,1^ "iv. '■'.' I If I If 1 Mwm M'vl : si IBM wHi ■BBS - ; *V'^>t ■ ■ ^H I ■ ■ OSBEHfl v .'« v.*- □K hk BJHr9M0Hi$3 ■■■■■■nH ■■■H ■■H ■ 'v?-^** ■ I I BBl LIBRARY ^ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO / 3/L HEGELIANISM AND PERSONALITY 13 in. Balfour pfjtlosopfn'cal iUcturcs, flUmfccrsitg at (EbinlutnjTj. HEGELIANISM AND PERSONALITY ANDREW SETH, M.A., LL.D. PROFESSOR OF LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH SECOND SERIES OF BALFOUR LECTURES SECOND EDITION WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCXCIII PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. I HAVE taken the opportunity afforded by the call for a second edition to read through the Lectures carefully, making such modifica- tions as seemed required in view of the criti- cism to which they have been subjected. The changes are slight and mainly verbal, but here and there I have cut out an unguarded phrase ; and a few notes have been added at points where criticism has been specially active. If I have not satisfied my critics, I may, at least, have made my meaning plainer to those whose philosophic creed is not yet fixed. The sale of the Lectures encourages me to hope that the volume has proved helpful to many in this position, and the criticism it has en- vi Preface to Second Edition. countered must be regarded as a wholesome stirring of the philosophic waters. Two points of a more general nature may be briefly referred to. My insistence on Reality has been taken in some quarters as an attempt to rehabilitate the unknowable thing-in-itself. This I cannot help feeling somewhat hard measure after the pains taken in the Lectures on " Scottish Philosophy," and elsewhere, to demolish that philosophic superstition. My contention in the present volume is simply that knowledge is, in the nature of the case, a symbol or representation of reality, and that, however inseparably related, knowing and being can never be identified. Knowledge would not be knowledge but for the reference to reality which it contains. The other point is the charge which has been brought against the book of being misleading, because "while condemning what is bad" in Hegel it does not "separate out and defend what is good." There is, no doubt, a certain amount of truth in this; but it is the fate of most criticism to emphasise the points of Preface to Second Edition. vii difference, and to take for granted the ground occupied in common. These Lectures were ostensibly a criticism of Hegelianism as an ab- solute system, and as I had on several previous occasions assumed the role of sympathetic expositor, there seemed the less reason for covering the old ground again. I do not think, however, that any one reading even the present volume attentively can fail to find in it the most ample acknowledgment of Hegel's philo- sophic services, and a high appreciation of the aim and spirit of his philosophy. The criti- cism may even be said to be directed in great measure not against Hegel, but against the logi- cal tendencies or implications of his thought. Edinburgh, December 1892. PREFATORY NOTE TO FIRST EDITION. The following Lectures, forming the second series of Balfour Philosophical Lectures, were delivered in the University of Edinburgh at the close of last winter session. They take up the questions which were suggested by the concluding lecture of the previous course on Scottish Philosophy ; but they will be found to depend for intelligibility on nothing beyond themselves. In preparing for publication, I have adhered to the lecture form ; but in what now stands as the third and fourth lectures, I have found it desirable to alter the arrange- ment of topics which was adopted in delivery. I have also endeavoured, by occasional changes and additions, and by the help of Appendices Prefatory Note to First Edition. ix and fuller references, to bring into relief the chief points on which my criticism turns, and at the same time, by more careful definition, to avoid the possibility of misconception. St Andrews, October 1887. CONTENTS. LECTURE I. KANT AND NEO-KANTIANISM. PAGE Relation of these Lectures to the previous course on Scotch Philosophy — English Neo-Kantianism or Neo- Hegelianism — Green's Spiritual Principle — Source of the conception in German philosophy — Sketch of the following Lectures — Results of the Kantian philosophy — Refutation of the sensational atomism of Hume — Time, space, and the categories — The Self or Subject — The terms synthetic and transcendental as applied to the Ego — The transcendental and the empirical Self — The transcendental method — Kant unfaithful to his own principles — Legitimate outcome of the transcen- dental method — Mr Shadworth Hodgson's statement of the position — Neo-Kantianism transforms Kant's theory of knowledge into a metaphysic of existence — Green's account of the Spiritual Principle — It repre- sents merely the formal unity of the universe — Kant's insistence on the abstract character of his inquiry — Neo-Kantianism illegitimately converts " consciousness in general " into " a universal consciousness" — Ferrier's more cautious argument — Negative or critical attitude of the theory of knowledge— Kant's own position, . I Appendix to Lecture I. Leibnitian elements in Kant's doctrine of things-in-themselves, . . -39 xii Contents. LECTURE II. FICHTE. Fichte the first to transform Kant's theory of knowledge into an absolute metaphysic — His constitutionally syn- thetic mind — Every philosophy must be a Monism — Dogmatism and Idealism as the only two possible types of philosophy — Impossibility of explaining the Self by action ab extra — Fichte's distinction between the Ab- solute Ego and the empirical self— His speculative ex- planation of the given element in knowledge — The Non- Ego and the origin of consciousness — A series of me- chanical metaphors — Fichte disclaims this interpreta- tion of his theory — Exclusively practical character of his idealism at this period— It leaves no permanent reality in the universe — Later forms of his theory — Disuse of the term Ego — Schelling's Absolute a relapse into Spinozism — The inevitable result of substantiating the logical unity of thought as a creative Self — Fascina- tion of the conception— Taken as a metaphysic, it de- prives both God and man of real existence — Fichte's later developments — Life or Nature as the prius of individuals — Knowledge as independent and self-ex- istent — Existence of God out of and beyond the pro- cess of evolution, ....... 42 Appendix to Lecture II. Green's account of feeling, 79 LECTURE III. THE RELATION OF HEGEL'S LOGIC TO EXPERIENCE. Hegel's relation to Fichte and Schelling — The notion of development in Hegel — Hegel's relation to Kant— The Logic as the centre of the system— An immanent criticism of categories — Hegel's Anthropomorphism Contents. xiii defended— Dependence of the dialectic on experience — Trendelenburg's criticisms — Order of exposition re- verses the order of thought by which the results were reached— True explanation of the onward impulse in the Method — The Absolute Idea derived by Hegel from the human self-consciousness, .... 84 LECTURE IV. LOGIC AS METAPHYSIC : THOUGHT AND REALITY. Relation of Hegel's Logic to his Philosphy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit — The Absolute Idea and the Ab- solute Spirit— Identification of Logic with Metaphysics — The Transition from Logic to Nature— Impossibility of such deduction — An absolute philosophy must con- struct everything as a necessity of thought— Compari- son between Hegel and Plato — The endeavour to con- struct existence out of abstract thought— Hegel's scorn for "Being" involves a fallacy— Nature as the other of thought — Things merely exemplifications of logical notions — Hegel's statements only true as metaphors — Identity of Knowing and Being in this sense impossible — Illustration from Schelling — True conclusion from Hegel's own admissions — Hegel's account of Nature as a system of types — Non-logical character of Nature as a mere collocation — Hegel's use of the term Con- tingency, . . . • • • • • .107 Appendix to Lecture IV. Kant and Fichte on the question of real existence, . . • . 149 LECTURE V. hegel's doctrine of god and man. Hegel evades the questions of the divine existence and human immortality — Ambiguity of the terms Spirit xiv Contents. and Absolute Spirit — The system deals throughout only with generals — Hegel's scheme of reconciliation peculiarly grand — Spirit intended to be the concrete unity of God and man— What the system yields is alternation, not union — Two lines of thought in Hegel — Relation of the Absolute to the world-process — If the Absolute exists as completed self-consciousness, there is no room for Nature or finite selves— Illus- trated from the Philosophy of Religion — The Son and the World — Recourse to mythical explanation of the real world— Second line of thought starts with the real world — Hegel's interpretation of history — Identi- fication of human history with the divine life — De- velopment in time— Outline of Hegel's conception— The Absolute as the one Subject of the historical pro- cess — Misapplication of the philosophical notion of development, . . . . • • • • l S7 LECTURE VI. HEGELIANISM AS AN ABSOLUTE SYSTEM. Identification of the Absolute with the last term of human achievement — Hegel's own position — The Hegelians of the Left — Human persons as foci of an impersonal system of thought — Idealism and Rational- ism pass into Materialism and Sensualism — Feuerbach and Strauss — Self-existence of thoughts unmeaning— The Absolute not to be identified with the historical process — Hegel's Absolutism exemplified in Ethics and Politics— The Philosophy of Law : the real is the rational — Hegel's explanations : the real and the truly real — His use of the term "truth" — Unwilling confession of failure — Absolutism destructive of ethical endeavour and historical progress— Hegel's own con- demnation of this attitude of finality, . . . . 194 Contents. xv CONCLUSION. The unification of consciousness in a single Self the radical error of Hegelianism and Neo-Kantianism— Uniqueness and exclusiveness of every self as such — The universal Self is rooted in the fallacy of Scholastic Realism — Traceable to a confusion between logic or epistemology and metaphysic or ontology — The doctrine sacrifices the personality of God — Ambiguity as to human im- mortality — These two positions complementary sides of the same view of existence, .... 225 HEGELIANISM AND PERSONALITY. LECTURE I. KANT AND NEO-KANTIANISM. In beginning a second course of these Lectures, I may be permitted to refer very shortly to the argument of the former course, with the view of indicating a certain continuity of thought between the two. The first course was de- voted to a comparison and contrast of Scottish and German philosophy ; and, amid much un- likeness, there still seemed to be justification for pointing to certain broad lines of similarity. These lines of similarity were determined by the opposition of both to a common foe — namely, to Empiricism, as that appeared histo- rically in the sensational atomism of Hume, 2 Hegelianism and Personality. which still remains, and must continue to remain, the classical form of that theory. Certain contentions of Reid were i-nstanced which, if construed liberally, might fairly be compared with positions taken up by Kant against the Humian Empiricism. After the exhibition of these points of unanimity, certain other aspects of the Kantian theory were ex- amined, which have made it, in my opinion, as fruitful of harm in one direction as it has been of good in another. I mean Kant's view of the subjectivity of the categories and forms of thought, and his doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, based as that is upon the notion of the thing-in-itself. In the last lecture, there was little opportunity for more than general considerations as to the possibility of philo- sophy as a completed system of the universe ; but in the last paragraph I pointed out several important questions to which the answer of Hegelianism (which was taken as the type of such a system) seems, on the surface at all events, vague, if not unsatisfactory. These questions centred in the question of the nature of the individual, and it is here that we have to resume the subject. There will be nothing further said in these Kant and Nco-Kantianism. 3 lectures of Scottish Philosophy. The object of this second course will be critically to test the Idealism reared upon Kant's foundations by his successors in Germany, and now repre- sented in this country by a number of writers often classed together as Neo - Kantians or English Hegelians. Neither of these terms, perhaps, is unobjectionable, for the English followers of Hegel do not profess to bind them- selves to any of the details, or even to many of the characteristic doctrines, of the master ; while, if we use the former term, we must bear in mind that the doctrine of the English Neo- Kantians is to the full as different from Kant as that of the Neo-Platonists from Plato. But it is useless to quarrel over a name whose de- notation, at all events, is sufficiently understood. It is enough for our present purpose if we know who are the thinkers referred to, and what are their characteristic doctrines. I need only name, therefore, the late Professor Green of Oxford as the most eminent of the writers re- ferred to, and one to whose utterances, more especially since his lamented death, a certain authority has been accorded, as to those of a leader and accredited exponent of this mode of thought. 4 Hegelianism and Personality, Now the most superficial acquaintance with Green's writings is enough to tell us that his whole system centres in the assertion of a Self or Spiritual Principle as necessary to the ex- istence alike of knowledge and morality. The presence of this principle of connection and unity to the particulars of sense alone renders possible a cosmos or intelligible world, and is likewise the sole explanation of ethics as a system of precepts. The impressive assertion of this one position constitutes Green's con- tinually repeated criticism upon Locke and Hume, and upon current English Empiricism. It may almost be said to constitute his entire system. As regards the critical part of Green's work, there has been of late, I think, a growing admission of its victorious and, indeed, con- clusive character. But as regards the nature of the Self or Spiritual Principle which is, in his hands, the instrument of victory, the candid reader of Green is forced to admit that almost everything is left vague. It was only in the Prolegomena to Ethics,' in fact, that any definite indication was given that the principle was to be interpreted as a universal or divine Self, somehow present and active in each in- dividual. And even there this conception is Kant and Nco- Kantianism. 5 little more than hinted at, and the possibility of such a relation between the divine and the human, as well as the evidence for the identi- fication of the two selves, is nowhere explained. What is meant in such a relation by the divine Self, and what by the human self? Here Green seems to fail us. The Self which he uses with such effect as a weapon of critical warfare is nowhere precisely defined by him, so as to be capable of employment constructively as a metaphysical reality. The ambiguity which thus clings to Green's central conception is incident, I propose to show, to the source from which he derived it. That source, as is well known, was the Kantian philosophy read in the light of the Hegelian system. Green's view of the Self — which means his view of the universe — cannot be properly understood or fairly judged without some insight into the genesis and growth of this conception in the thought of Kant and his successors. Instead, therefore, of confining myself to a criticism of Green's statements, I propose to trace the development of his central doctrine. The manner in which what we may call broadly the Hegelian conception was reached, will be itself, to a certain extent, 6 Hegelianism and Personality. the best criticism of the system which we are asked to accept. For, while leaving much of Hegel on one side, Green and the English Hegelians reproduce his fundamental position in their own doctrine of the Self. Conse- quently, should examination detect any radical flaw in the doctrine of German idealism in reference to the self and God, the same criti- cism will be found to apply to the English idealism of to-day in the same reference. It may also be said in favour of this method of procedure, that the constructive efforts of English idealism consist as yet more of hints and references to the German writers than of independently elaborated statements. In carrying out this programme, however, it will be desirable, as far as possible, to avoid en- tangling ourselves in the historical parapher- nalia of successive systems. I will rather endeavour to disengage leading principles, dwelling with this view chiefly upon the final form of German idealism in Hegel's system, and treating of Kant and Fichte only so far as they either lead up to Hegel's posi- tions, or illustrate them effectively by contrast. The remainder of this first lecture will accord- ingly deal with those features of the Kantian Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 7 theory which have an immediate bearing on the later Idealism, and will criticise the position taken up by Green, so far as that directly depends upon a manipulation of Kantian doc- trines. The second will be devoted to Fichte, because the step taken by Fichte in transforming Kant's theory of knowledge into a metaphysic of the universe is all-important in the present connection ; and, moreover, the progress of Fichte's thought through its different stages appears to me to throw an instructive light upon some positions afterwards taken up by Hegel. The three following lectures will criti- cise somewhat closely the leading determina- tions of the Hegelian system. This criticism will be found to turn mainly on Hegel's treat- ment of existent reality, or, what turns out to be the same thing, of the individual. The question is as wide as existence, and concerns the individual being wherever found ; as such it will be first discussed. But it will not be amiss to examine still more in detail the implications of this Idealism in regard to the divine existence, the human person, and the questions which are of most intimate concern to us as men. If these implications are unsatisfactory or inadmissible, it will then be 8 Hegelianism and Personality. comparatively easy to determine how far the English version of the theory is open to the same objections, and how far these invalidate its claim to be an intelligible and consistent metaphysical system. The Kantiair theory supplies, at the very least, a conclusive refutation of the sensational atomism into which Empiricism had at last resolved itself in Hume. Or, as it was formerly put, 1 Hume's own system is the self-refutation of the fallacy of the abstract particular. If we start with such isolated particulars, all synthesis or connection must of necessity be illusory. Even the illusion of connection is, however, demonstrably impossible, unless through the suppressed presence of certain principles of real synthesis. As a matter of fact, we nowhere do start with the mere particular, the isolated atom of sense ; on the contrary, such perception is altogether impossible to the mind. We cannot look at anything "in itself"; everything is indissolubly connected with other things, and its very existence involves this reference — or rather multitudinous references — beyond itself. In place of amplifying this point here, I may 1 Scottish Philosophy, p. 66. Kant and Neo-Kantianism. 9 be allowed to refer to what was said in the second lecture of the previous course on " The Philosophical Scepticism of David Hume." Kant's system, then, contains the demonstra- tion that from sense as sense knowledge can never by any possibility arise. And this demonstration is not merely negative ; it has also its positive side, inasmuch as Kant exhibits to us some of the chief principles of synthesis or rational connectedness which are essentially involved in knowledge. All events, Hume had said, are "entirely loose and separate," and knowledge, he had contended, is resolvable into such events. But this is so far from being true, that an event, if it be known, is knowable at all only by reference to the background of the past against which it stands out, as it were, in relief. Impressions or sensations must, at least, be known as successive ; or, in other words, time is a universal form of synthesis, weaving them together in spite of their quali- tative differences, and thus rendering an isolated particularity impossible. The notion of sub- stance — that is to say, of permanence and change — -and the closely allied notion of causality, are involved in the perception of succession from the first, for they are simply i o Hegelianism and Personality. transcripts of the essential nature of an exist- ence in time. But existence merely in time, Kant goes on to argue, is impossible to realise. Time implies as its correlate Space. The very notions or categories which have just been described as transcripts of the essential nature of time carry with them this reference to space. Conscious- ness of time can arise only through the perception of change, and change implies the perception of a permanent which is changed — a background, as it was expressed above, against which the fleeting moments of time, as filled out by subjective feeling, may be ap- prehended as appearing and vanishing. Space, or rather space with its filling of matter — existence in space — furnishes the perception which serves as this necessary background. Change is perceivable and dates are possible, just because the world exists as a permanent object in space. Now whether or not the absolute necessity of space to time be accepted as thus expressed, the correlation and mutual reference of the two in our experience is not open to doubt. Space is a basal element of our knowledge as ineradicable as time, and as incapable of deriva- Kant and N co-Kantianism. 1 1 tion from units of sense as such. Kant's cate- gories of quantity, relation, and modality may be regarded simply as an analysis of the nature of space and time. They are the principles of connection and coherence in a world laid out in these two elements ; they constitute, in short, the abstract or intellectual expression of what is perceptively present in space and time. 1 Kant's proof may be accepted, then, so far as it asserts that these forms, and with them these categories or principles of mutual relation and explanation, are necessarily involved in our experience of the known world, and that without them no knowledge would be possible at all. Accordingly, a sensationalism which begins by denying the presence of these principles must be impotent to evolve them, though the appearance of success may some- times be obtained by the covert assumption of the very principles in question. Going further, however, or rather retracing our footsteps and bringing to light the funda- mental but hitherto unobserved assumption, 1 The categories of quality refer to what has been called the material element in experience — to the actuality or reality of existence, without reference to the nature of that existence as temporal or spatial. 1 2 Hegelianism and Personality. we reach the central position of Kantian and subsequent idealism — the necessity of a per- manent subject of knowledge. A knowledge of sequent states is only possible when each is accompanied by the " I think " of an identical apperception. Or, as it has been otherwise expressed, there is all the difference in the world between succession and consciousness of succession, between change and consciousness of change. Mere change or mere succession, if such a thing were possible, would be, as Kant points out, first A, then B, then C, each filling out existence for the time being and constitut- ing its sum, then vanishing tracelessly to give place to its successor — to a successor which yet would not be a successor, seeing that no record of its predecessor would remain. The change, the succession, the series can only be known to a consciousness or subject which is not identi- cal with any one member of the series, but is present equally to every member, and identical with itself throughout. Connection or related- ness of any sort — even Hume's association — is possible only through the presence of such a unity to each term of the relation. Hence, while it is quite true, as Hume said, that when we enter into what we call ourselves, we cannot Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 1 3 point to any particular perception of Self, as we can point to particular perceptions of heat or cold, love or hatred, it is as undoubted that the very condition of all these particular per- ceptions, given along with each of them and essential to the connecting of one with another, is precisely the Self or Subject which Hume could not find — which he could not find because he looked for it not in its proper character, as the subject or correlate of all perceptions or objects, but as itself, in some fashion, a per- ception or object added to the other contents of consciousness. All knowledge or experience, then, presup- poses a Self. The Self thus unearthed Kant terms " the highest principle of all exercise of the understanding," and he names it, somewhat cumbrously, the synthetic unity of apperception or the transcendental unity of self-consciousness. The adjectives indicate its nature and function. The unity is synthetic, because it binds together, as related members of one whole, what would otherwise fall apart as unrelated particulars ; and moreover, it is only through this synthesis that the unity of the Self or Ego exists. It is the unity of the synthesis, and apart from its synthetic activity would no more be real than 1 4 Hegelianism and Personality. the particulars of sense would be real without its action. A unity is impossible without a manifold of which it is the unity ; or, in other words, the Self can be conscious of its own identity, that is, can be conscious of itself — can be a Self — only through the elements which it unites. You cannot have thoughts without a thinker, but it is equally true that you cannot have a thinker without thoughts. Any attempt to separate the two sides is a departure from reality, and the substantiation of an abstraction. In short, the ultimate fact of knowledge is neither pure subject nor pure object, neither a mere sensation nor a mere Ego, but an Ego or Subject conscious of sensations. It is not a mere unity, but a unity in duality. This duality belongs to the very essence of self-conscious- ness, and cannot be banished by any philosophy which is faithful to facts. The term transcendental, applied to the unity of apperception, has a similar implication. It does not mean, as is sometimes supposed, that the Ego is an entity beyond experience ; it means, on the contrary, that the " identical self" is deduced or proved solely with reference to ex- perience, as a necessary condition of knowledge. Out of that reference it has no meaning, and Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 1 5 consequently no assertions can be made about it. The term also serves to keep before us the contrast repeatedly emphasised by Kant be- tween the Self in question and the empirical Ego. The empirical self is the matter of the internal sense in its form of time ; in other words, it is the succession of mental states — the thoughts, feelings, and actions — upon which a man may look back as constituting the record of his experience, his life. The empirical self is thus an object among other objects ; it is part of the process of experience. As Kant says, it is the object treated by empirical psychology, which he describes as a kind of physiology of the internal sense. It is with reference to the empirical ego that man is said to have the power of making himself his own object. When we do so — when we turn our attention inwards, as the saying is — it is this empirical conscious- ness which lies spread out before us, not, of course, the whole history, but the mingling feelings and desires, the thoughts, intentions, and resolves which fill out our present con- sciousness, and which are themselves in their dominant moods and directions the outcome of the mental actions and circumstances that went before them. This consciousness of certain 1 6 Hegelianism and Personality. present experiences upon a background of dominant modes of thought and courses of action constitutes the present existence of the empirical self. In the language of recent psychology, the empirical self is a complex presentation to consciousness ; it is " continu- ously, but at no one moment completely, presented." x From such a presentation or object, the transcendental self or the unity of apperception is carefully distinguished by Kant. Without going back upon ground already traversed, it is sufficient to remember that the empirical self is serial ; and a series, if it is to be known as such, implies a consciousness present to each of its members, and self- identical throughout their change. To the transcendental Ego alone belong such predi- cates as " static," " permanent," " unchangeable," " identical." 