towards each other. Even if they are not embodied
and reduced to a sensuous level of existence, they are
held to be originally separate and unconnected. How
they all came into being, and whether they do not all
by gradations and differentiation proceed from one root,
are questions neither asked nor answered.

The level of representative thinking — thinking i. e.
which is not the grasp (Begriff] of the reality, but only
the apprehension of something which stands for and
represents it — is the level on which we all come, more or
less, to stand in our non-philosophic moments. It is, in
essentials, the realm of what Plato called &>£a, — the level
of consciousness which fails to rise to see the unity of
essence in the many single goods and beauties, which
holds its knowledge (such at is) at the mercy of acci
dents, not bound by the conclusions of reasoning, — the
realm which is not without reality, but an immature
and uncertain reality. It is, in essentials, the same as
what, as opposed to intellectus, Spinoza styled imaginatio.

xxiii.] PICTURE-THINKING.

329

Imagination, to Spinoza, is an understanding under the
bondage of particular passions and temporary interests,
which loses sight of the great bond of being or Substantia,
and fixes its glance on the parts in subordinate and
infra-essential relationships : which is always finite,
i. e. never really comprehensive and self-sustaining in
its view, but always limited by a tacit reference to some
thing outside itself. The ' Representation ' is the idea,
in the loose and inexact use of that word, which goes
with the phrase mere idea, — i. e. a mere mental image,
which is not the reality, though it is believed to do duty
for and to represent it *. Yet it is not a mere thought :
rather its whole aim and meaning is to refer to reality,
to suggest it, to bring it nearer us. Its fault is that it is
an imperfect, partial, one-sided, or even one-pointed
idea. It is really an instance and phase of the ignava
ratio, to which a date or name serves as a TTOU o-rco of
explanation.

'At Kilne there was no weathercock,
And that 's the reason why.'

Such ' representation/ according to Hegel, is, e. g., the
mode of intelligence accessible to those who cling to
the mere, or abstractly, religious mood, and who cannot
or will not rise to the comprehension of their creed.
Its facts or dogmas present themselves to such a
restricted conception as the parts of a picture or the
stages of a history, in visible or imaginatively-constru-
able space, and in a succession of times. The essence
of religion, of course, for Hegel as for other exponents
of its inmost nature, is a feeling of certitude or faith
which transcends the gulfs and separations of the secular
consciousness, which sees with the believing soul the

1 Hegel's Werke, ii. 431 : ' Wobei das Selbst nur reprasentirt und
vorgestellt 1st, da ist es nicht wirklich : wo es vertreten 1st, ist es
nicht.' Cf. ib. 416.

330 PROLEGOMENA. [xxill.

inner peace, the absolute harmony of the true reality.
Pectusfacit theologum. The sense of utter dependence
on God, incomplete identity with the sense of absolute
independence in God— that strength of faith is the very
life of religion. But when religion seeks to give an
intelligent expression of her faith, when she tries to give
a reason acceptable to the outside world, she is apt,
unless specially trained in the high things of the spirit,
to base her creed not on the rock of ages, but on the
signs and miracles of the times. She has tried to
theorise the faith : but, although her faith may be sound
and true, the religious spirit, unless it be also the spirit
of wisdom and reasoned truth, runs a risk of falling into
the fallacy of Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. She descends
therefore to the region of representation : she uses the
language of sense and analogy ; she presents the spiri
tual under the guise of the natural. Yet in her heart of
hearts these things are only a parable, — they are but

' Flesh and blood
To which she links a truth divine.'

Hegel— in the introduction to his lectures on the Philo
sophy of Religion— is reported to have given the follow
ing characteristics of 'representation/ (a) It is still
trammeled by the senses. Thought and sensation
strive for the mastery in it. Thought is bound fast to
an illustration : and of this illustration it cannot as
representative thought divest itself:— the eternally
living idea is chained to the transient and perishable
form of sense. It is metaphorical and material thinking,
which is helpless without the metaphor and the matter.
(b) Representative thought envisages what is timeless
and infinite under the conditions of time and space. It
loses sight of the moral and spirit of historical develop
ment under the semblance of the names, incidents, and
forms in which it is displayed. The historical and philo-

xxill.] PICTURE- THINKING. 3 3 1

sophical sense is lost under the antiquarian. Repre
sentative thought keeps the shell, and throws away the
kernel, (c) The terms by which such a materialised
thought describes its objects are not internally con
nected : each is independent of the other ; and we only
bring them together for the occasion by an act of subjec
tive arrangement1.

The thing — the so-called subject of the properties, of
which it is really no more than the substratum — affords
no sufficient ground for the unity of the properties
attached to it. The substratum or subject of the propo
sition is given, and we then look around to see what
other properties accompany the primary characteristic
for which the name was applied. But the term of
popular language is not a real unity capable of support
ing differences ; it is only one aspect of a thing, a single
point fixed and isolated in the process of language by
the action of natural selection. And so, to ask how the
properties are related to the thing, is to ask how one
aspect, taken out of its setting, is related to another
isolated aspect : which is evidently an unanswerable
question. Science is right in rejecting the 'thing* of
popular conception. If a is a, and nothing more, as the
law of Identity informs us, then it is for ever impossible
to get on to b, c, d, and the rest. The union between
the thing divided or defined, and its divided or defining
members, is what is termed extra-logical ; in other
words, it is not evident from what is given or stated
in the popular conception. That union must be sought
elsewhere, and deeper.

And when we step in to overcome the repugnance
which the point of conception, or what is supposed the
subject, shows against admitting a diversity of predicates,
—when we force it into union with these properties : or

1 Philosophic der Religion, i. p. 137 seqq.

332

PROLEGOMENA. [xxm.

when we try to remove the separation which leaves the
cause and effect as two independent things to fall
apart ; our action, by which we effect a unification of
differences, may, from another and a universal point of
view, be said to be the notion, or grasp of thought,
coming to the consciousness of itself. Thought, as it
were, recognises itself and its image in those objects of
representative conception, which seem to be given and
imposed upon the intellect. The two worlds, which the
understanding accepts as each solid and independent,—
the world of external objects or conceptions, and the
world of self, — meet and coincide in the free agency of
thought, developing itself under a double aspect. It is
the 'original synthetical unity of apperception ' (to quote
Kant's words), from which the Ego or thinking subject,
and the 'manifold' or body and world, are simultaneously
differentiated. Thus, on the one hand, we ourselves no
longer remain a rigid unity, existing in antithesis to the
objects presupposed or referred to by representative
thought : and on the other hand the so-called thing
loses its hardness and fragmentary independence, as
distinguished from our apprehension of it. Our action,
as we incline to call it, which mends the inadequacies of
terms, is from a philosophic point of view, the notion
itself coming to the front and claiming recognition.
The process of thought is then seen to be a totality,
of which our faculties, on the one hand, and the existing
thing, on the other, are isolated abstractions, supposed
habitually to exist on their own account. To view
either of these systems, the mental, on the one hand,
and the objective world, on the other, as self-subsistent,
has been the error in much of our metaphysics, and in
the popular conceptions of what constitutes reality.
The idealism of metaphysicians has been often as narrow
and insufficient as the realism of common sense. An

XXIII.] REPRESENTATION AND THOUGHT. 333

adequate philosophy, on the contrary, recognises the
presence of both elements, in a subordinate and forma
tive position. Representations may be compared to the
little pools left here and there by the sea amongst the
rocks and sand : the notion, or grasp of thought, is the
tidal wave, which left them there to stagnate, but comes
back again to restore their continuity with the great sea.
In our thinking we are only the ministers and inter
preters of the Idea, — of the organic and self-developing
system of thought.

The difference between a representative conception
and a thought proper may be illustrated by the case of
the term ' Money/ Money may be either a materialised
thought, i. e. a Representative Conception, or a Notion
Proper. In the former case, money is identified with
a piece of money. It is probably, in the first instance,
embodied in coins of gold, silver, and bronze. In the
second place, a wide gulf is placed between it and the
other articles for which it is given in exchange. If
other things are regarded as money, they are generally
treated on the assumption that they can in case of need
be reduced to coinage. The conception of money by
the unscientific vulgar considers it separately from
other commodities : and the laws which forbade its
exportation gave a vigorous expression to the belief
that it was something sui generis, and subject to con
ditions of its own. The scientific notion of money
modifies this belief in the peculiarity and fixity of
money. Science does so historically, when it can point
to a time and a race where money in our sense of the
word does not exist, and where barter takes the place
of buying and selling. Science does so philosophically,
when it expounds what may be called the process of
money, — the inter-action or meeting of conditions to
which the existence of money is due. The notion of

334 PROLEGOMENA.

money, as given in the Ethics of Aristotle, says that it
is the common measure of utility or demand. When
we leave out of sight the specific quality of an object,
and consider only its capacity of satisfying human
wants, we have what is called its worth or value. This
value of the thing, — the psychological fact which is left,
when all the qualities marking the objective thing are
reduced to their social efficiency — is the notion, of
which the currency is the representation, reducing
thought to the level of the senses, and embodying the
' ideality ' of value in a tangible and visible object. So
long as this ' idea ' of value is kept in view, the cur
rency is comprehended : but when the perception of
the notion disappears, money is left a mere piece of cur
rency, the general notion being narrowed down to the
coinage. Thus the notion of money, like other notions
in their ideal truth, is not in us, nor in the things
merely : it is what from a minor point of view, when
we and the things are regarded under the head of want
or need, may be called the truth of both, the unity of
the two sides. Thus considered, money falls into its
proper place in the order of things.

CHAPTER XXIV.

FROM SUBSTANCE TO SUBJECT.

'!T is; in my view; all important/ says Hegel1, 'to
apprehend and express the True not as Substance, but
equally much as Subject.' Substance, as Spinoza
defines it, is that which is in itself and which is con
ceived through itself, something which does not need the
conception of something else by which its concept may
be formed 2. Substance, in other words, is something
which serves to explain itself, which is causa sui. The
mind, looking out on the wide world of mutable and
manifold objects, finds its rest in the great calm of
a something at their base, the eternal nature which,
itself unmoved, is the one foundation, complete and
sufficient, of all things, — a res aeterna et infmita, which
can feed the mind with joy alone3. These words suggest
only an object — a transcendent object — the basis of an
objective order. They seem to leave little for the con
templating subject to do save to discern it and, so dis
cerning, to rest in it and to love. They seem to leave
substance a mere datum, a far-off all-embracing end in
which the variety of human effort can find a central
object and a final close. Yet, in the end it appears 4
that this Res aeterna loves himself with an intellectual

1 Hegel, Werke, ii. 14. 2 Spinoza, Eth. Def. 3.

3 Spin. De intell. Em. \. 10. * Spin. Eth. v. 35.

336 PROLEGOMENA. [xxiv.

love, and this love is identified with the love of man to
God, so far at least as man's mind, considered sub
specie aeternitatis, can be said to 'explicate' Deity.
From this conclusion it might be said that Spinoza
rises above the mere category of substance : God is no
longer the mere foundation of things — the absolute
object of all objects. He rises in human spirit (regarded
in its eternal significance) to the rank of a true subject.
He is not merely known as the True ; but He himself,
living and moving in the essential spirit of man, knows
himself and acquiesces in his infinite beatitude. But if
this be the legitimate inference to be drawn from the
closing sections of the Ethics, it is not the view ordinarily
suggested by the mention of Spinoza's doctrine. That
doctrine, on the contrary, seems, as it first confronts us,
and as it has taken its place in history, to omit the
subjectivity which had found so decided a recognition
in the commencement of Cartesianism. In the cogito
ergo sum so much at least is clearly stated : true being
—the true — is not merely known, but itself knows ; not
a mere object, but a subject : a subject-object, or, an
Idea. It is to be admitted, indeed, that Descartes
hardly remains at this altitude, but he touches it for
a moment. Even when he finds in the conception of
God a security for truth and reality, and thus seems to
base these on a one-sidedly objective standard, he
regards God as, on the other hand, the truth and
reality postulated and presupposed by the structural
system of our ideas. God — such seems the tendency
of his so-called 'proof — is the inevitable prius and
presupposition of our thought and being : He makes us
know, as much as He is ultimately the object known: He
is the unity and the creator of subject and object.

But it is hardly possible to get in philosophy the full
recognition of the antithesis between subject and sub-

xxiv.] SPINOZA. 337

stance and the inclusion of both in the fuller Idea, till
after the time of Kant. Kant himself is, in essentials,
the antithesis of Spinoza, but it is not till Fichte that
the full force of that antithesis is expressly recognised.
With Hegel, the two opposite points of view are equally
insisted on : the immanence and the transcendence of
the True, the Real, the Absolute : or, in other words,
the unity in it of subject and object, or of thought and
existence. Or, in the words of the religious spirit, though
heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him,
He dwells in the spirit of the righteous, and is not far
from any one of us. The truth is not the correspond
ence or agreement of an idea with a further reality
which it represents. Such an idea or ' representation '
is a projection which has escaped from our hands,
which has slipped from our grip, and which, while
owning its mere vicarious character, at the same time
beckons us on to seek a reality we can never find.
The ' representation J is in a way objective — it is set
over against us: but yet it is not truly objective, not
self-subsistent and self-possessed. Its objectivity is
the objectivity of a name : a quasi-objectivity, which
requires to be dipped in the living waters of intelligence
before it can really exist and act. It seems, to the
untrained observer, to point only outwards to the real
object which it copies or designates : to a deeper re
flection, it is seen to point equally inward to the mind
which informed it and projected it. Thus the knowing
subject, and the known object, with the representation
which acts as a perpetual mediator to connect and yet
not unify the one of these terms with the other, — all
at last take their place, reduced and transfigured, in the
unity of the Idea.

According to the Spinozist point of view, thought, it
might seem by a sort of miracle, dispels the mists that

z

338 PROLEGOMENA. [xxiv.

envelop and bewilder it, sees through the multeity of
modes, and the isolated pictures of imagination, to
the true reality, one, infinite and eternal. Before that
august vision of absolute wholeness the only attitude
of a finite mind would seem to be resignation, worship,
reverence, — deeply shading into the submission of
absorption. For in it intellect and will are declared
to have no place *. With such a statement, we get
that first aspect of religion which has found its most
imposing representative in the faith of Islam. In every
religion there must, however, be more than this : or
it would fail to do what all religion essentially does.
Sheer dependence— Schlechthinnige Abhangigkeit (as
Schleiermacher has named it)— can never be the whole
burden of a religious teacher's message. Always — at
least in the background— there is a contradictory
element — in apparent discrepancy with the first — the
deification of the worshipper. And as the Ethics of
Spinoza — like every complete system of speculative
truth— deals with a problem parallel to, if not even
identical with, that of religion, its initial definitions and
main programme must never let us forget the tacit pre
suppositions worked out to explicitness, as they are
partly, in its conclusion. When Intellect and Will are
denied to the Deiis—Natura — Substantia, it is meant that
the Absolute is and has more than intellect and will
can well name, and that in Him (or Her, or It, for the
pronominal distinctions of gender matter nothing here),
the separation of will from intellect is a fallacy which
can have no place. What Spinoza casts out are the
lower passions, the affections of weakness ; these as
such, i. e. as elements of weakness, can have no place
in Him. But in God, as in the free man who most
resembles God, and in whose love He loves himself,
1 Eth. i. 17 schol.

SPINOZA, 339

there is— but that also in terms we cannot fathom-
abundance of joy— the joy of infinite self-realisation.

Partly by the complementary theory of Leibniz, partly
by the antagonist theories of Kant, the way had been
prepared for setting forth, and in fuller outline, the
implications so tardily admitted by Spinoza. It was
only by a misuse or mal-extension of a word that
Herder's God — a God who is Force — and the Force of
Forces — could be supposed an advance upon Spinoza.
There is in Force an analogue of Life ; but it is life in
dependence, life not self-centred, always going forth,
and when it goes forth dissipated. It is as it were
pushed from behind, and is lost in what comes after it.
If a Force of Forces means anything, it means some
thing more than Force: it means a master of force,
a force-controller and force-adjuster, a unity and
principle of forces. And Substance, as Spinoza under
stood it, is more than this variability, this deification
of instability. It is the unity in which the variety and
disparity of existence, the multiplicity of vicissitude, is
merged and lost, only again to issue from it, and yet
not leave it behind, in the infinitely-various modes of
its two great and conspicuous attributes of conscious
ness and extensionality. If Hegel then sought to go
beyond Spinoza, he sought to find a formula which
would lose nothing that Spinoza had reached, but
would at the same time bring out what Spinoza had
left an implication, or noted in a partial rectification.
As in religion, besides the utter dependence on God
(so that, God failing, I perish), there must be also an
absolute union, complete reconciliation — complete as
culminating in unity and identity (so that God shall
not be God, unless I am I): so it is in philosophy.
The Absolute cannot merely be, and be far away — the
last goal in which the variety of life is made one, and

z 2

340 PROLEGOMENA. [xxiv.

the turmoil of the passionate existences laid to rest.
The Soul which is (as some of the medieval Christians
would say) still in itinere, a wayfarer, is such because
its glance is turned on outward circumstances : but
country is no accident : the soul even here carries
with it that patria, ' which is the heavenly/ in its
longings, and has it, even while yet on pilgrimage, in
that strong possession of all things by itself, which
the theologian styles Faith. This goal determines
the pilgrimage, fixes its direction, gives progress to
its steps.

