c** ,0' ♦ 'O. * .. . 1 h,4 V* - ,0 <• ' o , v * A %< ?> A % ' .6 / THE WORLD'S EPOCH-MAKERS EDITED BY OLIPHANT SMEATON Hegel and Hegelianism By R. Mackintosh, D.D. Previous Volumes in this Series : — CRANMER AND THE ENGLISH REFORMATION. By A. D. Innes, M.A. WESLEY AND METHODISM. By F. J. Snell, M.A. LUTHER AND THE GERMAN REFORMATION. By Principal T. M. Lindsay, D.D. BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM. By Arthur Lillie. WILLIAM HERSCHEL AND HIS WORK. By James Sime, M.A., F.R.S.E. FRANCIS AND DOMINIC. By Prof. J. Herkless, D.D. SAVONAROLA. By Rev. G. M 'Hardy, D.D. ANSELM AND HIS WORK. By Rev. A. C. Welch, M.A., B.D. MUHAMMAD AND HIS POWER. By P. De Lacy Johnstone, M.A.(Oxon.) ORIGEN AND GREEK PATRISTIC THEOLOGY. By Rev. William Fairweather, M.A. THE MEDICI AND THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. By Oliphant Smeaton, M.A. j PLATO. By Prof. D. G. Ritchie, M. A., LL.D. PASCAL AND THE PORT ROYALISTS. By William Clark, LL.D., D.C.L. EUCLID: HIS LIFE AND SYSTEM. By Thomas Smith, D.D., LL.D. THE WORLD'S EPOCH-MAKERS Hegel and Hegelianism By R. Mackintosh, D.D. Professor of Apologetics in Lancashire Independent College Manchester AUTHOR OF "FROM COMTE TO BENJAMIN KIDD " New York. Charles Scribner's Sons 1903 /ion ^3 PREFACE To write shortly upon Hegelianism has proved even more extraordinarily difficult in accomplishment than it seemed in prospect ; and much that had been set down for discussion, especially towards the end, has been crowded out. It was necessary for this series and for this writer to discuss Hegel from a point of view accessible to all who are interested in "the world's epoch-makers " ; yet in breaking off the author feels with regret that many a matter has been left un- explained which must prove a stone of stumbling to the beginner. Within this little book such a reader may find some measure of help from the Index. He may further be recommended to study the notes upon Hegel's phraseology at the end of the prolegomena to Dr. Wallace's translation of the Logic. Among many other serviceable books, Dr. E. Caird's short volume, Hegel — by a master in philosophy and especially in Hegelianism — stands pre-eminent. Half of it is biographical. The other half confines itself to stating and enforcing, with much sympathy, Hegel's vi PREFACE central point of view. For that among other reasons it seemed best that the present handbook should attempt an outline of the various portions of the system. The Chicago handbooks edited by Dr. Morris will be found of great service in pursuing further study of Hegel's detail. But no magic can make Hegel an easy author ; and no helps, however efficient, ought to be used as substitutes for personal knowledge of the master mind. 1 1 In the literature at the head of several chapters, it will be observed that (A) stands for translations ; (B) for untranslated and relevant portions of Hegel's writings ; (C) for helpful works in English on the subjects under discussion, or works influenced strongly by Hegel. CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE V PART I. General and Historical, chap. I. introductory 1 ' II. PRELIMINARY OUTLINE 7 III. REMOTER ANTECEDENTS — PLATO, ARISTOTLE, SPINOZA . 31 IV. PROXIMATE ANTECEDENTS — KANT, ETC 42 V. HEGEL'S LIFE AND WRITINGS 65 VI. BRITISH HEGELIANISM— EARLIER PHASES .... 85 VII. BRITISH HEGELIANISM— LATER PHASES . . . .105 PART II. Detailed and Critical. VIII. THE HEGELIAN LOGIC Contents of Hegel's Lesser Logic IX. THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE . . . Brief Note on Contents of Philosophy of Nature X. TRANSITION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT Outline Contents of Philosojihy of Mind . 127 148 150 174 175 181 Vlll CONTENTS CHAP. XI. HEGELIANISM AND PSYCHOLOGY . Note A. On the Phenomenology of Spirit Outline Contents of the Phenomenology . XII. HEGELIANISM AND ETHICS .... Outline Contents (of Philosophy of Right) XIII. HEGELIANISM AND ESTHETICS . Note : Hegel's "Division of the Subject " XIV. HEGELIANISM AND HISTORY Note : Hegel's Historical Groupings XV. HEGELIANISM AND CHRISTIANITY Abridged Contents of Philosophy of Religion XVI. FINAL STATEMENT AND ESTIMATE PAGE . 183 . 195 . 201 . 203 . 217 . 218 . 233 . 235 . 252 . 254 254, 273 . 275 293 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM CHAPTER I Introductory Philosophy is often described as a doctrine of the Absolute. It is not indeed specially characteristic of Hegel to use such a definition. He prefers to speak of the Idea. For Hegel is upon his own showing an idealist, and an absolute idealist. When we have dealt with his system in detail, particularly with what he calls Logic, we shall find ourselves, or ought to find ourselves, better able to appreciate the motives of his terminology. Still, the difference in words does not imply a difference in subject or topic. Like other philosophies, Hegel's might also be called a doctrine of the Absolute. He ends his expositions in the region of " absolute know- ledge " or " the absolute idea." This sounds somewhat abstract and aloof from every- day life. It may be said at the outset that Hegel's philosophy less than any other stands aloof from reality or aspires to a construction in vacuo. We may very possibly blame him for being unduly entangled in the realities of ordinary experience ; we cannot fairly charge 2 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM him with disparaging them. And if we are allowed to translate the word Absolute by a less pretentious equi- valent, we may be helped to repel the unfair suspicions spoken of. The doctrine of the Absolute is a doctrine of reality. Whatever is real — in or below the half- deceptive appearances of things — through or behind the "phenomena" of ordinary experience or of the physical universe — that is the object of the philosopher's quest. He is not the only teacher of mankind who seeks reality. Every teacher who deserves respect has the same high ambition somehow ruling in him. Yet in certain respects the philosopher stands alone. He is pledged to thoroughness, and tries to push inquiry further than it is carried by others, e.g. by the physical sciences. Properly, of course, the word " science " simply means knowledge; it is by a conventional use of language that we restrict the word, as we ordinarily do, to specialised knowledge in a single department. When Hegel uses the German word for science — Wissenschaft — there is no corresponding restriction. And is not Hegel justified ? If partial knowledge ought to be studied, is there not room for one who shall cultivate knowledge as a whole ? Knowledge as a whole, or reality as a whole — we may use either form of words without change of meaning ; or are we prepared to fall back upon the despised groping of the Platonic dia- logues, and suppose that one kind of knowledge deals not with reality but with the unreal ? It is more fashionable nowadays to suppose that a reality exists with which knowledge cannot enter into any relation. Whether this is wiser than the other onesidedness may be questioned. Hegel will vigorously deny its wisdom. INTRODUCTORY 3 The philosopher, then, studying knowledge or reality as a whole, will inquire whether there are assumptions made by the special sciences — what these are — within what limits they hold good. This is no part of the work of special science. So long as in practice it respects its proper limits — and it usually though not always succeeds in doing that — a special science may live and do good service without ever being distinctly conscious of the qualifications which ought to be under- stood when its results are stated. Knowledge is like a sum in arithmetic worked out to several points of deci- mals. The special science is a schoolboy who usually is content to get two or three decimal figures and then stop. If he is in an ambitious mood, however, he will work to twenty or thirty figures — going far beyond what his data warrant. Philosophy claims to be an expert, carrying the sum exactly as far as it ought to go, and knowing precisely why the calculation has to stop at a particular figure. It may still be doubted whether we shall gain any- thing by discussing the absolute reality in abstract terms. Are there not many kinds of reality which have nothing to do with each other ? Here we notice another of the peculiarities of Hegel. He is a monist. He does not believe in different kinds of reality, so distinct that we cannot bring them together. Being an idealist, he affirms that the nature of thought or of knowledge gives us our most reliable clue to the nature of reality ; and his friends may further argue that two wholly distinct realities, if they came to be known, would rend the unity of consciousness. For good or for evil, Hegel defines reality (and thought) in the abstract. And the conceptions of the Real which he 4 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM builds up in his Logic he carries with hirn when he proposes to expound special aspects of the known Reality, as in nature, or as in ^Esthetics or Ethics or Religion. Dualism is repudiated and protested against; at the same time, duality — in subordination to unity, and as a means of manifesting or realising unity — is asserted everywhere. The great man who presented these thoughts on the boldest scale to the modern world — or indeed to any period of the world's history, ancient or modern — has little purely biographical interest attaching to his life and character. Even when he is caught up in the current of notable and tragic events — even when Napoleon wins a battle within sight of the philo- sopher's study and within earshot of his lecture-room — the thing: is accidental and external to him. Its effects cannot modify though they may perplex or delay his true development. In the history of a thinker the landmarks are ideas; his boldest and most thrilling deeds are books or lectures. What is true of thinkers in contrast to men of action is pre-eminently true of Hegel among all the race of thinkers. He seeks to reduce reality not merely to the form of subjectivity as thought, but to the form of intellect as logical thought. Knowledge on his view grasps the Absolute ; nothing eludes knowledge. Goodness and beauty are existences to which the principles of knowledge or of thought afford a clue ; and the supreme interest of beauty and goodness is to afford help in the development of in- telligence. We believe, therefore, that we shall do most justice to our subject by dealing mainly with Hegelian- ism, mentioning as regards Hegel only what may afford a chronology of his works and make his position intel- INTRODUCTORY 5 legible — so far as one can do this in a compend — when we compare him with his predecessors and with his principal British disciples. Even during his life his idiosyncrasy counted for little. Other men have swayed their time by the charm or the force of their per- sonality; Hegel's overmastering desire was to be an impersonal servant of the Idea — in more familiar language, a servant of [abstract] truth. It was indeed Hegel's belief that no one in effect achieves more or achieves less than what his thoughts entitle him to. Form on ultimate analysis appears to be part of the content; that favourite distinction melts, like all others, in the Hegelian laboratory. When the same thoughts are held to move society differently as in- terpreted by a different character, Hegel judges that they are not the same, but modified in exact proportion to the difference in their effects. An " edifying " philo- sophy was his pet aversion ; and we may safely say that no man ever handled such lofty themes in so con- sistently and coldly scientific a spirit. We never feel the beat of a heart in his writings — only the pulse of thought. A manual of the Differential Calculus will appear a warm and sentimental treatise when compared with the merciless pages in which Hegel anatomises the soul of man or the nature of the Blessed God. Nothing that he has said will, by the manner of his saying