2 The term transcendental is also applied by Kant in a wider but precisely similar sense to characterise his whole method of philosophic proof. The transcendental proof, as he is never weary of telling us, is the proof by reference to 1 Ward, article "Psychology" in the ninth edition of the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica.' 2 Stehend, bleibend, unwandelbar, identisch. Kant and Neo-Kantianism. 1 7 the possibility of experience. It is the analy- sis of experience or, as we may say here, of knowledge, with a view to discover its indis- pensable constitutive elements. Taking the fact of knowledge as it finds it, it does not inquire how that fact was realised or came into being ; but, moving always %vitJiin the fact, it asks what are the conditions of its being what it is, what, in other words, are its essential elements. As Mr Shadvvorth Hodgson says, it is an analysis of the nature of knowledge, not of its genesis. The transcendental method is a proof, consequently, which can never overstep experience, which can never be justified in detaching the conditions of knowledge from the synthesis in which it finds them. Neither the particulars of sense, on the one hand, nor the universal of the Ego, on the other, can be so detached. If the isolation of the former gave rise to the fallacy which was traced to its culmination in Hume — the fallacy of the abstract particular — the isolation of the latter involves the no less dangerous fallacy of the abstract or empty universal. Particulars exist only as a manifold referred through the cate- gorised forms of time and space to the unity of the subject ; and the subject exists only as B 1 8 Hegelianism and Personality. the unity of the manifold whose central principle of connection it is. In a word, the procedure of a transcendental philosophy which would be consistent with itself must be immanent throughout. But if this is so, then it is evident that many of Kant's own statements will require revision. It is manifestly inadmissible, for example, to speak of the categories and the forms of space and time as belonging especially to the subject, and as imposed by it upon an alien matter. As soon as we so speak, we have deserted the immanent point of view ; we have hypostatised the Ego apart from the synthesis in which alone it exists, and by way of concealing the naked- ness of our abstraction have clothed it with certain forms of thought. So conceived, these forms are no better than innate ideas of the crudest type, lodged somehow in the individual mind. Kant's whole distinction between matter and form, which treats the former as the con- tribution of the object and the latter as specially due to the subject, is quite untenable, it has been pointed out, on transcendental principles. What, indeed, could offend more flagrantly against these principles than such an attempt to transcend the bounds of possible experience Kant and Neo-Kantianism. 1 9 and to treat subject and object as two causally related entities, outside of knowledge, which by their interaction give rise to knowledge ? This subject-in-itself and object-in-itself, each con- tributing its share to the composite whole of knowledge, are the very chimeras which Criti- cism and the transcendental method went out to slay. There is certainly interaction between the human organism and its environment ; and the human subject, when his organism is affected, is able to refer that affection to an external object. But this whole process takes place within the world of knowledge, or in Kantian language within the realm of pheno- mena. It is a phenomenal object — the organism — which is affected, and it is another pheno- menal object — say, the sun — to which the affection is referred. There is no reference whatever, it is argued, to a noumenal back- ground, in which the causes of knowledge existed before knowledge was ; and the meta- phor of impression, while intelligible in the physiological sphere indicated, is entirely out of place, and, in truth, unmeaning, when applied to the subject of knowledge. Subject and object are terms, in short, that have a meaning only within the world of knowledge ; they are 20 Hegelianism and Personality. not to be taken as two transcendent things-in- themselves. And as soon as we cease to regard them as such, and cease to treat experience as the result of their interaction, all ground for Kant's view of the subjectivity and relativity of our knowledge disappears. Knowledge is like a seamless garment which cannot be divided and have its parts assigned in this fashion. There is one intelligible world, all the elements of which are mutually comple- mentary and equally necessary. We cannot have form without matter, or matter without form ; but the two are not brought together. The form is the form of the matter, and the matter is, as it were, simply the exhibition of the form. This necessity of correlation may be treated without injustice as the fundamental feature of the transcendental method. And if now we ask what is to be said of the self, we may most correctly reply that " so far is it from being a figure of speech that the self exists only through the world and the world through the self, that we might say with equal truth the self is the world and the world is the self. The self and the world are only two sides of the same reality ; they are the same intelli- gible world looked at from two opposite points Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 2 l of view." x It is, of course, only from the point of view of the self or subject that this identity can be grasped, but this does not confer upon the self a separate existence. The transcen- 1 Essays in Philosophical Criticism, p. 38. The first essay of this volume, on " Philosophy as Criticism of Categories," is in the main an attempt to expound the view here indicated, though, as I now think, without sufficient recognition of its necessary- limitations. These limitations arise from the fact, emphasised in what follows, that the analysis deals with the constituent elements of knowledge as knowledge, not with the metaphysical elements of the real world which it is the function of knowledge to know. The foregoing account of transcendentalism made consistent is not intended, therefore, as a statement of my own position, any more than it professes to be a rendering of the Kantian theory as conceived by Kant himself. It is obvious that while Kant investigates the logical presuppositions of knowledge or experience (finding them in the transcendental unity, the categories and the forms of space and time as applied to a sensuous matter), this knowledge is always for him the knowledge by a real being of a world of real beings ; and therefore it has its real presuppositions in the existence of the noumenal self and of what he calls things-in-themselves. I agree with Kant (and apparently differ from many Neo- Hegelians) in holding that these real presuppositions are necessary, but I do not follow Kant in holding them to be unknowable. It must be admitted, however, (1) that the subject cannot be presented in experience as an object, and (2) that the being of a real thing, even if fully known by me, must remain distinct from my knowledge of it. I may know its essence, but I cannot experience its existence ; its life can be lived by itself alone. These were in all probability the chief consider- ations which led Kant to his unfortunate doctrine of the unknowable thine -in-itself. 22 Hegelianism and Personality. dental self, as the implicate of all experience, is, for a theory of knowledge, simply the necessary point of view from which the universe can be unified, that is, from which it becomes a universe. For the rest, the mind and the world, subject and object, are convertible terms ; we may talk indifferently of the one or of the other : the content of our notion remains the same in both cases. Such, it seems to me, is the legitimate out- come of the transcendental method, when it is consistently applied, and when the results are stated in their most exact and unadorned form. If I am not mistaken, Mr Shadworth Hodgson's Philosophy of Reflection is, as regards the au- thor's main contention, the most clear-sighted and thoroughgoing application of the Kantian method ; and the doctrine of subjective and objective "aspects" there developed seems to coincide with the result reached above. Mr Hodgson maintains most jealously the imma- nent nature of the inquiry, and consequently refuses (rightly as it seems to me) to attribute causal activity to the Subject which the in- quiry yields. To do so would be, in his lan- guage, to relapse into the Dogmatic or causal- entity view from which it is the special function Kant and N co- Kantianism. 23 of the Critical theory of knowledge to set us free. He recognises at the same time the limitations of the inquiry, and does not put forward the theory of knowledge as a ready- made ontology ; he does not claim, on the strength of it, to possess an absolute theory of the universe. In this he differs markedly from Neo-Kantians like Green. Green also claims to follow out the transcendental method to its legitimate issue, and to make Kant consistent with himself; but in so doing he avowedly trans- forms Kant's theory of knowledge into a meta- physic of existence, an absolute philosophy. This transformation forms the core of the Neo-Kantian position, and it raises afresh the question of the nature of the transcendental self — a question not sufficiently answered even by all that has been already said. What is the transcendental self which plays so great a part in this analysis ? Kant calls it on occasion the " pure " or " primitive " Ego, and speaks of it as " the highest principle of the exercise of the understanding." It lies at the basis of the categories, he tells us, and forms " the ground of their possibility " ; it is " the vehicle of all conceptions whatever." x " The 1 Werke, iii. 274 (ed. Hartenstein, 186S), Meiklejohn, 237. 24 Hegel ianism and Personality. static and permanent Ego," he says in one place, "constitutes the correlate of all my ideas"; 1 "all objects which can occupy me are determinations of my identical self," 2 and hence the transcendental Ego may be spoken of, with strict propriety, as "the correlate of all existence." 3 Expressions such as these, coupled with the sharp distinction drawn be- tween the transcendental and the empirical self, perhaps first suggested to Kant's suc- cessors their metaphysical transformation of his conception. This self which seems to have no predicates of mortality about it — which seems to be the presupposition of all else, while itself presuppositionless — has been taken by later thinkers, and markedly by the English Neo-Kantians, as a universal or ab- solute self-consciousness, or in plainer terms as the one eternal divine Subject to which the universe is relative. This identification, though it may not be found in Kant himself, is dictated, they contend, by the consistent tenor of the whole system. In so far, therefore, 1 Werkc, iii. 581 (from the version of the Deduction of the Categories in the first edition). 2 Ibid., iii. 5S5. 3 Ibid., iii. 617 (from the Paralogism of Pure Reason in the first edition). Kant and Neo- Kantianism. -o as they present this doctrine as the direct outcome of the Kantian System, the soundness of their philosophical conclusion may fitly be considered here, without unduly anticipating the argument of the following lectures. Green, then, explicitly identifies the self which the theory of knowledge reveals — the " single active self-conscious principle, by what- ever name it may be called," 1 — with the universal or divine self - consciousness. He calls it himself most frequently a "spiritual principle." It is "the eternally complete consciousness" which, according to his view, makes the animal organism of man a vehicle for the reproduction of itself. Numberless ref- erences to this eternal self might be quoted from the ' Prolegomena to Ethics,' with only verbal variations in statement. It is the punctum staus, to which all order in time is relative. Its constant presence to the rela- tions which constitute the content of the universe communicates to these relations their permanence and objectivity. It is their "medium and sustainer"; 2 the objectivity of the universe just means its existence for such a consciousness. It will be observed, further, 1 Prolegomena to Ethics. 40. 2 Ibid., 68. 26 Hegelianism and Personality. that Green habitually attributes to this eternal Self a constitutive activity which is tanta- mount to creation. It is said to " make nature"; nature is said to "result from the activity of the spiritual principle." But if we consider the character of the method by which the result was reached, such predicates will appear more than questionable, for the Self is nothing apart from the world. If it is necessary as the sustainer of relations, it is nothing apart from the relations which it sustains. They exist together, or not at all ; they exist, as was said above, as two aspects of the same fact. Accordingly, as Mr Balfour pointed out in a criticism of Green's metaphysics, published in ' Mind' a few years ago, if we speak of activity at all, " we must allow that it is as correct to say that nature makes mind as that mind makes nature ; that the World created God as that God created the World." 1 This is so far from being a travesty of the Neo-Kantian position that it seems the only possible way of stating it when we aim at perfect frankness and scientific explicitness of expression. And, indeed, in discussing the applicability of the term " cause " to describe the relation between 1 Mind, ix. So. Kant and Nco- Kantianism. 27 God and the world, Green himself warns us that "there is no separate particularity in the agent, on the one side, and the determined world as a whole, on the other, such as characterises any agent or patient, any cause and effect, within the phenomenal world." " That the unifying principle should distin- guish itself from the manifold which it uni- fies is indeed a condition of the unification, but it must not be supposed that the manifold has a nature of its own apart from the unifying principle, or this principle another nature of its own apart from what it does in relation to the manifold world." 1 Indeed, "the concrete whole," he says in another place, " may be described indifferently as an eternal intelligence realised in the related facts of the world, or as a system of related facts rendered possible by such an intelligence." 2 Apart from the meta- physical bearing given to it, this is almost in so many words the result which we reached a little ago by the aid of the transcendental method. The self or unifying principle has then, ac- cording to Green, no nature of its own apart from what it does in relation to the manifold 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, So, Si. a Ibid., 38. 28 Hegelianism and Personality. world. But what the unifying principle does in relation to the manifold world is simply to unify it. Green himself tells us in one place that we know the spiritual principle only as "a principle of unity in relation." 1 That, cer- tainly, is all that the transcendental analysis of knowledge tells us about it. The eternal Self which we reach along this path is no more than a focus imaginarius into which the multi- plex relations which constitute the intelligible world return. Such a focus or principle of unity enables us to round off our theory with an appearance of personality, but it does not satisfy in any real sense the requirements of Theism. Adapting a phrase used by Hegel in another connection, we may say that this Self is like a constitutional monarch who reigns but does not govern — whose signature is the necessary completion of every document, but is affixed impartially to each as it is laid before him. Such a monarch, says Hegel, may aptly be compared to the dot on the i ; he represents the unity of the State, and gives the formal imprimatur of his " I will" to its actions. In like manner, the transcendental Ego, as re- vealed by the theory of knowledge, represents 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, 72. Kant and Neo-Ka ntia n ism. 2 9 merely the formal unity of the universe as known; 1 and unless we have other data, and approach the question along a different road, we are still far from anything like spirituality or freedom in the ordinary sense of these words. Green's use of the term " spiritual principle " is almost inevitably open to misinterpretation, and by its associations leads even himself to make assertions which are not warranted by his own proof — which are indeed inconsistent with it. In this respect, Kant saw his way more clear- ly than many of those who make bold to teach him consistency. It was not merely his en- 1 Professor Dewey complains (Mind, xv. 60) that the account of the Self given in this paragraph is inconsistent with what was said of it above on pp. 14 and 18. " There the Self was not formal ; the form was an abstraction apart from matter. . . . Instead of being merely logical, the Self was the unified universe. . . . The subject which 'exists only as the unity of the manifold whose central principle of connection it is,' becomes trans- formed in ten short pages into a 'focus imaginarius into which the multiple relations which constitute the intelligible world return,'— a 'principle of unity.'" But the whole point of my argument is that if we try to use the transcendental Ego as a metaphysical reality, and speak of it as a spiritual principle which makes nature, then we are substantiating it apart from the manifold. And if, as stated on p. 18, it exists only as the unity of the manifold, then it must be true, as stated here, that when so separated it represents merely the formal unity of knowledge. 30 Hcgclianism and Personality. tanglement in "psychological" prejudices that held him back from such conclusions. He understood the nature of his own inquiry, and knew what it could yield him and what it could not. In this connection Kant has received perhaps less than justice at the hands of his critics. It may be that he mingles psychology with his theory of knowledge ; but the conse- quences may be quite as fatal, if we confound the boundaries of epistemology and metaphys- ics. In point of fact, however he may nod at times, Kant is in general sufficiently awake to the distinction between his transcendental in- vestigation and an investigation into psycholo- gical matter of fact. He enforces in various passages the perfectly general character of his inquiry. He is dealing, he says, not with any individual mind or consciousness, but with consciousness in general, with " the conditions of possible experience," x " the unity of possible consciousness," 2 or, as he calls it in another place, with " the logical form of all cognition," 3 with the ultimate nature, as we might say, of 1 Werke, iii. 575. 2 Ibid., iii. 585. :! Ibid., iii. 578. The recurrent use of the term "possible" is chai-acteristic of Kant — possible experience, possible con- sciousness, possible cognition ; so also the phrase uberhaupt — thought in general, experience in general, &c. Kant and Neo-Kantianism. 3 1 knowledge as knowledge. The transcendental logic, in a word, is a study of knowledge in abstracto. But just because of this perfectly- general or abstract character which belongs to the investigation, the results of the investigation must also be perfectly general or abstract. They will be abstract conditions, not concrete facts or metaphysical realities. The analysis reveals to us, according to its own claims, certain conditions which must be fulfilled in every instance of actual knowledge — certain categories or fundamental modes of connection, and, as a supreme condition, the unity of the pure Ego — but it deals itself with no actual knower, whether human or divine. It deals, in a word, with possible consciousness, or con- sciousness in general, which, so long as it remains a "general," is of course a pure ab- straction. But if this is so, it must be in the highest degree improper to convert consciousness in gene- ral without more ado into a universal conscious- ness. Surely it does not follow that, because we are professedly abstracting from any par- ticular self of experience, we are therefore analysing the absolute or divine self-conscious- ness. The transcendental theory of knowledge 32 Hegelianism and Personality. because it is an abstract inquiry, necessarily speaks of a single Self or logical subject ; but this singularity is the singularity which belongs to every abstract notion, and decides nothing as to the singularity or plurality of existing intelligencies. We can have absolutely no right to transform this logical identity of type into a numerical identity of existence. The theory of knowledge, at least, can give us no such right. Yet this seems to be precisely the step which Neo-Kantianism takes. It takes the notion of knowledge as equivalent to a real Knower ; and the form of knowledge being one, it leaps to the conclusion that what we have before us is the One Subject who sustains the world, and is the real Knower in all finite in- telligences. It seems a hard thing to say, but to do this is neither more nor less than to hypostatise an abstraction. It is of a piece with the Scholastic Realism which hypostatised humanitas or homo as a universal substance, of which individual men were, in a manner, the accidents. Similarly here, the notion of know- ledge in general — the pure Ego — which is reached by abstraction from the individual human knower, is erected into a self-existent reality — "an eternally complete self-conscious- Kant and Neo- Kantian ism. 2>3 ness" — of which the individual is an imperfect reproduction or mode. There no doubt may be an eternally complete self - consciousness which holds a creative relation to our own, and much of Green's theory of the universe may be substantially true ; but if so, its truth must be established upon other lines. It is resting on a fallacy to believe that the eternally complete self-consciousness is proved in this fashion by the theory of knowledge. Ferrier's argument in his ' Institutes of Meta- physic,' in many respects so similar, appears to me to be much more cautious than Green's, and more consonant with the conditions of the theory of knowledge. A short reference to it may elucidate the point at issue. Ferrier proves in his Epistemology and Agnoiology the im- possibility of matter per se or mind per se, and thus lays down certain fundamental conditions to which all cognition must conform. That is to say, he too analyses the notion of know- ledge ; but he does not proceed to hypostatise it, as we have seen Neo-Kantianism do. The concluding propositions of the Ontology simply apply the notion to the elimination from exist- ence of what has been proved to be contra- dictory and inconceivable. " The only true C 34 Hegelianism and Personality. and real and independent existences are minds- together-with-that which they apprehend." So runs the second last proposition, and the last says: "All absolute existences are contingent except one; in other words, there is one but only one absolute existence which is strictly necessary, and that existence is a supreme and infinite and everlasting Mind in synthesis with all things." Even this is more than is strictly warranted by the theory of knowledge alone ; it depends rather on general metaphysical con- siderations. But at least neither here nor in the working out of the propositions is there any identification of the necessary existence and the contingent existences. There is no state- ment whatever as to the relation between them, for the theory of knowledge affords no data for determining that relation. The real service of the theory of knowledge in this connection is, that it eliminates the thing- in -itself and the Ego-in-itself — the mere object and the mere subject — and therefore legitimates the assertion that all existence to which we can attach a meaning must be existcnce-for-a-self, or, as it may perhaps be otherwise expressed, the only real existences are selves — i.e., beings who possess either in higher or lower fashion an Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 35 analogue of what we call self-consciousness in ourselves. But whether there be one Self or many selves, and, if there be both, what is the relation between the One and the many — these are questions of metaphysics or ontology, not to be settled out of hand by the perfectly general result to which the theory of know- ledge leads us. Unquestionably the results of the epistemo- logical investigation must have an important bearing upon the metaphysical problem ; but the office of the theory of knowledge must, in the main, be negative or indirect, ruling out certain solutions as inadmissible rather than itself supplying us with a ready-made solution. In a word, the theory of knowledge, even in its amended form, must maintain the critical attitude at first assigned to it by Kant. Though we may disagree with many of the arguments by which he supports his position, it cannot, I think, be doubted that Kant was methodically correct in the view he took of his own inquiry. There is nothing in it, as I conceive, to pre- clude us from the attempt to construct a meta- physical system ; but it cannot stand itself as a dogmatic theory. Kant himself, it is almost superfluous to point o 6 Hegelianism and Personality, out, would never have acquiesced in the deduc- tions which his Neo- Kantian followers have drawn from his premisses. Nothing, of course was further from his thoughts than an iden- tification of the transcendental Ego with the divine self- consciousness, as is sufficiently proved by his constant references to the latter as a perceptive, that is, a non-discursive under- standing, the very possibility of which we are unable to comprehend. 1 But Kant further re- fuses to recognise the transcendental Ego as constituting the real self even of the individual human knower. This is, in fact, the text of his 1 As if anticipating that the attempt would be made to rep- resent the difference between the human consciousness and the divine as essentially one of degree, Kant expressly declared himself on this point in an important letter to Marcus Herz in 17S9. It will be found, he says, "that we cannot assume the human understanding to be specifically the same as the divine, and only distinguished from it by limitation — i.e., in degree. The human understanding is not, like the divine, a faculty of immediate perception, but one of thought, which, if it is to produce knowledge, requires alongside of it — or rather requires as its material — a second quite different faculty, a faculty or receptivity of perception."— Werke, viii. 719. As further emphasising the complete distinction existing in Kant's mind between the consciousness of the individual and the divine self- consciousness, reference need only be made to the thoroughly transcendent conception of God with which the Kantian ethics end— a being apart, whose function it is to mete out happiness in accordance with desert. Kant and Neo- Kantianism. 37 whole contention in the well-known argument headed " The Paralogism of Pure Reason." Kant is there attacking the old metaphysical psychology for reasoning, not indeed to the same conclusion, but on precisely similar lines to those on which the Neo- Kantian proof of the universal Self has been seen to run. The metaphysical psychologists also started with the abstract Ego, which forms the presup- position of knowledge ; and as this unity of consciousness is one, eternal (or out of time), and indivisible, they proceeded to prove by its means the necessary immortality of the human soul. This is the Paralogism which Kant at- tacks, and in the course of his attack we get a collection of predicates applied to the pure Ego which serve as a wholesome corrective to some of the proud names heaped upon it before. The Ego, he says, is " a merely logical quali- tative unity of self- consciousness in thought generally ; " it is in itself a perfectly empty or contentless idea — a perfectly empty expression which I can apply to every thinking subject — nay, it is actually " the poorest of all our ideas." No doubt the argument here is overlaid in parts by extraneous considerations, and infected by Kant's relativistic prejudice ; but in pointing 38 Hegelianism and Personality. out the merely logical character of the self reached by the analysis of knowledge, he is not only guided by a sounder instinct, but shows also a keener insight than his speculative fol- lowers. " The logical exposition of thought in general is mistaken," he says, " for a meta- physical determination of the object." The words are spoken of the metaphysical psy- chologists, but it would be impossible to char- acterise more aptly the fallacy which underlies the Neo- Kantian deification of the abstract unity of thought. Appendix to Lecture 1 . 