In the myth-loving language of Plato (and of Words
worth in his Platonic ode) the Soul has in other spheres
of being dwelt with the gods and seen the secret of the
world : it is itself one of the immortals, and as it is
here and now, is in a land of exile. At the morning of
birth, the living sample of humanity has left his original
glory behind; and a deep forgetfulness— only short of
absolute — cuts it off from his every-day consciousness.
In his present reality he finds himself in a land of
darkness, fast bound in a hollow of the rock, looking
out only on the ghostly images that flit across his
prison wall, cast there by the objects that move between
his back and the light of a mysterious fire behind him
and them. Such is his natural estate, as it meets the
bodily eye : the estate of the lowly savage, whom
superstition and ignorance seem to hold as their cap
tive for ever. But, though his high home and his
glory of other days have left no conscious memory in
the soul, asleep and imbruted in its fleshly house, they
have not departed without leaving a trace behind. For
forgetfulness is not blank non-existence. The sample
of humanity inherits the birthright of his fathers — he
has hopes and fears, duties and rights, which are his, if
he can mature himself to take possession of them. He

xxiv.] THE PLATONIC MYTH. 341

suffers from the pains of growth, from the sense of
disparity between what he is and what he may and
should be — from the noble uneasiness and dissatisfac
tion of a being who feels — if he does not know — his
infinite potentialities. For these potentialities— other
wise they have no title even to that name — are also
actualities, yet actualities which protest their own in
completeness, and crave imperiously for what they
lack. What he has is his right, but his right only in
so far as it is also his duty. It is as such, and only as
such, that he still retains the soul in all its prerogatives :
as the right, which is the duty, of knowledge. Such
a pre-figured and promised, but yet to be realised,
possession is what Plato has called Eros, or Love.
But it is a Love whose wings are at first invisible, and
who often seems rather to crawl among ignoble things
than to soar in the free fresh air.

The process of experience has been by Plato called
Anamnesis or Recollection. But Recollection is not
always an easy, and never a merely passive, process ;
and sometimes the forgetfulness seems so deep that no
extraneous stimulus can at all move it. We have seen
already one of these stimuli which rouse the sleeping
sense — the mystery of numbers : and there are many
others. But, we have also learned, that in the psychical
sphere items of memory are not, as reckless fancy puts
it, stored up in compartments, sorted and arranged,
ready to be pulled out. The process of recollection
is a complicated affair : an affair of give and take, of
comparison and selection and rejection, of construction
and reconstruction. You cannot haul up ready-made
memories from the mine. And this perhaps was some
times forgotten by Plato ; it certainly has been by more
than one of his commentatprs. You may, no doubt, call
up ideas from the vasty deep : but they come by laws

342 PROLEGOMENA. [xxiv.

and principles of their own. Even when they come,
which they sometimes do unexpectedly, they come as
an echo of the calling mind. Recollection involves
intellectual process : as Kant said, the synthesis of
imagination reposes upon the synthesis in the concept.
Yet— and this is the point which Plato's title of
Anamnesis accentuates— unless ' the soul had been such
as to be affected in this way ' (the words are those of
Aristotle), unless the soul had been implicitly intellectual
in tone and faculty, it would not have grasped the
presented universe under the categories which it uses.
There is, says Aristotle, in the barest act of sensation
a congenital power of judgment ; there is, says Plato,
an eye of the soul— a natural virtue of intelligence,
which can never be put into it, and must always be
presupposed in any theory of its processes.

There are, therefore, no innate ideas, says Cudworth
in explanation of Plato, if these ideas mean formed
and completed products of knowledge. All ideas in
this sense begin and grow within the range of experi
ence, and the history of their growth or development
in literature and art can be at least approximately
traced. We can trace, that is, the successions and
connexions of the various types of beauty, or goodness :
can show how the idea at one time dwelt in one of its
aspects, at another in a different one. We can observe
the variation, and it may be the progress, in men's con
ception of God. But it is another matter when we
seek to explain these ideas themselves out of other
elements, heterogeneous to them. When that question
is asked, then with Plato we seem, in the absence of
any theory of origins, obliged to own that it is by the
Beautiful that beautiful things come to be beautiful.
The M6ra£acrt9 fls «XXo yews — the crossing of essential
boundaries— which Aristotle forbids to science, still

xxiv.] ULTIMATE CATEGORIES. 343

raises its eternal barrier in the logical, if it cease to
hold good (as has been suggested) in the physical
sphere. In the totality which we call the world and
experience of reality there are, so to say, ultimate and
irreducible provinces. The utmost that philosophy,
i. e. science, can do with these is to co-ordinate them,—
to show their mutual filiations, adaptations, and har
monies, — to note their inadequacies and discrepancies.
They are not all of equal rank, perhaps ; they have to
yield to each other, it may be in turn : but none of
them can be arbitrarily expunged from the totality, and
none of them shown to be a mere phase of others. To
do that is to strip the universe of its variety and — it
may be added — of its beauty and its interest. If it be
a false philosophy that does it, there is a good deal
of false philosophy abroad. There is a lust of ex
planation which is never content till it has found an
equation for everything, till it has expressed every
thing in terms of the common-place, till it has emptied
everything of all that made it individual and real, and
turned it into an abstract, identical (as only abstracts
can be) with some other abstract. Such abstractions
are of course useful, and therefore need no excuse,
when restricted to a special sphere. So long, that is,
as we remember that it is an abstraction we are making,
and that we are arbitrarily simplifying the real natural
problem, no harm is done by these artificial construc
tions ; and they are important steps in a larger process.
But what is correct and useful within a range whose
limits we can define, becomes dangerous when carried
beyond all bounds. Its approximate truth then becomes
misleading error.

It is these irreducible elements — these great provinces
in human experience, in reality, in the system of
reason — that correspond to the more important of what

344 PROLEGOMENA. [xxiv.

are known as Platonic ideas. As ultimate constituents
of the actual world they are in the narrower sense
inexplicable. One does not amount to an exact sum
of some others, nor is one got from another by the
simple process of subtraction. But if they cannot be
explained, by being reduced to multiples of some one
basis, they can be comprehended in the respective
implication and explication they exhibit with their co-
realities. They can be correlated, reduced, and unified :
we may even say, they can be identified ; but if we use
such a term, we must mean that there is some totality
beyond and above them in which they all find a place
and all are harmonious ; in which all when brought to
their Truth are really one and the same. This birth
right of human nature in all ages and countries — this
central essence of man's spirit — is the realm of Platonic
ideas. They are the great elements, or constituent
members, of humanity and of reality : the framework
of his mind and of the world. How in each case they
may be wrought out in detail, to what degree they may
here be evolved, and there stunted, is a matter of
historical research. And, in a sense, even it is not
wrong to try to trace them one to another : to explain
them, as the phrase is, one by another. For they are
essentially connected : they are members of one system :
they are unified and harmonised in a way for which
even the word 'organism ' is wholly insufficient. They
are the poles and lines on which the tent of human life,
of intelligent life, is stretched : but they are also the
invisible ties which bind together the earth and heavens,
and all that is therein.

These ideas therefore are immanent in man : for they
are the basis of human nature. But to name, to dis
entangle them, to measure out their bounds and describe
their connexions— that is no easy work. And that is

xxiv.] PLATONISM. 345

the work of Platonic recollection. That is the process
of historical experience. But it is a small thing for
Plato to say that these ideas are innate in man. What
he is more concerned to make clear is that in the
possession or vision of these eternal forms, the human
soul is a partner of the gods, a citizen of the heavens.
In less mythical language, man, as an intelligent, artistic,
moral, and religious being, is not a mere accidental
on-looker on the surface of things, but near their central
and abiding truth. The forms of his mind, to speak
after the manner of Kant, are the objective essences
of the real world of experience. Degrees there may
be in the reality which they possess — less or larger
measures of truth to full experience — but true and real
they are : never mere falsity or emptiness. To estimate
the amounts of that reality is a problem Plato often
tried. At one time it seems as if the Good were in his
estimate the form of forms, the real of reals : but when
we look closely, we see that it is a goodness which is
synonymous with real reality or perfect being. At
another time truth, i. e. reality, seems to be lord of all :
at another, beauty : and again he seems to confess his
inability to lay down the order of precedence in this
hierarchy. Of one thing only he is perfectly clear : and
that is the unreality, the non-entity of the sense-world
as merely perceived, and the true being of the world of
reason. But he has no doubts as to the central truth
that in the good, the true, and the beautiful, there is
a higher reality — a more far-reaching and deep-piercing
influence than in all the mere variety of sensation, the
mere multitude of sensible fact.

What Plato has sometimes called the act of remi
niscence, what he has sometimes called the instinct
of Love, is also known to him as the process of Dialectic.
For reminiscence has to watch and wrestle with the

346 PROLEGOMENA. [xxiv.

inertia of oblivion, has to set the imagined beside the
real, and to correct percepts by concepts, concepts by
percepts, has to brace up its energies, and to advance
not by mere pressing onward, but by tacking and zig
zagging through contrary difficulties finally realise
itself. And love too is a battle, where the craving for
union has to measure its force with the instinct of inde
pendence, where selfishness and self-surrender seek
a reconciliation, and where in the close, if the close be
love, each is self-retained only as self-abandoned, and
each rises to a higher union in which lower selfhoods
are absorbed. Even so in the course of Dialectic. It
is the art which divides and conjoins, which unifies and
distinguishes : the art of asking and answering. To
Plato it appears in the main as an action of the in
telligent subject : but an action which, as he hints, is
almost a natural instinct, which through discipline has
become an art. In the hands of its typical artist, it
proceeds, or seems to proceed, as if unconscious of its
principle and end. Socrates has, as he professes, no
overt conception of the result : he has no knowledge of
the positive conclusion to be reached. It is the Logos
—the logic of reality— which sustains the movement.
Abandoning any subjective humour of carrying the
argument to a preconceived end; one is swept on by
the current of real logic— the reason in things. The
dogma we have set up and seemed to see before us,
will, if we are dispassionate, carry us on beyond itself,
and suggest aspects calling for recognition and accept
ance. If only we refrain from arresting the movement
of criticism, — a course to which prudence, ease, custom,
and every form of the ignava ratio counsel us,— truth
will reveal itself in us, and by us. It is because other
aims, personal and particular, are so ever-present with
us, that speculative free inquiry seems so hard. It is

X XIV.] PL A TON ISM. 347

we who insist on closing up the door, not the truth
that is reluctant to show itself.

Truth, then, is self-revelation or development. Not
a result which is to be accepted, bowed to, and reve
renced : but the result issuing (and only valuable as
issuing) from a process in which we and objectivity are
fellow-workers. The truth may no doubt be presented
—as Spinoza does present it — in definitions, stating the
net result as fundamental fact. Fundamental fact it is ;
but as so stated, as Substance, it comes as a stranger,
almost as an enemy : the great vision, suddenly offered
to untrained eyes, overwhelms and alarms the living
sense of self, of personality. Hegel wishes to show it
as a friend, as our very own,— as Subject (but not merely
subject). It is for this that philosophy runs through
its cycle and returns into itself. Man points to nature
and nature to man : universal to individual : thought to
things: the self to God, and God to the human soul.

CHAPTER XXV.

REASON AND THE DIALECTIC OF UNDERSTANDING.

REPRESENTATIVE conceptions, besides being the
burden of our ordinary materialising consciousness, are
also the data of science, accepted and developed in
their consequences. Because they are so accepted, as
given into our hand, scientific reasoning can only insti
tute relations between them. Its business as thus
conceived is progressive unification, comparing objects
with one another, demonstrating the similarities which
exist between them, and combining them with each
other. The exercise of thought which deals with such
objects is limited by their existence : it is only formal.
It is finite thought, because it is only subjective : it
begins at a given point and stops somewhere, and never
gets quite round its materials so as to call them truly its
own. Each of the objects on which it is turned seems
to be outside of it, and independent of it. Each point
of fact, again, when it is carried out to its utmost, meets
with other thoughts which limit it, and claim to be
equally self-centred. Such knowledge creeps on from
point to point. To this thinking German philosophy
from the time of Kant and Jacobi applied a name,
which since the days of Coleridge has been translated
by l Understanding1.' This degree or mode of thinking

1 'Verstand.'

UNDERSTANDING. 349

— not a faculty of thought — is the systematised and
thorough exercise of what in England is called ' Common
Sense/ In the first place, it is synonymous with prac
tical intelligence. It takes what it calls facts, or things,
as given, and aims only at arranging and combining
them and drawing from them counsels of prudence or
rules of art. Seeing things on a superficies, as it were
so many unconnected points, here itself and there the.
various things of the world, it tries to bring them into
connexion. It accepts existing distinctions, and seeks
to render them more precise by pointing out and sifting
the elements of sameness. Its greatest merit is an abhor
rence of vagueness, inconsistency, and what it stigmatises
as mysticism : it wishes to be clear, distinct, and prac
tical. In its proper sphere, — and it has an indis
pensable function to perform even in philosophy :
wherever, that is, it is unnecessary to go into the
essential truth of things, and one has only to do good
work in a clearly defined sphere, — the understanding
has an independent value of its own *. Nor is this true
merely of practical life, where a man must accommodate
himself to facts : it is equally applicable in the higher
theoretic life,--in art, religion, and philosophy. If
intelligent definiteness does not make itself apparent in
these, there is something wrong about them.

It is only when this exercise of thought is regarded
as a ne plus ultra, and its mandates to restrict inves
tigation by the limits of foregone conclusions find
obedience, that understanding deserves the reproachful
language which was lavished upon it by the German
philosophers at the close of the last century. The
understanding is abstract : this sums up its offences in
one word. Its objects, that is the things it deals with

1 ' Die Vernunft ohne Verstand ist Nichts ; der Verstand doch
Etwas ohne Vernunft.' Hegel's Leben, p. 546.

350

PROLEGOMENA. [xxv.

and believes utterly real, are only partly so, and when
that incompleteness is unrecognised, are only abstrac
tions. Both in its contracted forms, such as faith and
common sense, and in its systematic form, the logical
or narrowly-consistent intellect, it is partial and liable
to be tenacious of half-truths. Only that whereas in
feeling and common-sense there is often a great deal
which they cannot express, — whereas the heart is often
more liberal than its interpreting mind will allow — the
reverse is true of the logically-consistent intellect. The
narrowness of the latter is, in its own opinion, exactly
equal to the truth of things : and whatever it expresses
is asserted without qualification to be the absolute
fact. Its business is, given the initial point (which
is assumed to be certain and perspicuous), to see all
which that point will necessarily involve or lead to.
For example, Order may be supposed to be the chief
end of the State. Let us consider, says the intelligent
arguer (without wasting time on abstruse inquiries as
to what Order is or means, and what sort of Order we
want), to what consequences and institutions this con
ception will lead us. Or, again, the chief end of the
State is assumed to be Liberty. To what special forms
of organisation will this hypothesis (also assumed a
self-evident conception) lead ? Or we may go a step
further. It is evident, some will say, that in a State
there must be a certain admixture of Order and Liberty.
How are we to proceed — what laws and ordinances
will be necessary, to secure the proper equilibrium of
these two principles ? The two must be blended, and
each have its legitimate influence.

These are examples of the operation of Understand
ing. It can only reach a synthesis (or conjunction),
never a real unity, because it believes in the omni
potence of the abstractions with which it began : but

XXV.] UNDERSTANDING.

35*

must either carry out one partial principle to its conse
quences, or allow an alternate and combined force to
two opposite principles. Its canon is identity: given
something, let us see what follows when we keep the
same point always in view, and compare other points
with the one which we are supposed to know. Its
method is analytic : given a conception in which popu
lar thought supposes itself at home, and let us see all
the elements of truth which can be deduced from it.
Its statements are abstract and narrow : or, in the
words of Anaxagoras, one thing is cut off from another
with a hatchet1. In its excess it degenerates into
dogmatism, whether that dogmatism be theological or
naturalistic.

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 suffi
ciently 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 pro
cess, — that in it, in any thought or idea, several tenden
cies 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 2, — by infinite thought,

On ov Kex&piffTai d\\rjAuv ra cv T$> kvi Koa^a ov5t a.TTOK(KoiiTai

Simplic. Phys. fol. 383 (ed. Diels, p. 176).
Vernunft.'

352 PROLEGOMENA. [xxv.

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 know
ledge 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

'•] DIALECTIC.

353

becoming the possession of a community,— truth and not
merely conviction, must pass through doubt. The pre
misses 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 mate
rials 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 intelli
gent 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 V 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

1 Novunt Organum, Book I. 70.

A a

354 PROLEGOMENA. [xxv.

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 Expe
rience 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 sciences1.

Dialectic is the negative or destructive aspect of
reason, as preparatory to its affirmative or construc
tive 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 pro
gressive 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

1 Phenomenologie des Getsfes, p. 67.

XXV.] DIALECTIC. 355

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 con
duct: 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 ex
posed, 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 under
standing. These points, as so defined and exaggerated,
are what dialectic shakes. Not an alien force, but the

A a 2

356 PROLEGOMENA. [xxv.

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 knowledge1. Thus is described the
active unrest of growth, the ' inquietude poussante,' as
Leibniz called it,— the quickening force of the nega
tive and of contradiction.