it, make any one the braver for reading it or the better for remembering it. The philosopher has almost if not altogether eaten out the man. Thus, if much of what we say seems to deal with philosophy rather than with Hegelianism or with Hegel, let us remember that Hegel is the philosopher par excellence — the man in- terested in truth, in all truth, in nothing but truth, or 6 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM interested in other experiences simply as phases in the intellectual search for truth. Moreover, Hegelianism is certainly not yet a dead doctrine or a spent force. We are not building a cenotaph in honour of one great man. We are introducing the reader to a fortress of thought, now perhaps somewhat decayed, or at least reported to be so, but still inhabited by living men and hard fighters. CHAPTEE II Preliminary Outline What is stated here must be regarded as purely pro- visional. It does not follow the line of any of Hegel's own statements, and, if accepted, must be taken upon trust. It is an effort to express the leading thoughts of Hegel so as to make them, if not intelligible, yet some- what less unintelligible to the beginner. We shall treat his main positions as a progressively unfolded doctrine of the Absolute. Or, to use less alarming language, we shall regard them as progressive definitions of the nature of what is real. We throw to the front a belief which we regard as deeply character- istic of Hegel, namely, I. Reality is a system. We might approach the same thought by saying that reality is conceived as a unity — or that there is a unity divined in all existence. That is indeed a belief characteristic of Hegel, but it seems well from the very first to emphasise his opposi- tion to Pantheism of the ordinary type. Ordinary pantheists hold unity to be important and difference trivial; they regard unity as an objective fact, but difference as a mere human fiction. It is not so with Hegel. To him, existence is necessarily revealed not simply as a unity, but as a unity of distinguished and 8 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM related parts — -in short, as a system. We may add that reality is interpreted as a system of the highest kind — an organism and more than an organism. The whole is believed to imply every part, and every part is believed to imply the whole. Or, again — more briefly, if less significantly — every part implies every other part. "Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower — but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is." This is very far from our ordinary common-sense way of conceiving reality, and it may be asked how Hegel dares to make such an assumption. He is not greatly concerned to justify himself to the startled beginner. He lived in an age of proud idealist speculations, and was more interested in comparing his own type of philosophy with rival systems, than in laying bare to the plain man the approaches to wisdom. One answer indeed he offers, but a formidable one ; he tells us that the final justification of his system is to be found by working through it as a whole. If you will (and can) follow him, he will show you a place for everything, and everything in its place, and he will show you that each pigeonhole must be added in its turn to round off those which have gone before. And surely this answer is sufficient, if it be true ; but it is not available for a preliminary survey. In anticipation of fuller epitomes yet to be given, we may say that it is unquestionably from the nature of Thought Hegel derives his belief in the systematic character of the Keal. " To think," said Sir William Hamilton, " is to condition, to relate " — a PRELIMINARY OUTLINE 9 description of thought which Hamilton seemed to re- gard as seriously damaging the pretensions of thought to represent reality. But why ? Why must we assume that reality is a contingent plurality rather than a systematic unity ? Above all, why should we do so when our own thought forces us in the opposite direc- tion ? Its relating activity, if finished, must give us a system of absolute and complete determination, such as Hegel affirms that we already can recognise in the nature of reality. If our minds necessarily evolve certain beliefs when engaged in their task of thinking — if, e.g., they compel us to regard reality as a system, or else to abandon cognition altogether — is not that a full proof of the validity of such belief ? Do not considerations like these establish the thesis with which we are dealing ? Even physical science drops hints of a similar bear- ing. Has not the spectroscope proved that in distant stars — where Mill thought it highly questionable whether two and two would not make five — the same chemical elements are at work which we know in our laboratories ? Thus already a posteriori science verifies the assumption of unity and reason even in the material cosmos. A favourite example with Hegel himself is that of the magnet. If we approach its study with mechanical prejudices in our minds, we shall assume that the magnet is due to composition, and we may propose to break it in two and divide it, one of us keeping the north pole and one the south. But the magnet, material as it is, refuses to be thus divided into con- stituent fragments. Each portion is a whole; each turns out to possess both a north pole and a south. io HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM The question between Hegel and his adversaries may be formulated thus — which is the truer type of the constitution of the real universe, a heap of stones or a magnet ? 1 Or — to go one step further — a heap of stones, or a living organism ? Or— again a step fur- ther — matter, or thought ? For it is not to be supposed that Hegel is mainly occupied with the material universe. His Encyclo- paedia is, or seems to be, divided into three regions — a world of thought (Logic) ; a world of reality, in some sense or other estranged from thought (Nature) ; and a world of reality consciously penetrated by thought (Spirit). That division, however, is characteristically hard and obscure, and a learner will be wise to post- pone his study of it until a later stage. It is more important now to understand in general terms that the system of reality to which Hegel points us is absolute and all-inclusive. God, if He exists, must be placed in it, or, better perhaps, must be revealed through it. To be aloof from it would be to fall out of reality altogether. Hegel might have adopted the phrase with which the Agnostic young lady once startled the author of The Epic of Hades — " There is nowhere else." Positively, this all-inclusive sweep of the system of reality implies that Hegel must find a place within it for the spiritual interests of mankind. Morality and religion must be parts of reality, no less than matter or force. This is the moving interest in the case of the more earnest minds who adhere to 1 This is not the only nor the main reason why Hegel's "Notion'"' has sometimes been rendered "Polarity." The opposition (in unity) of pole and pole is a still more precious parable in the opinion of Hegel's disciples. PRELIMINARY OUTLINE n the Hegelian system— men like the late T. H. Green. They believe that, in defending the reality of ordinary knowledge, or the trustworthiness of thought, they are helping to fight the one great battle of belief against the spirit of denial. In the English-speaking world, we are accustomed to alliances between an Agnostic philosophy and a religious faith. It is im- portant to have the opposite view thrust even sharply on our notice. It is well to remind ourselves that there are capable thinkers who regard any such alli- ance as a piece of intellectual cowardice, or a covert treason. In the sense in which we have explained it, and as understood by Hegel, reality is not something aloof from thought, but (to say no more) includes in itself the great determinations or categories by which the human mind grasps its knowledge — these also are realities. Hence we may profitably regard Hegel's view of reality as an extension of Kant's view of thought. So far as Kant furnished a positive refuta- tion of Hume's positions, we may say that it consisted in one special point. Hume had practically affirmed that sequence was a reality, while causation was no- thing but a subjective fiction, the fruit of association. Kant showed — by a new mode of treatment involving a deeper analysis of subjectivity — that it was impossible to explain the consciousness of sequence without im- plying a consciousness (explicit or implicit) of that ideal bond of union between sequent phenomena which we know as the law of causation. Apart from that, Kant showed, human knowledge would be a rope of sand. A conscious series must be more than a series. It rests on a unity — subjectively, the unity of the 12 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM conscious Self ; objectively, the unity of causal processes reciprocally determining each other. (Thus, be it noted, the unity, even according to Kant, develops into a sort of system.) Accordingly, human knowledge is revealed as a web of necessary relations. Sequence and necessary causal connexion, things which treated objectively seem to be totally different assertions, turn out to be nothing else than different sides of the same set of facts when we study them by the new methods of the Critical Philosophy. The natural result is that, if we believe in sequence, we must also believe in causation. In Kant this position is evacuated of mean- ing by the deeper and subtler agnosticism which he puts in the place of Hume's ; but Hegel bids us be in earnest with Kant's result. The difference between Kant's and Hegel's ideas of system appears further when we pass on to higher determinations of outward reality than mechanism. According to Kant, we can- not study organisms without conceiving them as unities moulded by [purpose, or] " final cause." Every plant or animal is an end to itself. It persists as a unity through changes — seeking its own continuance and the continuance of its species. It is some- thing quite different from a mechanical compound of parts. But Kant thinks we must bear in mind that we have not such support for our ideas of teleological nature as for our ideas of mechanism. 1 The mechanical sequence of natural phenomena is the alter ego of human self - consciousness ; teleological nature is an 1 It is incomprehensible that Tennyson's "Flower in the crannied wall " should ever be found quoted in relation to Kant's limited world of mechanisms. Dr. E. Caird quotes it as we have done {Hegel, p. 180). PRELIMINARY OUTLINE 13 unverified shadow of mind somehow projected into the world of mechanism. " God might have made the earth bring forth Enough for great and small, [The oak tree and the cedar tree,] Without a flower at all ! " It lies in the very nature of things that, if we are to be conscious of sequence, we must recognise causa- tion. It does not lie in the nature of things that, if we are ourselves to be conscious or self-conscious beings, we should discover organisms as well as mechanisms around us. They are, as Mr. Gladstone styled Parnell's contribution to the Kilmainham treaty, a hors d'ceuvre. They are a fifth wheel to nature's coach. In contrast with these views of Kant's, Hegel seeks (by methods which we shall presently indicate) to verify all the principal categories of human thought as being bound up with the simplest exercise of self-consciousness. Meantime let us notice some features of this idea of system. First, the idea, if it can be vindicated, offers the highest kind of verification for each particular thought. Empiricism rests every truth on the authority of some one fact of experience or some collection of such facts. Intuitionalism appeals to the sense of subjective necessity — strong for those in whom it exists — power- less to convince others, and attaching to hallucinations as strongly as to the axioms of mathematics or the elementary truths of morals. Idealism, on the contrary, appeals to the coherence of the whole. Every part supports every other part. If you think at all, you must accept whatever is shown to be involved in the connected system of the great thought of reality. 