39 APPENDIX TO LECTURE I. Though it is hardly, perhaps, an integral part of the present argument, it seems natural to connect Kant's refusal to substitute for the real self a purely logical or formal unity with his refusal to identify the reality of the external world with mere relations. Kant's doctrine of things-in-themselves, as ordinarily understood, I cannot but hold to be fundamentally false, and a fruitful source of error ; x but it does not therefore follow that the whole external world is nothing more than a complex of thought-relations. There seems no reason why, if we resolve the rest of the external world in this way, we should not reduce our fellow-men also to mere complexes of relations, which have no existence on their own account. For our fellow-men are given to us, in the first instance, as part of the external world ; and it would seem as if the same reasons which make us assign to them an existence on their own account, and not as mere objects either of our own or of a supposed universal consciousness, should lead us to attribute an (at least analogously) independent existence to the external world, or at any rate to certain existences in it. Kant himself, after the promulgation of his Critical system, was resolutely averse to speculation beyond certain limits ; but there are indications in his writ- ings that, if indulged, his speculations would have led him in a Leibnitian direction, as was indeed natural in the case of one who had been reared and 1 The fifth lecture of the previous course was chiefly devoted to combating the doctrine of the unknowable thing per se, as it appears in Kant and Hamilton. 4-0 Hegelianism and Personality. had passed a great part of his life within that school. If this be taken as the idea underlying his assertion of things-in-themselves, it may be readily admitted that much of the objectionableness of that doctrine would disappear. Kant's position in regard to the real existence of the self, and his doctrine of an independent existence of things as more than relations, do in fact form part of a tolerably coherent realistic metaphysic, which was overshadowed but never displaced in Kant's mind by his Critical idealism. This realistic ground- work has been more and more lost sight of in certain circles, as the idealistic deductions from the Kantian theory have come more and more into prominence. But when this is the case, Kant's own position is inevitably misunderstood. It is not without interest to note that the isolated passages in which Kant suggests a Leibnitian interpretation of things-in-themselves are precisely those which have been seized upon by later writers as anticipations of the Fichtian theory. This has been conclusively proved by Ueberweg, 1 in regard to one of these "asides" of Kant, which occurs at the end of the section on the Paralogism of Pure Reason, and is therefore connected with the present subject. Kant is speaking of the supposed difficulty of explaining an interaction between mind and matter, between the non-spatial and the spatial. They appear to be separated, as Hamilton was fond of saying, by the whole diameter of being. But, in point of fact, Kant argues, the " transcendental object which underlies external phenomena, as well as that which underlies internal perception, is in itself neither 1 History of Philosophy, ii. 175. Appendix to Lecture I. 4 1 matter nor a thinking being, but a to-us-unknown ground of phenomena. ... I can very well suppose that the substance which in respect of our external sense possesses extension is in itself the subject of thought which can be consciously represented by its own inner sense. Thus that which in one aspect is called material would at the same time, in another aspect, be a thinking being — a being whose thoughts, it is true, we cannot perceive, but the signs of whose thoughts in phenomena we can perceive." 1 1 In first edition. Werke, iii. 694. 4 2 LECTURE II. FICHTE. In the philosophical development with which we are here concerned, Fichte is an important figure. As was mentioned in the previous lecture, he was the first to transform Kant's theory of knowledge into an absolute meta- physic, and in so doing he laid the corner- stone of the whole fabric of German idealism. Fichte is interesting and instructive alike in his general mode of procedure, in the diffi- culties he encounters, and in the admissions to which these difficulties drive him. More- over, being immediately based upon Kant, his constructions have in some ways a closer resemblance in form to those of Neo-Kantians like Green than is the case with the later and less accessible system of Hegel. FicJitc. 43 But though building- immediately upon Kant, Fichte represents a totally different type of mind. Kant is patient and analytic, Fichte is boldly synthetic ; his system is essentially, as it has just been termed, a construction. It is a construction to explain the duality of sense and reason — of receptivity and spontaneity — which Kant either left standing as an ultimate fact, or simply referred to the accepted psy- chological opposition of mind and things. Fichte claims to present us with a meta- physical explanation of this psychological appearance. He begins by scornfully dismiss- ing things - in - themselves as in no sense a philosophical explanation. To explain sensa- tion or " the given " by referring to the action of a thing-in-itself of which we know nothing, is to darken counsel by words without know- ledge. Fichte stoutly refused to believe that Kant could ever have intended the thing-in- itself to be so interpreted. "Should he make such a declaration," said the impetuous philo- sopher, " I shall consider the ' Critique of Pure Reason ' to be the offspring of the strangest chance rather than the work of a mind." When Kant soon afterwards published the declara- tion in question, his disappointed disciple was 44 Hegelianism and Personality. driven to reflect that the Holy Spirit in Kant had thought more in accordance with truth than Kant in his individual capacity had done. To Fichte himself it was an axiom that philosophy, if it is to be philosophy at all, must be in one piece. Its explanation must be a deduction of the apparently disparate elements of existence from a single principle ; to rest in an unexplained dualism means to despair of philosophy. But if every genuine philosophy is thus a Monism of some sort, there are, Fichte pro- ceeds, only two possible systems or types of philosophy between which we have to choose. The one of these he calls Dogmatism, a mode of thought which, when consistent with itself, most commonly takes the form of Materialism, though Spinozism is also cited as being, on a higher plane, the typical example of a rigorous Dogmatism. The system or type of thought opposed to Dogmatism Fichte calls sometimes Criticism, sometimes Idealism. The opposition of the two systems consists in this, that Dogmatism starts with the absolute or independent existence of "things," and is therefore inevitably led, in the last resort, to explain the conscious intelligence as their Fi elite. 45 product ; while Idealism, on the other hand, refuses to start otherwise than with the Ego, and ends by explaining "things" as forms of the Ego's productive activity. By Dog- matism the Ego is treated as a thing among things, from whose combinations it results by the ordinary process of causation ; in Fichte's own phrase, the Ego becomes in such systems "an accident of the world." And if such an attitude be once adopted, it is of comparative- ly little importance whether the substance of which it is an accident be the divine essence, as with Spinoza, or cosmic atoms, as with the Materialists. In either case our philo- sophy becomes transcendent, because we go (or rather try to go) behind the Ego, and make it an accident or appendage of some- thing else. Criticism, on the other hand, says Fichte, characterising his own philosophy, is throughout immanent in its procedure. The Ego takes the place, as it were, of the uni- versal substance of Dogmatism ; and instead of the Ego's being an outcome of " things," all "things" have their existence within the circle of the Ego. The Ego is the one primary and indubitable fact ; or rather, in Fichte's language, it is the eternal act or energising 46 Hegelianism and Personality. through which we live, and within which all existence is contained. Moreover, Idealism alone furnishes a real solution of the problem. The explanation which Dogmatism offers of the genesis of self-consciousness or the Ego is completely illusory. It leaves unexplained the essential feature of self-consciousness — the duality or doubleness, if it may be so expressed, which lies in knowledge and reflection. The Ego is not a mere fact, which exists as the Dog- matist conceives a "thing" to exist; it is existence and knowledge of existence in one. Intelligence not only is ; it looks on at its own existence. It is for itself, whereas the very notion of a thing is that it does not exist for itself, but only for another — that is, for some intelligence. " In intelligence, ac- cordingly," says Fichte, " there is, if I may express myself metaphorically, a double series of being and looking on, of the real and the ideal. The thing, on the other hand, repre- sents only a single or simple series, that of the real — mere position or objective existence. . . . The two lie, therefore, in two worlds between which there is no bridge." 1 Things 1 Werke, i. 436. Fichtc. 47 produce things in a chain of mechanically determined causality, but this causal action is all within the real series ; there is no bridge from a thing to the idea of a thing, no passage from a world of mere things to a consciousness which knows the things. Every attempt to bridge this chasm turns out, says Fichte, to be "a few empty words, which may, indeed, be learned by heart and repeated, but which have never conveyed a thought to any man, and never will." x Unless, therefore, we accept the Ego with its duality as an ultimate fact, or rather the ultimate world-constituting fact, we can never reach it along the lines of Dog- matism. Accordingly, as the existence of the self-conscious Ego is not a more or less probable hypothesis, but an ever-present fact of our own experience, we are shut up to the rival system of Idealism. It is, in fact, of the very essence of the Ego that it cannot be produced by anything external to itself; it is self-centred, self-creative, and its life is the per- petual re-affirmation of itself. In Fichte's lan- guage, it is the Absolute Thesis, self-position or self-affirmation. This forcible statement will probably be 1 Werke, i. 438. 48 Hegelianism and Personality. accepted as a sufficient refutation of the standpoint against which it is directed. It is fundamentally impossible to explain the existence of a self as a result of action ab extra; it exists only through its own activity. As Fichte says, " I am altogether my own creation. Through no law of nature, or any consequence of nature's laws, but through absolute freedom, not by a transition but by a leap, do we raise ourselves to rationality." 1 The contradiction which any one may detect in such a statement is involved in every account of the origin of a self-conscious life ; for surely it lies in the very nature of the case that our own existence forms our necessary pre- supposition. We abut here upon an impene- trable mystery, for to conceive our own origin would mean to transcend altogether the con- ditions of our being. If the conception were possible, we should be loosed at once from our individual moorings. It may be that we should then be as God ; but the human reason totters on the verge of such a problem. Apart, however, from any attempt to solve a problem which they do but suggest, Fichte's words appeal to us as a true rendering of the 1 Werke, i. 298. Fichte. 49 characteristic feature of the concrete Ego — its self-centred activity, which excludes the idea of mechanical causality, and forbids us to treat the self as a retainer of any thing or system of things. But Fichte goes further than this, and we are but entering upon the most char- acteristic portions of his system. Great part of his philosophy is, indeed, little more than an attempt to overcome or rationalise the con- tradiction contained in his own words quoted above. The attempt is made by means of a distinction within the concrete self between the pure or Absolute Ego and the self of the in- dividual as such. It is not, we are told, to the concrete personality of the individual as such that this absolute position or self-creation in strictness refers, but to "the Ego as absolute subject," to "pure consciousness." This pure Ego is not a fact that we can discover or verify within our empirical consciousness, Fichte tells us ; it is rather an act which " lies at the basis of all consciousness and alone makes conscious- ness possible." x The burden of the contradic- tion seems somehow lighter, if we can divide the roles in this fashion, assigning creative func- tion to the pure Ego and the part of creature 1 Werke, i. 91. D 50 Hegelianism and Personality. to the empirical self. Nor is the device a new one in the annals of philosophy ; for we find a very similar division of labour in Aristotle between the vovs iroirjriicbs and the vovs TraOrj- rifcbs, the Active and the Passive Reason. But in Fichte's case the distinction is drawn directly from the Kantian scheme. The absolute Ego is simply Kant's transcendental unity of apper- ception ; but the identification of that unity with the central creative thought of the universe has now been made. Instead of being, as with Kant, the function of human thought, which generates the form, and the form only, of a phenomenal world, the pure Ego has become for Fichte the absolute creator of an absolute world. The working out of this distinction between the absolute and the empirical Ego is found to include, in Fichte's hands, an explanation of the apparently " given " element in knowledge, which was referred to at the outset as the underlying motive of his philosophy. For Fichte does not deny, any more than Kant did, that the ordinary consciousness seems to itself to be filled from an alien source. He acknowledges that the objective world is to the individual, in the first instance, simply a Fichtc. 5 1 given material, in relation to which he is re- ceptive ; the individual may be said, in the strictest sense, to find it presented to him. Fichte calls this objective aspect of conscious- ness the Non-Ego, and is thus far from deny- ing the fact which Kant formulated in his as- sertion of a given element in knowledge. But, as already remarked, he seeks a speculative explanation of this fact or appearance — an explanation which Kant can hardly be said to have attempted. 1 Fichte's explanation is not found, however, in the theoretical sphere, that is, in the domain of knowledge as knowledge. Kant, it is well known, considered that only in dealing with the practical or moral reason had he penetrated to the noumenal reality of the Self; and it was here that the intense ethical fervour of Fichte's nature attached itself most closely to the Kan- tian philosophy. In practical reason or will, we find, according to him, the reality of the world- process, the reality of which knowledge gives only a picture, a representation, a rendering. In the idea of duty or moral destiny is to be found the ultimate explanation or meaning of existence. From this point of view, then, we 1 See Appendix, p. 79. 52 Hcgelianism and Personality. first come to perceive the necessity of the object as Non-Ego — that is, as something seemingly foreign and alien. Only through the Non-Ego, as an obstacle of this sort, can the practical activity of the Ego be realised. The creation or " positing " of the Non-Ego is thus the device of the Absolute Ego itself, in order to attain self-realisation. " The Absolute Ego," he says, "is absolutely identical with itself; everything in it is one and the same Ego, and belongs (if so inapt an expression may be allowed) to one and the same Ego ; there is nothing here to distinguish, no multiplicity. The Ego is every- thing and is nothing, because it is nothing for itself. ... In virtue of its essence it strives (though even this is not strictly true except with reference to the future) to maintain itself in this condition. There arises in it a difference, consequently something alien or foreign." x By the finite or practical Ego which results, the difference whose emergence is thus enigmati- cally expressed must be simply accepted as a fact ; and the Non-Ego which impedes its ac- tivity keeps therefore a character of foreignness. Nevertheless, as the thing-in-itself may be taken as an exploded fiction, and the Non-Ego exists 1 Werke, i. 264. Fie /lie. 53 only for the Ego, the appearance of opposition must be held, from the speculative point of view, to be due to the nature and action of the Ego itself. It is, as we may say, its own activity taking a roundabout way. This is, in effect, Fichte's celebrated theory of the Aiistoss or shock of opposition in which consciousness arises. In working out the idea, Fichte is dangerously lavish in his use of me- chanical metaphors. The fundamental concep- tion, however, is that the Absolute Ego may be compared to an infinite outgoing activity, which, so conceived, is formless and character- less. It requires to break itself against some obstacle, and thus, as it were, be reflected back upon itself, in order that it may come to self- consciousness — in order that we may be able to distinguish anything in it, or to apply any predicate intelligently to it. For Fichte says, quite unequivocally, that it is only the limited Ego, whose striving is met by a counter-striving, that is conscious. " Only by means of such a Non-Ego is the Ego intelligence." 1 Where this is not the case, where the Ego is all in all, " it is for that very reason nothing at all." 2 Taken in any literal or mechanical sense, the 1 Werke, i. 248. - Ibid., i. 261. 54 Hegclianism and Personality. objections to such a construction are tolerably obvious. The whole excursion into the void preceding consciousness is an attempt to tran- scend self-consciousness and construct it out of antecedent existences, and that after emphati- cally denouncing the futility of such experi- ments. The Anstoss is entirely a metaphor taken from the struggles of the embodied Ego against material obstacles, and as such is quite inapplicable to the action of intelligence and its relation to its objects. Moreover, the Ab- solute Ego cannot receive the Anstoss, because it is either subject and object at once and therefore all -containing, with nothing beyond it on which it could impinge, or, as devoid of self- consciousness, it is, as we found Fichte himself saying, " nothing at all." And above all, it may be asked, What do we mean by speakings of an Ego, when what we have is admittedly no more than a formless and aim- less activity ? But perhaps it is hardly fair to Fichte to say that he consciously intended to give a mechani- cal explanation of the kind just indicated. At all events, the objections made to his theory, and the manifold misunderstandings to which it gave rise, drew from him an indignant dis- Fickle. 5 5 claimer that he had ever dreamt of giving an actual construction of consciousness before all consciousness. 1 He brands such an interpre- tation as a gross misunderstanding of his meaning — as if he had set about to write the biography of a man before his birth. " Con- sciousness exists," he declares, " with all its determinations at a stroke, just as the universe is an organic whole, no part of which can exist without all the rest — something, therefore, which cannot have come gradually into being, but must necessarily have been there in its completeness at any period when it existed at all." In other words, he would tell us that he is not narrating what ever took place, but is analysing an eternal fact or process — analys- ing consciousness, in short, into its different moments, though these are inseparable, though they are, indeed, mere abstractions, if supposed to exist separately. We cannot refuse to accept a declaration so explicit. It would actually seem to be the case that, at this stage of his philosophy, Fichte did not contemplate any self- consciousness as existent except the self- consciousness of finite individuals. Being, existence, and suchiike terms, always had a 1 Cf. Werke, ii. 379 and 399. 56 Hegelianism and Personality. flavour of grossness about them for Fichtc. He would have readily allowed, therefore, that the empirical individuals were the only exist- ences or real beings in the world, though con- tending at the same time that their existence derived its meaning from a moral order of the universe. Fichte did not, therefore, at this stage, attribute to the Absolute Ego any ex- istence on its own account ; it was to him simply one aspect of the self-consciousness of the empirical individual. Hence he could not but vehemently repudiate an interpretation of his theory which turned it, in his own contemp- tuous phrase, into a story or tale. We get accordingly, at this period of Fichte's life, what is perhaps the most characteristic form of his idealism — an idealism which he loved to describe as not dogmatic but prac- tical. It looks not behind to a source from which things proceed, but forward to their goal or destiny, determining not what is, but what is to be. 1 It is worth our while to look some- what closely at the appearance which the uni- verse presents on this theory, in order to see how far the theory is tenable, and at the same 1 Cf. Werke, i. 156. Fichte. 5 7 time how far Fichte consistently maintains the position which he claims to occupy in regard to the Absolute Ego. He disclaims, as has been said, anything like a primitive reality or source of things. The finite, striving Egos constitute the sum of actual existence, the external world being simply the material or sphere of their moral action. The striving of the finite Egos is due, certainly, to the ideal of a moral destiny present to each. This ideal is the motive -power of the whole struggle with its eternal or never-ending ad- vance. We are drawn forward by " the idea of our absolute existence," or, as it is some- times called, " the Idea of the Ego," — that is to say, by the idea of an absolute or unim- peded activity. Just as in the case of Aristotle's rekos or End, this idea of the Ego and the eternal Sollen, or Ought-to-be, involved in it, contains the explanation of the whole evolution. But the Idea of the Ego is not, so far as can be gathered from Fichte, an eternal priiis, and in this respect it differs from the Aristotelian reXo?. It is merely an idea, and will never be actual. It cannot be realised, for the very sufficient reason that the extinction of oppo- 58 Hcgelianism and Personality. sition would signify the cessation of the strife on which consciousness depends. It was doubtless the intensity of Fichte's moral earnestness, and his somewhat exclusive attention to that side of experience, which led to such a formulation of his philosophy. But even as a metaphysic of ethics, such a theory is insufficient. Morality becomes illusory, if it is represented as the pursuit of a goal whose winning would be suicidal to morality itself, and to all conscious life. This consummation is unequivocally expressed by Schelling in his youthful work, 'On the Ego' — a work which was commended by Fichte himself as an un- exceptionable presentation of the doctrine of the ' Wissenschaftslehre.' "The ultimate goal of the finite Ego," says Schelling, " is enlarge- ment of its sphere till the attainment of identity with the infinite Ego. But the infinite Ego knows no object, and possesses, therefore, no consciousness or unity of consciousness, such as we mean by personality. Consequently the ultimate goal of all endeavour may also be re- presented as enlargement of the personality to infinity — that is to say, as its annihilation. The ultimate goal of the finite Ego, and not only of it but also of the Non-Ego — the final goal, Fichte. 59 therefore, of the world — is its annihilation as a world." * We may well, then, withdraw our eyes from the goal, if we are not to lose heart for the race. Fichte's account, in short, leaves no permanent reality in the universe whatever. The world is hung, as it were, between two vacuities — between the pure or Absolute Ego, on the one hand, which is completely empty apart from the finite individuals whom it constitutes, and "the Idea of the Ego," on the other, which is admittedly unattainable, and, if attainable, would be a total blank, the collapse of all con- scious life. . But it was impossible that such an exclusively practical point of view could be maintained for any length of time as a metaphysic of the uni- verse. The manifold empirical Egos could neither be taken as metaphysically self-explain- ing, nor could they be explained by reference to a re\o<; or End, which is a mere idea. There is evidence that Fichte himself — though at one time, as has been said, he might, if challenged, have acquiesced in the statement that the real- ity of the universe consisted simply of striving finite Egos — was at no time completely satis- fied with this conclusion. And, in spite of dis- 1 Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophic, § 14. 60 Hegelianism and Personality. claimers in regard to any existence of the Absolute Ego prior to and apart from its finite realisations, it is hardly possible to explain satisfactorily the extreme elaboration bestowed upon this theory of the Absolute Ego and the Anstoss, without believing that Fichte was at least half-consciously impelled by the need of some priu s, which should not be merely logical — some metaphysical prius or ultimate Reality from which the origin of finite Egos might be explained. This conviction is confirmed when we turn to the later forms of his theory. He first denied, as we have seen, that he meant to speak of a real prius at all; but almost immediately he seems to have begun to feel the impossibility of doing without an ultimate reality of some sort. At the same time he was quick to recog- nise the inapplicability of the term Ego, with its implication of self-consciousness, to such a prius as the theory led to. Accordingly, we find the two processes going on side by side ; he gradually disuses the term Ego, and at the same time embraces more distinctly the idea of a metaphysical ground or source. Thus, in 1800, in the ' Destiny of Man,' speaking of the Absolute Ego as identity of subject and object, Fichte. 6 1 he defines it as " that which is neither subject nor object, but the ground of both, and that out of which both come into being," and refers immediately afterwards to " the incomprehen- sible One " which " separates itself into these two." 1 And as early as 1S01, we find him dropping the term Absolute Ego, and adopting the more general designation of the Absolute. The same course was taken by Fichte's youth- ful disciple Schelling. When Schelling pro- ceeds to define the Absolute as the indifference- point of subject and object — "pure identity in which nothing is distinguishable " — it cannot any longer be doubted that we are being offered a metaphysical ground or source of the actual world, but neither can it be pretended that these terms indicate an Ego, an intelligent or spiritual principle. Fichte described his own system as an inverted Spinozism, in which the Absolute Ego stands in place of Substance, thus conserving the rights of the self-conscious life, and justifying the name Idealism. But here it is proved by the self-development of the system that, when thought out, it falls back into Spinozism pure and simple. The Absolute Ego passes into the Absolute, and turns out to 1 Werke, ii. 225. 62 Hegelianism and Personality. be no better than an absolute Substance from which all determinations are absent. It is on the same footing with negations like the Un- conscious, or the Unknown and Unknowable. This result, however, is not accidental to the theory ; it is the natural and inevitable result of the mode of reasoning pursued. In consider- ing the Kantian philosophy in the first lecture, we dwelt at considerable length on the impos- sibility of separating the transcendental unity from the empirical consciousness which it unifies. To suppose it existing on its own account is as if we supposed that one end of a stick could exist without the other. Kant was under no temptation to separate the transcen- dental and the empirical self, because the for- mer was for him simply the logical unity of thought in general, and he had never thought of identifying it with a divine or creative Self. But in Fichte (and this constitutes his interest and importance) this step — -the step which is repeated in Green, and which forms the central tenet of Neo-Kantianism— has been definitely taken. And as soon as this identification is made — as soon as we begin to speak of the Absolute Ego, or the universal consciousness — the temptation to separate becomes irresistible. Fichte. 