At the word ' contradiction ' there is heard a mur
mur 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 rela
tions 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 collec
tions of beliefs, perceptions, hopes, and wishes, in no
very obvious connexion with one another. An united
self, one, harmonious, and complete, is probably rather

1 Plato, Symposion, 203.

xxv.] CONTRADICTION. 357

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 momen
tary point of view). The deeper consciousness may go
on entirely independent of the train of the more super
ficial 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 know
ledge, 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 imper
fection 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 contra
diction 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,

358 PROLEGOMENA. [xxv.

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 contra
dictory, 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 sub
ordination. But both elements are equally essential,
and if the unity is less palpable in the abstract begin
nings, 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 nega
tion 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 ade
quacy of that finite. Both the partial views have a right
to exist, because each gives its contribution to the
science of truth \ 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

1 Cf. Dante, Farad, iv. 130.

XXV.] THE UNITY OF CONTRADICTIONS. 359

two elements coincide and unite. But we must be
careful here. This coincidence or identification of oppo-
sites 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 un-
analysed 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 sub
jected 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

360 PROLEGOMENA. [xxv.

unity, which has been reached by a process of reflec
tion, and which as a conscious unity involves that
process.

Reason, then, is infinite, as opposed to understand
ing, 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 Syllo
gism : — the mere generality of the Universal, which,

XXV.] DIALECTIC. 361

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 real
ising 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 ', to the concep
tion 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 dia
lectical 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
1 See in the Logic (vol. ii. p. 145).

362 PROLEGOMENA.

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 i, 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 a, 0, y. 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.

PROLEGOMENA

BOOK III
LOGICAL OUTLINES

PROLEGOMENA

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 l, 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 some
thing 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

1 E.g. 'formal' in Hamlet, iv. 5. 215; 'informal' in Measure for
Measure, v. 236.

366 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvi.

* vehicles of the form.' Thus spontaneously did Bacon
reconstruct the Aristotelian theory of the interdepend
ence 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 argu
ment 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 myste
rious 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

xxvi.] FORM AND MATTER. 367

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 con
geners, 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 *. All life and reality i
manifested in dualism — in antithesis : but the life an
the reality is one. Mind— Getst— actualised and intel-

1 Encycl. § 574 (Philosophy of Mind, p. 196).

368 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvi.

ligent experience — is the one ultimate and essential
reality \ 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 experi
ence 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 Hegel2, '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

1 Encycl. § 377. 2 Logic, vol. ii. p. 30.

XXVI

.] LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY. 369

meant to be the absolute beginning : and that pure or
mere thought was the congenital endowment of the
heaven-born philosopher1. 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 develop
ment was the fact, and the truth, of which 'becoming*
is a meagre, abstract phase.

Logic, then, is not the Science of mere or pure^K
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 pre
supposes the complete philosopher who shall be the
complete organ of absolute intelligence, of universal and
eternal Spirit.

1 The criticisms of A. Trendelenburg, in his Logische Unter-
suchungen, rest on such assumptions. 'Trendelenburg,' says Hart-
mann, ' means low-water mark in German philosophy.'

Bb

370 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvi.

* 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
field1, 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

1 See above all Bradley's Principles of Logic, and Bosanquet's
Logic, &c.

xxvi.] THE FORM OF THOUGHT. 37 !

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 term1, 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 psycho
logical 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 ex
plores. 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

'Das Wahre ist der bacchantische Taumel, an dem kein Glied
nicht trunken ist ; und weil jedes, indem es sich absondert, ebenso
unmittelbar sich auflOst, — ist es ebenso die durchsichtige und ein-
fache Ruhe.' Phenom. des Geistes, p. 35.

B b 2

372 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvi.

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 syn
thetic 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

XXVI.] THOUGHT AND REALITY. 373

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 anc
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 6Va, 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 o-?7^aii/o>em (which were incorporeal).
These Xe/crd, as they were otherwise called, were to the
Stoics the proper sphere of Logic. In the sense there
fore 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 pro
perly 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

374

PROLEGOMENA. [xxvi.

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 vnapfrs, or bodily subsist
ence. 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 re
unite meaning and theme to execution and orchestra
tion : 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 re
union. Yet if in the complete reality we thus dis
tinguish 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 out
lines of Logic. There they are written in blacker ink

XXVI.] THOUGHT AND REALITY. 375

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 articu
lately be anything for us : and such thoughts seem to be
its net extract, its quintessence, its concentrated mean
ing. 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

376 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvi.

proof or disproof: no mere code of rules for the evalua
tion 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 \ 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 unifica
tion of the problem of the Organon with that of the
first philosophy, a unification of Logic with Meta
physics : 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 concep
tion, 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

1 Prantl, Geschichte der Logik, i. 87.

XXVI.] THE SCOPE OF LOGIC. 377

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 along1/

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 con
jectures, 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 for
mation 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 study
ing the phenomena of thought, of which the species
or types were no less numerous and interesting than

1 Wissenschaft der Logik, i. p. 39.

378 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvi.

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 con
sciously and distinctly. The history of philosophy
records the steps in the conscious and artificial manipu
lation 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 phi
losophy, 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. Be
hind the individual — who is often unduly regardless
of his contemporaries and predecessors, and who writes

XXVI.] HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. 379

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 evo
lution 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 pellueid 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 philo
sophies 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-oper
ation 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 \

1 See Encydop. § 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,

380 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvi.

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 l. But the logical Idea is only a phantom Deity

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.
1 Hegel's Werke, iii. 33.

XXVI.] THE SCOPE OF LOGIC. 381

— 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 intro
duction 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 spon
taneous 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 investi-

382 PROLEGOMENA.

gation 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 under
stands 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 to
gether1/

1 Wissenschaft der Logik, i. p. 43.

CHAPTER XXVII.

ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE I 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 Un
knowable 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 scries. To the third

384 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvil.

everything is seen in connexion, but not a mere unilinear
connexion : each, when studied, more and more com
pletes 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 \ 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 Goethe2 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 Rela
tivity 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

1 Cf. Herbart's maxim, ' Wie viel Schein, so viel Hindeutung auf
Sein.' (Hauptpunkte der Metophysik.}

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.'

xxvii.] ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE. 385

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 Rela
tivity, 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 con
stitution 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

c c

386 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvii.

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 abso
luteness 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 found
ation, 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 J : 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 ;

1 Logic (Encyclop.} §§ 85, 87, 112, 194, &c.

XXVII.] LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS. 387

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 sub
stituted an Absolute, self-revealing in the terms of
thought. Being is deposed from its absoluteness, and
made the first postulate of thought. Former Meta
physics had dashed itself in vain against the reefs
that girdle the island of the supersensible and noumenal,
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 ad
vice to metaphysicians1 was that, while scientific re
search continued to concentrate the attack of analysis
upon single experiences conforming to certain con
ditions, 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 sug
gestion, 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 Ab-
solute, as the totality, universe or system of Relativity,

1 Metaphysic is, in Kant's usage, ambiguous. It means («) a sup
posed science of the supersensible or unconditioned reality; (6) a
study of the conditions or presuppositions— the Kantian a priori— of
some aspect of Experience, e. g. a Metaphysic of Moral rules.

C C 2

388 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvn.

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, unintelli
gible 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 Meta
physics 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) \ They

1 His usual term is Denk-bestimmungen, 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,

XXVII-J THE CATEGORIES. 3_89

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 appre
hended 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 per
petually 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 back
ground.

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 unifica
tion, 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 impal-

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.

390 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvil.

pable. 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 con
demned 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

XXVIL] THE CATEGORIES. 3pl

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 descrip
tion 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, demon
strate, relate, and unify, — and not to generalise \ 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 magni
tudes 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 in
flections 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

1 Generalisation is only one small aspect of thought, with speciali
sation 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.

392 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvii.

independent and tangible shape in the articles, pro
nouns, 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 rela
tions, — 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. Origin
ally 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 after
wards, 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 cate
gories, 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., ex
presses activity only as a piece of property, an appro
priation 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 mani
pulation of these particles and forms is what makes
an idiomatic knowledge of a language, as distinct from
a mere remembrance of the vocabulary. And philo
sophy is the recognition of their import and signifi-

xxvii.] CATEGORIES IN LANGUAGE.

393

cance. Thus in Greek philosophy the central questions
turn upon such words as Being and not-Being : Becom
ing : 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.1 And again in
Modern Philosophy, how often has the battle raged about
the meaning of such words as I : will : can : must : be
cause : same and different: self: &c. !

1 ov and ju/) ov ; TO yiyvu^fvov : TO l£ ov : TO ov evf/ta : TO ri ?/v
elvat : TO TI iaTi : 9a.T(pov : <tv : TO p.^a KCU TO /u/cpov : TO /tad' 5,\ov :
TO Ka6' tKaarov : ru5e TI.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE THREE PARTS OF LOGIC.

LOGIC, as it is understood in these pages, is the criti
cal 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 constitu
tion 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 \ may be

1 Being (das Seyn) probably conveys much more to an English
reader than is here meant or wanted. It is Being, where the dis
tinction between essence and appearance has not yet emerged or
been thought of. If being = TO 6v, then essence (Weseri) = rb OVTM
ov, the being which underlies and yet includes appearance. Wescn

BEING. 395

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

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 sub
stance 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
ovffia is an obvious illustration of this.

In the translation of the Logic, IVesen 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.

396 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvui.

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 con
sciousness 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 ' im
personal ' 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

XXVIII.] ESSENCE.

397

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 deter
mining 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

398 PROLEGOMENA. [xxvni.

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 specifi
cate, 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/ de
noting reference, or connexion-with-something-else :
e.g. the cause has an effect : the thing has properties.
Instead of numerals, come the prepositions and pro
nouns 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 reflec
tive 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

XXVIII.] RELATIVITY. 399

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 rea
soning is to throw the emphasis on one side of the rela
tion, and to regard the other as accessary and secondary.
Contrasts between essentia and existenlia : 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 — ofEssenh'a
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, Exist- -
ence 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,

400

PROLEGOMENA. [xxvill.

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 inde
pendent 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 Thought1. 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 Cate
gory 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

1 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.

XXVIII.] THE NOTION. 401

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 exist- .
ence in details, and difference, the actuality or con
tingency—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 "TITe 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 \
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 uni
versal principle in its details that the individual reality
1 See vol. ii, Notes and Illustrations, p. 408.
Dd

402 PROLEGOMENA. [XXVIH.

of the percept is assured. That we can elicit a notion
from a perception is only possible because it is impli
citly 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 mechan
ical 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 mem
bers 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 con
nexion 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 graces
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 mechan-

XXVIII.] THE IDEA. 403

ical 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 objec
tivity, 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 uni
verse — the Absolute — ean 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 6^pla and
cvepyfia 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 per
ception in Nature : and thus the Idea, as developed in
Logic, forms the prologue and presupposition to the
Philosophy of Nature.

d 2

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 some
what 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 intel
ligence. Such an emancipation however cannot be
complete and self-realised without a sharp and painful
wrench at the moment of mental birth. The great

THE SCEPTICAL DOUBT. 405

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 seven
teenth 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 refor
mers. To the former the burden is the burden of
the unintelligible : to the latter the burden of the un
bearable 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 pro
bation : not rejected, but for the moment declined :
not denied, but asked to present its credentials l. This
1 Cf. p. 9o.

406 PROLEGOMENA. [xxix.

is the fTroxjy 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 precipi
tancy 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 Subjec
tivity 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 one1. 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 Dcus 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.

1 Augustin. Soliloq. i. 7. ' Deum et animam scire cupio. Nihilnc
plus ? Nihil omnino.'

xxix.] THE SCEPTICAL DOUBT. 407

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 <a<9oXou never quite equals
the Kaff CKCHTTOV. 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

408 PROLEGOMENA. [xxix.

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 diffi
culty. 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 princi
ples 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 pecu
liarities, 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

XXIX.] REQUIREMENTS OF A PRINCIPLE. 409

into insignificance, as its amplified theory gains in
significance.

But an adequate principle must have other qualities l.
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, how
ever, 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 dra
matic 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 com
pilation, a school-book, a bundle of notes, and contri
butions 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.

1 'A Principle,' says Herbart (Psychologie ats 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.'

410 PROLEGOMENA. [xxix.

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 sick or fur 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
fiir 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 conscious
ness 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

XXIX.] BEGINNING AND DEVELOPMENT. 411

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 philo
sophy 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 simi
larity 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 pro
cess 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 found
ation, or, of which it is (otherwise viewed) the first

412 PR OLE COM EN A. [xxix .

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 differ
ences, — 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 be
hind, 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 : —

XXIX.] BEGINNING AND DEVELOPMENT. 413

which point, accordingly, is a unity or inter-penetration
of positive and negative. This absolute self-concen
tration 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 apprehen
sion 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 sur
roundings, and ofone 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,

414 PR OLE G OMEN A.

fade away into generalised forms of universal applica
tion. 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 in
voluntary 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.

CHAPTER XXX.

THE LOGIC OF DESCRIPTION : NATURAL REALISM I BEING.

THE antithesis between thought and being, between
idea and actuality, between notion and object, is almost
a commonplace of criticism. Between the ideas of the
subject and objectivity a great gulf seems to yawn fixed
and impassable. Thinkers, like Anselm and Descartes,
have (it is asserted) attempted by a trick which cheated
themselves to get from the notion to the object. But —
as Kant is supposed to have for ever shown — these
decepti deceptores are now universally discredited \ Yet
the same Kant had shown that the ' things ' of ordinary
experience are only ideas or appearances in conscious
ness. These latter ideas, however, were verified by the
necessity of interdependence in which they stood, as
given by sense. From the notions which Anselm and
Descartes proposed to invest with objectivity, there was
absent the feature of sense-perception. They were
not limited and real ideas, but synthetic laws, general
and abstract aspects of reality, modes of .conception.
They were not definite and individualised things, but
terms or conditions for all concepts and realities. They
were forms, — forms essential to the explication of
reality— and never mere parts of reality.

1 What he did show was that these Ideas were not objects in the
vulgar sense of reality, or things.

416 PROLEGOMENA. [xxx.

With such ' forms ' or ' thought-terms/ such abstrac
tions, Logic (a la mode de Hegel] has to deal. And in
dealing with them it has to counteract this popular
distinction (which Kant inclines toward) which sets up
an insuperable division between thought and being,
between reality and syllogism, between is and is
known. Certain of these denominators which thinking
employs to describe reality the popular mind wholly
identifies with reality. That being is a thought, that
force and thing are only modes of conception, sounds to
the untrained intellect only a verbal quibble. Things,
beings, are there — out there, it says : force is ' ultimate
reality/ It is perhaps ready to allow that substances
are only mental figments : but it is more doubtful about
causes, and inclines to assume them to be in outside
nature, and to generate a real necessity in things. On
the other hand, it has little doubt that concepts and
syllogism are only our ways of looking at reality,— the
reality of substances and phenomena, with quality and
quantity : that ' final cause ' is a mere subjective principle
of explanation : and that ideas and knowledge are alto
gether additions superinduced on a real world.

Now what the Logic shows is that, on one hand, all
these terms are ideal and regulative ; and on the other
that they are real, because constitutive of reality.
Showing— or shall we say, reminding us — that being
is after all a form of thought, it shows us that know
ledge, at the other end, contains or implies reality. It
is the business of logic as a fundamental philosophy to
dispel the illusion that sensations are fixed reality:
that causes and effects are an absolutely real order;
whereas concepts and sciences and still more aesthetic
and moral principles are not. Its doctrine is that all
our thought-terms, the most vulgar and the most
delicate, are, as we may put it, symbolical of reality :

XXX.] THOUGHT AND BEING. 417

explications and manifestations of it. Absolutely real—
if that means utterly unideal — none of them are. On
the other hand, absolutely ideal, — if that means utterly
unreal — none of them are either. If you call them
real, their reality is that of thought. If you call them
ideal, it is an ideality of a real. Being is not a fixed and
solid substratum, a hard rock of reality, on which we
may build our relations and further determinations.
It also is a thought : it also lives in relation, and
becomes more real by further determination \ But
the habit comes natural to the majority to attribute
essential and independent reality (total reality) to the
thought-modes it is familiar with in practice : whereas
the modes familiar to more advanced intelligence are
put aside as merely ideal.

Thus in proportion as Logic insists on the reality of
idea, it insists also on the ideality of being. Being is
after all a thought : when separate from the relations of
experience, a very poor thought. A 'supreme being* even
is a thought. And the question of questions for Logic is
what degree of reality, what amount of truth does each
.result of unification express. Is it self-consistent and
complete, or does it imply further elements, and if so, in
what direction does it suggest and receive completion ?
But at the best the reality of a logical term is an
abstract or formal reality, and consists in its power to
interpret, to expound, to define the Absolute. Its more
concrete and material reality it has in Nature and in
Mind. There however Philosophy has in a further
measure to repeat its earlier lesson and show that
Nature is not without its ideal aspect, and that Mind is
founded on physical reality.

All science tends to carry us over the hard lines of

1 Cf. the controversy between Schiller and Goethe as to idea and
observation, quoted by Whewell, Scientific Ideas, i. 36.

E e

41 8 PROLEGOMENA. [xxx.

separation which practical interests treat as if ultimate
disruptions. The sciences of Nature, for instance,
in their completed circle must carry us from the inor
ganic to the organic : must in some way make a path
from the lifeless to the alive. The science of thought
has a corresponding task. It has to show that the
incommensurability between thought and being, or
between the idea and actuality, disappears on closer
examination. When we trace the development of
thought sufficiently far, we see that Being is an imper
fect or inadequate thought, — certainly not adequate to
the Idea, but not for that reason generically differing
from it. The fixity of Being as more than, and
superior to, mere Thought is a habit of mind, due to
the same worldly-minded immobility as leads us all
to believe (and, within the limited practical range, to
believe rightly) that the earth is solidly at rest, notwith
standing all the demonstrations of the Copernicans.
But Thought has not deposited all its burden, or
uttered all its meaning in Being. Being is the veriest
abstraction, — the very rudiment of thought — meagre as
meagre can be. It is on one side the bare position or
affirmation of thought : on the other hand it is the
very negation of thought, — if thought be only possible
under difference. For a mere 'Is* is a mere inde
scribable without-difference. There is no such thing as
mere Being : or mere Being is mere nothing : mere
Being is not.