14 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM Secondly, the idea is not overfavourable to belief in Free Will. The case is not perfectly clear. We shall argue hereafter that Hegel's thoughts leave room for Libertarianism ; but his British followers have gone strongly against it ; and we cannot deny that, in sup- port of their choice, they may plausibly appeal to this master thought or deep foundation of the Hegelian philosophy, the thought of a connected system. " Thirdly, the idea is favourable to optimism. All is of one piece, and " the whole is good," as the author of Gravenhurst used to insist. 1 It perplexes one to observe how effortless the optimism of a good Hegelian appears. He might say with an optimist of a very different school, Walt Whitman, " No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God and about death." To the strength of his logic — his mere logic — tears and blood and sins are negligible quantities. Fourthly, the idea if strictly interpreted is fatal to the idea of Supernatural Revelation ; — there is nowhere else. We do not assert that it is fatal to belief in Divine personality. On that great question, as on many others, Hegel himself seems to be ambiguous, and his followers may plausibly claim support from him for opposite conclusions. But he is more plainly hostile to the idea of revelation or redemption. The idea of system, as he states it and works it out, seems to involve a colossal and remorseless naturalism (of reason, not of matter), which is totally incompatible with any form of the Christian Church's faith in Jesus Christ. Hegel himself perhaps veils this conclusion, at least for the most part; but we agree with his distinguished student, Dr. E. Caird, in holding that 1 The phrase is at least as old as Rousseau. PRELIMINARY OUTLINE 15 Hegel's principles in regard to religion involve con- clusions beyond those generally recognised, or — perhaps — generally contained, in his utterances. But to this point we return later. Having said so much, it may be well to add that the present writer regards this conception o£ system as the deepest, the most suggestive, and probably the most solid thing in Hegel. All metaphysics — i.e. all sustained thinking in its ultimate phases — brings us face to face with some such conception of reality. If there are limits to the possibility of maintaining or developing the thought in question, these are limits to human reason. Instead of asking whether such an affirmation be true to fact, we must rather ask, In what sense it is true ? or, under what limits ? II. Reality is a graded system. So far we have learned that, in the system of reality, as conceived by Hegel, all parts are justified. For all are needed ; they are all integral, organic. We must now add that all are not equally important. While they are alike justified, they are not perhaps justified in equal measure. They stand to each other in rela- tion of superiority and inferiority. In the Logic, this grouping refers to different thoughts; — though we must remember that, even in the Logic, the thoughts refer to reality ; they are definitions of the Real (constituting together somehow one great defini- tion). In the Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit, the grouping refers explicitly to different phases of objective reality. In the two latter, the meaning seems — perhaps only from custom — more readily intelligible. It is the grouping of the Logic, however, which Professor Andrew Seth seems to have 1 6 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM in view when he praises the grading of categories as Hegel's greatest achievement, Dr. Seth's able pupil, Dr. Mellone, concurring with him. Primarily, such grading seems to imply that the earlier definitions of reality vanish as false or inadequate, while the later ones — or possibly only the very latest of all — hold the field as adequate to the facts. Reality is not bare being in the abstract ; reality is " the Notion " or " the Idea " — i.e. reality is a grand coherent system of unity preserved in and fulfilled through differences. We are confirmed in supposing that Hegel takes this view, according to which lower " categories/' once seen to be lower, are done with, when we learn that the earlier categories are represented by their successors. Their life-blood passes into their conquerors ; they live on, transmuted into higher forms of life. Why then secure them a separate existence at all, even at an inferior grade ? Plainly, they may apply in a special sense to a part of the real. There may be a section or department of reality within which they are peculiarly appropriate. We find, accordingly, that in the world of our knowledge and experience, mechanism survives alongside of teleology, and the chemical substance alongside of the psychical or ideal subject. Part of Hegel's wisdom is to point out that we ought to apply mechanical or chemical categories to appropriate phenomena, while passing to higher categories for teleological or spiritual facts. Concurrently with this, however, we must keep in mind that, according to Hegel, not the smallest fragment of reality can be finally or fully explained except by the highest cate- gories (" Flower in the crannied wall "). If anything in the universe were mere mechanism or mere dead PRELIMINARY OUTLINE i; matter, Hegel would despair of God and of the spiritual life of man. The plain working category of the lower ranges of thought leads somewhere to con- tradiction; and the contradiction pushes us onwards and upwards. This grading of categories permits Hegel and Hegelians to treat much current opinion as " true in a sense," or " true from a certain point of view," but "in a deeper sense false." It provides further that we should arrange all catagories in a certain orderly sequence. We do not pass directly to the highest, when a lower form of thought reveals its limitations ; we try the next in order — the limitation detected is supposed to force us precisely into the next phase of thought. If coexistent parts of the system of reality are successive stages in our conception of the whole, still we must not think that this succession has primarily anything to do with time. When the philosophy of Spirit introduces us to the study of history, we find the categories taken up one after another at successive periods — partly in the history of mankind as a race, more clearly in the history of philosophies, or — the two statements have the same meaning for Hegel — of philosophy. In themselves, or in the Logic, thoughts cannot be temporally prior and posterior. As well in- quire whether the north pole of a magnet is cause of its south pole ! One thought ideally implies the other — makes room for it — passes into it — always ideally. A special source of perplexity is Hegel's habit of returning upon a lower category whenever he finds it convenient to do so. If the categories are successive definitions of the universe of reality, we expect that we shall be done with the lower category (at least as 18 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM applied to the whole of things) when we reach the higher — the higher, which ex hypothesi includes in itself all that was true in the lower. But Hegel pays no respect to any such inference. His point of view is briefly defined in his writings (against Spinoza or equally against Schelling) as a belief that reality is "not [a] substance but [a] subject." Yet he astonishes his reader by treating reality again and again as "substance," even after the definition "subject" has been announced and argued for. It is as if he defined reality as " substance " qua real, natural, material, and as " subject " qua ideal. Instead of " not substance but subject," he seems to allow himself now to affirm "not only substance but also subject." He seems to perceive no distinction between these two formulas. This is a specimen of the extraordinary and licentious logical laxity which we find in Hegel side by side with much delicate and even hair-splitting work. What do we gain by arranging the categories in a fixed order (as definitions of the real whole) if they not merely survive in their children but walk as ghosts ? The precedence is not much more serious than that observed in walking out of a drawing-room at a dinner party. Some go sooner, others later; but all go to the same table. Successive phases in Hegel are co-ordinate aspects, and co-ordinate aspects are successive phases. He who supersedes another is before very long himself super- seded. Does the mere order in which the phases occur matter very much? Taking everything together — remembering that (1) the lower category does not fully explain even its own department, and that (2) the lower category may be called on when convenient to explain features in the highest department — one doubts whether PRELIMINARY OUTLINE 19 Hegel's apparatus of grading is much better than sleight-of-hand. He may not have tricked us over it, but he has secured to himself every facility for doing so. Hegel imperils his profound conception of reality as a system when he seeks to justify it in this fashion. And yet we shall need some such grading — we may say, if we like, some such evolution ; but we must re- member that the Hegelian evolution is not an evolution in time. Hegel shows us therefore different thoughts passing into each other in a bewildering procession. " At last they heard the fairy say 'Attention, children. Are you never going to look at me again ? ' . . . They looked, — and both of them cried out at once, ' Oh, who are you after all ? ' ' You are our dear Mrs. Doasyou- wouldbedoneby ' — ' No, you are good Mrs. Bedonebyas- youdid ; but you are grown quite beautiful now.' ' To you,' said the fairy, ' but look again.' ' You are Mother Cary,' said Tom, in a very low, solemn voice ; for he had found out something which made him very happy, and yet frightened him more than all he had ever seen. ' But you are grown quite young again.' ' To you/ said the fairy. ' Look again.' . . . And when they looked she was neither of them, and yet all of them at once." Hegel, too, has a magic show ; and he is the fairy who says from time to time, Look again} Or Hegel is like a crystal gazer. The ordinal eye can see nothing where he looks ; but he reports to us the whole universe in miniature. Or Hegel is like Hamlet studying the 1 Kingsley's Water Babies. — This parable must not be taken in the sense of ordinary Pantheism. The various thoughts (for Hegel) are not merely identical but different, and their differences require us to take them in a certain fixed order. 