63 We can hardly avoid substantiating this " eter- nal Self," and ascribing to it a creative function in respect of the manifold human individualities, which look so little self-dependent and self- explaining. Green, as we saw, repeatedly ascribes such creative action to his spiritual principle. It is, indeed, I believe, the need of some permanent principle on which these mani- fold individual selves might be seen to depend, combined with the perception that no self can be explained materialistically, or quasi-material- istically, by action from without, that prompts the identification in question. Unless the two selves can be so far separated as to supply the metaphysical explanation required, the charm of the identification is lost. Probably no one who has really lived in this phase of thought can fail to remember the thrill with which the meaning of the new prin- ciple first flashed upon him, and the light which it seemed to throw upon old difficulties. It had become impossible, with due regard to the unity of things, to conceive God as an object, as something quite external to ourselves ; and, on the other hand, there seemed nothing but a relapse into ordinary Pantheism, with its sub- mergence of self-consciousness, and all that 64 Hcgelianism and Personality. hangs thereby, in a general life, which reason and conscience alike declare to be inferior to our own. But, in this dilemma, the universal consciousness seemed to rise upon us as a crea- tive power which was not without us, but within, — which did not create a world of objects and leave it in dead independence, but perpetually unrolled, as it were, in each of us the universal spectacle of the world. The world was thus perpetually created anew in each finite spirit, revelation to intelligence being the only ad- missible meaning of that much-abused term creation. We had here a new and better Berkeleianism, for God in this system (so it seemed), was not an unknown Spirit, hidden, as it were, behind the screen of phenomena ; God was not far from any one of us, nay, He was within us, He was in a sense our very Self. Here, too, we had a principle which seemed to satisfy as well as Pantheism the imperative need of unity, but did so without sacrificing the claims of self-consciousness. For Self, as the eternal sustaining Subject of the universe, formed the beginning, middle, and end of the system. I do not think I can be wrong in attributing to considerations like these the remarkable Fickle. 65 hold which this conception has exercised over many minds. It flashes upon them like a wholly new point of view, and seems to deliver them from a host of difficulties. The deliver- ance may be in part illusory, but it is not therefore a mark of speculative weakness to have embraced the conception. On the con- trary, it is a conception which only a specula- tive mind could have originated, and for whose intelligent apprehension a genuine speculative effort is demanded. None the less, however, is the supposed solution wrapped in fatal ambiguity. When the rush of feeling subsides which first bore conviction in upon our minds, we are reluctantly forced to admit that, what- ever adumbrations of the truth such a con- ception may contain, it is, as it stands, a play of abstractions which is essentially impossible and unmeaning, but which, if taken seriously as a metaphysic, would deprive both God and man of real existence. For surely, if we do not mean to pay ourselves with words, it is essential to the coherence of the above account that this divine, creative Self should really exist as something more than the individuals whom it constitutes, and in whom it creatively works. If the account is to have any meaning E 66 Hcgclianism and Personality. as a satisfaction of our metaphysical and re- ligious needs, the Absolute Ego must really be an Ego. If it is to fill the metaphysical place assigned to it by the system, and to justify, for example, the appellation of spiritual principle, it must exist for itself, with a self- consciousness of its own. Indeed it would be easy to show that many of those who have espoused this theory have explicitly attributed such a self-consciousness to the Absolute Ego ; while many more, without making the matter clear to themselves, are habitually swayed by the same associations. It cannot, however, in the interests of clear thinking, be too plainly pointed out that, whatever other warrant there may be for such a conception of the divine Self and its creative relation to the human consciousness, there is absolutely none in the theory under consideration. The theory not only does not show the Absolute Ego to be self-conscious and creative, but it becomes unmeaning to make such assertions about it, if it is in a strict sense "nothing at all" when separated from the individual consciousness whose unity it is. The process of hypostatisation by which this divine Self is reached is somehow thus. Fichte. 6 7 It is as if we took the concrete personality of the individual — which may be described in certain of its aspects as an instance of unity in multiplicity or permanence in change — and separated the unity from the multiplicity, assigning the unity to a universal or divine Self, and treating the multiplicity, or the changing " states of consciousness," as the empirical self or the individual qua individual. Thinkers like Fichte or Green fully admit, when questioned, that a real self-conscious being, in the ordinary sense of the word, comes to pass only when these two sides are united. Nevertheless it is made to appear as if this real self-consciousness were the result of activity on the part of the universal Self, as if the latter supplied itself somehow with matter in the shape of empirical states of conscious- ness, which it then proceeds to unify. But this is to seek to produce a reality from the union of two abstractions. Distinguishing two inseparable aspects of any concrete self, we substantiate one of them, and make it do duty for God ; the other — what is left of us — we do not exactly substantiate, but we think of it as an effect of our first abstraction. But the true result of this course is, as I have said, to 68 Hcgelianism and Personality. deprive both God and man of real existence. This is manifest in the case of God, but it is not less true of the individual. The empirical self is not the real self, it is not the whole man ; for half the man has been taken away to be made into a god. The empirical self is merely, so to speak, the objective side of the man's consciousness. He is left without a self of his own to which his "states of con- sciousness" could be object, and the divine Self — a Self identical in all men — is brought in to perform that function for him. The individual seems thus to become no more than an object of the divine Self, a series of phenomena threaded together and reviewed by it — an office which it performs in precisely the same fashion for any number of such so-called individuals. Such a representation, in truth, wipes out the selfhood and independence of the individual with a completeness which few systems of Pantheism can rival. But when the issue is thus made plain, it must be apparent that the representation cannot be a true one. The real self is one and indivisible, and is unique in each individual. This is the un- equivocal testimony of consciousness. The argument which seeks to undermine it is Fichte. 69 converting an identity of type into a numerical unity of existence, and then treating the real individuals as accidental forms of this hypos- tatised abstraction. But the fact that we all speak of ourselves in the first person, using the same term "I," surely does not imply that this logical subject exhausts the reality of that which it symbolises ; still less does the identity of the symbol imply that all these different selves are numerically one and the same Self. On the contrary, whatever resemblance there may be, and whatever be the mode of their comprehension within the all-containing bounds of the divine life, it is certain that, as selves, it is of their very essence to be relatively in- dependent and mutually exclusive centres of existence. When the first step has been taken, the progress of thought in regard to this hypos- tatised abstraction is as we have just traced it in Fichte, so far as we have followed him, and in Schelling. It is discovered that the so-called Absolute Ego is not an Ego at all ; the term Ego is dropped, therefore, and there remains the Absolute without further designa- tion, as the womb out of which all things jo Hegelianism and Personality. proceed. This is a solution which settles everything in an easy fashion, but which seems to give up everything for which "Idealism" was supposed to strive. The Absolute, so conceived, is simply a predicateless ground of existence in general ; or, in Hegel's well-known phrase, it is the night in which all cows are black. This is a consummation, therefore, which need not detain us further. Fichte's own later developments are more interesting, because they soon abandon this path, and show an endeavour to cope more conscien- tiously with the difficulties of the question. 1 It has already been pointed out how he began to disuse the term Absolute Ego, em- bracing at the same time more definitely the idea of a causal prius of individual intelligences. The term which he afterwards used most frequently to designate this prius — the term 1 In referring to these developments, I have restricted my- self to his more academic utterances where regard is had to scientific accuracy of expression, and have not entered upon his more popular and semi-religious lectures. The manifold (often unfinished) forms in which Fichte presents his views, and the varying terminology in which he clothes them, make it a very difficult task to disentangle his later positions. It is permissible to doubt whether, on certain points, they had taken definite shape in his own mind. The quotations that follow are all taken from the "Thatsachen des Bewusstseins." Fichte. 7 1 which he used, for example, in his Berlin lectures, and in the important work called ' Facts of Consciousness,' which was carefully prepared by him for publication — is Life {Lebe?t), or " the universal Life." And it pres- ently appears that what he is speaking of is not the abstraction of the transcendental unity, but Nature, the elemental and unconscious existence out of which, as a matter of his- torical fact, the human individual seems to arise. The world, as we perceive it apart from the free action of conscious beings, is, he says, "a mere objective being, a mere stream- ing out (Ausstromen), pure externality without any inner core. 1 If free activity is to be realised " — and this is, of course, for Fichte the only worthy end of existence — " the One Life must first of all gather itself together out of that universality and dispersedness into a single point. . . . In such a contraction, the power which contracts itself is evidently the One Life, for except it nothing exists. The individual only comes into existence there- 1 Werke, ii. 639. This Life, he says a few pages further on, is itself neither in space nor time ; it is a mere force, pure force without substrate, which is not itself a phenomenon at all, and which cannot therefore be perceived, but which lies at the basis of all possible phenomenal or perceived existence. "]2 Hegelianism and Personality. by, the self-contraction of the One being the original actus individuationis" He is evidently anxious to be as explicit as possible, for he goes on to repeat — " What is it, then, that makes and produces the individual ? Evident- ly the One Life, through the contraction of itself. ... It is unconditionally necessary that Life assume individual form, if it is to act. There can be no action except in individual form, seeing that only thereby does Life con- centrate itself into the point of unity from which all action must start. Only in the individual is Life a practical principle." 1 "Would it be strictly correct," he reiterates, " to say that the individual becomes conscious of himself? By no means, for the individual does not as yet exist at all ; how, then, could he become anything ? On the contrary, we ought to say Life [das Lcben) becomes con- scious of itself in individual form and as in- dividual." 2 Moreover, we may go further and say, " The universal Life creates the in- dividual anew at every moment, though it is permissible, when we are not speaking strictly, to use the static form of Life in the individual in question as a logical subject, and to say 1 Werke, ii. 640, 641. " Ibid., 647. Fichte. 73 the individual creates himself afresh with absolute freedom at every moment." 1 The individual, however, it must always be re- membered, is not an existence by himself, " but only a contingent form " of the One Life. 2 "The One does not lose itself in the various and opposite forms of itself, but remains per- manent in all their change, and is therefore in strictness that which exists for or by itself in Life" (das eigentlicli fur sick Seyende am LcbciL) It is not, as will be seen, the Absolute, taken as equivalent to God, but it is, he says, " the Absolute in life {das Absolute am und im Lebeii) as contrasted with its mere appear- ances. 6 This is ample evidence that the prius from which the individual emerges is not an Ego in the ordinary sense of that term. It is Nature, which is treated by Fichte as the visible ap- pearance of the universal Life or Force 4 of which he speaks. But, it may be rejoined, the terms he now uses all seem to imply that very origin of consciousness from the unconscious, of the ideal from the real, which Fichte before declared to be inconceivable. This, however, 1 Werke, ii. 649. 2 Ibid., 640. 3 Ibid., 642. 4 He sometimes varies " Leben" by "Kraft." 74 Hegelianism and Personality. was an inconsequence too gross for Fichte to be guilty of ; and on looking more closely we find him speaking of " Life " as " the life of Knowledge," 1 and at other times expressly identifying Knowledge and Life. 2 Sometimes, instead of Knowledge, he uses the phrase "universal and absolute Thought." "Universal and absolute Thought," he says, " thinks the other Egos, and me myself among them — that is, it produces them by its thought." 3 " In the first unreflective act of perception, for example, it is not I who think ; we must rather say thought itself, as an independent life, thinks of its own prompting and through its own powers." This is plainly the exact parallel of what was said above of the relation of " the universal Life " to the individual thinker ; and similarly he speaks in this connection of individuals as simply the points in which knowledge comes to self-perception. And again, condemning the popular prejudice or misrepresentation that according to his system the world is made a product of the individual's thought, he says, with a slight variation of phraseology, " Not the individual but the one immediate spiritual 1 Werke, ii. 555. 2 Cf. Werke, ii. 6S5, &c. ' J Ibid., 603. Fichte. 75 Life itself is the creator of all phenomena, and therefore of the phenomenal individuals them- selves. Hence it is that the ' Wissenschafts- lehre ' insists so strongly on thinking this One Life pure and without substrate. Reason, universal thought, knowledge as such, is higher and more than the individual. To be able to conceive no reason save such an one as the individual possesses as an accident of himself, is tantamount to being unable to conceive reason at all." 1 The contempt which is here just indi- cated finds full expression towards the end of the book. Fichte there asserts roundly that " Knowledge has a truly independent existence. It exists by itself as a free and independent Life, and we require no bearer of knowledge." The inability to do without such a bearer, he brands as " the absolute annihilation of philo- sophy." " Man does not possess knowledge, but knowledge, so God will, is to possess man. - Those who are conversant with the Hegelian system and its developments will not fail to note how closely this result of Fichte's later speculation resembles the impersonal system of thought which is put forward by some Hegel- 1 Werke, ii. 607, 60S. 2 Ibid., 6S8. j 6 Hegelianism and Personality. ians as the ultimate reality of the universe, and the only God for which the system can find room. Fichte, however, as already hinted, does not identify this independent self - existing Knowledge with God. His statement on this subject comes almost at the end of the treatise we have been considering. Knowledge, he seems to say, must have an object ; if it were simply knowledge of knowledge, it would collapse into nonentity. The object of know- ledge is God, and knowledge is accordingly described as the image or perception of God. More strictly, however, it may be said that God is never known purely as He is, and Knowledge or Life (which are perfectly identical terms) might therefore be better described as " the in- finite striving to become in reality the image of God." God Himself is " the absolute, the self- subsistent, that which does not enter into pro- cess, and has never come into being : of which one can say absolutely nothing else than just — it is." 1 This doctrine of God is peculiar to Fichte's later thought, and is so obscurely enunciated (besides being so entirely biographical in its interest) that it would be out of place to dwell 1 Cf. Werke, ii. 6S0-S7. Fichte. 7 7 upon it longer here. But it is at least apparent that he now ascribes to God an existence out of and beyond the process of evolution which formerly constituted his entire universe. He had felt, it would seem, the necessity of bringing permanence and metaphysical reality into his system by the assertion of this Absolute Being as the last term of explanation and the object of all knowledge. Fichte has thus at least the merit of having faced the question of the mode of existence we are to attribute to the Divine Being and the relation in which he stands to the process of world-evolution. This is a ques- tion which we shall find it by no means easy to determine in the Hegelian system. Mean- while, Fichte's conclusion on the subject — his assertion of an Absolute Being who does not enter into process — is worth noting as the outcome of the prolonged criticisms and modi- fications to which he subjected his earlier sys- tem. The second point in this new version of his theory which demands a passing word (also in connection with Hegel) is the transforma- tion of the Absolute Ego into the notion of "absolute knowledge" or "universal thought" as self-supporting, depending upon God, it is 78 Hegelianism and Personality. true, for its object, but requiring no subject or bearer, itself giving rise to individual subjects by a process of self-concentration. The final disappearance of the empty Ego is hardly a cause for wonder or regret ; but, in spite of Fichte's imperious tone, and his warning that we are merely setting the seal to our own philo- sophic incompetency, we must summon up all our hardihood and openly confess that to speak of thought as self-existent, without any con- scious being whose the thought is, conveys no meaning to our minds. Thought exists only as the thought of a thinker ; it must be centred somewhere. To thought per se we can attribute neither existence nor causal activity ; and this being so, it can have no place in metaphysics as a theory of Being. This is a point which will receive abundant exemplification in the system of Hegel, which we now pass to consider. Appendix to Lecture II 79 APPENDIX TO LECTURE II. It is worth noting that in dealing with the material or given element in knowledge (cf. p. 51, supra), Fichte is more conscientiously thoroughgoing than Green. In fact, though the Neo-Kantians dismiss Kant's explanation of sensation as unphilosophical and irrelevant, they seldom volunteer an explanation of their own ; and it is evident that, to Green at least, the facts of sense — the sense - qualities of things — constitute a serious embarrassment. He constantly assumes a stream of sensations as the material upon which the pause-giving and rationally constitutive activity of thought is exercised. These fleeting sensations form, as it were, the straw out of which his bricks are made, and it is difficult to see how he could commence operations without them. It is the equivocation between feeling and felt thing (between mere sensation and sensation transformed by the presence of the permanent Ego and qualified by manifold rational relations) that furnishes him with his recurring criticism upon Empirical thinkers. The whole aim of idealism, he says, "is to articulate coherently the conviction of there being a world of abiding realities other than, and determining the endless flow of, our feelings" ('Prolegomena,' 39). But though Green is successful in showing that the thinkers he criti- cises have imported into sensation or feeling much more than they are willing to acknowledge, his very mode of stating the question seems to involve the existence of mere feeling in some fashion as that which thought transforms into a system of So Hegelianism and Personality. stable facts. He sees this himself, and endeavours (' Prolegomena,' 46 et seq.) to treat it as an illusion necessarily incident to our point of view. " There is a point at which the individual's retrospective analysis of the knowledge which he finds himself to possess necessarily stops. Antecedently to any of the formative intellectual processes which he can trace, it would seem that something must have been given for those processes to begin upon. This something is taken to be feeling pure and simple. When all accretions of form due to the intellectual establishment of relations have been stripped off, there seem to remain the mere sen- sations, without which the intellectual activity would have had nothing to deal with or operate upon. These then must be in an absolute sense the matter — the matter excluding all form — of experience." The statement is warrantable, if at all, he says, " only as a statement in regard to the mental history of the individual," and of course it is easy to show that sensation, as a -n-pwri] vX-q of this sort, is something of which no assertions can be made, inasmuch as it lies outside " the cosmos of possible experience." " Mere sensation is in truth a phrase that represents no reality. . . . Thought is the necessary condition of the existence of sensible facts, and mere sensation, in the sense supposed, is not a possible constituent of the realm of facts " (pp. 48, 49). But this appears, after all, rather to overstate the case; for "this does not mean," Green goes on to say, " that no being can feel which does not also think. We are not called upon here to inquire whether there are really animals which feel but have not the capacity Appendix to Lecture II. 8 1 of thinking. All that the present argument would lead us to maintain would be that, so far as they feel without thinking, their feelings are not facts for them, — for their consciousness. Their feelings are facts ; but they are facts only so far as determined by relations, which exist only for a thinking con- sciousness and otherwise could not exist. And in like manner, that large part of our own sensitive life which goes on without being affected by conceptions, is a series of facts with the determination of which, indeed, thought, as ours or in us, has nothing to do, but which not the less depends for its existence as a series of facts on the action of the same sub- ject which, in another mode of its action, enables us to know them." "Just so far as we feel with- out thinking, no world of phenomena exists for us. The suspension of thought in us means also the suspension of fact or reality for us. We do not cease to be facts, but facts cease to exist for our consciousness." The feelings exist as facts, it is implied, for the universal consciousness — " the consciousness which constitutes reality and makes the world one." But, according to Green's own showing, the real world present to such a conscious- ness would consist of the objective conditions of the successive feelings ; it would be the totality of the conditions of sensation minus the sensative experience itself. But surely in the case of feeling it is the latter — the existence of the feeling for the feeling consciousness — which is the real fact to be explained. Without absolutely denying this aspect of feeling, Green's explanation seems arbitrarily to rule such experience out of the category of reality or fact, and to identify feeling with its 82 Hegelianism and Personality. physiological conditions in a way which dangerously resembles the cruder dicta of Materialism. In his posthumous ' Lectures on Logic ' he deals with the same question, and suggests that " the notion that an event in the way of sensation is something over and above its conditions," may be " a mistake of ours arising from the fact that we feel before we know what the reality of the feeling is " (Works, ii. 190). " For the only sort of consciousness for which there is reality," he says roundly, " the conceived conditions are the reality" (191). "For a subject perfectly intelligent, reality would be the fact that a sensation shall occur or has occurred just as much as that it is now occurring, because such a subject would not be a subject of the sensation " (185). To this I can only reply, that such a statement seems to me to wipe out the whole subjective experience of sensitive creatures, and to substitute for this moving world of actual events in time a static or timeless knowledge-picture of the conditions of such events or happenings. This is borne out by what he says elsewhere of this hypothetical case of a subject perfectly intelli- gent but not itself the subject of sensation. " Ad- mitting an eternally thinking subject as the correlatum of nature," Green asks in another place, "what is nature for such a subject ? " (Works, ii. 74). " Nature is really," he answers, " or for the eternal thinking subject, for God, what it is for our reason." But "when we come to say what it is for our reason, we cannot get beyond the mere formal conditions of there being a nature at all." " For reason, nature is a system of becoming which rests on unchangeable conditions." In other words, we get the general Appendix to Lecture II 83 conception of orderly change — the schematised categories of substance and cause — and no account whatever is given of the content or "matter" of nature. And even so much, it afterwards appears, is possible only for a sensitive consciousness, for such a scheme involves the experience of existence in time. "Sensibility," Green says, "is the con- dition of existence in time, of there being events related to each other as past, present, and future ; " and he therefore postulates " an eternal sensibility " as "the eternal condition of time" (Works, ii. 79, 80). This illustrates at least the impossibility of getting to work without feeling, but the interpretation to be put upon it in conformity with Green's general line of statement is hard to fix. And when he else- where traces the whole difficulty to "a process of abstraction," and assures us that " feeling and thought are inseparable and mutually dependent, in the consciousness for which the world of experience exists," that "each in its full reality includes the other" ('Prolegomena to Ethics,' 51), one cannot help feeling that this is heroically to cut the knot instead of untying it. It is a seductive but unsatis- factory method of surmounting actual difficulties to refer us for their solution to a possible divine ex- perience which we cannot even conceive. As Hume said, our line is too short to fathom such immense abysses. Green's imbroglio in regard to sensation and time is, at all events, significant as an index of the difficulties which attend the post-Kantian idealism in its attempt to account on its own principles for Kant's " natura materialiter spectata." 8 4 LECTURE III. THE RELATION OF HEGEL'S LOGIC TO EXPERIENCE. As we should expect, the form of Hegel's system was conditioned by the form which philosophy had taken in the theories of his immediate predecessors. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel stand upon the common basis of the Idealism which they developed out of the Kan- tian system. But Schelling, as we have seen, in developing Fichte's earlier views, had drifted into a position hardly distinguishable from Spinozism. A philosophy whose Absolute is described as "total indifference" or "pure identity in which nothing is distinguishable," has its face turned the wrong way. Schelling, like Spinoza, cannot avoid speaking as if the developed system of differences which consti- Hegel's Logic and Experience. 