The first category of Ontology is that of Being. It is
the merest simplicity and meagreness, with nothing
definite in it at all : and for that very reason constantly
liable to be confused with categories of more concrete
burden. It denotes all things, and connotes next to
nothing. It does not however mean something which
has being ; it does not mean definite being : still less

XXX

.] MERE BEING. 419

does it mean permanent and substantial being. Ordinary
language certainly uses being in all these senses. But
if we are to be logical, we must not mix up categories
with one another : we must take terms at their precise
value. Mere Being then is the mere ' Is/ which can
give no explanation or analysis of itself: which is in
describable in itself: which is an ' Is ' and nothing more.
The simplest answer to those who invest Being with so
much signification, is to ask them to consider the logical
copula. ( Every school-boy knows ' that the ' Is ' of the
copula disappears in several languages : that it is far
from indispensable in Latin : that in Greek e. g. the
demonstrative article serves the same purpose. In
Hebrew too the pronouns officiate for the so-called
substantive verb : and the same verb probably does not
exist in the Polynesian family of languages, where its
place is supplied by what we call the demonstrative
pronoun \ In the copula, which according to M. Laro-
miguiere, as quoted by Mr. Mill, expresses only ' un
rapport special entrele sujetet Vattribut? we encounter the
mere undeveloped and unexplained unifying of thought,
the very abstraction of relativity 2.

1 The use of the substantival form Being for the verbal (participle,
infinitive, or indicative) suggests an idea of permanence and sub
stance, or essence. So potentiality seems much more real than may
or can. And yet the phrase He knows Swa/m is only equivalent to
He can or may know (Svvarai or li/Se'x«Tcu).

2 When it is said that : ' It is strange that so profound a thinker as
Hegel should not have seen that the conception of definite objects,
such as a dog and cat, is prior no less in nature than in knowledge
to the conception of abstract relations, such as is and is not? it is dif
ficult to say what the writer meant. Had he ever heard of geometry ?
Both in nature and in knowledge (i. e. in the natural process from
sense to thought) chairs and tables are prior to lines and surface.
The mathematical point and line are abstractions, i. e. thoughts,
and no image of sensuous reality. It is also true that the ordinary
conception of the sun's movements was ' prior no less in nature than
in knowledge ' to the theory of the earth's rotation. And no doubt

£62

420 PROLEGOMENA. [xxx.

In the beginning, then, there is nothing and yet that
nothing is. Such is the fundamental antithesis of
thought : or the discrepancy which makes itself felt
between each several term of thought and the whole
Idea of which they are the expression. Being is the
term emphasised as absolute by understanding: then
the dialectical power, or the consciousness of the whole,
steps in to counteract the one-sided element. In other
words, thought, the total thought, asks what is Being,
mere and simple ; and answers mere nothing1. The one
aspect of the point is as justifiable as the other. In other
words the two aspects are indissoluble : they are in one.
The term ' Unity/ applied to the relation of Being and
Not, may perhaps mislead : and it is therefore better to say
that the two points of view are (as Mr. Spencer puts it)
at once ' antithetical and inseparable/ An unrelated
being, an ' absolute ' (i. e. separate and transcendent)
reality is an Unknowable, i. e. an ineffable, an unspeak
able of which we can legitimately predicate a not- ,
leaving imagination to fill up the blank after the hyphen.
A mere Not, with no substratum which it negatives, is
mere Being : and a mere Being, which has no sub
stratum, is a mere Not. The movement upward and
the movement downward are here illustrated : and it is
evident that they are the same movement2, — the same

Hegel, sedate though his boyhood was, had made the acquaintance of
dog and cat in his pre-logical days : as of balls and windows before
he was turned upon Euclid. See Hansel's Letters, Lectures^ &c.,
p. 209.

1 As Being to ordinary unthinkingness seems to mean a great deal
it cannot expound, so the mind full of the mystic depths of time and
space is disgusted to find them turn so empty and shallow when it
would set forth its wealth. See Augustin. Confess, xi. 14.

2 This may be illustrated by saying that to affirm is the same
energy of thought as to deny, and that the difference lies in the terms
related by the judgment. In themselves, the one act is as empty or
meaningless as the other.

XXX0 fS AND IS NOT. 421

unrest, only differentiated as up and down by some
termini not yet explicitly brought into view. Each— Is
and Not— as it seeks to differentiate itself, to make
itself clear; passes into the other. In fact, the very
vocation, calling, or notion of Being and Nothing, is not
Being and Nothing, but the tendency of each to pass
into the other. Their truth, in short, is not in them
selves, but in their process,— and that process by which
the one passes into the other is ' To become.' Try to
get at mere Being and you are left with Nought : of
mere Nought you can only say it is. The two
abstractions have no truth except in the passage into
one another: and this passage or transition is 'To
become/ Take reality apart from what it leads on to,
and from what it has come from, apart from its end or
purpose and from its cause, take it as mere being:
then this being in its supposed singleness and self-
subsistence is really annihilated : stat magni nominis
umbra-, but it is the name of nothing. True being
is always on the way to or from being: to stop is
fatal.

This unity or inseparability of opposite elements in
a truth or real notion is the stumbling-block to the
incipient Hegelian. The respectable citizens of Germany
were amazed, says Heine, at the shamelessness of
J. G. Fichte, when he proclaimed that the Ego produced
the world, as if that had cast doubts on their reality ;
and the ladies were curious to know whether Madame
Fichte was included in the general denial of substantial
existence1. If easy-going critics treated Fichte in this
way, they had even better source for amusement in
Hegel. That Being and Nothing is the same was a
perpetual fund for jokes, too tempting to be missed.

1 Heine, Ueber Deutschland (Werke), v. 213.

422 PROLEGOMENA. [xxx.

Now, in the baldness, and occasionally paradoxical
style, of Hegel's statements, there is some excuse for
such exaggerations. Being and Nothing are not merely
the same: they are also different: they at least tend
to pass into each other. In the technical language
of logicians, the question is not what being denotes,
but what it connotes. The word Ms' had, it may be,
originally a ' demonstrative ' meaning, a ' pronominal '
force, which in course of time passed from a local or
sensuous meaning to express a thought. No doubt
4 is ' and ' is not ' are wide enough apart in our appli
cation of them as copula of a proposition : but if we
subtract the two terms and leave only the copula
standing, the difference of the two becomes inexpres
sible and unanalysable. In both there is the same
statement of immediacy or face-to-faceness : that two
things are brought to confront each other, — united, as
it were, without producing any real or specific sort of
union. If Thought be unifying, Being is the minimum
of unification : if Thought be relating, Being is the
most abstract of relations. So abstract, indeed, that its
relativity is completely lost sight of: so utterly one,
that it vanishes in a point. And just because it
is (as it seems) out of relations, it must be nothing.
No doubt, between the two terms Being and not-Being
a difference is meant; when they are employed, a
difference is thrown into them ; and then they are not
the same : but if we keep out of sight what is meant,
and stick to the ultimate point which is said, we shall
find that mere being and mere nothing are alike inappre
hensible by themselves, and that to institute a difference
we must go out of and beyond them. Perhaps some
approach to the right point of comprehension may be
made, if we note that when two people quarrel and
can give no reason or further development to their

XXX.] 76- AND BECOMES. 423

opposite assertions, the one person's Ms' is exactly
equal (apart from subsequent explanations) to the other's
Ms not.' The mere 'Is' and 'Is not' have precisely
the same amount of content: a mere affirmation or
assertion, which is mere nothing,— because connecting,
where there is nothing to connect.

The truth of 'is' then turns out 'become': nothing
is: all things are coming to be and passing out of
being. This illustrates the meaning of the word 'truth'
in Hegel. It is partly synonymous with 'concrete,'
partly with the ' notion.' With concrete : because to
get at the truth, we must take into account a new
element, kept out of sight in the mere affirmation of
being. With notion : because if we wish to compre
hend being, we must grasp it as 'becoming.' For
truth lies in transcending the first or merely given.
We have to go forward, and to go backward, as it
were : forward from being, backward to being : we
look before and after. The attempt to isolate the mere
point of being is impossible in thought : it would only
lead to the 'representation' of being, — i.e. the notion
of being would be arrested in i^g development, and
identified probably with a sensible thing, i.e. with
something, and some concrete thing said to be.

If being, however, is truly apprehended as a passage
from the unknown to the known, or as emergence
from bare vacuity, then it implies a definiteness,
which we missed before. Somewhat has become: or
the indeterminate being has been invested with defi
niteness and distinct character. Mere being (mere Is)
is nothing : to be something is must be not something
else. The second step in the process to self-realisation
therefore is reached : Being has become Somewhat ;
which is more, because it professes less. The fluid
unity or movement from 'is' to 'is not,' and vice versa,

424 PROLEGOMENA. [xxx.

has crystallised : and ' There is ' is the still imperfectly
unified result precipitated. By this term we imply the
finitude of being, — imply that a portion has been cut
off from the vague, and contrasted with something else.
In the ordinary application of the word, Being is espe
cially employed to denote this stage of definite being1.
Thus we speak of bringing something into being : by
which we mean, not mere being, but a definite being,
or, in short, reality. Reality is determinateness, as
opposite to mere vagueness. To be real, it is necessary
to be somewhat,— to limit and define. Whatever is
anything or is real, is eo facto finite. Even an infinite
therefore to be real must submit to self-limitation.
This is the necessity of finitude : in order to be any
thing more and higher, there must come, first of all,
a determinate being and reality. But reality, as we
have seen, implies negation : it implies limiting, dis
tinction, and dependence. Everything finite, every
'somewhat/ has somewhat else to counteract, narrow,
and thwart it. To be somewhat (esse aliquid) is an
object of ambition, as Juvenal implies : but it is only
an unsatisfactory goal after all. For somewhat always
implies something else, by which it is limited : whereas
mere being, just because it is nothing, is free from the
check of an other.

This, then, is the price to be paid for rising into
reality, and coming to be somewhat: there is always
somewhat else to be minded. The very point which
makes a ' somewhat/ as above a mere ' nothing/ is
its determinateness : and determinateness, as at first
determinateness from outside, a given and passive
determinateness, is also a negation and limit. Now
the limit of a thing is that point where it begins to
be somewhat else : where it passes out of itself and yields

1 -naaa ovaia Soxei r65e TI orjfAaivciv f Ar. Cat. 5).

XXX. J DETERMINATE BEING. 425

to another. Accordingly in the very act of being deter
mined, somewhat is passing over into another : it is
altering, and becoming somewhat else. Thus a ' some
thing' implies for its being the being of somewhat else :
its being is as it were only to be beside something
else, — it is finite, and alterable, a this with a that
always in the neighbourhood. Such is the character
of determinate being. It leads to an endless series
from some to an other, and so on ad infinitum : every
thing as a somewhat, as a determinate being, in reality,
presupposes a something else, and that again has some
third thing; and so the chain is extended with its
everlasting And, And, And, (as in the children's way
of telling a story). Somewhat-ness is always vexed
by the fact that it is not somewhat else : and for that
very reason, ceasing to be the primary object, it becomes
somewhat else itself; and the other term becomes the
somewhat. And so the same story is repeated in
endless progression, till one gets wearied with the
repetition of finitude which is held out as infinite.

Thus in determinate being as in mere being we see
the apparent fixity resolved into a double movement —
the alteration from some to somewhat else, and vice
versa. But a movement like this implies after all that
there is a something which alters : which is alterable,
but which alters into somewhat. This somewhat which
alters into somewhat, and thus retains itself, is a being
which has risen above alteration, which is independent
of it because including it : which is for itself, and not
for somewhat else. Thus in order to advance a step
further from determinate and alterable being, we have
only to keep a firm grasp on both sides of the process,
and not suffer the one to slip away from the other.
We must not merely say, but energise the unity of the
two 'antithetical yet inseparable' elements we are

426 PROLEGOMENA. [xxx.

naturally disposed to take and leave only as One and
an Other. Something becomes something else : in
short, the one side passes on to the other side of the
antithesis, and the limitation is absorbed. The new
result is something in something else : the limit is taken
up within : and this being which results is its own limit,
i. e. no restrictive limit at all, but self-imposed character
istic and definiteness. It is Being- for-self: — the third
step in the process of thought under the general category
of Being. The range of Being which began in a vague
nebula, and passed into a series of points, is now
reduced to a single point, self-complete and whole.

This Being-for-self is a kind of true infinite, which
results by absorption of the finite. The false infinite,
which has already come before us, is the endless range
of finitude, passing from one finite to another, from
somewhat to somewhat else, until satiety sets in with
weariness. The true infinite is satisfaction, — the in
clusion of the other being into self, so that it is no
longer a limit, but a constituent part in the being. Such
inclusion in the unity of an idea, of elements which are
realistically separate, is termed ' ideality.3 The antithesis
is reduced to become an organic and dependent part.
It still exists, but as no longer outside and independent.
Thus in determinate being the determinateness is found
in somewhat else : in being-for-self the determinateness
is self-realisation. Being-for-self may be shortly ex
pressed by 'one' or 'each*: as determinate being
a, or an, or by 'some': and Being simple has no
nominal equivalent. As 'some1 is always fractional
or partial, 'each* is always a whole or unit. Mere
Being has not the consistency of any noun or pronoun :
it is the bare (impersonal) verb.

But 'each for self* expresses the sentiment of an
armed neutrality with implicit leanings to universal

XXX.] BEING AND INDIVIDUALITY. 427

war,— the bellum omnium contra omnes. Each is self-
centred, independent, resting upon self, and not minding
anything else,— which is now thrown out as indifferent
into the background. Each is centripetal ; anything
else is for it a matter of no moment. If determinate
being was something to be explained by something
other, this is or professed to be self-explanatory, and
rests upon itself. It seems purely affirmative, and
promises to give a definite unity. But we cannot free
thought from negation in this sphere, any more than
in the earlier. We may, if we like, assert the absolute
self-sufficingness, primariness, and unalterability of each;
but a very little reflection shows the opposite to be
true. The very notion of each is exclusiveness towards
the rest : a negative and, as it were, polemical attitude
towards others is the very basis of Being-for-self. One
after one, they each rise to confront each, each exclud
ing each, until their self-importance is reduced to be
a mere point in a series of points, one amongst many.
When that is clearly seen, their qualitative character
has disappeared : and there is left only their quantity \
The negative attitude of each to each forms a sort of
bond connecting them. If to the reference which con
nects we give the name of attraction, then we may say
that the repulsion of each against each is exactly equal
to their mutual attraction. And thus, in the language
of Hobbes, the universal quarrel is only the other side
of the general union in the great Leviathan : repulsion,
in the shape of mutual fear, is the principle of attraction.
Thus each for self is repeated endlessly : instead of
the atom or unit we have a multitude, utterly indifferent
to what each is for itself. The mere fact that it is,
entitles it to count, and so constitutes quantity.

1 Hence the disparaging sense in which the term ' individual ' may
be used.

428 PROLEGOMENA. [xxx.

Here we may shortly recapitulate the categories of
Quality or Being Proper. It forms three steps or
grades : those of indeterminate being : determinate
being : self-determined being : or if we speak of them
as processes, we have becoming : alteration : attraction
and repulsion \ From the extreme of abstraction and
concentration thought, under the form of Being, passes
on to greater determinateness and development. The
fixity of mere Being is seen to imply a distinction
of elements, and a dependence of one upon the other :
where the ' is ' and ' is not ' part from each other
sufficiently to let us distinguish them. This is the
stage of finitude : when we say that there is somewhat,
but there are others, and imply that any one has an
end, a limit, a negation in its nature. These words
describe the finite scene, — a fragmentary being which
makes an advance upon indeterminateness, but loses
its wholeness and is always and necessarily leading on
to something else. It is the revulsion from the vague
and yet unspecified universal to definite and limited
particulars. In the third stage the limit is uplifted and
included in the particular, which now contains its
negation in itself, — is (by accepting its dependence)
independent, is its own ground, and may be called an
individual. But an individual, again, implies an aggregate
of ones, or a multitude. This being-for-self is an
individual or atom : it is the basis of those higher
developments known as subjectivity and personality.
These are, as it were, higher multiples of it.

This first sphere of thought, apparently so abstruse
and unreal in its abstractions, had to be thus narrowly
discussed because it presents all the difficulties and
peculiarities of Hegel in their elementary form. They

1 These latter terms being used in a metaphorical sense.

XXX.] THE PROCESS OF QUALITY. 429

are clearly the fundamental problems of ancient Greek
philosophy— of that first or fundamental philosophy
which discusses Being and its intrinsic attributes or
accidents. Modern superficiality has sometimes re
proached these old thinkers (who, forsooth, ' knew no
language but their own ') for their tiresome insistence
on this problem of Is and Is not. Compared, indeed,
with what are called topics of interest, e. g. the Soul
and the Hereafter, or the origins of the Cosmic process,
tiresome such inquiry is. But it is the bitter lesson
of experience that till such fundamentals are at least
critically surveyed, the interesting topics will still (and
in more than one sense) belong to the Unknowable.
Herbart not less than Hegel sees it is the prime
business of philosophical criticism (i. e. of philosophy)
to examine thoroughly those primary notions on which
the whole structure of thought rests. It is on the
comprehension of the radical limitations latent in the
seemingly simplest terms of thought, that the profoundest
problems of human interest ultimately turn.