20 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM clouds. "Do you see yonder cloud, that's almost in shape of a camel ? By the mass, and 'tis like a camel indeed. — Methinks it is like a weasel. — It is backed like a weasel. — Or, like a whale ? — Very like a whale . . . (They fool me to the top of my bent)." The seer compels one to recognise the shapes that he reports. He forces upon us each identification that his nimbler fancy arrives at. Till he told us of them, we should never have framed any such thoughts. Or Hegel's system is like a kaleidoscope — a very colourless kaleido- scope, peopled by the living atoms of pure thought. A turn and another turn and another turn give us un- expected rearrangements. According to Hegel, there is no one who turns the machine — Hegel himself would be shocked at the thought of doing so — how dare he thrust his own subjective opinions into such high and holy company ? The machine is self -moved ; there is a spirit in it ; its name is Thought or the Universe. By their own necessity — and in a definite sequence — the patterns rearrange themselves and melt into each other. A further consequence of Hegel's method is that, while we affirm the different phases as coexistent aspects, we are never able to bring them together. Thus, e.g., he cannot tell us what we derive respectively from ethics and from aesthetics. Each has its place; each yields its place. The monotonous alternation of praise and blame never pauses. There are no results in any department which are not at the mercy of a slightly deeper analysis. Or, if there is any qualification to be attached to this statement, it must refer to the highest stage in philosophy — that " absolute knowledge " which closes alike the Phenomenology and the Encyclopaedia. So far, Hegel PRELIMINARY OUTLINE 21 has introduced us to nothing definitive. For a moment it might seem that we had a rock to build on ; the next moment Hegel had proved that our supposed rock was the usual old quicksand. But where does Hegel him- self stand ? From what point of view can he work, if no point of view has more than evanescent validity ? It is like the endeavour to apply the historic method to one's self. Even the most convinced advocate of re- lativity and limitation in man's moral outlook must hesitate to handle his own beliefs and principles upon historic methods. For himself, his beliefs must be ultimate. He knows that they are only an approxi- mation; but, being a limited and finite mind, he is compelled ordinarily to suppress that consideration. Absolute knowledge is the one portion of Hegel's system which does not pass away. While other parts seem to be stages in " appearance," this, which has no master over it, looks like " reality." Here we find one of the gravest arguments in support of the opinion that Hegel's position is Pantheistic. Other things are and are not; this is and abides — this vision of perfected logical insight, without beauty or love or goodness — this unclothed skeleton of abstract system. Probably Hegel takes pleasure in regarding reality as a sequence of phases because in this way he seems better able to vindicate its unity. As long as one is dealing with co-ordinate aspects, the unity of the Real seems little more than a name. Like the thing- with- many-qualities, like the Substance which, according to Agnosticism, is unknown, though every one of its many attributes may be known, reality is left ununified when we affirm many aspects in one Real. We have done nothing more than contradict ourselves, or render ex- 22 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM plicit the antinomy which is implicitly present every- where. If, on the other hand, aspect yields to aspect or passes into aspect, then unity is safe. The trans- formations of the Notion, 1 in the course of its ideal evolution, provide equally for unity and for difference. If we reject this ingenious suggestion and fall back upon co-ordinate aspects, we ought to recognise what we are doing. We are setting limits to the human mind. We are recognising that for us it is impossible fully to solve the problems constituted by the nature of our thought. Our thought relates to each other a group of aspects which we know or believe to be unified in the Absolute ; but — unless by some trick like Hegel's — we cannot expound this unity from our standing- ground as finite intelligences. This idea of successive phases really involves the next point, namely, Hegel's principle of progress by contradiction. For the phases exclude each other. When one comes, another goes. Those at two re- moves may resemble each other (though of course they likewise differ); exclusion — sharp exclusion — is the only relation conceived or permitted between adjacent phases. III. Reality is a system, or a union, or a unity of opposites. Sometimes this is proved by showing one phase pass into its contradictory ; at other times proof is offered that the thing as it stands is self- contradictory. The latter is the more formidable argu- ment ; the former is Hegel's favourite method of state- ment. In discovering this alleged law, Hegel thinks that he has put his finger upon the very pulse of reality. It is in the light of this supposed law that he 1 See below. PRELIMINARY OUTLINE 23 feels able to reconstruct the universe in a system of " a priori " [i.e. necessary] thought — he uses the phrase at times. Once again we must recognise that even here Hegel is not the solemn trifler whom the vulgar take him to be. Most of us are ignorant of the contra- dictions that lurk in our thought — as ignorant as the men of Athens were in the days of Socrates. Kant has taught us that, wherever Time and Space are ruling "forms" of perception, there we shall encounter con- tradictions. Every part refers us for an explanation of it to other parts ; and the process is endless ; we can never reach a whole, and, until we do, we seem to have reached nothing. Hegel proposes not merely to generalise contradiction as significant of the finite — a conception possibly wider than the material world of Time and Space, — he takes contradiction to be the move- ment of the Absolute. If science as ordinarily studied under conditions of Time and Space fails to satisfy the mind — if finite explanations fail us — must we not supplement them by the "speculative" 1 explanations which philosophy supplies ? We must grasp both explanations as one system or one process. We must conceive finite nature, with all its contradictions, as the expression of absolute thought or reason, yet as the opposite of absolute reason ; and we must conceive that absolute thought fulfils itself by constantly passing into the finite and constantly rising above it. To Hegel, therefore, contradiction is not merely the law of the finite but the law of the absolute. The latter contra- dicts itself by producing the finite, and the finite, urged by the burden of its own contradictions, ultimately 1 Almost entirely a term of praise. It does not imply among Hegelians less certainty in the result, but more capacity in the method. 24 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM returns in thought [i.e. in man, or — in Hegel this is almost an equivalent — in philosophy] to the repose of the Absolute. The contradiction, if never healed, is always healing — it is not Hegel who believes in the "imbecility" of a "reason" which makes opposite assertions and then sits down in despair and cries out for " faith." If always with us, but yet always healing, contradiction upon a large view (it is claimed) may be described as always healed. "For an ye heard a music like enow They are building still, seeing the city is built To music, therefore never built at all, And therefore built for ever." 1 When you paint a figure portrait, you give it a back- ground — perhaps a conventional red curtain or a vaguer grey cloud; or perhaps a little bit of pre-Raphaelite landscape. Ideally, the whole earth and indeed the whole boundless universe lies in the background ; but you ignore that. The most realistic of artists must select and conventionalise; he is painting one man — not the universe. Kant's method is to bring into clearer consciousness the slurred background of know- ledge. We live in moments, do we ? But every moment is a focus of all eternity and all immensity. Knowledge is a connectedness between the fragmentary " now " and the whole of existence. Hegel more boldly — and surely also more paradoxically — tries to show that " the instant grows eternity." The part is more than a part — it is a phase or embodiment of the whole. In the successive transformations which it undergoes in the laboratory of thought, it becomes its background. Indeed, it becomes everything. It generates the whole 1 This is precisely the idealist gospel — valeat quantum. PRELIMINARY OUTLINE 25 universe of the possible and the actual. For you treat it (being a part) as if it were the whole ; and then you strike upon limits and upon self-contradictions which give you no rest till you know " what God and what man is." The part involves the whole; this is proved since, if you take the part by itself, you treat as a [or as the] whole. The contradictory nature attributed to thought (or to reality) may be elucidated by the law that the knowledge of opposites is the same, 1 or by the principle of reaction in the historical development of thought. But in Hegel it stands above such helps. We may think it a doubtful way of defending the idea of system or the idea of gradation. Hegel thinks it a luminous certainty, precious for itself independently of its ap- plications. He thinks it gives him a living universe in contrast to a universe of fossil forms. It is merely sensuous thought, or merely subjective thinking, he tells us, which confronts things with each other in hard isolation. Speculative thought sees the differences vanish in a higher synthesis as fast as they emerge. Everything is a stage — and a fleeting stage ; nothing is more than a stage. Each flashes or flickers into sight for a moment, and then is gone. Everything is true, in a sense, and everything is false from a higher point of view ; and there is no possible way of reaching the higher truth except by the mediation of lower and falser beliefs. Truth is the synthesis of all possible half-truths. Truth is the result reached when we have been tossed from aspect to aspect until we are thrust into the very heart of things. If you try to go straight 1 "The relation to its opposite or negative is the one essential relation out of which a thought cannot be forced." — Dr. E. Caird, Hegel, p. 162. 26 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM to the centre, it evades you. Second thoughts — or possibly rather " third, which are a riper first " — are the best. First thoughts, simply because they come first, cannot possibly be more than a rough one-sided sketch of the reality of things. The aspects of truth come to us in a definite sequence; but finality is impossible, unless in absolute philosophy, or perhaps in the totality of the process of the universe; and the latter Hegel himself might admit is not accessible to human reason — only (if God is personal) to the Divine. Hegel thinks that he establishes the necessary con- nexion of things by following this rule; or that, by means of it, things develop their own inner nature in the Hegelian philosophy, which thus fulfils the ideal of science strictly so called. Few moderns will admit this bold claim. It was Hegel's great resource against the subjectivity of Schelling, and if we distrust it we regard Hegel himself as subjective and arbitrary. In fact, if we reject the dialectic, we might describe Hegel as an essayist. The essayist is one who, without much in- ductive gathering of materials, exhibits an unusual degree of insight in dealing with commonly known facts. When Mr. Bosanquet tells us that " Hegel's writing " is " attractive chiefly by the force and fresh- ness of its detail," 1 he is praising Hegel as an essayist. The distinctive quality of science is a rigorous method. Hegel's dialectic claims to be " scientific " in the highest sense; if we reject the claim, we do not necessarily reject everything in Hegel, but we reduce his merits to those of one who says various " forcible " and " fresh " things " in detail," as good essayists do. And it is hard for us to trust Hegel's " science." We 1 Hegel's Philosojihy of Fine Art, Translator's Preface, p. vi. PRELIMINARY OUTLINE 27 feel sure that so great a master of thought can pro- duce plausible and impressive reasons ad libitum for identifying any A with any B — or again for regarding any A as the contradictory of any B. There seems in- tolerable laxity in Hegel's view of what constitutes one term the negative of its fellow. Just when scientific rigour was most essential — just when Hegel, in criticis- ing Schelling, felt the need of rigour — he has flung us a brilliant literary paradox. One is tempted to transfer to Hegel his own parable of the painter who has only two colours on his palette. From all the infinitely varied and delicately graded relations of the Real, Hegel picks out merely two — bare identity and absolute contrast. He does not simply refer existence