85 tutes the intelligible world were unreal in com- parison with this pure identity, and existed only in the " imagination " of the individual. It is against this submergence of difference, and consequent extinction of the life of the universe, that some of Hegel's sharpest sayings are directed in the famous Preface to the 'Phe- nomenology of Spirit' According to the mot already quoted, such an Absolute is no better than the night in which all cows are black. The "truth," or ultimate reality, of the universe cannot be a pure, " original," or " immediate " identity ; it must be an identity that mediates or restores itself — in other words, an identity which is realised through difference. The type of such an identity is found in the self-conscious life, and "everything in philosophy depends on the insight that the Absolute is to be appre- hended not as Substance but as Subject." So Hegel sums up his contention, making a return, as it were, to Fichte's position to re- emphasise the central principal of Idealism, which Schelling had been in danger of for- getting. But the principle reappears in a form con- siderably changed. This is largely traceable to the strong- hold which the notion of devel- 86 Hegeliauism and Personality. opment had on Hegel. In the same Preface, Hegel blames Fichte for taking the Subject as a motionless ready-made form into which, as it were, we stuff all the facts of the universe, and imagine that everything is then comfort- ably explained. It is true that Fichte de- scribed the Ego as not so much a fact but an act — a continual energising or self-realisa- tion, and might, therefore, have readily adopted Hegel's account of the Subject as essentially the process of its own becoming (Sichselbst- werden) ; but he did not connect the process with the facts of nature and history. It re- mained, for the most part, an abstract construc- tion in vacuo, as we saw in examining the account of the An stoss. Hegel refuses to take Self-consciousness, Subject, or Spirit, either as a ready-made fact or as an abstract construc- tion, and insists on connecting it with the pro- cess of cosmic development, which is thus viewed as the process of the development or " becoming " of Spirit. Only then, he says, is Spirit the True, the Whole, or the Absolute. And if our demonstration is to be complete, we must be able to draw all the facts of nature and history within this process, and exhibit them as stacrcs or elements in the self-devel- Hegel's Logic and Experience. 87 opment of Spirit. If we separate the Absolute from this process our idea becomes a mere abstraction ; the Absolute, according to his ex- pression, is essentially result, or rather it is "the result together with its becoming." It is only putting the position slightly otherwise to say that this process of evolution, as crowned and consummated in Spirit, is itself the ultim- ately real. The beginning is the same as the end, for both are united in the notion of End, Purpose, or Final Cause (Zweck). In a de- velopment so conceived the End is in the be- ginning, or the real beginning is the End ; the first stage is implicitly the last. By this conception of development, Hegel not only transforms the abstract Ego of Fichte, but also makes a distinct advance upon Schel- ling, though Schelling uses the idea of develop- ment freely enough. This advance has often been compared to that made by Aristotle upon Plato. The dominating conception of the Aris- totelian philosophy is the notion of End or Final Cause ; and Aristotle's advance upon Plato lay chiefly in the clearness with which he grasped the truth that the ultimate meta- physical explanation of existence must be sought not so much in a prius out of which things 88 Hegelianism and Personality. emerge as in the goal towards which they move. Not that the notion of End does not appear in Plato ; it may be traced very plainly in the account of the Idea of the Good, and in the quest of Perfect Beauty as set forth in the ' Symposium.' But it is a frequent character- istic of Plato's thought to look back to the beginning rather than forward to the End, and to lose itself, accordingly, in cosmological con- structions. And in this Schelling resembled or followed Plato, forgetting that, as soon as the beginning is separated from the End, it becomes something perfectly formless and indefinable — a source or womb to which things are referred, but which contributes nothing to their explan- ation. It cannot be doubted that Hegel owes to his profound study of Aristotle much of the advantage which he has over his predecessors — his firmer grasp of reality and the less arbi- trary character of his constructions. And in particular, so far as he consistently maintains the Aristotelian doctrine of the evepyeia as phil- osophically prior to the SiW/u? or potentiality out of which it appears to be evolved — the doctrine of the TeXo9 or End as the explanatory cause of the whole development — so far it may be cordially allowed that Hegel represents what Hegel's Logic and Experience. 89 is profoundest and best in modern philosophy. This thought was, I believe, the inspiration and motive - power of his philosophy. It is more doubtful whether the system which he elaborated is ultimately consistent with it. Hegel's relation to Kant is even more im- portant for the proper understanding of the specific features of his system than those rela- tions to Fichte and Schelling which have just been adverted to. Fichte's system has its centre in Ethics, Schelling's in the Philosophy of Na- ture ; Logic is the centre of the Hegelian system. Iii this peculiarity we may trace the more im- mediate influence of Kant and of the Transcen- dental Logic which formed the core of Kant's first great ' Critique.' Hegel's Logic is neither more nor less than an expansion, a completion and rectification of Kant's table of the categories. In other words, it is a systematic grammar of thought — an analysis of the nature of our gen- eral conceptions and of their relations to one another. The special result of the analysis is, indeed, just to make explicit the mutual rela- tions of these conceptions, and to assign, there- fore, to each its proper sphere of explanation, its proper place and function in the organism of knowledge. The points of view from which 90 Hegelianism and Personality. Kant and Hegel respectively undertake the analysis of our general notions are different. Hegel often blames his predecessor for under- taking his criticism of knowledge solely with reference to the question whether the concep- tions examined are subjective or objective, a priori or a posteriori, in their origin. He main- tains (rightly, as it appears to me) that in trying to determine such a question we are essaying an impossible task. Thought cannot ultimately criticise its own validity. To do so would re- quire a second species of thought to sit in judgment upon our first or actual thought, and a third thought to test the validity of the verdict thus obtained, and so on ad infini- tum — a species of never-ending appeal as weari- some as fruitless. The trustworthiness or ob- jective validity of our thought is, and must be, an assumption. Such an assumption may, if it is desired, be styled the trust or faith of reason in itself; such faith, at all events, is the only reasonable attitude, and from the nature of the case no arguments can be advanced in support of a distrust which is tantamount to absolute scepticism. Hegel justly, therefore, sets aside the subjective prejudice which infects Kant's investigation, and insists upon the necessity of HegeVs Logic and Experience. 91 a perfectly disinterested investigation of our conceptions. His Logic is to be an analysis of the nature of thought undertaken without any preconceptions — an examination of our conceptions or categories on their own account, with a view to define them precisely and fix their mutual relations. The result is, as I have tried to show on another occasion, 1 that instead of an impossible criticism ab extra of thought as such, we get an immanent criticism of one conception by another. The whole theory of knowledge re- solves itself, indeed, into this immanent criti- cism of categories. That is to say, a systematic survey of our conceptions enables us to estimate the significance of each single conception aright, and prevents us from putting it to work for which it is inadequate or unfit. It enables us to see which are the poorer, less determinate, or more abstract conceptions, and which are, in comparison, richer, more determinate, more concrete. With this insight, we perceive that the latter are, in Hegel's phrase, the "truer" categories — that is to say, they give a more adequate account of the ultimate reality of 1 Essays in Philosophical Criticism, Essay I. Philosophy as Criticism of Categories. 92 Hegelianism and Personality. things. We cease, therefore, to put forward the more elementary determinations of thought, as if they were pre-eminently adapted to express the nature of that reality. We do not define God as Being, with the Eleatics, nor, with Spinoza, as Infinite Substance, nor even as the Great First Cause. Such deter- minations, though in a sense true so far as they go, are recognised by a systematic criticism of thought to be wholly inadequate as expres- sions of the divine nature. They are inade- quate, not merely as all human conceptions must be inadequate to such an object, by reason of our ignorance ; they are inadequate even with reference to what we know. We know them to be inadequate by reference to other conceptions which we possess — by refer- ence, in brief, to a conception like self-con- sciousness, which we may draw from our own experience. In general, such a review enables us to do justice to our conceptions all round — to allow to each its relative justification, and, on the other hand, to repel the extravagant claims put forward on behalf of some to embody the only objective or scientifically accurate account of the universe. Some men of science are fond of advancing this claim on Hegel's Logic and Experience. 93 behalf of the categories of mechanism. The ideas of matter and motion are so clear and simple, that it seems as if all explanation must consist in reducing phenomena to terms of matter in motion ; so at least it is often con- tended from the scientific side. But such explanation is often a practical supprcssio veri ; it is a suppression of part of the fact to be explained. Nothing is more essential than to be on our guard against the seductive simpli- fication of facts which consists in their reduc- tion to simpler categories. It is, of course, possible to treat any fact more or less abstractly — that is, to take account only of certain of its aspects, not of the full concrete fact. The explanation by reduction to simpler categories is such an abstract account — an account true so far as it goes, but not the whole truth, and consequently false if put forward as such. Hegel's analysis and systematisation of the categories is therefore of the highest importance both for science and for a sound philosophy. By its means, according to his own expression, we become master of our conceptions instead of being mastered by them. And by bringing to light the different threads of meaning which sometimes mingle in a single term, he has 94 Hegcliauism and Personality, frequently laid bare the motives of many an old dispute, and settled it thereby in the only way in which settlement was possible. More- over, coming to the work, as we have seen, without any of Kant's preconceptions, Hegel was in a position not only immensely to amplify and improve the Kantian scheme, but also to avoid the arbitrary distinction which Kant had drawn between certain categories as objectively valid and others as merely regulative ideas. Hegel passes from Mechanism to Chemism, and from Chemism to Teleology, and the notion of the organism, recognising in all alike an objective validity. So far from being a mere subjective gloss upon the lower, the higher categories are a more accurate and adequate rendering of the nature of things. Pre-eminently is this the case with the category or notion to which all the rest lead up, the notion of self-consciousness, or, as Hegel calls it when it attains the form of speculative insight, the Absolute Idea. Instead of being dealt with as an unexplained excrescence upon the universe, the self-conscious knower is treated by Hegel as the ultimate fact, to which all other facts — if we may even speak of them provisionally as independent facts — Hegel's Logic and Experience. 95 are relative, and in which they find their ex- planation. Instead of shrinking from what is called Anthropomorphism, he accepts this ultimate category of thought as the only one we can use in seeking to give an adequate account of the great Fact of existence. And here it seems to me that Hegel is unques- tionably correct. Nothing can be more certain than that all philosophical explanation must be explanation of the lower by the higher, and not vice versa ; and if self-consciousness is the highest fact we know, then we are justified in using the conception of self-consciousness as our best key to the ultimate nature of existence as a whole. Hegel, however, has the air of saying a good deal more than this, and hence it becomes necessary to consider somewhat carefully the relation of Hegel's Logic to experience, and the nature of the proof which he professes to give of the " development" of conceptions there ex- pounded, and of the supreme conception in which, as he would say, the whole development returns to itself. Hegel apparently wishes us to believe that his procedure is entirely pre- suppositionless, and that it is guided by an unerring dialectic wholly free from subjective g6 Hegelianism and Personality. admixture, and representing, as he says, the march of the object itself {der Gang der Sadie selbsf). And as the Logic advances from its beginning in the most abstract datum of thought to its consummation in the notion of self-con- sciousness or speculative knowledge, this latter notion is represented as proved by the same passionless and unerring dialectic to be the ultimately True, But if we aim at soberness, we may correct a number of seemingly extrava- gant statements by other utterances of Hegel himself. Here as elsewhere, in the exposition of his system, Hegel has suppressed the reference to experience. He presents everything syn- thetically, though it must first have been got analytically by an ordinary process of reflection upon the facts which are the common property of every thinker. Thus the notions with which the Logic deals admittedly form part and par- cel of the apparatus of everyday thought, and the development which Hegel gives of them is simply their systematic placing. The very abstraction of " Being," with which the Method starts, is the starting-point merely because it is the baldest abstraction that we can make from the complex fulness of actuality ; it is the barest statement that can be made about the Hegel's Logic and Experience. 97 actual. And once got by this process of ab- straction, it is not to be supposed that Being gives birth, as it were, out of itself to the more concrete conceptions which follow. It may be fairly granted, I think, to critics of the Method like Trendelenburg and Von Hartmann, that every step of the advance is empirically con- ditioned. The celebrated dialectical opposition which is the nerve of the process is not the con- tradictory opposition of the logician. Mere contradiction yields nothing new, — nothing, therefore, which, by synthesis or fusion with the original datum, could yield a third product different from either. The opposition which Hegel makes his fulcrum is contrary or real opposition ; the second is not simply the nega- tive of the first, but both are real determinations of things. But if this is so, then the first does not of itself strike round into its opposite. The opposite arises only for a subjective reflection which has had the advantage of acquaintance with the real world. Such a reflection, playing upon the empty abstraction, perceives its need of supplement by reference to the fuller reality from which it is an abstraction. Only in this way is the path to be traversed determined. The forward movement is in reality a progress G 98 Hcgelianism and Personality. backwards : it is a retracing of our steps to the world as we know it in the fulness of its real determinations. This view of the Method is well expressed by Trendelenburg, perhaps the acutest of Hegel's logical critics, in a passage which I cannot do better than quote. " The dialectic," says Tren- delenburg, " begins according to its own de- claration with abstraction ; for if ' pure being ' is represented as equivalent to 'nothing,' thought has reduced the fulness of the world to the merest emptiness. But it is the essence of abstraction that the elements of thought which in their original form are intimately united are violently held apart. What is thus isolated by abstraction, however, cannot but strive to escape from this forced position. In- asmuch as it is a part torn from a whole, it can- not but bear upon it the traces that it is only a part ; it must crave to be completed. When this completion takes place, there will arise a conception which contains the former in itself. But inasmuch as only one step of the original abstraction has been retraced, the new concep- tion will repeat the process ; and this will go on until the full reality of perception has been restored. . . . Plainly a whole world may de- Hegel" s Logic and Experience. 99 velop itself in this fashion, and, if we look more narrowly, we have discovered here the secret of the dialectic method. That method is simply the act by which we undo or retrace our original abstraction. The first ideas, because they are the products of abstraction, are recognised on their first appearance as mere parts or elements of a higher conception, and the merit of the dialectic really lies in the comprehensive survey of these parts from every side, and the thereby increased certainty we gain of their necessary connection with one another." l Totally damaging as this may appear, at first 1 Logische Untersuchungen, i. 94, 95. As an example of the general criticisms made in the text, it is sufficient to take the very first triplet, ' Being, Non-being or Nothing, and Be- coming,' and here we may again conveniently follow Trendelen- burg. "If Becoming is clear to us through perception, there may easily be distinguished in it the moments of Being and Non-being. Thus, while day is dawning, we may say ' it is already day,' and also 'it is not yet day.' We separate or dis- tinguish these moments in Becoming as actually observed, but -without in the least understanding logically the characteristic of real existence in virtue of which they are present together. . . . Pure Being, identical with self, is rest ; Nothing, like- wise identical with itself, is also rest. How does the movement of Becoming arise out of the union of these two motionless ideas? ... It could not do so unless the idea of Becoming were presupposed. From pure Being, an admitted abstraction, and Nothing, again an admitted abstraction, it is impossible that there should suddenly arise Becoming, this concrete per- too Hegelianism and Personality. sight, to the claims of the Method, it is not diffi- cult to see that it is a perfectly true account of Hegel's method of going to work. What is more, Hegel himself, though he might "hold it not honesty to have it thus set down," will be found fully admitting that the dialectical ception which presides over life and death." — (Logische Unter- suchungen, i. 38.) The constant presence of such concrete phantasmata — in other words, the essential dependence of the Logic on temporal and spatial metaphors— is evidently fatal, it may be added, to its claim to be, in any special sense, pure thought. Trendelenburg proves conclusively how the images of physical motion and physical processes cling to, and really dominate, the account of transitions which are supposed to take place in the ether of pure thought. Trendelenburg is followed here by Haym (Hegel und seine Zeit, p. 318). As the Method will not engage our attention further, this may be the most convenient place for remarking that a detailed criticism of the Logic would only reveal how great is the part played by subjective reflection in its construction ; almost at any point Hegel might have en- gineered his path otherwise than he did. Nor are examples wanting of purely arbitrary and illusory transitions, as, for example, that in the Psychology signalised by Trendelenburg, where we are supposed to pass by the necessity of the notion from the ages of man to the difference of the sexes, and thence to sleeping and waking ! In general, it may be said that the Method is more or less of an artifice to introduce system ; and when reduced to a mechanism, it leads to forced constructions. What is valuable in the Logic is its matter, not its form ; and the profound philosophical criticisms embedded in it would retain their value in any setting. Cf. Dr Stirling's remarks in the last note to Schwegler (p. 475), where he seems to approxi- mate to this view. Hegel's Logic and Experience. 101 advance really depends upon the fuller know- ledge which the subject brings with him from his experience. " As a matter of fact," he says, " we bring the Notion and the whole nature of thought with us ; and so we may very well say that every beginning must be made with the Absolute, and that all advance is only its ex- position." 1 And again, " It must be allowed that there is an important truth in the rep- resentation that the movement forwards is a movement backwards to the ground of the whole, to the original and the true, on which that with which we made a beginning de- pends." 2 In fact, we come here upon a stand- ing characteristic of Hegel's thought, namely, that the order of exposition always reverses the real order of thought by which the results were arrived at. Consequently, we have to look for the real fact from which he started, the real explanation of the whole process, in the result which he apparently reaches by means of it. He really lets down the ladder only in order to mount again by it to his original starting-point. The result is, therefore, not proved, in the or- dinary sense, by the dialectical evolution which we go through to reach it ; it was the under- 1 Werke, v. 334. 2 Ibid., iii. 64. 102 Hegelianism and Personality. lying assumption of the whole. Thus (to take an example) it is, in a manner, true to point out that the different conceptions, as they pass in review, are so many imperfect modes of ex- pressing the Idea, which impel us onwards, therefore, to the perfect form. Hegel habit- ually speaks in this way. " Being," he tells us, " is the first definition of the Absolute, but it is also the most abstract and sterile." " Be- ing-for-self," or the One, the last stage of Quality in the Logic, also " finds its readiest instance in the Ego." Similarly with Essence, the Thing and its properties, Substance and its accidents. " Though an essential stage in the evolution of the Idea, Substance is not the same with the Absolute Idea. It is the Idea under the still limited form of necessity ; it is not the final Idea." Hence, on reaching the end, he is able to say, " Each of the stages hitherto reviewed is an image or adumbration of the Absolute, but at first in a limited mode ; and thus it is forced onwards to the Whole, the evolution of which we have termed Method." x But the true explanation of this onward impulse in the lower conceptions lies, as has been said, in their ap- parent goal. They are all anticipations of that 1 Wallace's Logic of Hegel, 325 (Werke, vi. 410). Hegel s Logic and Experience. 103 goal, because we are anthropomorphic, and necessarily so, to the inmost fibre of our think- ing. Every category, that is, every description of existence or relation, is necessarily a tran- script from our own nature and our own ex- perience. Into some of our conceptions we put more, into others less, of ourselves ; but all modes of existence and forms of action are necessarily construed by us in terms of our own life. Everything, down to the atom, is constructed upon the scheme of the conscious self, with its multiplicity of states and its cen- tral interpenetrating unity. We cannot rid our thought of its inevitable presupposition. Nor, it may be remarked, is there any reason why we should look upon this necessity as an irk- some bondage and a source of illusion. This is what we usually associate with the term anthropomorphism ; and undoubtedly there is a rude and uncritical anthropomorphism, ap- plied both to nature and God, which amply deserves all the reprobation it has received. We must not, like the savage, transfer the ful- ness of our personal life to the forces of nature, nor, as we are too apt to do, must we make God altogether in our own image. Our anthropo- morphism must be critical. But to seek to escape 104 Hegeliauism and Personality. from it altogether is as futile and, it may be added, as gratuitous as the attempt already mentioned to criticise the validity of thought as such. It must not be supposed, therefore, that I am finding fault with Hegel's acceptance of self- consciousness as the ultimate category of thought — that through which we think every- thing else, and through which alone the universe is intelligible to us. On this point I am quite at one with him. I merely wish to make it plain that this notion is not really reached by any " high priori road," but is simply derived by Hegel from the fact of his own self-conscious experience. We need not be misled in this respect by the grandiose title of the Absolute Idea. The Absolute Idea, speculative know- ledge, pure knowledge, the pure Ego, as it is variously termed, is simply the notion of know- ledge as such, the relation described by Aris- totle, when he said that in a sense the thinker and his thoughts are one. In its essence, the relation of knower and known is, as it were, a transparent relation, in which the difference of subject and object may be said to be over- come. Of the human consciousness this can- not, in strictness, be asserted, seeing that both in knowledge and practice we seem to be de- Hegel's Logic and Experience. 105 pendent upon what is not ourselves. If, how- ever, we suppose cognition and volition, as finite activities, to have done their work, then the matter, which at first has the appearance of being extraneously received, will have been thoroughly intelligised and reduced to law ; while, on the other hand, through volition, it will have become, in all its parts, the vehicle or expression of rational ends. In that case, it may be argued, the self-conscious knower would recognise in the object nothing foreign, but only, as it were, the realisation of his own personality. This is Hegel's idea of perfected knowledge, or rather of an eternally complete self-consciousness, as reached at the end of the Logic. There is a passage in which Fichte describes what he calls " the Idea of the Ego " in almost identical terms. But Fichte, as we saw, treated this Idea as an ideal incapable of realisation, and Hegel is constantly taunting the Fichtian Idealism with its mere Ought-to- be. In one sense Hegel is plainly right, for it is an impossible speculative position to found upon an ideal which is nowhere real. But if Fichte merely meant to say that this specula- tive ideal is not, and never will be, realised in the progress of human experience, then Hegel 106 Hegclianism and Personality. is as plainly in the wrong if he intended to call this position in question. It may be granted to Hegel, as against Fichte, that the idea must be realised in the divine self- consciousness — that, so far, it is not a mere Ought-to-be. But to us such realisation remains a belief or faith, not something which is attained in actual know- ledge, even in the reflective knowledge of the absolute philosopher. It is one thing to assert the metaphysical necessity of an Absolute Self- consciousness, another to assert the present realisation of absolute knowledge in a philo- sophical system. But it will be seen in the sequel that it is a characteristic of the Hegelian system to bind up these two essentially different positions in such a way that it becomes impos- sible to say which is intended. At this stage it is enough to repeat that, however the Logic may seem in its conclusion to overleap the human consciousness altogether and transport us directly to the specular outlook of Deity, it comes no nearer converting faith into sight than any other system has done. The Absolute Idea is no more than an ideal drawn by Hegel from his sole datum, the human self-conscious- ness, and does not of itself lift us beyond our starting-point. io7 LECTURE IV. LOGIC AS METAPHYSIC : THOUGHT AND REALITY. Having thus indicated the relation in which the Hegelian Logic stands to experience, we must next consider the place it holds in the system. Although, as I have said, the centre of Hegel's philosophising, it forms only the first part of the fully articulated theory. What, then, is its relation to the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit which follow it ? This is a point of no little importance to realise clearly, first in understanding, and secondly in passing judgment upon the Hegelian system. For, at first sight, it is difficult to see any difference between the Absolute Idea in which the ' Logic ' culminates and the Absolute Spirit with which Hegel closes the record of Phil- io8 Hcgclianism and Personality. osophy in general. The Absolute Idea is defined as "the unity of the Notion and its reality," "the unity of the subjective and the objective Idea," " the Idea which thinks itself," "the Idea which is object to itself," "the eternal perception of itself in the other, the Notion which has achieved itself in its objec- tivity." It is "both in itself and for itself; it is the vorjcns vorjcre(D$ which Aristotle long ago termed the supreme form of the Idea." These designations — all in Hegel's own words — seem essentially identical with what is afterwards said of Mind, Self-consciousness, or Absolute Spirit, on its return out of Nature, when it gains "clear prospect o'er its being's whole." And the relation between the two is not made quite plain by Hegel's manner of treatment. A key will be found, however, if we remember that throughout the Logic (in spite of the experiential basis which we have claimed for it) Hegel has been nowhere in direct contact with facts or factual existences. The Logic moves, as he tells us himself, in a realm of shades — that is, in less metaphorical language, it deals from beginning to end with abstrac- tions, with general notions, or, to use a technical term, with abstract universals. In place of Logic as Metaphysic. 