Thus, in the first place, the process of Being, as seen
in the light of the whole system of Logic, shows that
reality is truly known only as a trinity,— or perhaps
rather as a duality in unity. This is the ' Notion ' or
' Grasp ' of Being. First, reality seems an unspecialised
and self-centred being,— and that by itself is mere
nothing : a mere universal. Second, it appears a special
ised and differentiated being of some and other: a
mere particular, limited by other particulars, and so
finite. Third, as a combination of the two earlier
stages : as wholeness with determinateness, as unity ;
and so an individual which is the true or complete and
authentic character of ail being. In the metaphysics
of Being these three elements follow, one after another :
but in the logic of the notion they interpenetrate,

430 PROLEGOMENA. [xxx.

and each of them is the others and the total. The
truth or the notion of being takes it in Being-for-self
as a universalised particular or as an individual. —
In the second place : the sphere of mere Being is that
of mere identity : that of determinate being is the
sphere of otherness, difference : that of self-determined
being is the sphere of well-grounded existence. —
Thirdly : the first sphere may be illustrated by the
freedom of indeterminateness, expressed by the word
' may ' : the second by necessity or determinateness,
expressed by the word ' must ' : and the third, by the
freedom which even in its determinateness is self-
determining, expressed by the word 'will.' — Fourthly:
these steps illustrate the meaning of the Hegelian
technical terms setzen : aufheben : an sich : fiir sick :
Idealitdt: Realitdt. Thus Determinate Being or some
what is an sich or implicitly (by implication) somewhat
else : and the process of determinate being is to lay it
down or express (setzen} it as such. When this ex
plicitly-stated ' other ' or limit is included in the Being,
and reduced into a unity with somewhat in each Being-
for-self, it is said to be ' aufgehoben ' — uplifted, as it
were, so that it is no longer a separate existent, but is
still an efficient element. As being partly this, and
partly that, now one, and now an other, which limits
and is limited, determinate being is Realitdt. The
characteristic of reality is externality of its parts, which
are thus left side by side quasi-independent : that of
ideality is unity and solidarity of function. When the
mutual dependence of elements is tightened till it
becomes equivalent to unity and totality, these elements
are seen in their Ideality (Idealitdt}. Such a total has
the others in it as elements (Momente) ; they are there
ideally (ideeller Weise\ as it were (in the loose analogical
use of that term) organically : that is, they are denied the

XXX.] QUALITY AND QUANTITY. 431

privilege, which their total has, of being-for-themselves.
They do not enjoy the benefit of their own being, though
their presence is felt.— Fifthly : Being-for-self is absolute
negativity; i.e. the negation of negation. Determinate
being was a negation of Being mere and simple : Being-
for-self is the negation of this, and so a return to true
affirmation, as including the element of negation.

Being seemed to describe a complete reality. But
its latent limitation has become explicit. It only
retains itself by a self-assertion which leaves it a
mere abstract unit, or atom, — a unit with nothing
in it to be united, and where it matters not whether
it be somewhat or other. The quality of Being,
in which all qualitative attributes are lost and sunk,
is Quantity: the characteristic of which is to be
a matter of no importance to Being, as it originally
presents itself. In other words, whilst Quality is
identical with Being,— while Being means qualitative-
ness, and the Being of a thing means its quality, or
constitution ; Quantity is external to Being, and a thing
is, while its quantity undergoes all sorts of variation.
At least this is true within certain limits : for quantity
is not an ultimate category any more than quality. But
for the present the truth of quality is quantity ; or, in
other words, if a thing is to be anything definite it
must ultimately rest on a solid atom : must be a
unit and amenable to measurement. First come quali
ties, such as sweet, green, and the like : these seem to
be truth and reality to the senses and the natural
mind : and in their universality are represented by
the abstract terms of qualitative being. The first step in
the progress of knowledge consists in seeing that quality
presupposes quantity. Number, in short, is the proxi
mate truth to which the vague qualitative distinction of
a, some, and each is to be reduced. The qualitative

432 PROLEGOMENA. [xxx.

differences of sounds are reduced to relations or ratios
of number : and so are the other data of sensation.
We see this truth recognised in the Atomic School,
which may be taken to represent the summing-up of
that period of thought which begins with the ' Being '
of Parmenides, and the ' Becoming ' of Heraclitus.
When Democritus says that, although bitter and sweet
are conventional distinctions, yet in reality there is
only atoms and void1, he is introducing a distinction
between real and apparent. But again the irregular and
sporadic appearances of species of quality are replaced
by a gradual and regular series of quantities. With
mere Being you have a conception quite unfit for
describing the manifold reality. But by breaking up
the whole Being into a countless number of atoms of
being, you get the means of establishing an equation
between a given sensible and some multiple of the
atomic unit. Thus Atomism, with its many bits of
being and its interfluent non-being in which they can
unite, replaces the total and complete universe of being
and its attendant shadow of unreality, the world of
opinion. Still the Is not clings to the Is: if each atom
seems complete, they are subject to a necessity which
forces them by negation, i. e. by the void (as Atomism
figuratively calls the repulsion of the atoms) to meet
each other and form apparent unities. Before a step
could be made to higher problems, it was necessary to
see that the proximate truth of the qualitative world,-—
or world of sense proper (Idia ato-fyo-is), is in its simplest
terms a quantitative world, or world of common sen-
sibles (KOIVO. aur&r}Ta)f universalised sensibles, number
and quantity.

The sphere of quantity need only be briefly sketched.

1 v6fj.y J\VKV not vo/jia) iriicpov crty Se dropa nal Kevuv. Democritus
ap. Sext. Empir. adv. Math. vii. 135.

XXX.] QUANTITY.

433

It has its three heads : (i) quantity in general,— the
universal and vague notion of quantitativeness, the
mere conception of reality as the Great and the Little,
or the More and Less1: (2) Quantum, or defined
quantity, expressed in the shape of a number : and
(3) the quantitative ratio or degree, which is the indivi-
dualisation or self-determination of numbers, or their
application to one another, — which gives the real
meaning and value of numbers. The fundamental
antithesis, which we found in quality, comes before
us here more definitely as the opposition of many
ones in one number. In every quantity there are the
two elements: the 'one,' unity or solidarity, which
renders a total number possible, and the 'many' or
multiplicity, which gives it real body and character.
By this quantitative law, reality must always be both
Continuous and Discrete. Thus when I regard a line
as consisting of a number of points I treat it as
a discrete quantity: as many in one. When, on
the other hand, I regard the line as the unity of
these points, it becomes a continuous quantity. These
distinctions are not so trivial as they may appear:
they lie at the bases of paradoxes like those by which
Zeno disproved the ordinary representations of motion,
and when a M.P. informs the House of Commons that
it is impossible to divide 73/. is. 6d. by i/. 25. 6d., he
is, like Zeno, and perhaps more unconsciously, for
getting that these quantities are not merely continuous
but discrete.

The Pythagoreans, according to the tradition of
antiquity, philosophised number. In it they found
the reality, or the principle of things,— the character
istic feature which dominated existence, and by which

1 Aristotle's p.a\\ov Kal rJTrov : see Metaph. i. 6 TO pfya /tal rti

Ff

434 PROLEGOMENA. [xxx.

the world in all its multiplicity could be made coherent
and intelligible. They saw it composed of two elements :
a limit or limiting, and an unlimited : the latter as it
were a dark ground, measureless and endless, on which
definiteness was gradually marked out. Such a limiting
principle would be e. g. the unit of number. But the
full definiteness of number only comes out when a
numerical scale is fixed on, in which each number bears
a definite ratio to what goes before and what comes
after. Each number in such a scale is really a multiple
of its unit : a product of its unity into its multeity, of
the monad into the indefinite duad. It is this view of
each number, as the product of its prime unit with
the ratio, which comes explicitly to the fore in Degree,
or quantitative ratio. Each so-called quantitative state
ment is thus a ratio between a given quantity in the
object and an assumed standard or unit of number.

These implications latent in quantitative order or
determination come out in mensuration. If quantitative
or numerical precision is to have a real basis, it
presupposes the existence of a qualitative atom or
unit which shall be the Measure. Measure is therefore
the truth and the unity of quantity and quality : each
refers forward and backward to the other, and both
lead up to or imply a modulus, or standard unit. Such
a standard unit may seem, at first sight, to be a matter
of arbitrary choice and imposition. There seems to be
no ultimate reason for taking the foot or the cubit as
unit of measurement : and if the original foot or cubit
be the king's limb, it is easy to say that the whole
thing is conventional and artificial. But it is evident
on further reflection, first that the foot or the pace is
the natural and primitive measurer of lengths of space
for the human being, and secondly that the particular
foot which is imposed as the measure is taken as being

XXX.] MEASURE AND STANDARD. 435

normal and typical. So too it is partly arbitrary choice
which fixes upon the starting-point for the scale of
temperatures : but here also the range from freezing-
point to boiling-point of the commonest of liquids affords
a sufficient standard from which naturally to carry on
the scale above or below it.

What happens is therefore that what is the rule, the
standard, — we may also say, the test of being, is the
natural mean or average. The measure presents itself
as the permanent and regular proportion of quantity
and quality. It is the amount or quantity at which
things settle down in equilibrium and produce the
quality or characteristic feature of the object. To say
that Measure is the supreme category or the truth of
being — of that superficial being which merely is — of the
mere fact of perception— is to say that the prime or
governing feature of reality, its obviously dominant
characteristic in this sphere, is a self-imposing harmony
and proportion. It naturally arranges itself — defines
and describes itself in rhythmic series, in regular scales,
in symmetrical schemes. All things are in geometrical
proportion, self-defined and uniformly graded. Such
a conception and category of reality may be said to be
peculiarly Greek. The doctrine of the Mean is well
known as a principle of their popular Ethics. But the
Mean is an average which is regarded as a Normal,—
a regular and permanent mode of being which is equi
valent to a standard. The rule is given by the logic of
facts and of nature. There is in it an apparent opti
mism — a belief that what is predominant and funda
mental is right : a doctrine of immanent symmetry and
order. The mere habitual custom is as such held to be
the right and good. It is true, no doubt, that Prota
goras came to point out that this Measure was not
inherent in things, but came from Man, the measure of

F f 2

436 PROLEGOMENA. [xxx.

all things : and that the later philosophy had to show
how the conception of reality should be re-construed,
if the objectivity of Measure and symmetry in the
universe were still to be maintained. Still even with
this correction the belief remained down to the Stoic
School that being is essentially self-ordering : that
Nature is immanent proportion.

The Measure thus emerging as the Mean, which
stands out as the permanent background or recurrent
same amidst varying extremes, is set against these di
vergencies and used to measure them. It has to serve
as a denominator for all of these : or each of these
differences has a definite ratio to it. For that purpose
it must be so graded or present such a scale that the
smallest difference from it that exists may be measured,
estimated and defined in terms of it. It is here out
of place to consider how this can be accomplished,—
how mensuration in any case is solved as a problem of
scientific determination. What is more important is to
note the fact that appearances everywhere start up to
testify to the incompatibility of the two elements in
measure, — to their tendency to fly away from each
other. It is only within certain ranges that quantity
and quality change proportionately to each other. The
colour spectrum, the scale of musical notes, the series
of chemical combination, the order of the planets, all
are found in experience up to some point to follow
a symmetrical order, and exhibit a measure. But after
that point is reached, a sudden change or transition
occurs. There is a break in the continuity of being :
without warning, a new series of physical manifestation,
having a new rule or measure, emerges by a sort of
catastrophe. So also, it is only to a certain portion
of the process of physical order in the human body
that psychical changes are found to correspond.

XXX.] FROM MEASURE TO ESSENCE. 437

Everywhere the correspondence or harmony or pro
portion of immediate fact has its breaks, — its sudden
emergencies into a new range of being.

It is on the repeated evidence of this fact — the dis
continuity of immediate being, the inexplicable gulfs
which separate its ordered provinces from one another,
that we rise to the distinction of two orders or grades
of being: a double aspect of reality. The primitive
consciousness is, we may suppose, confined to one level
of being, one world. And so long as the facts remain
within limits there is no need to go further. The
measure is the rule. But the uniformity breaks down
abruptly 1 : the rule has its inevitable exceptions : it is
no law or principle, but only the factual majority within
a fixed range. Thus the measure, to fulfil all that is
expected of it, and be a full expression or definition of
reality, must go beyond a mere measure : must become
the essence, or rather give place to the essence. In
order to explain the irregularity and want of measure
which turns up if we exceed the narrow provinces of
being, we are forced on the conception of a being, one
permanent and the same, set in relation, antithetical but
inseparable, to an other being, manifold, changing, and
different. The undying rhythm, the ceaseless symmetry
retreat into the further region — the world beyond : while
the older surface-being, as set against it, comes to be
a mere phenomenon or appearance, a derivative and
dependent something, which has its roots of being in
the underlying law and essential reality. But the two
planes are still in intimate connexion, in a correlation
which becomes more and more palpable as its impli
cations are disclosed and realised.

This change from Measure to Essential Being is one

1 Thus, the sharp break at death suggests the reference of vital
phenomena to a substantial soul.

438 PROLEGOMENA. [xxx.

which Greek philosophy seems to exhibit in the step
from Pythagoreanism to Platonism. Plato himself has
noted the passage from what have been called the
mathematical to the metaphysical categories, and in
sisted on the essential and higher truth to which mathe
matics only point. Mathematical terms give the supreme
definiteness to the world of being; they show it as in
its several compartments a world immanently ordered
and measured. As in Greek Art, all seems to be fully
brought to the surface : as the image suggests no
further and deeper meaning, but affords an absolute
identity of aspect and purport; so the natural and semi-
popular philosophy of Greece was satisfied for its ethics
with the proportionate, the becoming, the beautiful.
Plato however passes beyond the surface, and reflects
the apparent fact on a deeper permanent reality behind.
That reality is still, in name, only the ' form ' or ' shape J
— only the regular and permanent type — only the
measure. But it is called the really real, the OVTM &/, —
the being of being. In it the truth is clear, transparent,
one and systematic, which in the sensible or immediate
world is obscure, confused, multiple. It is the key to
explain the difficulties and irregularities of the first and
visible scene. Yet even Plato never for a moment
forgets the essential correspondence of the two realms,
however he may insist upon their separation, and how
ever hard he may find it to explain how being can be
duplicated, how the one can be many and yet not cease
to be one, how appearance has part in reality.

This indeed is not a difficulty confined to Plato. It
is, after all, the same antithesis as we found in the
beginning : the Is which lapses into the Is not. It now
becomes the play of positive and negative — of perpetual
relativity : of a known dependent on an unknown,
and an unknown interpreted by a known : an essence

XXX.] FROM MEASURE TO ESSENCE. 439

guaranteed by its show or seeming and a Schein which
supposes permanent Sein. How can a thing be, and
yet not be true ? How can pleasures seem and not be
real ? Aristotle, taking up the Platonic antithesis of
true and apparent being, carries it on into greater
detail. Matter and form : possibility and actuality : are
amongst his cardinal pairs of correlatives. But he is
anxious to maintain their essential relativity : to show
that reality only is and maintains itself as the unity of the
two poles of universal and particular, reason and sense,
or as a syllogism and a development. So far as he
succeeds in doing this, Aristotle rises above the cor
relational view of reality into the comprehension of it
as a unity, which carries itself through difference into
self-realisation.

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE LOGIC OF EXPLANATION AND REALISTIC
METAPHYSICS I ESSENCE.

THE coherence and consistency of being was, it
appeared in the last chapter, only to be maintained by
assuming it to fall into two planes, or orders, always
however relative to each other. The need of a measure
forced itself upon even the superficial student. In the
ordinary business of economical life one commodity of
common use or of general acceptability steps into the
place of a common measure. At first it is no more than
one amongst many, a more suitable and convenient
means of discharging the task of mensuration. But
gradually it draws away into a world of its own, and
acquires in common estimation a unique and peculiar
dignity. It becomes a commodity of a higher order
than the common, and is even treated as if it had
intrinsic and inherent worth, apart from all relations of
exchange. In a further stage it rises to rank as an
invariable and almost supersensible standard, which
amid all the fluctuations of currency tends to remain
unchanged. One loses sight of the movement out of
which it grew and in which it exists — the social give
and take, the interaction of individual needs and
general opinion.

The characteristic feature of this sphere of thought
is the perpetual antithesis of terms. And its tragedy is

\

RELATIVITY. 441

the result of the tendency to separate the terms, and
treat them as independently real. It matters not how
often this error may be detected. Each side of the
antithesis no doubt reflects itself upon the other. But
we as constantly fail to note that reflection. Even
the philosopher who most loudly preaches relativity
falls into the common trap, and speaks of relatives as
ultimate and absolute. He talks of an Unknowable, as
if it could be without a Known (or Knowable) : whereas
no such term fully manifests itself. Each term owes
its distinct existence to its correlative : each gives itself
over to the other, and invests it with meaning and
authority. Accordingly when even the ordinary mind,
which takes these categories as they are given, is asked
what each means, it can only reply by referring to the
other. A cause is that which has an effect. The
dialectic in the nature of thought, — its self-revising
self-conscious nature — which was concealed in the First
Part of Logic, where one term, when carried to its
extreme, passed over into another, is made obvious in
the Second Part, where each term postulates and even
points to its correlative, and, however it may be contra
distinguished, cannot be thought without it. Thus,
force is a meaningless abstraction without the correla
tive expression or utterance of force : and matter means
nothing except in its distinction from, and yet reflection
on, form. These, it may be said, are simple and tauto
logical statements. They are principles, however,
which every day sees disregarded. Have they, for
example, been remembered by those theorists who tell
us that everything is ultimately reducible to matter, or
who propose to improve upon that theory by explaining
that matter is after all only another name for force ?
Forgetting how this reduction is made, they are dealing
with abstractions or mental figments, and losing their

442 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxi.

way in an endless maze of metaphysics. Do those who
speak so confidently of laws of nature as something real
and effective ever reflect that the two terms are more or
less relative to each other, and that there is some latent
metaphor in the phrase ? Or if they prefer to speak of
laws of phenomena, on which word is the accent to be
laid ? Those who thus speak of matter and force,
really speak of a matter which is formed and form-
possessed, capable of determining its own form, and of
a force which can rule its own exertions : and for such
conceptions the words in question are scarcely adequate
representatives. They use the language of the Second,
to express notions which properly belong to the Third
branch of Logic.