to these two co-ordinates, but treats diagonal movement alter- nately as horizontal and as perpendicular. The law of negativity is surely Vorstellung and not Begriff at all. Each negative in Hegel is supposed to be a definite negative and therefore to involve progress onwards. The logical statement does not fairly imply this. It could yield nothing but a barren alternation of + and — signs. Some other force than that of logic must have fixed the definite direction which thought follows. We must indeed remember a further point. Hegel does not propose to dispense us from the trouble of studying his transitions in detail, although he names a general law. On the contrary, he insists that a system is not a system or a science except in its detail. And in developing his details he reveals an embarrassing fertility of mind ; his method never shrinks into a schematic formalism as does the method of many of his expounders. We may restate then his position as affirming objective necessity, based on the contents of 28 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM any thought, for passing from it to another and a more satisfying thought. The working out of the alleged principle of contra- diction in Hegel is singular. The old logic of con- sistency assumes that whatever is self-contradictory is self-refuted or self-condemned. This position seems to be enthroned once more in the recent writings of thinkers who are or have been Hegelians — Mr. Bradley and Professor Koyce. Mr. M'Taggart, again, with his usual effort to rationalise Hegel [for the " understand- ing " ?] insists that even Hegel himself is faithful to the test. There would be contradiction, if no "higher unity " emerged as the deeper truth, reconciling seem- ing opposition; it emerges, however, and staves off the deadlock. Popular opinion goes to the opposite extreme from Mr. M'Taggart, thinking of Hegel as the man who legitimated contradiction, and hailed it as the native law of thought. Here, as so often both views seem to be right. Here, as in so many other cases, Hegel meets the " Either — or of the ordinary conscious- ness " with a supercilious " Both, if you please." " Yes, or No ? " they ask of him ; he answers Yes, and No. Things including contradictions do exist. Everything includes contradictions. But the contradictions are not unrelieved ; for everything gives rise to a higher thing, where that which at a lower stage was contradictory is shown to us merged in unity. Accordingly, Hegel's attitude towards the logical test of non-contradiction is rather complex. He does not simply defy it, as is generally supposed. He is not frankly faithful to it, as Mr. M'Taggart boldly contends. What Hegel really holds is that, when you discover a contradiction, you are forced to regard that in which it inheres as an PRELIMINARY OUTLINE 29 inferior phase of reality, and that you must discover its proximate neighbour in a phase of reality where the contradiction in question disappears. Having made that discovery, however, you have legitimated both phases — they are co-ordinate aspects of the real ; pro- vided always you subordinate A to B as lower to higher. If Hegel, e.g., subordinates morality to religion, he does not deny morality. He only — as he supposes — sees past it. IV. For completeness of statement we should be bound to introduce a fourth definition — Reality is the work of Thought. It is undesirable, however, to attempt here any dealing with this doctrine of Hegel's. The position may even be held that it does not add any- thing fresh to the three affirmations already reviewed — Reality is a system ; Reality is a system of various grades; Reality is a system which unites opposites. The new position — the idealist definition — undoubtedly affects the way in which Hegel conceives all his affirma- tions. For example, it is in the light of Hegel's idealist view of the real that our second point — reality as a graded system — has come under our notice in a different and perplexing form — reality as serial. While there are precedents in antiquity for a doctrine of Idealism, the emphasis laid upon thought as a guide to the nature of reality is very modern. From Kant in parti- cular Hegel inherits the assertion fully developed, yet burdened with a sceptical gloss. Kant holds that the world of our knowledge is a creation of thought ; yet he thinks it the unreal construction of the thought of individual men, all working similarly, but none of them attaining truth. Hegel seeks to dismiss this sceptical interpretation, and to state reality as being 30 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM (necessarily) that which thought produces, conceives, or apprehends. After we have glanced at the teachings of Hegel's idealist forerunners, and after we have given a short sketch of his external life and of the doctrines of his British followers, we must proceed to study in detail the way in which Hegel seeks to make good his view of [the Absolute, or] Reality. Last of all we must seek to deal with the difficulties inherent in the subject. Did Hegel's idealism mean that nothing but thought exists ? Did it mean simply that nothing exists except what is in accordance with thought ? (" The real is the rational"; "reality is rational and righteous.") Did it mean that nothing exists except thinkers ? Or did Hegel attempt in some way to combine two or all of these views ? These and kindred questions must for the present be postponed. They will engage our attention later. CHAPTER III Remoter Antecedents — Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza The name Idealism carries us back beyond modern philo- sophy, by its suggestions and affinities, if not in strict- ness by its personal history. Plato, to whom it points, is the father of all idealists, and Hegel more than any other modern takes up the task of speculation on the grand lines upon which Plato and Aristotle worked. The very word idea was introduced into philosophy by Plato; and for centuries it was used in tolerably strict adherence to his lead. Descartes, according to Sir William Hamilton, 1 broke down that usage for the first time, and Locke soon after was criticised in England because of the novelty attaching both to language and thought in his " new way of ideas." Hence it came about that ideas, from being eternal and lofty arche- types of all reality, were degraded in Hume's philo- sophy to the rank of decaying sensations, faintly surviving in memory. Hence, too, it has come about that moderns are accustomed to associate idealism 2 with 1 Reid, pp. 925, 926. 2 The derivative terms are late of appearing in our language. The Oxford Dictionary quotes Norris of Bemerton for "idealist" — in the Platonic sense — but gives "idealism" as an almost modern importation from the French. 31 32 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM doctrines like Berkeley's and in a lesser degree like Malebranche's (if hardly like Fichte's genuine teach- ing) — with subjective idealisms that assert the reality of minds and deny the reality of matter. Kant him- self, the father of a new and subtle type of idealism, called by him " critical " or " transcendental," pro- pounds something which he regards as a " refutation of idealism " 1 in the subjective or Berkeleyan sense ; but Kant in his turn is marked with the same nickname by Hegel, and has subjective idealism imputed to him. 2 It follows that opposite types of thought have been described by the same name, and that we may well find ourselves at the mercy of perverse associations if we study Hegel's " absolute idealism " expecting to find in it some modification of Berkeley. We may fare better if we look for some further unfolding of the thought of Plato. Plato's master, Socrates, is praised by Aristotle as having introduced the arts of "induction and defini- tion." These methods, however, were applied by Socrates in a narrowly if deeply practical spirit ; and even in ethics he, the first to call himself " philosopher," was conscious of being a " seeker of truth " rather than its possessor. 3 Thus "philosopher," like "essay," though it soon became an ambitious and aspiring title, was 1 In the Critique oj Pure Reason. 2 Wallace's translation of Logic, ed. 1, pp. 76, 77 — in contrast with "absolute idealism " — is that the first coinage of the latter term ? Dr. Harris (Hegel's Logic, p. 57) tells us that the phrases "subjective idealist" and "objective idealist" were used by Hegel in a review article in 1801. 3 Contrast the Preface to Hegel's Phenomenology (p. vi), which calls on us to " advance to science or actual knowledge and lay aside the old name of love for knowledge " [the amateurishness of such an attitude ?]. REMOTER ANTECEDENTS 33 modestly intended on its first introduction ; nor should we rightly interpret Socrates' modesty as part of his irony. Still, face to face with the blindness of tradi- tionary custom and the bewilderment caused by its decay, Socrates, with all his self -distrust, endeavoured to find some clear guiding light of principle. And, over- against the arbitrariness and selfishness which he and Plato traced in the methods of the Sophists, he set up the thought of binding rules for the art of human life. What Socrates recognised as man's hope and his need in practical affairs, Plato carried into all the regions of speculation. He adopted at the same time a more positive tone. To trace rationality in the world around was not with him a mere postulate or duty of the human mind ; it was the natural, necessary, trust- worthy working of thought. Things could be classified and defined. It was necessary to classify them. Things were nothing at all if they did not embody in them- selves thoughts — or ideas. One escaped from error to truth, from non-being to reality, when one grasped the idea behind the phenomenon. Sense, no doubt, was as shifting and baffling as Heraclitus could assert; but sense was not everything. Even in things of sense there were ideas, and we could reach them. The thesis of the first idealism was very much what Mr. M'Taggart regards as the thesis of Hegel's idealism, that " reality is " both " rational and righteous." 1 The proof of Plato's idealism, we may say, is simply this, that things will fall naturally into classes ; but the ancient world did not ask for proof so hungrily as does the modern world. It asked for a satisfactory answer to the question, Where or what is the Real? 1 Studies in Hegelian Dialectic, p. 1 20. 3 34 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM This philosophy, so roughly indicated, is only a beginning of speculative thought; and Plato left it vaguer than he need have done, because the artist in him tended to encroach upon the philosopher. More strictly, a shortcoming on the speculative field itself is the dualistic element in the system. Plato's ideas explain much — but not everything. There is an ir- rational element blended with them somehow in the constitution of reality. By necessity the real always falls short of the ideal type. The Platonic doctrine of immortality shows us this dualistic element with startling plainness. The dualistic strain stands in contrast with Hegel's Monism, and perhaps also with the character of Hegel's idealism as absolute. 1 It may be held, however, that Hegel's own doctrine of material "contingency" has close affinity with Plato's Hera- clitean view of sense. 2 Again, Plato's ideas are prac- tically left standing side by side without manifest interconnexion. It is not that Plato failed to see that they ought to be connected. As visionary or poet, he believed they were related ; as thinker, he could not carry out his programme in detail. One thing he never tried. Being an ancient and not a modern, he did not group the ideas as contents of a divine consciousness. This was not done until Neo-Platonism adopted the Logos doctrine and passed into contact with Jewish and Christian thought ; since then it has been a common- place of ancient and modern Christian Platonism. When Plato himself connects the ideas with one an- 1 Logic, 1st ed. of Translation, p. 79; compare Mr. M'Taggart, as above, p. 69. 