109 Kant's summary table, it professes to be an exhaustive system, of the categories. But this is literally all. In following the advance of thought it deals with the notion or concep- tion of Being and the notion or conception of Becoming, but with no actual beings or processes. It considers the categories of sub- stance and cause, but apart from any actual instance of substantial existence or causal agency. And finally, to come to the decisive point, it considers the notion of knowledge and the relative opposition of subject and object which it involves ; but as yet there is, and can be, no question of any real knower who might serve as a concrete example of the notion or type. Here, then, we touch the difference between the Absolute Idea and the Absolute Spirit. As the 'Logic' deals only with categories or logical abstractions, the Absolute Idea is merely the scheme or form of self-consciousness. In the other case — in the Philosophy of Spirit — we are dealing, or are supposed to be dealing, with realities, facts of existence. Hence the Absolute Spirit is, in the Hegelian system, the one ultimately real existence of which the supreme category of the Logic was a description or definition. 1 1 o Hegelianism and Personality. The Logic, in short, is ostensibly a logic and nothing more ; but in the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit we are offered a metaphysic or ontology — a theory of the ultimate nature of existence. It must, one would think, be of fundamental importance to clear thinking to keep these two inquiries dis- tinct, and that no matter how intimate their mutual relations may be, But so far is Hegel from doing this that, as I propose to show, he systematically and in the most subtle fashion confounds these two points of view, and ends by offering us a logic as a metaphysic. Nor is this merely an implication of his views ; for the identification of Logic with Metaphysics is often presented by Hegelians as the gist and outcome of the system. The Hegelian logic, it is said, is not a logic of subjective thought ; it is an absolute logic, and constitutes, therefore, at the same time the only possible metaphysic. We have first, then, to consider the path by which Hegel would lead us to a position, on the surface at all events, so extraordinary. After making the nature of the position clear to ourselves in this way, we shall have the materials for forming a judgment as to its philosophical tenability. Logic as MetapJiysic. 1 1 1 With this view, let us turn back to the end of the ' Logic ' and examine the step which follows. The transition from Logic to Nature has long been celebrated as the mauvais pas of the Hegelian system. It is, indeed, so remarkable, and so essentially incomprehen- sible to our habits of thought, that it will be best to keep close to Hegel's own language in formulating it. The Absolute Idea, he says in the larger ' Logic,' is " still logical, still confined to the element of pure thoughts. . . . But inasmuch as the pure idea of knowledge is thus, so far, shut up in a species of subjec- tivity, it is impelled to remove this limitation ; and thus the pure truth, the last result of the Logic, becomes also the beginning of another sphere and science." The Idea, he recalls to us, has been defined as "the absolute unity of the pure notion and its reality" — "the pure notion which is related only to itself;" but if this is so, the two sides of this relation are one, and they collapse, as it were, "into the imme- diacy of Being." "The Idea as the totality in this form is Nature. This determining of itself, however, is not a process of becoming or a transition " such as we have from stage to stage in the Logic. " The passing over is 1 1 2 Hcgclianism and Personality. rather to be understood thus — that the Idea freely lets itself go, being absolutely sure of itself and at rest in itself. On account of this freedom, the form of its determination is like- wise absolutely free — namely, the externality of space and time existing absolutely for itself without subjectivity." A few lines lower he speaks of the " resolve (EntscJiluss) of the pure Idea to determine itself as external Idea," 1 Turning to the ' Encyclopaedia ' we find, at the end of the smaller Logic, a more concise but substantially similar statement. " The Idea which exists for itself, looked at from the point of view of this unity with itself, is Perception ; and the Idea as it exists for per- ception is nature. . . . The absolute freedom of the Idea consists in this, that in the absolute truth of itself [i.e., according to Hegel's usage, when it has attained the full perfection of the form which belongs to it], it resolves to let the element of its particularity — the immediate Idea as its own reflection — go forth freely from itself as Nature." 2 And in the lecture-note which follows we read, as in the larger Logic 1 Werke, v. 352, 353. 2 Ibid., vi. 413, 414 ; Wallace, 328. The italics are Hegel's own throughout. Logic as Metaphysic. 1 13 — " We have now returned to the notion of the Idea with which we began. This return to the beginning is also an advance. That with which we began was Being, abstract Being, and now we have the Idea as Being ; but this existent Idea is Nature." In the beginning of the Philosophy of Nature — the " new sphere and science " which he referred to as thus inaugurated — no further light is vouchsafed ; it is simply stated that Nature has shown itself to be the Idea in the form of otherness. 1 What are we to say of the deliberate attempt made in these passages to deduce Nature from the logical idea ? Simply, I think, that there is no real deduction in the case. The phrases used are metaphors which, in the circumstances, convey no meaning whatever. As Schelling afterwards said, they merely indicate a resolute leap on Hegel's part across "the ugly broad ditch " which dialectic is powerless to bridge. On this point, few English thinkers are likely to have much difficulty in making up their mind. But if our condemnation is so prompt 1 A third account in some detail is given in the Philosophy of Religion (Werke, xii. 206-208), and forms in some respects a useful gloss upon the more authoritative and would-be scientific statements quoted in the text. This account is referred to in Lecture V., p. 172 et set/. II 1 1 4 Hegelianism and Personality. and decisive — if we condemn the attempt not so much because it has failed as because it was ever made — how are we to account for the form of rigorous deduction which Hegel adopts ? Is there no sympathetic explana- tion to be given of his procedure ? To some extent I think there is, if it be remembered that Hegel's true meaning is reached, as I re- marked before, by reading him backward rather than forward. He would certainly have pro- tested against the idea that he was here describ- ing any real process — anything that ever took place; just as he would have protested against the idea that he ever meant to assert a factual existence of the logical Idea by itself, antece- dently to the existence of Nature and Spirit. Nature itself, we can hear him saying, is an abstraction that cannot exist, if by existence is meant independent factual existence on its own account ; it exists only relatively to, or within, the life of Spirit, which is therefore in strictness the only existence or fact. But if this is true of Nature, it is still more manifestly true of Logic or the system of thought-deter- minations which sums itself in the Absolute Idea ; such a system is admittedly an ab- straction, and was never affirmed to exist in Logic as Metaphysic. 1 15 rerum naturd. Here again, then, as through- out the ' Logic,' it might be said we are merely undoing the work of abstraction and retrac- ing our steps towards concrete fact. This, as we have seen, implies the admission that it is our experiential knowledge of actual fact which is the real motive-force impelling us onward — impelling us here from the abstract determin- ations of the ' Logic ' to the quasi-reality of Nature, and thence to the full reality of Spirit. It is because we ourselves are spirits, that we cannot stop short of that consummation. In this sense, we can understand the feeling of " limitation " or incompleteness of which Hegel speaks at the end of the ' Logic' The pure form craves, as it were, for its concrete realisa- tion. But it need hardly be added that the craving or feeling of incompleteness exists in our subjective thought alone, and belongs in no sense to the chain of thought-determinations itself. Such, it seems to me, is the explanation which a conciliatory and sober-minded Hegel- ian would give of Hegel's remarkable tour dc force. In treating of Hegel on other occasions, 1 1 In The Development from Kant to Hegel, and in Mind, vi. 513 etseq. 1 1 6 Hegelianism and Personality. I have been fain to avail myself of this inter- pretation, being unable otherwise to put an intelligible meaning into his statements on the subject. For those who accept this reading, Hegel's clumsy stride from Logic to Nature will appear only an objectionable mode of presentation incident to the synthetic and impersonal form in which he had, once for all, cast his system. Otherwise they will lay as little stress as possible upon the so - called deduction. Further reflection has convinced me, however, that Hegel's contention here is of more fundamental import to his system than such a representation allows. Perhaps it may even be said that, when we surrender this deduction, though we may retain much that is valuable in Hegel's thought, we surrender the system as a system. For, however readily he may admit, when pressed, that in the ordo ad individuum experience is the quarry from which all the materials are derived, it must not be forgotten that he professes to offer us an absolute philosophy. And it is the character- istic of an absolute philosophy that everything must be deduced or constructed as a necessity of thought. Hegel's system, accordingly, is so framed as to elude the necessity of resting Logic as Metaphysic. i i 7 anywhere on mere fact. It is not enough for him to take self-conscious intelligence as an existent fact, by reflection upon whose action in his own conscious experience and in the history of the race certain categories are disclosed, which, when reduced by philosophic insight to a system of mutually connected notions, may be viewed as constituting the essence or formal structure of reason. He apparently thinks it incumbent upon him to prove that spirit exists by a necessity of thought. The concrete existence of the cate- gories (in Nature and Spirit) is to be deduced from their essence or thought-nature ; it is to be shown that they cannot not be. When we have mounted to the Absolute Idea, it is con- tended, we cannot help going further. The nisus of thought itself projects thought out of the sphere of thought altogether into that of actual existence. In fact, strive against the idea as we may, it seems indubitable that there is here once more repeated in Hegel the extra- ordinary but apparently fascinating attempt to construct the world out of abstract thought or mere universals. The whole form and structure of the system, and the express declarations of its author at points of critical 1 1 8 Hcgelianism and Personality. importance, combine to force this conviction upon us. The language used can only be interpreted to mean that thought out of its own abstract nature gives birth to the reality of things. Hegel's procedure here cannot but recall to our minds the similar reasonings of Plato. There is a difference, no doubt, between cate- gories and class-names ; but, otherwise, the resemblance is striking between the abstract chain of the Logic and Plato's system of general notions or Ideas, rising from stage to stage and culminating in the Idea of the Good. The Platonic world of Ideas was not an ab- stract One, like the principle of the Eleatics ; it was itself multiplicity in unity — a system of Ideas, each of which was connected with, or, according to the Platonic phrase, par- ticipated in, all the rest, the whole series being summed, as it were, in the Idea ol the Good. So far we have almost an exact parallel to Hegel's Logic. But for Plato also there arose the necessity of passing beyond this world of pure Ideas. The sensible world — the world of real multiplicity and change — pressed itself upon his notice. The sensible world presents us, not with a single changeless Logic as Metaphysic. 1 19 type, but with a multitude of ever-changing individuals, which may be said more or less perfectly to exemplify the abstract type, but the determinations of whose real existence are not exhausted by that formal definition. Here Plato also has recourse to a species of " passing over" on the part of the Ideas. Every one must have felt how difficult it is at this point, I do not say, to yield assent to what Plato says, but to put any intelligible meaning upon his words. " We cannot doubt," says Zeller, " that Plato meant to set forth in Ideas not merely the archetypes and essence of all true existence, but energetic powers ; that he regarded them as living and active, intelligent and reason- able." l They are represented as of themselves creative and as the efficient causes of the mani- fold and transient shadows of themselves which we call real things. But even if we grant Plato the self-subsistent existence of his pure forms, and try, per impossibile, to follow him in the dynamic efficiency which he ascribes to them, he still fails to give any satisfactory explana- tion of the indefinite reduplication by the Idea of its own exemplifications, not to speak of other essential features of the sensible world. 1 Plato and the Older Academy, 267. i 20 Hegelianism and Personality. He is obliged to call in a second principle, the Platonic matter, as it has been called — the unlimited element of space, he would appear to mean — as the condition of separation, division, motion, and unlimited repetition. A break- down very similar in this respect will be observed when we come to close quarters with Hegel. But, it will be said, surely it is impossible to ascribe such crude mythological conceptions to Hegel, who lived, after all, in the nineteenth century. How can we credit him with a point of view which we have even a certain shame- facedness in attributing to Plato? This is un- doubtedly an important consideration, and one which may well make us hesitate. But it is not the mythological detail which determines the fundamental similarity of two doctrines ; though, to my mind, Hegel's passage from Logic to Nature is to the full as mythological as anything we find in Plato. 1 Even the 1 Perhaps, too, we in England, and at the present day, hardly realise the extraordinary intellectual atmosphere in which the Hegelian system was produced. A time of philoso- phical zymosis or seething, Dr Stirling has styled the period : it was a time in which system chased system, and in which men ran riot in the most imaginative conceptions. Without leaving the ranks of the dii majores, who were also compara- tively the saner spirits of the movement, I may quote a passage Logic as MetapJiysic. 121 creative agency assigned to the Ideas is rather a necessary consequence of Plato's doctrine from Schelling's ' Lectures on the Method of Academic Study,' which illustrates to some extent the intellectual tone of the time. The passage occurs at the beginning of the eleventh lecture, in a discussion of the very point adverted to in the text —the relation of Nature to the Ideas, as he calls them after Plato. "God's mode of producing or creating," he says, "is a pouring of His whole universality and essentiality into par- ticular forms, whereby the latter, though special or particular, are yet universa, what the philosophers have called Monads or Ideas. . . . Now, though the Ideas in God are pure and ab- solutely ideal, yet they are not dead but living, the first organisms of the divine self-perception, which, on that very account, par- ticipate in all the qualities of His nature, and in spite of their particular form share in His undivided and absolute reality. In virtue of this participation they are, like God, productive, and work according to the same law and in a similar fashion. That is, they infuse their essence, as it were, into particular forms and reveal it through individual and particular things, though themselves timeless, and only from the standpoint of individual things, and for such individual things, existing in time. The Ideas are related to things as their souls ; the things are their bodies." Even if what is here asserted of the Ideas is a delegated life and activity, inasmuch as it is said to belong to the conceptions as elements in the divine life, yet there is still the same personifi- cation of abstract conceptions as with Plato, and a real activity is similarly attributed to them. If, then, we bear in mind that Schelling was Hegel's philosophical associate, or senior partner, so to speak, for several years — in fact, up to the very year (1803) in which this passage was published — and if we re- member that, as regards the philosophy of Nature in particular, Hegel did little more than adapt the ideas so prodigally thrown out by Schelling, I cannot but think that such a passage forms rather a sinister gloss upon some of Hegel's own expressions. 122 Hegelianism and Personality. than its distinguishing characteristic. The dis- tinctive feature of the Platonic theory of Ideas, in which it is the type of a whole family of systems, Hegel's among the rest, I take to be its endeavour to construct existence or life out of pure form or abstract thought. Plato's whole account of sensible things is to name the general idea of which they are particular examples ; Hegel's whole account of Nature is that it is a reflection or realisation of the abstract cate- gories of the Logic. If the reality of natural things consists only in this, then creative agency must be attributed, more or less explicitly, to the thought -determinations. In them, at all o events, lies the ultimate explanation of so-called existence. If this be admitted, the rest is for the most part matter of expression. If further corroboration is wanted of the view here taken of the relation of logic and reality in the Hegelian scheme, there are many in- cidental remarks, besides the official passages already quoted, which present the same idea in a different connection, and in a slightly different form. Nothing, for example, can ex- ceed the scorn which Hegel pours upon <; Be- ing" — which he rarely introduces without paus- ing to tell us that it is the very poorest and Logic as MetapJiysic. 1 2 3 most abstract of notions. " Certainly," he says, "it would be strange if the Notion, the very heart of the mind, the Ego, or in one word the concrete totality we call God, were not rich enough to embrace so poor a category as Be- ing, the very poorest and most abstract of all." 1 Every reader of Hegel must be familiar with this snort of contempt, which is heard most frequently, it may be noted, when the Onto- logical argument and modern criticisms upon it are under consideration. But we are apt to be taken in here by Hegel's superior air, under cover of which he evades the real point at issue. He is certainly correct in saying that the cate- gory of Being is the poorest and most abstract of all ; it is the very least that can be said of a thing. Consequently, if any one were to suppose that he had done with things, when he had simply affirmed their existence, he would undoubtedly be making a great mistake. Instead of being at the end of his task, he is only at the beginning. He must proceed to determine the mode of their existence in a thousand ways before he can be said, even approximately, to give a true account of their nature. In short, the progress of knowledge 1 Wallace's Logic of Hegel, 92. 1 24 Hegelianism and Personality. may very well be described as a continual advance towards greater determinateness. And if we apply this reasoning to the supreme object of thought — in Hegel's language here, to "the concrete totality we call God " — it is again very evident, as was pointed out in last lecture, that if we are content simply with an assertion of God's existence, we leave the whole question of the divine nature dark. Because Being is the last result of abstraction, people are apt to imagine that, when they have reached it, they have reached the grandest and most dig- nified title they can apply ; whereas, as Hegel says, it is the most meagre assertion that can be made. Hegel deserves all praise for the persistency with which he has attacked this vicious tendency of thought, and of the scho- lastic logic in particular, to hark back upon its first abstractions. But when all this is thank- fully admitted, the real point at issue remains untouched. When we say that a thing exists or possesses being, we may be saying very little about it ; yet that is, on the other hand, the all-important assertion upon which all the rest are based. When we are assured that we are dealing with a reality, we can go on from the elementary statement of its existence to a Logic as Metaphy sic. 125 more elaborate description of its nature. But that elementary statement must be originally made in virtue of some immediate assurance, some immediate datum of experience. We must touch reality somewhere ; otherwise our whole construction is in the air. Whether we rest content, as the ordinary consciousness ap- parently does, with the immediacy we seem to have in external perception, or restrict such immediacy to the perception of our own exist- ence — whether we look with some schools at the senses as the type of such assurance, or include also the higher feelings and what are called the dictates of the heart — in short, what- ever view we may take as to the precise locus and scope of such immediate certainty, no sophistry can permanently obscure our per- ception that the real must be given. Thought cannot make it ; thought only describes what it finds. That there is a world at all, we know only through the immediate assurance, per- ception, or feeling of our own existence, and through ourselves of other persons and things. Kant may have unduly narrowed the meaning of the term experience, but there is no circum- venting his classical criticism of the Ontological argument. There is no evolution possible of 126 Hegelianism and Personality. a fact from a conception. The existence of God must either be an immediate certainty, or it must be involved in facts of experience which do possess that certainty. If, in the light of what has been said, we look once more at Hegel's disparaging refer- ence to " Being," we see at once the fallacy which it involves, if it is intended to apply to the question before us. " It would be strange," he says, " if the Notion, the very heart of the mind, the Ego, or in one word, the concrete totality we call God, were not rich enough to embrace so poor a category as Being." Most assuredly the Notion contains the category of Being; so does the Ego, that is to say, the Idea of the Ego, and the Idea of God, both of which are simply the Notion under another name. The category of Being is contained in the Ego, and may be disen- gaged from it, much as, in the old logic of the schools, the notion " man " could be made to yield up successively the notion " animal," " substance," and the rest, and eventually the very notion in question — Being. But when we ask for real bread, why put us off with a logical stone like this ? It is not the cate- gory " Being," of which we are in quest, but Logic as MetapJiysic. 1 2 7 that reality of which all categories are only- descriptions, and which itself can only be ex- perienced, immediately known, or lived. To such reality or factual existence there is no logical bridge ; and thoughts or categories have meaning only if we assume, as somehow given, a real world to which they refer. But even if we waive objections which, I think, are insuperable, and allow Hegel to take this impossible leap from Logic to Nature, there remains the essential further question, What ac- count does he give of the Nature thus boldly deduced ? Is it an account at once credible and sufficient ? Nature, Hegel tells us, is the Idea or thought in the form of otherness, in the form of exter- nality to itself. Or again, more metaphorically, he quotes Schelling's saying that Nature is a petrified intelligence, or as others have said, a frozen intelligence; 1 or it might be described, he says again, as the corpse of the under- standing. Still more poetically he says : " Nature is spirit in alienation from itself. Hence the study of nature is the liberation of spirit in nature or the liberation of nature 1 Werke, vi. 46 ; Wallace, 39. 128 Hegelianism and Personality. itself; for nature is potentially reason, but only through the spirit does this inherent rationality become actual and apparent. Spirit has the certainty which Adam had when he saw Eve. This is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. For Nature is in like manner the bride to which Spirit is wedded. . . The inner heart of nature {das Inncre der Natur) is nothing but the universal ; hence, when we have thoughts, we recognise in nature's inner heart only our own reason and feel ourselves at home there." x But we must not be carried away by the poetry of passages which recall the rich metaphors of Bacon and Wordsworth. For when we inquire more narrowly into the Self or Spirit, which we recognise in nature under its form of estrangement, it is found to be neither more nor less than the logical categories — the Notion. This is implied, in- deed, in the very passage quoted, by the in- troduction of the phrase "the universal"; and it is made more explicit in a passage of the ' Encyclopaedia,' which conveys the same thought : — " The aim of knowledge is to divest the objective world that stands opposed to us of its strangeness, and, as the phrase is, 1 Werke, vii. 22. Logic as Metaphysic. 1 29 to find ourselves at home in it — which means no more than to trace the objective world back to the Notion, which is our inmost self." x And in another passage he expressly gives this explanation of his phrases about thought as the kernel of the world, and nature as a system of unconscious thought : " Instead of using the term Thought (Gedanken), it would be better, in order to avoid miscon- ception, to say category, or thought-determina- tion {Dcnkbcstimmung). For logic [which he has a few lines before identified with meta- physic] is the search for a system of thought- determinations in which the opposition between subjective and objective, in its usual sense, vanishes." 2 This system is, of course, the chain of categories unrolled in the ' Logic,' which, forming, as it were, the common basis of nature and mind, is spoken of by Hegel as " the absolute and self-existent ground of the universe." 3 Indeed, in his own words in the same connection, "the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Mind take the place, as it were, of an Applied Logic, and Logic is the soul which animates them both. TJicir 1 Werke, vi. 367. 2 Ibid., vi. 46 ; Wallace, 39. :! Ibid., vi. 51 ; Wallace, 42. I 1 30 Hegelianism and Personality. problem is only to recognise the logical forms under the shapes they assume in Nature and Mind — shapes which are only a particular mode of expression for the forms of pure thought." 1 But if men and things are merely types or exemplifications of logical notions, what con- stitutes the difference, we may ask, between the category, as such, in the Logic and the category, as thing, in nature? 2 If nature is "the other" of thought, thought in estrange- ment or alienation from itself, what is it that makes the otherness, the alienation ? What is the nature of the " petrifaction " that thought experiences ? Hegel is fain to speak of it in many places as materiature. 3 Similarly, Dr Stirling says that Hegel " demonstrates the presence of the notion in the most crass, re- fractory, extreme externality — demonstrates all to be but a concretion of the notion." 