The whole range of Essence or Relativity exhibits
a sort of see-saw : while one term goes up in impor
tance, the other term goes down. The several
antitheses, too, have their day of fashion, and give
place to others. Those inquirers who speak of the
phenomena of nature shrug their shoulders at the very
mention of essences : and the practical man, whose
field is actuality, acquires a very pronounced contempt
for both abstractions. One class of investigators glories
in the perpetual discovery of differences, and stigmatises
the seekers after identity and similarity as dreamers :
while the latter retort, and name the specialisers em
piricists. One intellect considers an action almost
solely by its grounds or motives : another almost solely
by its consequences. Some console themselves for
their degradation by piquing themselves on what they
might have been : others despise these ' would-be '
minds for what they practically are. What a wealth
there lies in each of us, which our nearest friends know
nothing of, and which has never been made outward !
But in this mode of thought, it is the persistent de-

RELATIVITY. 443

lusion, misleading science no less than metaphysics and
the reflective thinking of ordinary life, to suppose that
either of two relative terms has an existence and value
of its own. In Germany paper-money is sometimes
known as l Schein ' or Show. That term marks its
relativity to the gold or silver currency of the realm :
and it would be as absurd to pay with Austrian paper-
money in Persia, as to take one term of Essence apart
from its correlative. The disputes about essences, about
matters and forces, about substance, about freedom and
necessity, or cause and effect, are generally aggravated
by a forced abstraction of one term from another on
which its meaning and existence depend.

The essence may be roughly defined as that measure
or standard which corresponds to the variation of
immediate being, and yet remains identical in all
variation. Or, if we like, we may say that this imme
diate being, which, as derivative, may now be called
existence *, has its ground in the essence. The essence
is the ground of existence : and essence which exists is
a ' thing/ Such an existing essence or thing subsists in
its properties ; and these properties are only found in the
thing. Thus the essence, when it comes into existence
as a thing, turns out to be a mere phenomenon or
appearance. — Such briefly stated is the development of
essence proper into appearance.

With the idea of essential being — a permanent which
yet changes, there emerge the problems connected
with the double aspect of relation as identity and
difference, — the favourite categories of reflection.
These terms indeed the popular logician would fain
avoid as savouring of pedantic accuracy, and prefers
the psychological titles of similarity and contrast.

1 Existence, as opposed to Dasein, should thus imply the emergence
into efficient being from a state of quietude or passive latency (Wesen).

444 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxi.

These, he tends to insinuate, are unique experiences,
direct feelings, beyond which it is impossible to go
in analysis. The logician, on the other hand, must
insist on dealing with the more radical phase of the
terms. And he must note their essential interdepend
ence and their intrinsic contradictoriness. Abstract
sameness, or sameness which does not presuppose
a tinge of difference, is a fiction of weak thought,
which wishes to simplify the subtlety of nature.
Identity is a relative term, and for that very reason
presupposes difference : and for the same reason
difference presupposes identity and is meaningless
without it. The whole dispute about ' Personal Iden
tity/ as it descends from one English psychologist to
another, is enveloped in the obscurity which springs
from failure to grasp the logical antinomy on which
the question turns. When I feel that my friend whom
I have not met for years is still the same, should I
take the trouble to express myself in this manner,
unless with reference to the difference betwixt Then
and Now? If I remark that two men are different,
would the remark be worth making or hearing unless
there was some identity which made that difference all
the more striking ? The essence is, in short, the unity
of sameness and difference : and when so apprehended,
it is the ground by which we explain existence. The
essence, ground, or possibility, is at once itself and not
itself: if it is self-identical, it is for the same reason
self-distinguishing. If it is to be itself, it can only be so
by negativing what in it is other than itself. The
affirmation of self implies the negation of the other of
self, — the redintegration (though not the blank absorp
tion) of the other in it. This is the crux which lies
in Ex nihilo nihil fit : what exists must not be other
than the essence (the effect not more than the cause),

xxxi.] IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE. 445

and yet unless it is other and different, there has been
no passage from essence to existence.

The tendency to identify, and the tendency to dis
tinguish, alternate both in scientific thought and in
general culture. But whichever prevail for the moment,
it is only as a re-action and a protest against the one
sided predominance of the other. And thus both ulti
mately rest upon and presuppose a ground of existence
which is neither mere sameness nor mere difference.
It is only when the two tendencies meet and inter
penetrate that science accomplishes its end, and dis
covers the ground of existence. In the first instance
the world presents to incipient science the aspect of
mere identity and of mere difference. Likeness is
confounded with sameness, and unlikeness with diversity.
The popular and the infant minds do not draw fine
distinctions. Things to them are either the same or
different : one point of sameness may in certain con
ditions obliterate whole breadths of difference ; and
tiny divergence may make as nothing all the many
points of agreement, purely and simply, i. e. abstractly.
But the process of comparison, setting things beside
each other, teaches us to refine a little, and speak of
things as Like or Unlike. One thing is like another
when the element of identity preponderates : it is
unlike, when the difference is uppermost. Thus while
we distinguish things from one another, we connect
them. From mere variety, and mere sameness, we
have risen, secondly, to distinctions of like and unlike.
But, thirdly, this distinction of same and different is in
the thing itself. Everything includes an antithesis or
contradiction in it : it is at once positive and negative.
One can only be virtuous, so long as one is not utterly
virtuous '. To be a philosopher, implies that you are
As Aristotle says, The brave man stands his ground, yet fearing :

446 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxi*

not wholly or merely a philosopher. The rational
animal is so, because of an inherent irrationality, and is
so, only as rising upon and superseding it. Every
epithet, so to speak, by which you describe any reality,
presupposes in it the negative of the quality. Not
only does every negation presuppose an attempted or
surmised affirmation, but an affirmation is always, it
may be said, a re-affirmation against an incipient doubt.
Every stage of reality involves the presence of anti
thetical but inseparable elements : every light implies
a shadow to set it forth. The epithet of each real is
only a potiori. While it retains itself, it must lose itself.
Its positivity is only secured by its self-negation and its
identity is based upon its self-distinction. Every pro
position which conveys real knowledge is a statement
that self-sameness is combined with difference. Every
such proposition is synthetical : it unites or identifies
what is supposed to be implicitly different, or differen
tiates what seemed only identical. Here we have that
coincidentia oppositorum, which is the truth of essence.
Thus, e. g. the essence of the Self is the contradiction
between its self-centred unity and its existence by
self-differentiation into elements.

Essence, thus comprehended as the unity of identity
and difference, as that which is and is not the same, is
the Ground, from which an Existence comes as the Con
sequent. Or, otherwise expressed, the ground is the
source of the differences, — the point where they con
verge into unity, and whence they diverge into exist
ence. Everything in existence has such a ground : or,
as it is somewhat tautologically stated in the common
formula, a sufficient ground. On that account, it is no
great matter to give reasons or grounds for a thing, and

(cf. Tolstoi : Siege of Sevastopol} . If he does not fear, brave is not
the word for him.

XXXI.] THINGS AND PROPERTIES. 447

no amount of them can render a thing either right or
wrong, unless in reference to some given and sup
posedly fixed point. For the ground only states the
same thing over again in a mediate or reflected form.
It carries back the actual fact to its antecedent : and
thus deprives it of its abruptness or inexplicability, by
showing you it was there implicitly ; and therefore as
you accepted the ground you cannot complain of what
but serves to continue it. To refer to the ground is to
say there is really nothing new : and as you raised no
objection before, you need raise none now.

The Existent world— a world of existents, each con
ditioning and conditioned — is popularly described as a
world of Things. These Things are the solid hinges
on which turns our ordinary conception of change and
action. They act, and exhibit properties. Being is
partly substantive, partly adjective. The Thing itself
is the ground of its properties : i. e. each thing is
looked upon as a unity in which different relations con
verge, or an identity which subsists through its chang
ing states. This is the side emphasised in ordinary life,
when a thing is regarded as the permanent and en
during subject, which has certain properties. But a
little science or a little reflection soon turns the tables
upon the thing, and shows that the properties are
independent matters, which, temporarily it may be,
converge or combine into a factitious unity which we
term a thing. But these very matters cannot be in
dependent or whole, just because they interpenetrate
each other in the thing. The thing, which from one
point of view seemed permanent, and the properties,
which from another point of view seemed self-subsistent
matters, are neither of them more than appearance.
For they must be at one, and at one they cannot be.
And if we reduce the various matters to one, and speak

448 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxi.

of Matter in general, we have a mere abstraction — a
something which only becomes real by being stamped
with a special form. Mere Matter like mere Thing
(thing in itself) is a knowable Unknowable.

In this way we pass from the talk about essence,
things, and matter into an other range of the sphere of
relativity. We no longer have one order of being
behind or in the depth, and another referring back to
it. We now speak (as Mill does) of Phenomena :— not
phenomena of an unknown, but, simply disregarding
the background, we find all we want upon the surface.
For neither is thing more real than property, nor
essence than existence. Each is exactly equal in reality
to the other, and that reality is its relation to the other.
The thing and the essence with their claim to truth
disappear. Nothing truly is : but only appears to be.
The semblance (Scheiri) may refer to an essential. But
the appearance (Erscheinung) only refers to another
appearance, and so on. The phenomenal world is all
on one level : — as was the world of immediate being.
But, there, each term of being presented itself as inde
pendent : here, nothing is independent — nothing ever
really is, but only represents something else, which is
in its turn representative. Yet even here there is a
pretence of hierarchy in existence. In the pheno
menon a certain superiority is attributed to its Law.
But the conception of Law is hard to keep in its pro
per place. Either it assumes a permanency — even were
it but a permanent possibility — as contrasted with the
coming and passing phenomenon : and then it is apt
to be confounded with a real Essence. Or, on the
other hand, it comes to be looked on as a mere way
of colligating phenomena, — as a mere appearance in
the variety of appearance (as it were an iris in the
rain-drops) — a phenomenon of a phenomenon. Such

xxxi.] FORM AND CONTENT. 449

a distinction between the phenomenon and its law,
therefore, is and must be illusory, or itself only an
appearance. As such it is described as the difference
of Form and Content : two terms, which are incessantly
opposed, but which more than most antitheses reveal
when pressed the hollowness of their opposition. For
true or developed Form is Content, and vice versa.

Instead however of this practical identification of the
law of the phenomenon with the duly-formulated phe
nomenon itself, it is more natural to emphasise the
discordance of the two aspects of reality, and yet to
acknowledge their essential relativity. This essential
relativity in the phenomenon has a threefold aspect :
the relation of whole and parts; of force and the
exertion of force ; of inward and outward. The relation
of whole and parts tends to explain by statical compo
sition : the relation of force and its exertion, by dyna
mical construction. According to the former the parts
are constituted by their dependence upon and in the
whole, and yet the whole is composed by the addition
of the several parts together. Each extreme is what it
is only through the other. Only those parts can make
up a whole, which somehow have the whole in them :
and to become the whole, they must contrive to wholly
obliterate their partitional character. A better exhi
bition of the inner unity and the difference between
form and contents is seen in the relation of a force to
its exertion. Here the contents appear under a double
form : first, under the form of mere identity, as force, —
secondly, under the form of mere distinction, as the
manifestation of that force. Yet a force is only such in
its utterance or manifestation, while in that utterance,
if abstracted from the force it carries forth, all energy
has been superseded. This separation of content and
form, or of content as developed in two forms, appears

450 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxi.

still more clearly in the third relation : that of outward
and inward. This is a popular distinction of very wide
application in reference to phenomena. But neither
outside nor inside is anything apart from its correlative.
If the elements implied in the conception of phenomena
are to have full justice done them; it must be expanded
so as to give expression to these two phases, to include
the outward and the inward. But at first only by
reverting to something like the old distinction of essence
and existence, — an essence however which is existent
or phenomenal, and an existence which stands inde
pendent, though in correlation. Such being is Actuality
— being, i. e. which is what it must be, and must be
what it is.

Actuality, though it comes under the general head of
Essence, tends to pass away into another sphere. Here,
as elsewhere, we see that the general rubric of a sphere
is only partially applicable to some of its subordinate
sections. In essence proper there were, or were
assumed to be, two grades of being — a real or essential,
and an unessential or seeming : or being was regarded
(contradictorily) both as ideal (as one thing) and real
(as having several properties). In Appearance or
Manifestation the aspects of being are supposed to lie
on a level ; but they are always a pair of aspects,
one side of which is entirely dependent for its expla
nation on a reflection from the other, e. g. whole and
parts, the favourite category for explaining the larger
unities. But in the category of actuality there is
nothing so merely potential, so unessential as mere
essence recognised : and each actual is something firm
and self-supporting which does not, like a phenomenon,
merely borrow its reality from its antithesis or corre
lative. Thus we have, in a way, got back to the
characteristics of immediate being : only, as we find it,

xxxi. J ANALYSIS OF ACTUALITY.

45*

we have this affirmation of the self-subsistence of reals
contradictorily accompanied with the conviction of their
necessary interdependence. It is a reflective (or corre
lated), not an immediate reality. There is no other
world of being to have recourse to for explanation now :
nor can we play back and forward from aspect to aspect
of a reality which never comes forward itself, but only
as a reflection on or from another. The world of
reality is a self-contained world : its parts and phases
are each hard realities : and for that reason they bear
hard upon each other in the bond of necessity.

The total actuality falls naturally in our conception
into three elements. We separate first the central fact
—the nucleus of the business, the concentrated reality
in reality : the fact in its mere identity and inner
abstractness : the ultimate drift or inner possibility of
things. Then we turn to the rest of the concrete fact
—all without which the fact would not be itself— the
detail and particularity: this we treat as a sort of
materials or passive conditions from which the real fact
is to be produced, on which it is dependent and which
precede it in time. Lastly, in order to get back the
unity of the fact from these two unconnected elements,
we refer to some agency which puts them together.
The End — or thing to be realised — (so to speak) has to
be brought out by a motive agency (efficient cause)
which imposes the form (or general character) on the
matter and makes these one. By this analysis, however,
we have only put asunder what is one experience and
introduced a mechanical (external) unifier needlessly.
The name of conditions is given to the particulars or
details, considered apart from the rest of the fact, and
hypothetically invested with an existence anterior to it,
with the implication, first, that they are self-subsistent,
and secondly, that they to some extent involve the rest

G g 2

452 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxi.

of it. Again, the general fact, the fact in its mere
nominal or abstract generality or essence, its mere
possibility, does not exist separately: every fact when in
thought completed has its so-called conditions not out
side it, but as constituent elements, aspects, or factors
in it. Lastly, the so-called agency is the active element
itself in the act, an aspect or factor in the totality : the
aspect which keeps actuality together as a self-energis
ing fact — a Thathandlung and not a mere Thatsache (to
quote Fichte's phrase). Our practical and technical
habits, where the agent is other than his materials and
aims, lead us to draw the same distinctions in the realm
of total Nature : they are aspects useful in ordine ad
hominem which we, without due modification, apply in
ordine ad universum.

It is originally in our practical operations that the
distinctions of necessary and possible emerge, — with
a view to the accomplishment of our desires and pur
poses. That is necessary which is required and needed
if some bare plan is projected and is to be actualised :
it is the condition or conditions without which the end
cannot be attained. It is an epithet of the means.
Possible, on the contrary, is an epithet of the end or
plan, and denotes that there are means for its attain
ment, without however always specifying that this is
known of the present or given instance. It is clear that
everything as regards the application of these terms
will depend on the definiteness with which the plan is
conceived, both in itself so to speak and in its relations
with the rest of the circumstances. On the other hand,
when a result emerges without being included in the
purpose, and without any means having been employed
for attaining it, it is said to be a chance, accident, or
contingency.

These terms are applied by analogy to the uses of

xxxi.J POSSIBLE AND NECESSARY. 453

theoretical explanation. Just as in will you have
a general aim to begin with, which becomes more and
more determinate as it moves forward in the volitional
process to execution ; so in the attempt to understand
the world you suppose it first of all the mere shadow or
phantom of itself, a promise and potentiality of things
to come : a next-to-nothing, which however you credit
with a magic wealth of potential being. So much
indeed may this possibility be emphasised that nothing
more is needed: it is possible, and, without a thought of
difficulties and counteractives, you could swear that it
is actual1. Being removed above this solid land of
actuality, cut off from the ties and bonds of conditions,
it fancies itself moving in its vacuum ; and being free
from all bonds of actuality fancies itself actually free, or
self-disposing, whereas it can only claim this liberum
arbitrium indifferentiae, so long as it remains bare and
powerless possibility— a mere may-be, which, apart from
all conditions, would exist only by a mere contingency,
or freak of chance. This mere potentiality — being only
an ante-dated, presupposed, and hypothetical actuality
—being only a substance or substratum— must be
raised out of its supposititious existence into reality by
means of appropriate conditions. These conditions
are necessary to its resuming its place or reaching
a place in actuality. Thus each object becomes actual
or real from a presupposed possibility by means of an
external necessity. As in the former case the possi
bility was identified with power, and conditions were
left out of sight as comparatively unimportant : so here
the possibility— taken to lie at the root of the thing — is
made a mere susceptibility, which would be nothing
actual unless stimulated and necessitated from outside.