2 I find this view advanced by Professor Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, p. 57. REMOTER ANTECEDENTS 35 other, or with Theism, it is one of the number, the mysterious "idea of the Good," which is appealed to as somehow explaining the rest, and probably also as identical with Deity. 1 Moreover, it seems to have been a doubtful point with Plato, as afterwards in his school, whether there are ideas of artificial and mean things, or of those only which are natural and worthy. Plainly the whole doctrine is stated in an imperfect and half- poetical form. What it means essentially is the asser- tion of a real, permanent, or rational element in things. Details of statement are lacking, or, if present, are fanciful and suggestive rather than precise. Besides his work in formulating a theory of ideas, Plato has often been regarded as Hegel's forerunner in some of his details too — particularly in the dialogues which contain abstruse discussions upon abstract terms of thought, such as the Parmenides and the Sophist 2 The second part of the Parmenides, however — discuss- ing the difficulties involved in viewing reality either as one or as many — seems merely to offer sceptical and negative conclusions. That at least is the lesson which lies upon its surface; and one is confirmed in this impres- sion by observing that, in the first part of the dialogue, Plato seems to be exposing the weaknesses of his own theory of ideas. The ideas were to stand for the per- manent element in phenomena; but the Parmenides argues that, if the phenomena partake of mutability, the ideas contained in them must also be affected with mutability. Accordingly it is possible to regard the dialogue as a mere demurrer, " What shall we say to 1 It is hardly necessary to observe that moral goodness is at any rate far from prominent in this Platonic idea. 2 So Hegel himself in the Logic, Trans., 1st ed., p. 127. 36 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM all these difficulties ? Must we not say that hitherto philosophy has failed ? " In the Sophist, however, we find something like Hegel's Logic in the discussion of not-being. Not-being exists — that is the conclusion, explaining the possibility of error. Not-being is the other of Being and therefore involved in it. Here there seems to be something of that positive and con- structive albeit paradoxical development of " dialectic " which distinguishes Hegel from the merely negative or sceptical dialectic of Kant. The analysis of the most abstract terms of thought, even though it seems to issue in contradictions, is supposed none the less to demon- strate a connexion binding together different forms. Possibly Hegel is right in supposing that the Parmen- ides also shows Plato advancing along this track. The ordinary student will hardly discover that in the Par- menides ; but keener vision may read it between the lines. Another feature of interest in the Sophist is the construction of a provisional list of categories — Being, Not-being, Rest, Motion, Some and Other. An element of not-being (as the other of Being) enters into all. To that extent, the different ideas or categories in question are here connected ; one can hardly say that they are arranged in a system. This list and inter- connexion of categories is of interest rather as a prophecy of what is to come than as an actual achievement. When we pass from Plato to Aristotle, we seem to pass from poetry to prose, and from idealism to empiricism. The one fact regarding Aristotle which has worked its way into the general consciousness is REMOTER ANTECEDENTS 37 his critical attitude towards Plato, and especially to- wards Plato's ideal theory. The ideas (in their lack of connexion) do not explain but reduplicate reality — or rather reduplicate some of its aspects ; change, move- ment, life are unthinkable in that frozen world. Things of sense are first substances, and things of thought are second substances. This, however, is only one side of Aristotle ; and, with all that is true and pungent here, it is yet his lower side. A different view is opened up when we find that, in his own Metaphysics, Aristotle conceives reality as matter becoming real by acquiring or passing into form. This is an evolutionary philosophy; it may be said to find the real in the process of things. And the dualism of form and matter, which dominated Plato and dogged Greek thought, is at least in part broken down when we learn that, if not abolished, mere matter is always on its way to abolition or to trans- formation into a higher type of being. Nor is the dualism absolute even under existing conditions. What from one point of view is matter, from another is form. Only at the foot of the evolutionary scale have we mere matter, just as at the top, in the Divine mind, we have pure form. If this seems to modern minds terribly in the air, it may suggest to us that there was a speculative if not even a poetical element in Aristotle as well as in his master. It is not a reasoned system, but it is full of suggestions impossible to merely empiricist thought. Add Aristotle's conception of movement to Plato's conception of ideas as con- stituting reality, and you have something very like Hegel's Logic. This is the highest side of Aristotle's speculative thought. Midway we may place his list 38 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM of categories. This discussion, though it recurs again in his " First Philosophy " or Metaphysics, is conceived by Aristotle as a part of Logic, the science peculiarly of his own creation. His ten predicaments — Substance, Quality, Quantity, Relation, Place, Time, Situation, Condition, Action, Passion — are simply arranged along- side each other in a business-like way at the dictation of experience. They rise in importance when we con- sider their influence on Kant and through him on Hegel. When free speculation revived, or began to revive, with Descartes, a change was instantly manifest. Christianity had given the subject in experience a place from which he cannot be dislodged ; and there- fore the subjective note, in one way or other, rings through the whole of our epoch. The Ego is thrown to the front; ego cogito, ergo ego sum. Dualism is now not a lurking element somehow qualifying the real, but the most notable feature of reality. Reality is substance; but two substances exist — the purely active and the purely passive, — mind and matter. If this sounds to modern ears more simple and intelligible than the conceptions of Plato and Aristotle, that is merely because Cartesianism states the modern problem, and moves upon the lines which popular opinion still follows. In other words, we ourselves still in a sense belong to the Cartesian period, and must confess our sensitiveness to the thought of Descartes. All ages, indeed, must recognise a duality — unless they should prefer to say a triplieity — in existence. Being and thought, nature and spirit, the one and the many, stand over-against each other, whether we study the REMOTER ANTECEDENTS 39 philosophy of ancients or of moderns. What is peculi- arly Cartesian is to define the contrast by the names mind and matter, and to regard the contrast as abso- lute. Even in Descartes himself, however, there is the suggestion of a triplicity, softening his fundamental dualism. For God is a higher substance than either mind or matter; and in one passage Descartes even lets fall the pregnant observation that in a sense God is the only substance. Still, his main line of thought is that which sets up the " natural dualism " of mind and matter, still recognised by " common sense." When thought is left confronted by a dualistic oppo- site, one or the other element must give way ; and it is not thought that will yield. Through all hindrances, in spite of all kinds of difficulties, thought unweariedly seeks in some sense for unity. Out of Descartes there- fore proceeds Spinoza. There may be other " streams of tendency " in the great Jewish Pantheist, going back to the speculations of his own race, or to fore- runners in the Pantheistic creed like Vico; but the main influence revealed in him is surely Cartesian. The filiation is plain enough. Distinguish and an- tagonise them as you like, still mind and matter are obviously connected as well as contrasted in the one system of absolute reality; and the question forces itself — how can they be connected ? Paradox may be heaped upon paradox. Animal mind, one of nature's awkward intermediate links, may be ruthlessly denied, if not by Descartes, by his followers. God may be called in to bridge by special machinery the gulf which a dualistic type of mind has dug for itself. After a time, the strain proves too great; and unity, even abstract and exaggerated unity, follows on the assertion 40 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM of an unresolved dualism. In Spinoza accordingly we have a mind intoxicated with the thought of unity. And yet in Spinoza the unity is little more than a name. He asserts it, but, as Hegel would say, does not think it. There is one substance, we are told, but it breaks up into an infinite number of parallel and unconnected attributes, while we know only two, extension and thought. But the difference which sun- dered Descartes' world into two warring hemispheres is not conjured away by calling the two enemies " attri- butes " of a single inscrutable substance, nor by appeal- ing as constables of the peace to a ghostly band of additional attributes, unknown and unknowable, and so practically unreal. Further, when we are told that each attribute exhibits the whole nature of substance, and corresponds in parallelism to all the rest, Spinoza is saying what is quite .true of thought, but quite untrue of anything else. Thought knows extension — yes indeed ; but that simply implies that thought and extension are not on the same level, and are not random samples from a crowd. When one criticises Spinoza in the light of both Kant and Hegel, one sees that his two attributes are the two which make up the world of human reality. They are not warring hemispheres ; they interlock. They are not hemi- spheres at all; thought, as Hegel would say, "over- laps " 1 the world of extended matter, and holds it in its own grasp. Thought is first and last. It is both Logic and Philosophy of Spirit. Only the middle layer of the sandwich contains Philosophy of Nature. Thus, with help from Kant, we see how the ground 1 Often translated for greater dignity "overreaches" — a somewhat odd phrase in English, while extremely literal. REMOTER ANTECEDENTS 41 plan of Hegel's philosophy emerges as a reform of Spinozism. " Not substance but subject " is Hegel's terse and characteristically difficult way of expressing his modification of Spinoza's standpoint. When you take thought as your clue, you find that reality does not break up into an indefinite number of attri- butes, — partly known, mostly unknown, and therefore not verifiably connected with each other, — but into definite, knowable, and related aspects. Hegel believes in unity as strongly as Spinoza. But he insists, as it has been wittily expressed by Erdmann, that the unity shall not be a lion's den, with all the tracks leading inward and none outward. You must not only show that differences presuppose a unity, as of substance. You must also show that the unity (as a subject) breaks up necessarily into those differences which constitute the main outlines of known reality — an ambitious but a noble programme for philosophical thought. It may further be explained that, when writers with the Hegelian tinge repudiate Pantheism, they need not be taken to imply a doctrine of divine per- sonality, or to touch that problem at all. What they mean is to repudiate the conception of a substance repelling all predicates or attributes, a unity excluding all manifoldness, a being with no definite quality. Such a view had again and again been put forward by the Pantheistic schools of the past as the deepest view of reality. Hegelian critics rightly consider such a view not deep but blank. CHAPTER IV Proximate Antecedents — Kant, Etc. Literature. — At large, Dr. E. Caird's Critical Philosophy of Kant ; in brief, Professor A. Seth's Bevel, from Kant to Hegel [out of print]. Compare also Hegel's Logic, Eng. Trans., chaps, iii.