4 Now I maintain that the whole problem of reality as such is wrapped up in these metaphorical 1 Wallace, 41, 42. 2 Restricting ourselves for the present to the case of nature, though the assertion is made by Hegel equally of "the Philo- sophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit." :{ Materiatur. 4 Secret of Hegel, i. 177. The italics are mine. Logic as Metaphysic. 1 3 t phrases — otherness, petrifaction, materiature, concretion — and that by evading the question, Hegel virtually declines to take account of anything but logical abstractions. He offers us, in a word, a logic in place of a metaphysic ; and it may be unhesitatingly asserted that such a proposal, if taken literally, is not only untenable, it is absurd. " Neither gods nor men," as Dr Stirling says, when speaking in his own person, " are in very truth logical categories," 1 — and the same may be said of every natural thing. A living dog is better than a dead lion, and even an atom is more than a category. It at least exists as a reality, where- as a category is an abstract ghost, which may have a meaning for intelligent beings, but which, divorced from such real beings and their experience, is the very type of a non-ens. I am far from denying that we may truly speak of the categories as realised in nature, just as we speak, in a wider way, of the world as the realisation or manifestation of reason. But we must recognise the quasi-metaphorical nature of the language used, which simply means that the world gives evidence of being con- structed on a rational plan. To discover the 1 Schwegler, 476. 132 Hegelianism and Personality. categories in nature means no more than to understand nature by their means ; from which it is a legitimate inference that nature is laid out, as we may say, according to these concep- tions. Hegel apparently says, on one occasion, that his own elaborate phraseology means no more than the ancient position that vovs rules the world, or the modern phrase, there is Reason in the world. 1 If the system is reducible to this very general proposition, our objections would certainly fall to the ground ; but Hegel's own expressions go a long way further. His language would justify us in believing that the categories actually take flesh and blood and walk into the air, and that the whole frame of nature is no more than a duplicate or reflection of the thought - determinations of the Logic. Nor is this merely a forced interpretation put upon his words. It is, as will be more fully seen in the following lecture, if not his delib- erate meaning, still a real tendency of his thought. When he speaks, therefore, of the categories as the heart or kernel of nature, we require to be on our guard against the idea that logical abstractions can thicken, as it were, 1 Wcrke, vi. 46 ; Wallace, 39 ; in the context of some of the passages already quoted. Logic as Metaphy sic. 133 into real existences. Categories are not the skeleton round which an indefinite " materia- ture" gathers to form a thing. The meanest thing that exists has a life of its own, unique and individual, which we can partly under- stand by terms borrowed from our own ex- perience, but which is no more identical with the description we give of it, than our own inner life is identical with the description we give of it in a book of psychology. Exist- ence is one thing, knowledge is another. But the logical bias of the Hegelian philosophy tends, as I have said, to make this essential distinction disappear, and to reduce things to mere types or " concretions " of abstract for- mulae. " Hegel is so complete," says Dr Stir- ling in the context of the passage previously quoted, "that he leaves existential reality at the last as a mere abstraction, as nothing when opposed to the work of the notion." l That is just what I complain of. The result of Hegel's procedure would really be to sweep " existential reality " off the board altogether, under the per- suasion, apparently, that a full statement of all the thought-relations that constitute our know- ledge of the thing is equivalent to the existent 1 Secret of Hegel, i. 177. 1 34 Hcgclianism and Personality. thing itself. On the contrary, it may be con- fidently asserted that there is no more identity of Knowing and Being with an infinity of such relations than there was with one. Hegel's position, or the tendency of his thought, may again be aptly illustrated, I think, by two passages from Schelling. " In the highest perfection, of natural science," he tells us in the 'Transcendental Idealism/ "the phenomenal or material element must disappear entirely, and only the laws, or the formal ele- ment, remain. . . . The more law becomes apparent in nature, the more the hull or wrap- ping disappears ; the phenomena themselves become more spiritual, and at last cease alto- gether (zuletzt vollig aufhoren). Optical phe- nomena are nothing more than a system of geometry whose lines are drawn by the light, and the material nature of this light itself is already doubtful. In the phenomena of mag- netism all trace of matter has already vanished, and of the phenomena of gravitation nothing remains but their law, the carrying out of which on a great scale constitutes the mechanism of the heavenly movements." 1 And in another place we read : " The Philosophy of Nature 1 Woke, T. iii. 340. Logic as Met aphy sic. 135 gives an account of what is immediately posi- tive in nature, without attending to space, for example, and the rest of such nullities {den Raum itnd das iibrige NicJitige). It sees in the magnet nothing but the living law of Identity, and in matter only the unfolded copula in the shape of gravitation, cohesion, &c." 1 Surely, on reading a passage like this, we instinctively feel that the reality or qualitative existence of things is being spirited away from us under a metaphor. It may be very well for a philos- ophy so conceived to " abstract " from what it cannot explain ; but for all that, the magnet is neither the law of Identity, as Schelling sets it down, nor the Syllogism, as Hegel would have it to be. 2 In short, whatever truth such pas- sages 3 may have as accounts of the progress of knowledge, they leave the metaphysical question of existence untouched. Whatever importance we attach, and rightly attach, in philosophy to the universal or the formal, the individual alone is the real. 4 1 " Darlegung ties wahren Verhaltnisses der Naturphilosophie zu der verbesserten Fichte'schen Lehre, " Werke, I. vii. 64. 2 See Wallace, p. 42. 3 For a very similar passage in Hegel himself, see Wallace, 35, 36. 4 This statement has been much attacked as the expression J 6 Hegelianisrn and Personality. It cannot be supposed that Hegel was blind to a plain truth like this, and accordingly pas- sages might easily be quoted which apparently admit all that has been said. But the form which such admissions take in Hegel is char- acteristic. While not denying the individual character of existence, he yet adroitly contrives to insinuate that, because it is indefinable, the individual is therefore a valueless abstraction. of unqualified Nominalism. Nevertheless, in the sense in which I have used it, it seems to me unquestionably true. The question is not here of the " mere individual " or "mere particular " with which Neo-Hegelians make so much play. I have argued my- self against this abstraction in the fifth lecture of ' Scottish Phil- osophy,' dealing with the Relativity of Knowledge. Insistence on the mere particular may lead to the doctrine of an unknow- able substance behind the qualities ; but after we have banished the "metaphysical phantom of the thing-in-itself," surely a dis- tinction remains to be made between knowledge and existence. "What is any individual thing," asks Mr Ritchie (Philosophical Review, i. 278), "except a meeting-point of universal attributes?" And again, " Spiritual substance, like material substance, is either simply a meeting-point of universal qualities or a metaphysical phantom." Surely Mr Ritchie cannot seriously mean that his own existence, for himself, is no more than a cluster of abstrac- tions. As all knowledge consists of universals, it is obvious that, however far we may penetrate into the essence of any in- dividual thing, our account of it will be a set of universal attri- butes. But the attributes do not meet, as universals, in the real thing ; no number of abstracts flocking together will consti- tute a fact. In this sense, there is a complete solution of con- tinuity between the abstractions of knowledge and the concrete texture of real existence. Logic as Met aft hy sic. 137 Sensible existence," he says, for example, " has been characterised by the attributes of individu- ality and a mutual exclusion of its members. It is well to remember that these very attributes are thoughts and general terms. . . . Language is the work of thought ; and hence all that is expressed in language must be universal. . . . And what cannot be uttered, feeling or sensa- tion, far from being the highest truth, is the most unimportant or untrue. If I say 'the unit,' ' this unit,' ' here,' ■ now,' all these are universal terms. Everything and anything is an individual, a ' this,' or if it be sensible, is here and now. Similarly, when I say ' I,' I mean my single self, to the exclusion of all others ; but what I say, viz., ' I,' is just every other ' I,' which in like manner excludes all others from itself. . . . All other men have it in common with me to be ' I.' " * This demon- stration of the universal, or, to put it perhaps more plainly, the abstract, nature of thought, even in the case of those terms which seem to lay most immediate hold upon reality, is both true and useful in its own place. But the legiti- mate conclusion from it in the present connec- tion is not Hegel's insinuated disparagement of 1 Wallace, 32. 138 Hcgelianism and Personality. the individual, but rather that which Trendel- enburg draws from the very same considera- tions, that the individual, as such, is incomen- surable or unapproachable by thought. 1 Or, as Mr Bradley puts it still more roundly and tren- chantly, " The real is inaccessible by way of ideas. . . . We escape from ideas, and from mere universals, by a reference to the real which appears in perception." 2 If there is an approach to disingenuousness in Hegel's manner of turning the tables upon reality here, his treatment of the most charac- teristic feature of nature, and real existence in general, displays a much more unmistakable infusion of the same quality. Nature has been defined as " the other " of reason ; that is, it is in some way the duplicate or reflection of the thought-determinations of the ' Logic' Conceptions which were there regarded in their abstract nature are now exhibited as realised in actual existences. In Hegel's own formal definition, towards the beginning of the ' Naturphilosophie,' " Nature 1 "Das Einzelne ist an sich das dem Denken Incommensur- able." — Logische Untersuchungen, ii. 230. 2 Principles of Logic, 63, 69. Logic as Metaphysic. 1 39 is to be regarded as a system of grades, the one of which proceeds necessarily from the other, and constitutes its proximate truth ; not, however, in such a way that the one is actually produced out of the other, but in the inner idea which is the ground of nature." 1 In other words, the Philosophy of Nature gives us a system or ascending series of types, in which we pass from space and gravitation, at the one end of the scale, to the animal organism at the other. Speaking with some latitude, we may be said to pass, in such a progress, from the most abstract and imperfect analogue of self-conscious existence to the very brink of the appearance of consciousness in the world. The course of the exposition is swelled and distorted by the mass of empirical matter which Hegel takes from the special sciences, and forces, often violently enough, into the forms of his system ; but the method followed is intended to be substantially similar to that of the 'Logic' The whole system of types, moreover, is to be taken as- .an ideal development. It has nothing to do with the possible evolution of the planetary system out of a simpler state of mutually attracted vapor- 1 Werke, vii. 32. 140 Hegelianism and Personality. ous particles, with the origin of life from the non-living, or with the evolution of one animal type from another, as set forth in the Darwinian theory. With these questions of scientific evolution philosophy does not deal, according to Hegel's statement above ; his own evolution is, as he would say, a timeless evolution like that of the logical categories. That is to say, he contemplates the system of types as existing eternally side by side, all being necessary to the entirety of the system. " The notion," he says, " thrusts all its particularity at once into existence. It is perfectly empty to represent the species as evolving themselves gradually in time ; the time-difference has absolutely no interest for thought." l This embodies an im- portant truth, as I conceive, with regard to the philosophy of evolution, but we are not con- cerned with that aspect of the position here. What is evident from these quotations is, that nature is, in a manner, reduced by Hegel to a static system of abstract types. But a mere glance at nature suffices to show that its leading feature, as contrasted with the logical necessity which links the different parts of a rational system together, is its pure 1 Werke, vii. 33. Logic as Metaphysic. 141 matter-of-factness — I will not say its irrational, but its non - rational or alogical character. Things lie side by side in space, or succeed one another in time, with perfect indifference ; there is no logical passage from the one to the other. Why should there be just so many planets in our system, and no more ? and why should their respective sizes be just as they are? Why should one of them have been rent into fragments and not the rest? Why should the silver streak cut England off from Continental Europe ? Why should any island rise in ocean precisely where it does ? Why should there be an island there at all, and if an island, why not a mile to eastward or to westward ? No doubt, in many cases, we may be able to assign a cause for these facts — i.e., we may be able to point to a certain pre- vious distribution of things from which they necessarily resulted. It is conceivable that if our knowledge were perfect, we should be able to account in this way for the ex- act position of each minutest grain of sand. But the ultimate collocation to which we traced the present arrangement would be as far removed as ever from logical or rational necessity : it would be a mere collocation, some- 142 Hegelianism and Personality. thing wholly alogical, to be accepted as a matter of fact. The same thing might be further exemplified by appeal to another aspect of the world — an aspect which is coextensive with our whole experience of external nature. What logical connection is there between the different qualities of things — between the smell of a rose, for example, and its shape ; or between the taste of an orange and its colour? These qualities are found together, as matter of fact, but no process of reasoning could possibly lead us from the one to the other. Then, to go back to Hegel's idea of a system of types, what are we to say of the indefinite multiplicity of individuals in which the type is realised ? Why should there be more than one perfect example of each ? Of all this there is no account in Hegel ; yet it is the most char- acteristic feature of real existence. As Pro- fessor James says — "The parts seem to be shot out of a pistol at us. Each asserts itself as a simple brute fact, uncalled for by the rest, which, so far as we can see, might even make a better system without it. Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous — are the adjectives by which we are tempted to describe it." 1 1 Mind, vii. 187. Logic as Metaphysic. 143 It was not possible for Hegel altogether to ignore the aspect of existence emphasised in the last paragraph, but he seems to think that by naming the difficulty he has got rid of it. He calls it Contingency, and opposes it to the necessity of the Notion : " The contradiction of the Idea in its state of externality to itself as nature, is, more particularly, the contradiction between the necessity infused by the Notion into nature's formations (and their consequent rational determination as members of an organic totality), and, on the other hand, their indiffer- ent contingency and indeterminate lawlessness. Contingency and liability to determination from without have their right within the sphere of nature." * But then follows the audacious stroke by which Hegel endeavours to turn the tables upon reality. It is nature's fault, not the philosopher's, he says in effect, that facts behave in this alogical way. " It is the im- potence of nature that it maintains the deter- minations of the Notion only in an abstract or general fashion, and leaves their particular realisation exposed to determination from with- out." Again, he says : " Nature is Spirit in alienation from itself, which, as released out of 1 Werke, vii. ^56. 144 Hegelianism and Personality. itself, is full of freaks, a bacchantic god, who does not rein himself in and keep himself in hand ; in nature the unity of the notion is concealed." 1 He expresses the same idea more prosaically, but not less strongly, in the introduction to the ' Encyclopaedia ' : " The Idea of nature, when it is individualised, loses itself in contingencies. Natural history, geo- graphy, medicine, &c, have to deal with de- terminations of existence, with species and dis- tinctions which are determined not by reason, but by sport and external accident." 2 Finally, when the point comes up in connection with the category of Contingency in the Logic, Hegel takes occasion to make a disparaging remark upon the admiration sometimes lavished upon nature for its richness and variety : " In its vast variety of structures, organic and in- organic, nature affords us only the spectacle of a contingency that runs riot into endless detail. At any rate the checkered scene presented by the several varieties of animals and plants, conditioned as it is by outward circumstances, 1 YVerke, vii. 24. There is a play in the original upon the word " ausgelassen," which means both "released " or "let out," and full of freaks or riotous mirth. 2 "Die von ausserlichem Zufall und vom Spiele, nicht (lurch Vernunft bestimmt sind." — Werke, vi. 24 ; Wallace, 21. Logic as Me tap hy sic. 145 the complex changes in the figuration and grouping of clouds, and the like, ought not to be set above the equally casual fancies of the mind which surrenders itself to its own cap- rices." l " Contingency, however," he proceeds, " has, no less than other forms of the Idea, its due office in the world of objects. This is seen, in the first instance, in nature, on whose surface, so to speak, contingency ranges unchecked — a fact which must simply be recognised without the pretension which is sometimes, but errone- ously, ascribed to philosophy of seeking to find in it something which can only be as it is, and not otherwise." 2 These passages, more particularly the last, contain a curious combination of two points of view, one of which is wholly untenable, while the other is not open to a system like Hegel's. The first is that Contingency is itself a category, a form of the Idea, which, when the Idea is realised, must be represented and have its scope 1 It is perhaps worth remarking that Hegel's instances, being of an especially unimportant nature, tend to disguise the fact that what he calls contingency is coextensive with the whole range of existence as such. Thus, it is not merely my "casual fancies " that display contingency, but the whole course of my thoughts looked at as a process of events in time, that is to say, my whole subjective or individual experience. 2 Werke, vi. 288, 290 ; Wallace, 227, 228. K 1 46 Hegelianism and Personality. as well as the other categories. By calling a thing contingent, therefore, we seem to be mak- ing an assertion about it which brings it within the range of our rational system. But this is surely the most transparent fallacy. For, to say that a thing is contingent or accidental, is to say, in so many words, that we can give no rational account of why it is as it is, and not otherwise. It is hard to see how the saying that we have no explanation to give can be interpreted as itself the very explanation wanted. A system of rationalism which talks of what is " determined not by reason but by sport and external accident," must fairly be held to ac- knowledge a breakdown in its attempt to grasp the whole of existence. Hegel makes this acknowledgment, after a fashion, in what may be distinguished as a second point of view. He says that we must not pretend to reduce this contingency to reason, or, as he expresses it in the ' Naturphilosophie ' — " The impotence of nature sets limits to philosophy, and it is most unseemly to demand of the Notion that it shall comprehend such contingencies, and, as it is called, construct or deduce them." But he throws the blame on Nature. If we cannot rationalise the facts, that is merely because Logic as Metaphysic. 147 the facts are of no interest or importance to reason. Now, in a sense, this is a position which no one would think of disputing. So far as the meaning of the universe is concerned, it may be said that it does not matter whether such details are arranged in this way or in that way. And to expound the meaning of the universe constitutes, it may be argued, the essential task of philosophy. Philosophy has to show that the world embodies a rationally satisfying End, which does not fail of reali- sation ; but it is of necessity precluded from taking any notice of the individual facts, whether persons or things, in which this meaning, End, or Idea is realised. There is a certain amount of truth in this contention, though I venture to think that such a philosophy would remain seriously incomplete on its metaphysical side. But however that may be, Hegel, as the pro- pounder of an absolute system, is not entitled to hold such language. It might be intelligible on the part of a philosophy which, professedly starting with the tangled facts of experience, endeavoured to trace in them a thread of ration- al purpose, and thus work its way to the more or less confident assertion of a rational harmony or system. But it is otherwise with a philoso- 148 Hegelianism and Personality. phy which sets out from a completed system of thought, and professes to explain the factual world to its inmost fibre out of reason. Because it starts from the contingent individual facts of experience, the first system is in no danger of abolishing its own standing-ground. But for a system like Hegel's to waive aside all consid- eration of mere matter-of-fact, means not so much that the matter-of-fact basis is taken for granted, as that it is systematically ignored. And an important practical result will be that the End in which the meaning of the world is found will be the realisation of some abstract idea, without any regard for the individuals for whom or in whom it can alone be realised. The universe will tend to shrink together into a logical process, of which individuals are merely the foci. It will be seen in the next lecture that this is a special danger of the Hegelian system. Appendix to Lecture IV. 149 APPENDIX TO LECTURE IV. It may be instructive and not without interest to place on record the expressed opinions of Kant and Fichte on the question of real existence. They will be found (what we should hardly expect in the case of Fichte) to form an effective contrast to the tendency of Hegelian thought as indicated above. The com- parison is the more easily made since Hegel in his ' Logic ' is going over essentially the same ground as Kant in the ' Transcendental Logic ' and Fichte in the theoretical part of the ' Wissenschaftslehre.' Of Kant not much requires to be said. To him, of course, the categories are mere empty forms with- out the matter of sense. For the rest, his position has been indicated above. Every existential proposi- tion, he says, is synthetical. Its truth can only be ascertained a posteriori, or by a reference to experi- ence. Hence existence is something which no notion or system of notions can give us. This is the line of thought which he brings to bear with conclusive force upon the ontological argument for the existence of God ; and Hegel's persistent attempts to rehabilitate that argument are not without significance for a final estimate of his own system. Kant, as is well known, criticised Fichte's system (in his public declaration on the subject) as " neither more nor less than a mere logic, whose principles do not reach the material element in knowledge, but which, on the contrary, as pure logic, abstracts from the content of cognition. To extract from pure logic a real object is a futile task, and hence one which 1 50 Hegelianism and Personality. has never been essayed." l But though there is much in the form of the ' Wissenschaftslehre ' to justify this censure, it is less than just to Fichte. It is, however, by anticipation, a very apt description of Hegel's pro- cedure. Fichte expressly guards himself against the imputation in question. The theoretical part of the ' Wissenschaftslehre ' corresponds, as has been said, to Hegel's ' Logic ' ; 2 and at the end of this analysis Fichte tells us that the whole inquiry has been moving hitherto in a world of unrealities. We have been talking of the Ego, he says, but, so far, we have been talking " of a mere relation without anything that stands in relation — from which something, indeed, complete abstraction is made in the whole theoretical part of the ' Wissenschaftslehre.' " 3 In other words, we have been talking of the notion of the Ego, but not of any real Ego ; we have been dealing through- out with abstractions, not with real existences. Simi- larly, on coming to the second part of his investiga- tion, he says: "In the theoretical 'Wissenschaftslehre' we have to do solely with knowledge; here, in the practical part, with what is known. In the former case, the question is, How is anything posited, per- ceived, or thought [i.e., what are the formal conditions of knowledge, — what is the notion of knowledge in general]? in the present case it is, What is posited? If, therefore, the ' Wissenschaftslehre ' is to be taken 1 Werke, viii. 600. 2 It is, of course, far from being so exhaustive, and the order of the deduction is the reverse of Hegel's, beginning with the notion of the Ego as a synthesis of subject and object, and deducing a variety of categories from that relation. But dif- ferences of procedure do not affect the correspondence in aim of the two undertakings. 3 Werke, i. 207. Appendix to Lecture IV. 151 as a metaphysic, it must refer the inquirer to its practical part, for this alone speaks of a primitive reality." x A little later, he is speaking of feeling, which ordinary consciousness attributes to the action of a thing, but which Fichte maintains to be due to the Ego itself, and he adds this emphatic statement : " Here lies the ground of all reality. Solely through the reference of feeling to the Ego is reality possible for the Ego, whether it be the reality of the Ego itself or of the Non-Ego. . . . Our attitude to reality in general, whether of the Ego or the Non-Ego, is one of belief and nothing more." 2 "To forget this original feeling," he says elsewhere, " leads to a base- less transcendent Idealism and an incomplete phil- osophy which cannot explain the merely sensible predicates of objects." 3 It is true that Fichte does not leave this feeling a mere fact, as Kant did ; he refers it to the needs of the moral life, thus seeking, as it were, to rationalise it and bring it within the compass of his Monism. But what we are here con- cerned with is his insistence upon feeling as the only point where we touch solid ground and get a basis for our whole structure. The same point of view is still more impressively urged in the eloquent ' Bes- timmung des Menschen,' which he wrote in 1800 for use outside the schools ; it forms, indeed, the turning-point of the whole discussion. This treatise is divided into three books, the first of which, entitled ' Doubt,' portrays the misery 1 Werke, i. 2S5. 2 Ibid., i. 301. "An Realit'at iiberhaupt . . . findet lediglich ein Glaube statt." 3 Ibid., i. 490. This passage is from the Second Introduc- tion to the Wissenschaftslehre, published in 1797 ; the previous passages are from the Wissenschaftslehre itself. 