1 Put into Greek, the mere Iz'Se'xercu (licet, or forsitaii] is taken as
equivalent to 5vvap.ai (possum).

454 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxi.

This necessity in the very heart of actuality (which
is its characteristic to the reflectional mode of mind)
thus arises from the separation and hypostatisation of
its elements into independent powers which are so far
in stress and opposition. This is the climax of meta
physics — if metaphysics be the investiture of the
dynamic factors of the notion with the power and
character of supposed agents or forces. It appears
in three phases, with the three categories of substance,
cause, and reciprocity. To the first, reality is regarded
as dominated by its mere underlying potentiality : the
reality of the mere superficial contingents is controlled
by the necessity of its latent or substantial being. To
explain event or incident, here, is merely to bind it to
the generic nature or the intrinsic doom, which — unex
plained and inexplicable — manifests itself in an extrinsi-
cally fluctuating appearance of facts : e. g. the single
crime is explained as the product of social conditions.
Under the conception of Causality, each thing is a mere
might-be which owes all its actuality to a definite
antecedent or cause, — an antecedent termed for the
moment unconditional, but anon reduced to depend
ence on further conditions. The effect is as a fact : but
would not have been so unless for an earlier fact — i. e.
unless the effect in a supposed earlier stage of its
growth had been helped on by certain conditions or
circumstances to acquire actual and full being in the
effect. And cause and conditions can change places,
according to what we happen to regard as the central
nucleus or inner possibility of the effect. Lastly, the
conception of reciprocity recognises that causality is
rather an arbitrary simplification of reality into strands
of rectilinear event ; it remembers that Substance em
phasises the dependence of each non-independent
element on the supposed totality which they grow from,

XXXI.] CAUSE AND CONCEPT. 455

and doing so, it lays down the reversibility and essen
tial elasticity of the causal relation. The cause in
causing re-acts upon itself, and the effect is itself
a cause of the effect, active as well as passive. The
dependence in short is all-environing : nowhere is there
any loop-hole to escape from necessity. Motives act
on purpose, and purpose acts on motives : the stone
hurls back the hand that hurled it.

Explanation is thus baffled and thus forced to re
cognise its own limitations. The simplest fact is
beyond all the powers of explanatory science to do
full justice to : for to know fully the ' flower in the
crannied wall' after this method of explanation would
involve endless multiples of action and re-action. The
antinomy between necessity and contingency arose by
following out the antithesis, so natural to us, between
selfsame and different, essence and existence, substance
and accidents, till they were invested with a right to
independent place and function. But the separation
of the abstract receptacle of possibility, self-same and
essential, from the equally abstract conditions which
fill it up and make it actual, is only the great human
instrumentality of comprehension, which however is
not reached until each thing is realised and idealised
as an individual, which has universality and has par
ticularity, but never either alone. Its universality is
possibility— its particularity the aspect of contingency :
but these aspects are in submission to an inclusive
unity. The real when ill known seems contingent;
when somewhat better known it seems necessary by
external (physical) compulsion; in its truth to intelli
gence, the real is a self-active, a causa sui, or it is
necessary by that self-determination which is the freedom
of autonomy.

The view of the world under the category of actuality

456 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxi.

(Reality), and as dominated by the law of causality,
is the culminating stand-point of scientific or reflective
realism. It began with a mere descriptive science,
naming and qualifying the successive aspects of being, —
with description which passed through numeration into
the definiteness of measurement. But all such deter
mination was found to imply the existence of a per
manent reality, or at least to involve the reference of
one reality to another, outside of it, and yet not
independent of relations to it, which had to make part
of its nature. To the scientific realist the sum of fact
presents itself independent of consciousness, as a com
plicated mass of real elements governed by laws and
subject to necessities. Each thing or state of a thing
is explained by reference to something outside it, which
is its cause, and measured by something inside it which
is its unit or atomic standard. Alternately the refer
ence, and the unit are designated arbitrary (contingent)
and necessary (essential): i.e. they are sometimes
considered as only a way of looking at reality1 — and
sometimes as inevitable implications and conditions
of reality.

All this is Objective Logic : or, so far as it does
not realise its implications, it is Metaphysics. Its terms
of thought2 are in practice treated as elements of
a reality which is what it is, apart from thought-con
ditions, apart from consciousness. As Hegel exhibits
them in their interdependence, they hint their underlying
thought-nature, which in their empirical applications
is hardly apparent. For to the realistic stand-point
mind and subjectivity are left out of account as only
passive onlookers. The realist may no doubt speak
of a Subject : but he means a real, a corporeal self,

1 Herbart's Zufdllige Ansichl, or contingent aspect.
a ' Denkbestimmungen.'

xxxi.] SUBSTANCE AND SUBJECT. 457

an actual amongst other actuals. If he speaks of mind
and will, such mind and will are parts and ingredients
in a general scheme of causes and effects ; they are
points of transition through which passes the moving
stream of event. They also are things and substances.
They are agents and patients, always both, no doubt
but the chief circumstance to note is that they are
actuals, and that even knowledge and will are regarded
as species of action and motion.

When Protagoras laid down his maxim that Man
is the measure of all things, he stated, apparently in an
ambiguous manner, that the fact of measure (and all
that mensuration implies), and (we may add) the ex
istence of correlation in actuality, presupposed for
their explanation the assumption of Mind and sub
jectivity. Mind thus became the basis of all actuality
which claimed to be objective — claimed, in short,
to be actual. The truth and objectivity of the ob
jective lies in the subjective; Mind is its own measure,
i. e. the absolute measure, and it is self-relation. So
Kant had taught and Fichte enforced. The basis of
objectivity is the subjective; but a subjective different
from that so-called by the plain man or by the naive
psychologist. By the subjective he does not, as the
plain man, understand the compound of body and soul,
the living and breathing organism amid outer objects —
nor, as the psychological idealist does, a psychical
process, a series or bundle of states of consciousness,
always contrasted with a reality, the reality outside
consciousness. It is true that his language resembles
the language of psychology: as Herbart and others
have said, that is to be expected, for he talks of mind
and consciousness. But the consciousness he speaks
of is a unity that includes all space and all time : it
is one and all-embracing, infinite, because not as indi-

458 PROLEGOMENA.

vidual (psychological) consciousness set in antithesis
to reality, as the other half of the duality of existence.
It is consciousness generalised — Bewusstsein uberhaupt
—an eternal, i. e. a timeless consciousness, an universal
i. e. not a localised, mind : — a necessary Idea, but with
an inward self-regulating necessity. Such a conscious
ness Fichte called the Absolute Ego : but as we saw
before, the adjective transforms the substantive. Such
a consciousness, which is absolute self-consciousness,
is the Idea : — no psychical event, but the logical con
dition and explanation of reality whether physical or
psychical. The Idea is the presupposition of epis-
temology, but of an epistemology which claims to occupy
the place of old usurped by metaphysics. Metaphysics
has no higher category than actuality : transcendental
logic shows that actuality rests in the Idea, — reality
conceived and conception realised.

CHAPTER XXXII.

LOGIC OF COMPREHENSION AND IDEALISM : THE NOTION.

THE distinction between the psychical or psychological
idea and the logical concept has been more than once
alluded to. The idea or representation is under
psychical form exactly equivalent to the undigested and
passively accepted thing to which we give the title of
physical or external. It is the ideal, in the sense of
the psychical, pendant to the real : and hangs up in the
mental view in the same way as the real object to the
physical perception. It is in brief the. crude object,
considered not as existing, but as a state of conscious
ness — it is a reduplication in inner space of the thing
in outer space. If we cannot say it is altogether mytho
logical, we must however note that it is simply a psy
chical reflex, which has an existence only through
abstraction, and is neither more or less than the object
apprehended without comprehension.

The concept or notion is more than an image, and
less than an image. An idea-image is symbolical of
the unanalysed totality of the thing. But the notion
is in the first instance due to an analysis, and
secondly, a reconstruction of the thing. It takes
up the thing in its relations : it thinks it, i. e. it
abstracts and mutilates it, and artificially recombines.
It implies analysis and synthesis. It produces a sort
of manufactured thing : a mental construction. But

460 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxn.

the construction — as contrasted with the passivity that
says first A and then B and a connexion of them—
has the traces of subjective or mental violence about it :
for violence there is in the act of comprehension. We
have however got together in unity what actuality in
the process of history let fall asunder, and could only,
at the best, show as independent reals held against their
will in ubiquitous relations of reciprocity. But the
unity in which the individual sets the universal and the
particular is an imported unity, which though it gives
place and explanation to the elements of reality, seems
to impose its synthesis upon reality. So far the concept
is subjective only. It is an ample explanation including
the facts, but not quite self-explanatory. We conceive,
and judge, and reason : but all this is alien to the
object.

But there is a counterpart almost in antagonism to
this. There is a concept, i. e. a grouping of existence
into totals mediated by necessary links, which presents
itself as embodied in things : and this embodied concept
is the objective world. That world, apart from our
interpretation and conception, offers itself as a synthesis
of universal, particular and individual. It groups itself
into systems, mechanical, chemical, and teleological.
But in all of these there is lacking the evidence of the
inward and subjective principle of unification. The
unity is external, the members are held in a vice : their
unity is given as a fact : it follows through certain laws
and does not reveal itself. There is a want of per
spicuity of connexion : logic — the need of inner expla
nation — in short, is not satisfied by this logic of facts.
It is rather a realm of necessity than of freedom. It
wants life ; wants true self-activity. As in the sub
jective notion, the facts resented the hand of the logician
(for here is the sphere of logic proper in the old

XXXII.] OBJECT AND SUBJECT. 461

Aristotelian sense), and refused to show themselves in
the simple and transparent transitions of his argument:
so the objective synthesis of the members of a mechani
cal system, or of a kingdom of means and ends, lacks
the freedom and lucidity of inner movement which
logical insight demands. Objectivity — the logic of fact
— is a syllogism of necessity, so hardened and fixed
that the necessity of the conclusion is more obvious
than the self-determination by the syllogism.

The third stage of the Notion shows the union of the
pellucidity and ideality of the syllogistic progress with
the necessity and reality of the objective order. Here
actuality and the concept are at one. At first as a mere
fact — or more fact than idea. Life, organic life, is no
doubt development : a totality which is in all its parts,
and where parts have their being in the total. But life
as such, the so-called vital principle, does not emancipate
itself to a true universal : it is immersed in its par
ticulars. Intellectual life, on the contrary,— the form
of consciousness — rises independent and distinct from
the totality of life. Psychology follows Biology. But
as such — under the form of intellect and will— it has an
antithesis no less fatal to its absoluteness than the
opposite one-sidedness of life. There is — to put it in
language more familiar to the present day — there is an
analogue of life in all nature ; and all reality, even the
rock and the crystal, has its life-history. There is,
properly speaking, no mere inorganic reality : organic
life is universal. And then, going a step further, we
attribute to all reality something analogous to a soul, or
a consciousness. We talk, in rash moods, of 'mind-
stuff* and feelings, even in molecules. But as Spinoza
has reminded us, terms like Will and Intellect have
about them something finite, because they imply an
antagonism to an object : they are predominantly sub-

462 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxil.

jective. The reality in its final truth must be a subject-
object: the adequacy of thought and being, the equation
of real and ideal, the intellection which is life. And
this is called Absolute Idea. It is natural to translate
such an equation, when made a result, into a mere blank.
And a blank it would be, if we suppose all that has gone
before obliterated, and only the result left. Then, in
the coincidence of opposites, we have only a zero of
a gulf of negation. A life which is consciousness may
seem to fade away like a vague ideal with no reality.
A consciousness which is life can be no consciousness
at all. The is and the is known dare not coincide or
they perish both.

A categorical proposition, says Hegel, can never
express a speculative truth. That is to say : the subject
over-rides the predicate, or the predicate makes you
ignore the subject. The affirmation keeps out of sight
the negation. To say that life is consciousness makes
us forget that the very assertion would not and could
not be made, unless also life were other than conscious
ness. In its full proportion of meaning, therefore, the
proposition must imply a return to unity through dif
ference, to identity through otherness. Affirmation,
fully realised, is re-affirmation through negation. Cog
nition is but recognition deepened by contrast. This
law which governs — or rather which is — logic ; the
principle of identity through contradiction — must not
be lost sight of in the supreme struggle of thought.
The Idea is the unity of life and consciousness : but it is
a unity in which they are (aufgehoben) — not a zero in
which they utterly collapse.

We may illustrate in two ways. In the first we may
compare the 'Ei/epy«a of Aristotle. That is his formula
of reality. Nominally it only means activity and
actuality : and sums up the metaphysical formula for

XXXII.] THE ANTITHESIS 'N THE IDEA. 463

what really is,— the hard fact of being. But through it
there glimmers the meaning of consciousness. It not
merely is, but it means what it is. Energy of Soul is
the end of life— the supreme fulfilling of desire, and
consummation of tendency. As such it is, and feels that
it is. It is the virtuous deed, which is its own reward.
But Aristotle seems sometimes to fall from that identifi
cation of being and consciousness. The world of praxis
parts from the world of Theoria. In that case the
activity is a mere activity — the outward shell of action :
and then, as a supplement or complement to the abstract
result of the activity the consciousness of achievement
gets a distinct position as Pleasure: and the activity,
now no consummation, but only a means to an end, get
its completion from this arbitrarily abstracted shadow
of reality '.

The second illustration may come from Mr. Spencer.

1 We can think of Matter only in terms of Mind. We
can think of Mind only in terms of Matter. When we
have pushed our explorations of the first to the utter
most limit we are referred to the second for a final
answer : and when we have got the final answer of the
second we are referred back to the first for an interpre
tation of it.' Beyond this see-saw indeed we cannot go,
so as to leave it behind : but in reality we transcend it.
The Mind that is in terms of Matter is partly the region
of psychic event, partly the world of science, art and
religion. And psychic event is always antithetical to
physical reality. But the spiritual world already in
cludes the antithesis of psychical and physical, and
including it keeps it as a principle of life and conscious
ness. The supreme or absolute mind does not indeed

1 Cf. the quaint phrase by which Eth. x, TfAetoF r^v k
sinks below Eth. i, T£\OS 17 fvepytia,

464 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxil.

rise above Physis and Psyche so as to have no an
tagonism : but it is the unity of antitheses.

What those who crave for something higher than
this rest in unrest, this life in consciousness and con
sciousness in life, want, would destroy the very condition
of reality. Still philosophising, they would be above
philosophy. They want an objective reality in which
they may still their beating hearts, — a ' repose which
ever is the same ' and yet is not annihilation : — to sink
into the great sea of being, and leave consciousness
with its radical division behind. Such a craving philo
sophy, in Hegel's han^ds, has no power of satisfying.
It cannot, in the sensetwhich Jacobi and Schelling used
the words, reveal Being. It cannot get at the That
except by means of the What, and is the eternal anti
thesis and correlation of these two. It will always be
rational and logical — for it is its function to think being:
and it will re-affirm that an unthought and a-logical
being is a mere name, which in the language of humanity
at least has no meaning, whatever it may stand for in
the Volapuk of imagined gods. To go beyond this
correlation of Being and Thought is therefore no
advance, but a relapse into the Natura Naturans, which,
in its abstract completeness, is, but dare not be any
thing. Philosophy therefore in its supreme Idea is still
the 'Evepyeia of e«»pu', and not bare OiV/«. For it mere
Being is always Nothing. And to be actual it must
live in antithesis and live victorious over antithesis.
It follows the law of humanity (Und das heisst ein
Kampfer seiri)— which can only exist in warfare as
a church militant, but for continuous existence must
also be a church triumphant. Like religion and art, it
sometimes craves for utter union in the fullness of
Being. Such a fullness is the unspeakable and the
vain, — which we may picture as the apathy of Nirvana ;

XXXII.] CONCEPT AND REALITY. 465

but which is the absorption of Art, Religion and Philo
sophy, — the cease of consciousness and an abyss. We
may call it — it matters not — Being.

These stages of the Notion must be examined in
somewhat fuller detail. The subjective notion is the
effort at the comprehension (at first subjective) of the
two correlated elements into which actuality as such
has been seen to fall — and to fall again and again with
out end. It brings out, or explicates (and with some
opposition to the divisions of reality) the unity which
was presupposed by the antagonist and inseparable
reals. Hitherto we have had two things or aspects in
relation and move from one to the other by an act of
reflection. But to get two points in relation, they must
belong to or exist in a unity. The divided reality of
cause and effect must, if it is to be intelligible, submit to
a unification of its elements. It is comparatively easy
to get on if we are always allowed to have one foot on
solid ground, and can move the other. Give us a
standing-point, and explanation is simplified. But to
get a notion of things is, it may seem, to transcend them,
or get beneath them, and take a stand-point outside
actuality which shall unify them. If we added to
immediate being a further element to explain it, it may
be said we now superadd a third to explain the two
others. Over and above the different and related
elements, there is assumed to be a unity. And at first
it is certainly such a superimposed element, added to
the facts, and regarded as our way of looking at them,
as a subjective notion or grasp, holding together what
is in itself reluctant to be unified.