-v. When we turn to consider the closer antecedents of Hegel's speculation, there can be no doubt that the head-waters of the stream are to be found in Kant. This may well appear strange to us. Kant desired to " prove all things." He hoped to perfect the work of criticism, and to preclude what he called — if in a some- what special sense — metaphysical " dogmatism." His aim was to define the limits and boundaries of possible knowledge. Hegel, on the contrary, does not admit the existence of any such limits, and has at least the appearance of being bent upon exposition more than upon proof. Still, the filiation is no great mystery. It was not mere recoil or reaction that urged thought out of the narrow limits of the Kantian groove into the vast ambitions of the Hegelian system. Kant himself believed that human thought had a native and irre- pressible tendency to embody itself in great speculative " ideas of reason." No other agnostic system has ever grappled with the whence and the why of metaphysical conceptions as Kant has done. No other agnostic PROXIMATE ANTECEDENTS 43 system has been so many-sided, so plausible, indeed, so reasonable. But, great as he is, Kant is very delicately poised. Thought necessarily forces certain conceptions upon us ; yet we may be sure, on grounds of thought, that these conceptions fail to correspond with reality. The union of two such propositions is surely a forced one. Remove the second, and Kant's position carries you nine-tenths of the way towards Hegel's. Kant's own antecedents are not found in Descartes or Spinoza so much as in Locke and in Leibniz. The working of the critical spirit which tests all things is indeed discernible in Descartes' appeal at the outset to universal doubt; but his transition from universal doubt to universal certainty is all too hurried, and the dogmatic deductions of Spinoza are wholly alien to Kant. Like Leibniz and Locke, Kant begins with the individual mind, the tradition of Leibniz being the first to influence him. To Leibniz knowledge was an evolu- tion of the contents of the individual mind or monad, free from outside interference. It was never in touch with a reality beyond itself, though it was so adjusted as to mirror or rather to mimic the phases of the universe. These beliefs affected Kant chiefly in the abraded and popularised shape which they assumed in the philosophy of Leibniz's disciple Wolf — "the cele- brated Wolf," as Kant calls him. Thought (the thought of an individual thinker) produces knowledge out of its own resources — this doctrine Kant accepted from the Wolfians in youth ; and he never quite forsook it. The four "'attitudes of thought towards the objective world," which Hegel surveys by way of introduction to his lesser Logic} are — three-fourths of them — the 1 Hegel counts three, subdividing the second. 44 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM attitudes through which Kant's mind historically passed. Here as so often we find great illumination, when we can identify some of the ideal necessities traced out by Hegel with historical actualities. The "first attitude" of naif confidence in the power of thought, which we may identify with Wolf, was given up by Kant. It is the natural attitude for an early period. No one when he begins thinking is hampered with doubts as to the reliableness of his own thoughts. In time, however, Kant became the merciless critic of Wolfs dry-as-dust doctrines " of God, of the world, of the soul." And yet he continued to believe in their subjective necessity. The attitude of confident belief [in their contents] dropped off, but not the persuasion that mind necessarily works in us to these results. From one point of view the Ideas of Reason may be described as the ghost of the Wolfian philosophy sur- viving in Kant's maturer system. At first, however, the negative result came upper- most. Kant saw plainly that it was impossible to regard the empty formal process of thought conducted by Wolf as leading to material truth ; and to a large extent he threw himself into the arms of Lockian empiricism. In Locke himself we can observe that empiricism is not quite thorough-going; and Dr. E. Caird has shown that Kant was never so thoroughly at ease in empiricism, or so completely wrapped in " dogmatic slumber," as his own words might have led us to suppose. The decisive impulse to a new develop- ment was given by Hume. Hume exhibits the bank- ruptcy of empiricism. Far from explaining the attain- ment of knowledge in a better way than Wolf's philosophy, empiricism, which refers everything to PROXIMATE ANTECEDENTS 45 sensation, cannot account for any one fragment of knowledge. All is illusion, and the sceptics are right ; that is the last word of empiricism. Curiously enough, Kant does not seem to have been touched by the full breadth or depth of Hume's negations. It was at one point, the analysis of cause and effect, that Hume's reasoning pricked him. He perceived that Hume's view of causation as customary sequence — while logically arrived at on the principles of empiricism — was fatal to the reality of causal connexion. Accord- ingly, Kant felt the necessity of trying some deeper philosophy. He makes the rather odd remark that, if Hume had perceived the destructive bearing of his views upon all knowledge, he must have reconsidered them. The Kantian philosophy might itself have been built upon less sceptical lines if Kant had penetrated the full extent and realised the secret relish and delight of Hume's scepticism. As it was, Hume's influence induced Kant to throw up empiricism, while the ghost of empiricism remained with him in his second and lower doctrine of noumena — those things-in-themselves which are not Ideas of Reason but assumed causes of sensations. Thus Kant's " attitude towards the " ex- ternal " world " was largely empiricist. The individual mind, he thought, was not merely in the presence of an alien reality, but under influences proceeding from it. Only, this alien reality could not reach through into knowledge. In view of this remaining tinge of empiricism, Hegel ranks Kant — contemptuously enough — as offering merely a modification of the " second attitude of thought towards the objective world." Two standpoints had been tried and had failed, and Kant's great treatises, from the Critique of Pure 46 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM Reason onwards, represent the effort to formulate a tertium quid — holding of both, different from either. Speaking roughly, we may say that the Critique of Pure Reason deals with the True, the Practical Reason with the Good, and the Judgment with the Beautiful. Rightly or wrongly — or perhaps with partial but not with entire justification— subsequent philosophy, and especially that stream of thought which ends in Hegel, is very much more interested in the Pure Reason than in the other books. We may say that Hegel's task is to rewrite the Critique of Pure Reason from different presuppositions. We may say, indeed, that something very similar is incumbent as a preliminary task in philosophy upon every modern mind. No one who has not passed by that road can be considered to-day as an educated thinker in any part of the field of philosophy. Positions established in the region of the True must affect our conclusions everywhere. Truth is not merely one part of the field of knowledge ; it is a name, and an august name, for the whole. And so the book which deals in memorable and original fashion with first principles of truth deals with first principles of all things. Such a book is the Critique of Pure Reason. 1 Although Kant had designed to write a Metaphysic of Nature, summing up in systematic form the results of his critical survey, the whole apparatus of proof and definition is contained in the Critique. Kant's statement of his problem concentrates atten- tion on principles such as the law of cause and effect. 1 Kant himself opposes "Pure Reason" to "Mixed Reason," i.e. reason mixed with a posteriori elements in experience. Practical Reason is not the opposite but one of the forms of Pure Reason. PROXIMATE ANTECEDENTS 47 In his technical language, these are called " Synthetic judgments a priori." They are necessary to intel- lectual experience ; and therefore he thinks that even Hume must upon fuller reflection have admitted that they were valid in some sense. They are a priori, for Hume has shown that experience can yield nothing but what is customary and casual — nothing universally or necessarily true. And they are synthetic — they are knowledge, not platitudes ; but thought, as Logic teaches, and as the failure of Wolf's effort, to extract positive knowledge out of abstract thought, strongly confirms — thought is analytic or self -identical. Whence then comes knowledge ? True or false, whence comes this world of coherent useful experiences ? Kant's answer is, From the meeting of the inner and the outer. Thought — somehow — forgets its native character and becomes synthetic at the touch or influence of external reality. Sense — somehow — ceases to be blind and futile when it is taken up into rational thought. Hence results human knowledge — the strange operation of human thought upon an unknown datum. We may call this experimental knowledge a morbid product of the mind, but we must admit that it is as beautiful and wonderful as that other morbid product, a pearl. Kant is thus no less completely sceptical than Hume regarding the objective truth of man's knowledge, though he deals in a more serious spirit with its relative validity and subjective usefulness. So far as we have seen, there are two reasons for this scepticism. One is the conception of the nature of thought which Kant inherited from Wolf. If thought is formal, knowledge must come to thought from without (Locke), or else must imply some abnormal development within 48 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM (Kant). This is the point upon which Dr. E. Caird fastens. He argues that, if we regard Wolf's view of thought as ill founded, there is no reason why Kant's positions should involve the rejection of the objective truth of any necessary development of thought. Kant has, however, a second reason for scepticism, in the belief that two or more heterogeneous elements come together in all human consciousness. It may of course be held that this ground for scepticism is removed when we recast our views of the essential nature of thought. But it will be well to consider Kant's positions a little more fully. Kant recognises four elements in human experience and knowledge. There is matter of sense, due to things-in-themselves outside us; there are subjective a priori forms of sense, namely, time and space ; there are categories or principles of the understanding ; and there are principles in a higher sense, the Ideas — ideas which are Platonic in dignity, if not in reliableness — of Reason (as contrasted with mere understanding). These last " things-in-themselves " necessarily start to view within the mind, and, having done so, urge forward the whole process of knowledge, although from the nature of the case they never can find embodiment in phenomenal reality. The first assumed factor, the (more familiar) thing- in-itself, is logically the weakest and least defensible element in Kant's epistemology. It is a survival of empiricism. And what makes empiricism plausible to half -trained thinkers makes the thing-in-itself (of this definition) credible even to Kant — namely, the diffi- culty of supposing that mind, conceived as individual, should attain to knowledge of what is around it PROXIMATE ANTECEDENTS 49 unless by means of