1 5 2 Hegelianism and Personality. of a man entangled in Materialism and Fatalism, through viewing himself simply as a natural thing among other things — a mere wheel in the vast machine of the universe. The second book, entitled 'Knowledge,' describes his deliverance from such fears by the Kantio-Fichtian theory of knowledge. He is made to recognise the inner impossibility of the posi- tion which Fichte designates Dogmatism — the impos- sibility, that is to say, that a system of mere things should give rise to the unique fact of self-conscious- ness. On the contrary, he finds that the mere object is an unrealisable abstraction, and that the whole of the natural world, in which he seemed to be im- prisoned as an insignificant part, exists only as a phenomenon — that is, relatively to the consciousness which it threatened at first to engulf. But in the midst of his exultation there is suddenly borne in upon him the conviction that such a deliverance is, after all, purely illusory. For the demonstration has simply shown that all objects must, as such, be brought under the form of the knowing self. But such a self has no predicates of reality about it ; it is simply a formal point of unity for the process of knowledge. If the system of things is reduced to ideas or objects in consciousness, he himself is like- wise resolved into a mere Vorstellen or process of ideas without significance or aim, because without self-initiated activity. 1 When this insight is reached, 1 " Ich sclbst weiss iiberhaupt nicht, und bin niclit. Bildet sincl ; sie sind das Einzige was da ist, und sie wissen von sich nach Weise der Bilder : Bilder die voriiberschweben, ohne class etwas sei, dem sie voriiberschweben. . . . Bilder ohne etwas in ihnen Abgebildeles, ohne Bedeutung und Zweck. . . . Alle Realitat verwandelt sich in einen wunderbaren Traum, ohne ein Leben von welchem getraumt wild, und ohne einen Geist, dem da traunit." — Werke, ii. 245. Appendix to Lecture IV. 153 Fichte turns upon his anxious inquirer and upbraids him for supposing that this theory — which represents the theoretical ' Wissenschaftslehre ' — was to be taken as a complete system of the human spirit. " Didst thou imagine," he says, " that these results were not as well known to me as to thee ? . . . Thou askedst to know of thy knowledge. Dost thou wonder, then, that upon this path nothing more is to be found than just what thou desiredst to know — thy knowledge? . . . What arises through knowledge and out of knowledge is only a knowing. But all knowing is only representation or picture, and there always arises the demand for something which shall correspond to the picture. This demand no knowledge can satisfy. . . . But, at least, the reality whose slave thou fearedst to be — the reality of an independent sen- sible world — has vanished. For this whole sensible world arises only through knowledge, and is itself part of our knowledge. . . . This is the sole merit of which I boast in the system which we have but now discovered together. It destroys and annihilates error; truth it cannot give, because in itself it is absolutely empty." Only in the third book, entitled ' Belief or ' Faith,' does Fichte proceed at last to satisfy the demand of his disciple for reality, and to communicate his own final position. " There is something in me," he says, " which impels to absolute, independent, self-origin- ated activity. ... I ascribe to myself the power of forming an idea or plan, and likewise the power, through a real action, of embodying this idea beyond the world of ideas (ausser dem Begriffe). I ascribe to myself, in other words, a real active force — a force which produces being, and which is quite different 1 54 Hcgclianism and Personality. from the mere faculty of ideas. The ideas or plans spoken of above, usually called ends or purposes, are not to be considered, like the ideas of cognition, as after-pictures of something given ; they are rather fore-pictures, or exemplars of something which is to be produced. The real force, however, does not lie in them ; it exists on its own account, and receives from them only its determinate direction, knowledge looking on, as it were, as a spectator of its action. Such independence, in fact, I ascribe to myself in virtue of the afore-mentioned impulse." " Here," he proceeds, " lies the point to which the consciousness of all reality is attached. This point is the real activity of my idea, and the real power of action which I am obliged, in consequence, to attribute to myself. However it may be with the reality of a sensible world external to me, I myself am real; I take hold on reality here ; it lies in me, and is there at home. This real power of action of mine may doubtless be made an object of thought or know- ledge, but at the basis of such thought lies the im- mediate feeling of my impulse to self- originated activity. Thought does nothing but picture or represent this feeling, and take it up into its own form of thought." Actual existence, in brief, or the consciousness of reality, is reached, according to Fichte, only in Will, or in the immediate feeling of my own activity. Even in opposition to the sceptical doubts which the understanding may subsequently raise as to a possible self-deception, this feeling must be accepted as our only firm standing-ground ; it must be believed. Belief is " the organ with which I lay hold upon reality." These quotations have run almost to undue length. Appendix to Lecture IV. 155 But Fichte's testimony is especially important in view of his constitutionally deductive mind and his fond- ness of construction whenever an opening for it could be found. The passages quoted show him laying stress, even in his earliest writings, upon the essentially given character of reality. It must be lived or ex- perienced, if we are to know of its existence at all ; our relation to it must be that of immediate con- sciousness or feeling. Knowledge may afterwards take up this datum into its own forms, but knowledge stands always in this dependent or parasitical relation to reality. It is the picture or representation, the symbol of what is real ; but as Fichte says, " Know- ledge just because it is knowledge is not reality." It comes not first but second. As Schelling put it in his later writings — " Not because there is thought is there existence, but because there is existence is there thought." Or as we might express the same thing, connecting it with our parallel between Hegel and Plato, real things are not the shadows of intel- lectual conceptions, but intellectual conceptions are themselves the shadows of a real world. Nor is it allowable to reply that this is true only of human thought, and that the real world must still be admitted to be but the shadow of a divine or absolute thought. For, in the first place, God is included in the real world when that term is taken in its fullest extent, and the divine thoughts evidently presuppose the divine existence — a divine being whose thoughts they are. And, secondly, though we may perhaps speak of the real world in the narrower sense, as shadows or effects of the creative thoughts of God, the thoughts in that case are not active of themselves. "The real force," as Fichte says above, "does not 1 56 Hegelianism and Personality. lie in them " : it lies in the divine Being as living active Will. But here again Hegel parts company with Fichte. Just as he apparently makes a systematic attempt to deduce existence from pure or abstract thought, so the divine existence itself tends to shrink in his hands into a priority of certain logical notions, to which, as we have seen in the foregoing lecture, a dynamic or creative efficiency is attributed. This fact — which will be fully discussed in the lectures that follow — appears to be a striking confirmation of the view taken above of Hegel's real meaning. T5: LECTURE V. HEGEL'S doctrine of god and man. In the last lecture, Hegel's attempt to construct the world out of mere universals was somewhat fully dealt with, and we have now to consider more particularly the account which the system gives of God and man. Does it provide for their concrete reality, or is the general criticism of the last lecture applicable here too ? Do we recognise the same tendency to sublimate reality into abstract universals ? The first thing that strikes an attentive stu- dent is the way in which Hegel manages to evade giving any definite answer to the world- old questions which lie at the root of all phil- osophy — the questions as to the nature of God and His relation to man. This may seem a strange assertion to make regarding a system 1 58 Hegelianism and Personality. in which there is so much talk of the Absolute, so much talk of God, even under that more homely name. Yet I think it must be admitted that at the end Hegel leaves us in grave doubt both as to the mode of existence which he means to attribute to the Divine Being, and as to his deliv- erance on the question of immortality, which is after all the most pressing problem of human destiny. I need appeal no further than to the example of Dr Stirling, than whom no man has studied Hegel more profoundly or more hon- estly. Dr Stirling, as is well known, gives his ruling on the side of a personal God and human immortality. But whence the need of this labo- rious assurance, if Hegel's statements had been forthright, and the inevitable consequence of his system ? Whence those waverings in the 'Secret' before the final deliverance; whence, even after that deliverance, the hesitation that leavens the last notes to Schwegler? "Very obscure, certainly, in many respects," — so we read in the ' Secret ' 1 — " is the system of Hegel, and in none, perhaps, obscurer than in how we are to conceive God as a Subjective Spirit and man as a Subjective Spirit, and God and Man in mutual relation." If further evidence of this 1 I. 244. Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 159 ambiguity were necessary, it would be sufficient to refer to the history of the Hegelian school in Germany, which shows us Christian Theist and logical Atheist alike appealing to the Master's words and claiming to be the true inheritor of his doctrine. Such ambiguity was possible just because the question, which Dr Stirling formulates as the question of " God as a Subjective Spirit and man as a Subjective Spirit " is one of concrete existences, whereas it is the peculiarity of the Hegelian system that it deals throughout only with generals. Hegel speaks in strictness, from beginning to end of his system, neither of the divine Self- consciousness nor of human self- consciousness, but of Self-consciousness in gen- eral — neither of the divine Spirit nor of human spirits, but simply of " Spirit." The process of the world is viewed, for example, as the realisa- tion of spirit or self-conscious intelligence. But spirit is an abstraction ; intelligence is an ab- straction, — only spirits or intelligences are real. It is the same even when we come to absolute spirit — a case which might seem at first sight to leave no loophole for doubt. The forms of the German language itself seem to abet Hegel in his evasion : for though he talks (and by the 1 60 Hegelianism and Personality. idiom of the language cannot avoid talking) of " der absolute Geist " (the absolute spirit), that by no means implies, as the literal English translation does, that he is speaking of God as a Subjective Spirit, a singular intelligence. It no more implies this than the statement, " Man is mortal " (in German, " the man is mortal " ) implies a reference to a specific in- dividual. The article goes with the noun in any case, according to German usage ; and " absolute spirit " has no more necessary refer- ence to a concrete Subject than the simple " spirit " or intelligence which preceded it. Ab- solute spirit is said to be realised in art, in religion, in philosophy ; but of the real Spirit or spirits in whom and for whom the realisation takes place we are not told, and are ultimately left to choose between two sharply opposed and irreconcilable positions. This, however, is precisely what was to be expected from a philosophy which treats notions as the ultimately real, and things or real beings as their exemplifications. Hegel has taken the notion or conception of self-consciousness — Sub- ject, as he calls it in his earlier writings, Spirit in his later — and he conceives the whole process of existence as the evolution, and ultimately Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 1 6 1 the full realisation of this notion. But it is evident that if we start thus with an abstract conception, our results will remain abstract throughout. Spirit, when it reappears at the end of the development, will reappear, certain- ly, in a singular form, and we may imagine, therefore, that the reference is to the Divine Spirit ; but as a matter of fact it is the abstract singular with which we started, which means no more than " there is intelligence or spirit " — " the form is realised." But where or in whom the realisation takes place, of this nothing is said, or can be said, along these lines. For an answer we are forced to fall back upon ordinary experience ; and there it may be said that the action is realised in our personal existence and in the products of human civilisation. But as to any further and more perfect realisation in a divine Spirit, recourse must be had, I fear, to more homely methods of inference than Hegel patronises. Spirit, or " the concrete Idea," was beyond doubt intended by Hegel to be the unity in which God and man shall both be compre- hended in a more intimate union or living interpenetration than any previous philosophy had succeeded in reaching. And this unity or L 1 62 Hcgelianism and Personality. interpenetration was to be asserted without prejudice to the play of difference — without, therefore, falling back into a pantheistic iden- tity of substance. It was an aim and task worthy of a philosopher, for both philosophy and religion bear ample testimony to the al- most insuperable difficulty of finding room in the universe for God and man. When specu- lation busies itself with the relation of these two, each in turn tends to swallow up the other. The pendulum of human thought swings con- tinually between the two extremes of Individ- ualism, leading to Atheism, and Universalism, leading to Pantheism or Akosmism. This in- sight into the history of the past makes it all the more the imperative task of further phil- osophising to seek a statement of their relations which can be accepted as true by the speculative and the moral consciousness alike. Hegel was fully alive to this obligation, and his scheme of reconciliation is in its conception a peculiarly grand one. It is no less than to exhibit the whole process of the universe as so many neces- sary moments or stages in the triumphant and all-embracing life of God. Nor need there be any hesitation in allowing that the execution of the conception, too, will always remain one Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 1 6 j of the great monuments of the human mind. Even in its error, the Hegelian system is one of those " splendid faults " which may serve for the instruction of generations. But it cannot be accepted as a solution of the problem. Spirit is not the real unity of the two sides which it is intended to be, and is put forward as being. Though it is called " the concrete Idea," * we have no evidence that it is really concrete in the sense of designating an actual existence ; it is concrete only with reference to the " logical Idea" which preceded it. Spirit or Absolute Spirit is the ultimate product of that self-crea- tive projection of the Idea into existence which has been already criticised ; and it may there- fore be denominated the Idea as real. It is the real duplicate of the Idea, the notion of know- ledge hypostatised. But we have abundantly 1 Werke, xv. 685, at the end of the 'History of Philosophy,' where it is also "die sich wissende Idee" " der Gedanke der sich selbst fasst." Similarly, at the end of the ' Encyclopaedia ' (Werke, vii. 2, 468-469), Absolute Spirit is spoken of as "die sich wissende Vernunft," " die sich denkende Idee"; and it is said in the concluding sentence that "die ewig an und fiir sich seyende Idee sich ewig als absoluter Geist bethatigt, erzeugt und geniesst." Hence the term " the Idea " is often used, in a wider sense, to designate not the logical Idea specifically, but what Hegel would call "the concrete totality" of which his system is the explication. 164 Hcgelianism and Personality, seen the impossibility of reaching a real exist- ence by such means. " The concrete Idea " remains abstract, and unites God and man only by eviscerating the real content of both. Both disappear or are sublimated into it, but simply because it represents what is common to both, the notion of intelligence as such. They disap- pear, not indeed in a pantheistic substance, but in a logical concept. If we scrutinise the sys- tem narrowly, we find Spirit or the Absolute doing duty at one time for God, and at another time for man ; but when we have hold of the divine end we have lost our grasp of the human end, and vice versa. We never have the two together, but sometimes the one and sometimes the other — a constant alternation, which really represents two different lines of thought in the system, and two different conclusions to which it leads. But the alternation is so skilfully managed by Hegel himself that it appears to be not alternation but union. The truth of this statement will be best seen by pressing the question of the relation of God or the Absolute to the development sketched by Hegel in the 'Encyclopaedia.' That de- velopment proceeds from Logic to Nature, from Nature to Spirit, and in Spirit through Hegel's Doctrine of God and Alan. 165 all the grades of the slowly-opening individual intelligence to the Objective Spirit of society and the State, and further still to the Absolute Spirit, as existent and known in art, religion, and philosophy. The crucial question, there- fore, comes to be, what is the Subject here developed, and in what sense are we to take the term development? According to Hegel's usage, the Subject of the development is spoken of in the singular number, as " a uni- versal individual," and is expressly styled the Absolute. The Absolute is said in this development to come to itself or to realise its own nature. This seems, therefore, the answer to our question, and the existence of God (to go no further) would appear to be placed beyond dispute by such a statement. Nor is there any lack of explicit assertions of the divine existence on Hegel's part. It is as if he was conscious of the misleading effect liable to be produced by the form in which he had cast his system, and was desirous of counteracting such mistaken impressions. He reminds us, there- fore, ever and anon, that what appears as the end of the development is in reality also the beginning — the living presupposition of the whole. Thought does not exist first as Logic, 1 66 Hcgelianism and Personality. then as Nature, and finally in its completed form as Spirit ; it exists only as Spirit, which is thus the one res completet, or completed Fact, from which Logic and Nature are alike abstrac- tions. Accordingly this triple development has been, after all, only an ideal analysis, a logical separation of elements which are never really separate, but exist only within the con- crete life of Spirit. This is abundantly plain in the enigmatical but striking sayings that form the bulk of the Preface to the ' Phaenomenology,' some of which were quoted in a former lecture. 1 We meet the same thing in the larger ' Logic ' ; 2 and in the ' Philosophy of Religion,' where he is applying or carrying over the results of the ' Logic,' he takes even more pains to avoid misconception. In consequence of the logical 1 At the beginning of the Third Lecture, pp. 85-87 supra. Among other passages which might be quoted are such as the following: "The True is the becoming of itself, the circle which presupposes its end as its aim, and thus has its end for its beginning" (Werke, ii. 15). "The Absolute is essentially result, i.e., only at the end does it exist as what it truly is ; " but " the result is for that very reason the same as the begin- ning, for the beginning is to be taken as aim or purpose " (Ibid., pp. 16-17). 2 E.g., in the passage formerly quoted : " We may very well say that every beginning must be made with the Absolute, just as all advance (that is, all dialectical development) is only its exposition." Hegel 's Doctrine of God and Man. 167 evolution, he says, "We may have the mislead- ing idea that God is represented there as re- sult ; but if we are better acquainted with the subject, we know that result in this connection has the sense of absolute Truth. Hence that which appears as result, just because it is the absolute Truth, ceases to be something which results or draws its existence from anything else. . . . ' God is the absolutely True,' is equivalent to saying that the absolutely True, in so far as it is the last, is just as much the first. It is, in fact, the True, only so far as it is not only beginning, but also end or result — in so far, namely, as it results from itself." 1 This is a point on which references might be indefinitely multiplied. It is enough, therefore, in the meantime to accept Hegel's reiterated assurance that the Absolute — "absolute self- conscious Spirit" — is eternally self-existent, the only Fact in the strict and full sense of that term. How, then, is this completed self-conscious- ness related to the development which con- stitutes the world-process ? If we look closely 1 Werke, xi. 48. So again (p. 132), "The result casts off its character of result. . . . Absolute Spirit, conscious of itself, is thus the First and the Last." Cf. also xii. 178. 1 68 Hegelianism and Personality. at the account Hegel gives, we find, I think, that there is no real connection between the two, and that the appearance of connection is maintained by the use of the term develop- ment in a double sense. In the first place, the term is used with the associations derived from its use in the ' Logic' We may, if we will, call the systematic placing of conceptions in the ' Logic ' a process or development ; and if we do so, it is perfectly apparent that there is nothing here analogous to a development in time. There is a system of abstract notions mutually connected, which permit us therefore to pass from one to another by logically neces- sary but altogether timeless transitions. In fact, the whole system, as a system of abstractions, may be said to be out of time ; and the process of development, if we persist in calling it so, may also be spoken of as a timeless or eternal process. Now Hegel extends this idea of logically necessary and timeless transition to the process by which, in his own language, thought externalises itself in Nature, and re- turns to itself in Spirit. It is with logical necessity, we are told, that the logical Idea determines itself to be more than logic, and the same necessity drives it back upon itself Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 1 69 out of its temporary alienation. Hence Hegel speaks of this also as an eternal process. Ex- pressed in the language of religion, " God is the creator of the world ; it belongs to His being, to His essence, to be creator. . . . Creation is not an act undertaken once upon a time. What belongs to the Idea belongs to it as an eternal moment or determination." 1 " God is, as Spirit, essentially this revelation of Himself. He does not create the world once ; He is the eternal creator — this eternal self-revelation, this actus. This is his notion, his definition. . . . God posits the other and sublates it in His eternal movement." 2 " Without the world, God would not be God." 3 These expressions are all taken from the ' Philosophy of Religion,' but the doctrine is one which meets us throughout Hegel's works. The terms used are intended to convey the impression that the life of the world is included within the process of the absolute self- con- sciousness, and that everything is thereby satisfactorily comprehended within the all- containing walls of the divine unity. But it is impossible at one and the same time to describe this process as necessary and eternal, 1 Werke, xii. 1S1. 2 Ibid., xii. 157. 3 Ibid., xi. 122. 1 70 Hegclianism and Personality. and to include within it the real course of the world — nature and history. If we choose the first alternative, then Hegel's Nature — his second stage — is in no way different from Fichte's Non-Ego ; it is, indeed, as he himself describes it, simply the necessary negative or opposite involved in self-consciousness. An opposition or duplicity of some sort may readily be deduced as necessary to the exist- ence of self-consciousness as such ; but that is very far from constituting a deduction of nature or the world as an infinitely varied concrete fact. Fichte's construction, as he himself ad- mitted, was an ideal construction of the notion of self-consciousness, not an account of any real process or real existence ; and it is exactly the same with Hegel's. This eternal process of creation or self-revelation is simply the gen- eral notion of self-consciousness as such. To treat the divine life as the perfect example of this was perhaps not extraordinary ; certainly Hegel was not the first to do so. But it is simply matter of assertion on Hegel's part to draw Nature with its real processes and living forms within the circle, and to treat it all as simply the objective side of the divine Self- consciousness. And even if we were inclined Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 1 7 1 to let that pass, his construction leaves no room for any other self besides the divine Spectator. In short, as we have had so often to remark in Hegel, there has been a daring but unjustifiable stride from an ideal or notional analysis to real facts. Every Ego carries in itself a Non-Ego, but that does not justify us in sweeping all existence without more ado into the circle of a single Self-consciousness, identifying Nature with the Non-Ego of God, and simplifying the problem by extruding our own self-conscious- ness altogether. And it cannot be said that this is a misrepresentation of Hegel. If we are consistent with his position here, there is room only for one Self- consciousness ; finite selves are wiped out, and nature, deprived of any life of its own, becomes, as it were, the still mirror in which the one Self-consciousness contem- plates itself. Such is the scheme of the universe contemplated from the divine point of view. But I must repeat that it is reached by hypostatising the notion of self-conscious- ness and not by any progress from reality. There is, in fact, no bridge between this hypos- tatised conception and the world of real things and real men. This comes out very plainly in Hegel's own 172 Hegelianism and Personality. account in the ' Philosophy of Religion,' where he begins, contrary to his usual practice, with the Absolute in the completed perfection of its notion. Adopting religious terminology, Hegel speaks here successively of the kingdom of the Father, the kingdom of the Son, and the king- dom of the Spirit. The kingdom of the Father is further described in the heading as " God in his eternal idea, in and for himself." He begins by arguing that God, thus contemplated in his eternal idea, is still in the abstract element of thought ; the idea is not yet posited in its reality. But he goes on, under this same head, to speak of the absolute diremption or distinc- tion which must take place within this pure thought ; and thirdly, still under the same head, of God as Spirit, or the Holy Trinity. This " still mystery," as he calls it, is " the eternal truth " of philosophy ; it is " the pure idea of God." In fact, it just brings to light the essential nature of Mind or Spirit, as seen in the act of knowledge. " God, who eternally ex- ists in and for Himself, eternally distinguishes Himself from Himself — that is to say, eternally begets Himself as His Son. But what thus distinguishes itself from itself has not the form of otherness or alien being ; on the contrary, Hegel's Doctrine of God and Man. 173 that which is distinguished is immediately identical with that from which it has been separated. God is Spirit ; no darkness, no tinge of foreign colour, passes into this pure light." 1 In this separation, the first — that which distinguishes — may be called the uni- versal ; and the second — that which is dis- tinguished — the particular : but the two determinations are the same. The distinction is at once laid down and removed ; it is laid down as a distinction which is no real differ- ence. " The fact that it is so constitutes the nature of Spirit, or, if we express it in the form of feeling, eternal Love. The Holy Ghost is this eternal Love. . . . Love is a distinction between two who are yet for one another absolutely without distinction. . . . God is Love — i.e., he is this distinction and the nullity of this distinction — a play of dis- tinction in which there is no seriousness." 2 In spite, therefore, of what is said at the out- set — that God is contemplated here as still in the abstract element of thought — it does not seem possible to understand this elaborate construction as anything else than an account of the divine Self-consciousness as that really 1 Werke, xii. 185. 2 Ibid., 187. 1 74 Hcgelianism and Personality. exists for God Himself. As Hegel does not fail to tell us himself, it is a speculative con- struction of the Trinity ; and on Hegelian principles, the Trinity, so conceived, must un- doubtedly be held to exist for itself and on its own account. 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