The three aspects or factors in a Concept are the
Universal, the Particular, and the Individual. These
are what Hegel calls the 'moments' or 'vanishing
factors ' of the notion. They are ' vanishing/ because

nh

466 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxil-

in their logical mobility they form a pellucid union : if
they are distinct, yet they refuse to be independent of
one another. Or, we may say, each in its truth is the
meeting-ground and unification of the two others, thus
forming a sort of cycle of perpetual movement. And in
this way we may see that the addition of the third has
really been a simplification : it has made two one.
For the Unit which welds together is not a tertium quid,
but simply the explicit statement and assertion of the
truth implied in the antithesis, which was yet insepara
bility, of the two others. And for the same reason,
neither mere universal nor mere particular nor mere
individual are full reality, when taken apart. One can
understand how Hegel could speak of the ' Bacchante-
like intoxication J of the concept. It may be illustrated
by the following utterances in which a modern psycho
logist labours to express the complex unity of mental
fact. First we are told that a ' nervous shock/ e. g. the
awakening caused by a sudden blow, or a simple sensa
tion (so-called), is the ultimate unit of consciousness.
And if this were all, it would correspond to the qualities
of immediate being, which we can suppose measurable :
we should get a science of purely empirical psychology
based on psychical atoms. But, immediately after, it
appears that the ' relational element ' is never absent
from the lowest stage of consciousness. Accordingly,
besides feelings, there must be relations between feel
ings. And that means a good deal : especially if we
also note the proposition that, in truth, ' neither a feeling
nor a relation is an independent element of conscious
ness/ Evidently you cannot have either without both,
and it seems difficult to have both when neither is
independent. Nor does it mend matters to learn that
' a relation is a momentary feeling ' : for that only
seems a way of implying that it is, and yet is not,

XXXII.] CONCEPT AND REALITY. 467

a feeling. Such are the difficulties that beset the
sincere attempt to comprehend. The fixed points of
explanation stagger under the burden of truth ; and
their unsteadiness shows that they lack the full founda
tion. Yet that foundation — it must be repeated — is not
something extra : it is the underlying unity which gives
life to the relativity of the separates.

For the peculiarity of the Notional stand-point is that
it insists on thorough comprehension. The usual
explanation refers us from a later to an earlier, from
a strange to a familiar, from a complex to a simple,
from compound to elements. It keeps analysis and
synthesis, induction and deduction apart. To compre
hend is, on the other hand, to light up earlier by later and
later by earlier, and carry both into their unity. It
does not merely refer existence to its ground, pheno
menon to law, or effect to cause; because beyond
these it has still to reveal the unity of nature which
carries on one of these into the other. Thus, the
explanatory method in Social Science may either refer
us to the simple elements or parts out of which the
total is composed, or to an earlier stage in the same
institution's life. The analytical sociologist does the
former : the historical the latter. Neither really faces
the problem. For if the whole is made up of parts, it
is made up of parts which have been characterised by
the whole. If the later has come from the earlier, that
only shows that the nature of the earlier was inade
quately ascertained. Development— which implies a
permanent which changes, an identity which is also
different,— is thus more than mere reference to an
antecedent ; because the antecedent must also figure as
a simultaneous. Cessante causa, cessat et effectus. But
here, in the concept (or Xoyos) or syllogism, the perma
nent exists as the — may we call it — consciousness

H h 2

468 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxn.

which binds together the elements of reality, as the
life and the history, which is ideally continuous through
real changes, and is a real unity through the distinctions
of appearance.

Such a comprehension e. g. of the State would show
that though it must have a universal aspect, a parti
cular, and an individual, yet these are not severally
identifiable with the divisions of sovereign, executive,
and people, but that in each of the latter the three
moments of the notion must appear, and that e. g. the
people is not mere people, but also executive and
sovereign, just as the sovereign is no mere sovereign,
but also executive and of the people. The same may be
illustrated in the so-called individual. A man in his
special department and sphere of action may very likely
lose the sense of his wholeness and his integrity,—
perhaps in more senses than one ! He may reduce
himself to the limits of his profession. But in so doing
he becomes untrue, or, in Hegelian parlance, abstract :
he fails to recognise the universality of his position.
All work, however petty, which is done in the right
spirit, is holy.

' One place performs, like any other place,
The proper service every place on earth
Was framed to furnish man with : serves alike
To give him note, that through the place he sees
A place is signified he never saw.'

It is a false patriotism, for example, which is incon
sistent with the spirit of universal brotherhood : and
there is something radically wrong with the religion,
on the other hand, which cannot be carried into act
amid the pettiness of ordinary practical interests. The
universal, again, is not a world beyond this world of
sense and individuals : if it were so, it would itself be
a mere particular. It is rather the world of sense

XXXII.] UNIVERSAL, PARTICULAR, INDIVIDUAL. 469

unified, organised, and, if we may say so, spiritualised.
And an individual which is merely and simply indivi
dual is an utter abstraction, which is quite meaningless,
and in the real world impossible. Or, if we prefer to
express the same thing in connexion with the mind,
sensation apart from thought is an inconceivable ab
straction. Sensation is always alloyed with thought,
and we can at the most suppose pure sensation to exist
amongst the brutes. The mere individual opens out
and expands : and in that expansion we see the uni
versal : (sensation is thought in embryo). But, on the
other hand, the developed universal concentrates itself
into a point : (thought returns into the centre of feeling).
The same process of particular, individual and uni
versal, which thus goes on under the apparent point of
the notion, is more distinctly and explicitly seen, with
due emphasis on the several members, in the evolution
of the notion into the Judgment and the Syllogism.
The judgment is the statement of what each individual
notion implicitly is, viz. a universal or inward nature in
itself, or that it is a universal which individualises
itself. The judgment may, therefore, in its simplest
terms be formulated as: The Individual is the Uni
versal. The connective link, — the copula ' is/ expresses
however at first no more than a mere point-like contact
of the two terms, not their complete identity. By
a graduated series of judgments this identity between
the two terms is drawn closer, until in the three terms
and propositions of a syllogism the unity of the three
factors of the notion finds its most adequate expression
in (subjective) thought.

It may be a question how far syllogisms as they are
ordinarily found are calculated to impress this synthesis
of the three elements upon the observer. The three
elements there tend to bid each other good-bye, and are

470 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxil.

only kept together by the awkward means of the middle
term, and the conjunction 'therefore/ In these circum
stances it becomes easy to show, that the major premiss
is a superfluity, not adding anything to the cogency of
the argument. But under the prominence of this
criticism of form, we are apt to let slip the real question
touching the nature of the syllogism. And that nature
is to give their due place to the three elements in the
notion : which in the syllogism have each a quasi-
independence and difference as separate terms, while
they are also reduced to unity. The syllogism expresses
in definite outlines that everything which we think, or
the comprehension which constitutes an object, is a
particular which is individualised by means of its uni
versal nature. As always, thought refers to reality;
and a notion has to be carried out into objectivity. But
as Aristotle complained, matter is recalcitrant to form.
The objective appears at first only as an opposite, and
instead of revealing, it rather obscures and condenses
the features of subjectivity.

Objectivity, or the thought which has forgotten its
origin and stands out as a world, may be taken in three
aspects : Mechanical, Chemical, and Teleological. That
is to say, the mode in which groups or systems naturally
present themselves in the objective world, is threefold.
The contradiction which stands in the way of compre
hending objectivity comes from the fact that it contains
subjectivity absorbed in it. In other words, the object
is at once active and passive ; as thought and subjec
tivity it should be its own synthetiser, as objectivity it is
necessitated to interdependence, and the subjectivity,
at this stage, is in abeyance. Consequently, either
the two attributes co-exist, or they cancel each other,
or they are in mutual connexion.

(i) In the first case the objects are independent, and

xxxii.] OBJECTIVITY. 47'

yet are connected with one another. Such connexion is
an external one, due to force, impulse, and outward
authority. The principle of union is implied : but the
objects are mutually determined from without. The
more, for example, an object acts upon the imagina
tion, the more vehement is the reaction of the mind
towards it.— (2) But if the object is independent, as has
been allowed, then the determination from without
must really come from within. Thus desire is a turn
ing or bent towards the object which draws it. The
desiring soul leans out of itself. It gravitates towards
a centre: and it is its own nature to be thus cen
tripetal. The lesser objects of themselves draw closer
around the more prominent object.— (3) But if this
gravitation were absolute, the objects would lose their
independence altogether, and sink into their centre.
Accordingly if the independence of these objects is to
remain, there must be, as it were, a double centre, the
relative centre of each object, and the absolute centre
of the system to which it belongs. In each of these
three forms of mechanical combination, the objects
continue external and independent. A mechanical
theory of the state regards classes as independent,
seeks to produce a balance between them, separates
individuals and associations from the state, and,^ in
short, conceives the state as one large centralising
force with a number of minor spheres depending upon
it, but with a greater or less amount of self-centred
action in each of them.

The fact is that an object cannot really be thought
as thus independently subsistent. Its real nature is
rather affinity,— a tendency to combine with another :
it requires to receive its complement. Every object is
naturally in a state of unstable equilibrium, with a ten
dency to quit its isolation and form a union. This

472 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxil.

theory, which is called the Chemical theory of an
object, regards it as the reverse of indifferent : as in
a permanent state of susceptibility. When objects
thus open and eager for foreign influences combine,
there results a new product, in which both the con
stituents are lost, so far as their qualities go. The
qualities of the constituents are neutralised. A man's
mind, for example, prepared by certain culture, meets
a new stimulus in some strange doctrine, and the result
is a new form of intellectual life. But at this point
the process, which such a form of objectivity represents,
is closed : all that remains is for the product to break
up one day into its constituent factors. There is no
provision made for carrying it on further. Hence if
we are to have a self- regulating system of objectivity,
we must rise above the Chemical theory of objects.
And to do that, the first course is to look at the
objective world as regulated (though not immanently
constituted) by the Notion.

The Notion as regulative of objectivity, — as inde
pendent and self-subsistent, but as in necessary con
nexion with Objectivity,— is the End, Aim, or Final
Cause. According to this, the Teleological and practical
theory of the Universe *, the object is considered as
bound to reproduce and carry out the notion, and the
notion is looked upon as meant to execute itself in
reality. The two sides, subjective and objective, are,
in other words, in necessary connexion with each
other, but not identical. This is the contrast of the
End and the Means. By the 'Means' is meant an
object which is determined by an Enfi, and which
operates upon other objects. — (i) The End is originally
subjective : an instinct or desire after something —

1 Teleology meaning here not an immanent teleology, such as
.is found in organism.

XXXIL] TELEOLOGY AND LIFE. 473

a feeling of want and the wish to remedy it. It is
confronted by an objective mass, which is indifferent
to these wishes : and manifests itself as a tendency
outwards, — an appetite towards action. It seizes and
uses up the objective world. — (2) But the End in the
second place reduces this indifferent mass to be an
instrument or Means : makes it the middle term be
tween itself and the object.— (3) But the means is only
valuable as a preparation to the End regarded as
Realised, which thus counts as the truth of the thing.
These are the three terms of the Syllogism of Teleo
logy: the Subjective End, the Means, and the End
Realised. It is the process of adaptation by which
each thing is conceived as the means to some end,
and which actively transforms the thing into something
by which that end is realised. In the last resort it
presents us with an objective world in which utility or
design is the principle of systematisation : and in which
therefore there is an endless series of ends which
become means to other and higher ends. After all is
done, the object remains foreign to the notion, and is
only subsumed under it, and adapted to it. We want
a notion which shall be identifiable with objectivity—
which shall permeate it through and through, as soul
does body. Such a unity of Subjective and Objective—
the Motion in (and not merely in relation to) Objec
tivity — is what Hegel terms the Idea.

The first form of the Idea is Life, taking that as
a logical category, or as equivalent to self-organisation.
The living, as organisms, are contrasted with mere
mechanisms. The essential progress of modern science
lies in its emphasis on this aspect of the Idea : which
includes all that the teleological period taught about
adaptation, and only sets aside the externality of means
to ends there found. The savant of the last century

474 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxn.

and the beginning of the present dealt with the object of
his inquiries as a mechanical, chemical, or teleological
object. The modern theorist tends to see the world
as one self-evolving Life. According to the naturalist
of last century, kinds of animals and plants were
viewed as convenient, and perhaps arbitrary arrange
ments : according to the moderns, these kinds represent
the grades or steps in the life of the natural world.

What, then, is the nature of the process which we
call Life ? Is it adequately or definitely defined as
' a continuous adjustment of internal to external rela
tions ' ? Or is it a good deal more than anything the
word 'correspondence' implies? According to Hegel
it is nothing so simple, but a syllogism with three terms,
and a syllogism moreover which permutates its terms
and premisses. There is, in the first place, the term,
which is also a process, of self-production. The living
must articulate itself, create for itself limbs and members,
and keep up a perpetual re-creation of morphological
and structural system of parts. Secondly, there is the
assimilation of what is external to the living individual.
If there is to be life, spiritual or bodily, there must be
a physiological intus-susception of foreign elements.
Without this the first term or process is impossible.
Thirdly, there must be a term or process of Reproduc
tion or generation by which the living being passes itself
on as a new unit. All life, mental or bodily, involves
Reproduction. — These are the three terms of the pro
cess of vitality.

But such a life, considered as merely organic, the
life studied in Biology, is only a fragment. The truer
life is in the genus, not in the individual : the conscious
ness, the sensation which inwardly unifies the diversity of
organic processes. The universal has become the medium
in which the Idea exists : it exists no longer in immediacy.

xxxil.] LIFE AND IDEA. 475

The mere natural life gives place to the life of the Spirit.
The life of the Spirit has the double form of Cognition
and Will :— the theoretical and the practical action of
the Idea : or Truth and Goodness. In short, the Idea
divides into two halves, which yet remain the same at
bottom : Reason and the World : but yet there is
reason in the world. The action of the Idea, or its
process at this stage, is to bring these two terms into
connexion, and show their ideal unity. Beginning with
Reason, it goes on to discover reason in the World.
Truth consists in the adequacy of object to notion. Such
adequacy is the Idea : and an object which thus corre
sponds with its notion is an ideal object. The ideal
man is the True Man. Truth is the revelation of
rationality from the objective world : and Cognition is
the name for that process. On the other hand, Good
ness \s the realisation of rationality in the objective
world : and the Will is the name for that process.
Truth proceeds from the Objectivity : Goodness from
the Subjectivity. But truth can only proceed (analyti
cally) from the objective world, in so far as it is produced
(synthetically) by the subjectivity. And, on the other
hand, when the good is realised in objectivity, it is sub
mitted to the process of Cognition.

With the unity of Life and Consciousness, the Abso
lute Idea, we reach the supreme effort of Logic.
In Bacon's words, 'the truth of being and the truth of
knowing is all one ' (cf. p. 224). That is the absolute
condition of comprehending reality: the principle of
Absolute Idealism, so far apart from its psychological
wraith, and yet compelled to employ the same language.
But after all it is Logic, i. e., only the supreme logical
condition of the reality of the physical and psychical
world. And it gains reality at the cost of the disruption
of its elements : it lets the Is slip from the Is known—

476 PROLEGOMENA. [xxxn.

the est from the cogitatur — Being from consciousness.
Or, in less mysterious language, fundamental philosophy,
or Logic, gives place to the concreter system of Philo
sophy — the Philosophy of the Outward and of the
Inward actuality, — of Nature and Mind.

The reader of the Divina Commedia may hardly need
to be reminded that, at each of the grander changes of
scene and grade in his pilgrimage, Dante suddenly finds
himself without obvious means transported into a new
region of experience. There are catastrophes in the
process of development : not unprepared, but summing
up, as in a flash of insight, the gradual and unperceived
process of growth. There is birth and death in the
spiritual world : and such are moments of sudden
lapse, abrupt conversion, when the waters of Lethe
close around, and thereafter all things are new. There
are such moments of accumulated and abnormal inten
sity also in the Hegelian philosophy when a new cycle
of idea suddenly appears. Such are the epochs of
change at the great crises from Being to Essence, and
from Essence to Notion. There is a revulsion, a sharp
turn of the path which dialectic can enforce but cannot
smooth away, — on that path which dialectic indeed, as
opposed to the old logic of identity, shows not to be
a mere smooth continuity. All development is by
breaks, and yet makes for continuity.

This is again exemplified in the passage from Logic
to Physics. The reality which presents itself to the
philosopher as Nature is a world of reason — but, as it
stands, it only lives as some speechless work of art. It
is, so to speak, the picture on the wall — the reflection
that is cast by the fuller reality of experience. Reason
here is in the garb of sense-perception. Nature is the
silent image— the tableau vivant — which becomes intelli
gent, speaking, and real, in the observing and compre-

xxxii.] LOGIC AND NATURE. 477

bending mind. It is the statue of Condillac, not yet
invested with the minimum of sensibility and conscious
ness. Nature is or shows all that the Idea contained,
but contained only in possibility, as a logical condition
of reality. It shows it in reality — and that is a reality
spread through endless times and spaces. Its unity, its
meaning, its continuity are broken up into fragments.
Yet as Nature, i. e. in its structural unity, and not in the
dispersion of things and elements, it is all a unity of
development and has a life-history written in its organism
for intelligence to read and to reconstitute, on the as
sumption that all its accident and irregularity is but the
inevitable imperfection of reality as given in parts and
successions.

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