a contribution from without. Logically, however, we never can prove from Kant's own premises the existence of such things-in-them- selves. The utmost he could claim to say is that something unknown and unknowable happens to start the mind upon its new career (of experimental know- ledge). To call that vague Something an influence from a thing-in-itself is unproved assertion, or dogmatism, the antipodes of a truly Critical Philosophy. Secondly, there are the forms of Time and Space — a 'priori endowments of the mind, which as a matter of fact accompany all our experiences. We are compelled to attribute them to mind. No chemistry of blending sensations will ever explain a first experience in time ; the conception is as self-contradictory as (taken literally) a First Cause. We cannot, however, logically explain why Time and Space should always be with us. Logic suggests as at least a possible form of reality or phase of experience one "where space and time are not." Thus it is not a mere question of names when Kant contrasts his ^Esthetic (doctrine of the a priori contributions to sense knowledge) with the transcen- dental Logic, which deals with the contributions of understanding and the influences of reason. Might Kant not suppose that Time and Space are both subject- ive and objective, both a priori and a posteriori ? He could not, and that for two reasons. First, the hypothesis is superfluous, and to be rejected on the law of parsimony. If I am looking through yellow glasses, it is needless to suppose that by a miraculous coinci- dence, the landscape on which I am looking happens to be yellow in itself. But, secondly, the supposition that Time and Space are objectively real is shown (in the 4 50 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM second part of the Logic ; the Dialectic) to give rise to Antinomies {e.g., Has the world a beginning in time ? It cannot have. Had the world never a beginning ? That is inconceivable). This is one of the most im- portant novel contributions made by Kant to agnostic- ism — the emphasis upon contradiction, not in a casual or random mood of mockery, but as part of a sober theory. If mind transgresses its fixed limits, and tries to define noumena, then, says Kant, it necessarily falls into self-contradictions. This is a formidable addition to the armoury of doubt. If agnosticism is not to lead us forward from this point to pure scepticism, we must admit that Time and Space, which clamour for contradictory verdicts from the mind, are not part of the seen fact but part of the defective human apparatus of seeing. Such is Kant's finding. We may modify it ; but it will be difficult to set it altogether aside. The remainder of the great Critique follows the guidance of Aristotelian or formal logic, which Kant regarded as the pattern of a perfect science, finished at one stroke. Most interpreters, however, think that his debt was less than he supposed, and that the logician's list of judgments had not very much to do in guiding Kant's thought to his list of twelve categories. While he tells us that his list — arrived at, as he believes, by this appeal to formal logic — is alone systematic and exhaustive, yet he holds that his task is the same which Aristotle undertook when he drew up, in more empirical or less systematic fashion, a list of predicaments. Nor need Sir William Hamilton's protest against this identification distress us greatly. As Hamilton him- self suggests, the contrast at its broadest is only one between affirmations that may be made (in Aristotle) PROXIMATE ANTECEDENTS 51 and affirmations that we may make (in Kant). Here, then — half linked with Aristotle — we have an important advance towards Hegel's Logic. As Hegel recognises many more antinomies than Kant, so also he discovers many more categories — some of them, as we shall see, in a different part of Kant's own system and under other names. The treatment by which Kant's list is transformed into a Hegelian series is very clearly indicated by Dr. Caird. Modality 1 is struck out as irrelevant. Relation — if it is not rather a universal name for a category or thought - determination as such — is expanded threefold, and becomes the second part of the Hegelian Logic (the doctrine of Essence). The first part of the Logic (the doctrine of Being) is composed of Quantity and Quality taken in inverse order, the subdivisions of Quality being named anew, and a third heading, Measure, being added to Quality and Quantity. Finally, the pith of the Logic is found in part three, the doctrine of the Notion — a part of Logic wholly new in comparison with the categories of Kant, and new in its claim to entire logical strictness. Kant repeats his version of this doctrine of rational connectedness in a second form, which he regards as complementary to the first. The first, the list of categories proper, is meant to apply to conceptions, or terms, or objects; the second, the principles of judg- ment, are meant for propositions judgments or relations between objects. We need not pause over this or over 1 Kant's categories are as follows : — Quantity. Quality. Eelation. Modality. Unity. Reality. Substance and Accident. Possibility. Plurality. Negation. Cause and Effect. Actuality. Totality. Limitation. Reciprocity. Necessity. 52 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM other details of Kant's statement, like the schematism of the categories, by which they are dovetailed into Time and so indirectly into Space. If Kant had had a less superstitious reverence for Aristotle's Logic as a doctrine of thought, he probably might have simplified his great Critique to a large extent. We do not meet with anything essentially new till we reach the Dialectic, with its ideas of reason. Two of these terms recall Plato, and the second at least suggests Hegel once more. In Kant's nomenclature, Dialectic stands in contrast to Analytic as the negative to the positive, the destructive to the constructive. The categories (with their aliases and companions) represent the legitimate employment of thought for purposes of human experience or knowledge. Mind defines objects as one, as many — as substances, as causes, etc. That activity of mind is held to be both natural and necessary. It is " transcendentally " justified, i.e. experience guarantees it in this sense, that, without such activity of mind, there would be no such thing as orderly experience. Experience cannot prove it, since it presupposes it; or experience proves it only, but most conclusively, by presupposing it, — that and nothing else is what Kant means by transcendentalism. But mind is not satisfied with determining objects side by side in Time and Space or with establishing definite universal "laws" of relation between such objects. Mind craves some fuller harmony in things, some deeper unity than is revealed in the most perfect mechanism. And just here, according to Kant, mind oversteps the narrow limits which " transcendental " necessity marks out for its use. Definite objects, with definite relations between them, mind must constitute PROXIMATE ANTECEDENTS 53 for itself (on the basis of sense) if it is to possess an orderly experience. A more coherent system, with more intimate relationships, is craved by the mind; but in vain; it cannot show its title-deeds to that coveted possession. The whole expanse of Time and Space affords no room for such a thought-knit system of hypothetical realities as man yearns for. " That type of Perfect in his mind In Nature can he nowhere find." Yet the " type of Perfect " haunts him, urging him, if such a thing were possible, to sum up infinite time and measure infinite space. The whole of human knowledge is due to the pricking of this spur within the mind; and that is well. Error begins when we suppose that we possess actual knowledge of that which is no more than a vague impulse moving us to the knowledge of lower things. Under such a belief, we interpret mind as a soul -substance — simple, unde- composable, and therefore immortal (Wolf's Rational Psychology). Further, we interpret the world dog- matically, either as limited or as unlimited, both views being equally plausible at the first blush, and equally untenable when we weigh the counter-arguments — both, in fact, being empty, since the world which is known to us is nothing more than our subjective phenomenon [not a reality to which we may attach objective predicates — not a "thing in itself"]. Thus arises Rational Cosmology. Our final error is perpe- trated when we interpret the ideal systematic unity of all things, the mind's unreal and unrealisable aspiration, as a fact, a personal being, God (Rational Theology). Very noticeable here is Kant's inclination to a 54 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM Pantheistic conception of God. Elsewhere and pre- eminently in the Religion within the Bounds of Pure Reason he falls back into a narrow individualistic Deism, of an unduly moralistic type. Hegel therefore, whose work is so largely a shaping of Kant's thought to new issues, draws but little from Kant's direct deal- ing with religion. But he owes very much to this conception of God as the absolute all-inclusive unity of all things and all thought, and to the corresponding conception of religion — suggested though not affirmed by Kant — as a consciousness of this absolute Thought or absolute Whole. Noticeable also is Kant's criticism of the three traditional Theistic proofs. His reason- ings are forestalled partly by his Antinomies — in which, e.g., the conception of a First Cause, pointed to in the Cosmological argument, is discredited — partly by his view of the categories as limited to the (finite) objects of (ordinary) experience. The Ontological argument of Anselm and Descartes calls for a new pronouncement from him. Kant implies that this is the one real Theistic argument; both the others, he tells us, have to fall back upon it. Kant also frees it from the appearance of arbitrariness and extravagance which it presented in the statement of its original advocates. They did not make plain how any one individual idea could guarantee its objective existence ; Kant shows that the idea in question is not one in- dividual idea among a crowd of others, but is the background or complement of all the rest. If know- ledge is valid — i.e. if we know reality — God is known, for God is the absolute reality; or, as Kant puts it, God is the Idea or the Ideal suggested by every thought we frame. There is an immense amount of PROXIMATE ANTECEDENTS 55 Hegelianism implied here, in spite of the neutralising dose of scepticism in which Kant contrives to wrap it up. Summing up Kant's scepticism in the Critique of Pure Reason, from the Hegelian point of view, we abscribe it then, secondly, to dualism. Kant finds that knowledge contains two elements — thought and sense. He counts these two elements distinct and separate, because he cannot show how knowledge should come to us in the garb of space and time, while yet he knows that it does so come to us. This dualism takes on a darker colouring in view of Kant's (unproved and indemonstrable) assumption, that experimental know- ledge, with its sense forms, is called into exercise by the alien influence of things-in-themselves. A duality of thought and sense within experience is wilfully regarded as an origin of experience out of two distinct elements. Kant also contrasts the Ideas of Reason with the more limited forms of understanding. Hence between these two regions there seems to be disclosed yet another bottomless gulf. Perhaps, however, we may regard this not as a fresh difficulty, but as a necessary result of the use of the same method which gave us the previous dualism — that method under which dis- tinctions harden into absolute separation. The Ideas are indeed under a further condemnation. They must find their actualisation in the endlessness of time and space; and they cannot — there is no totality there. But this fresh criticism on the Ideas is somewhat dis- credited when we find Kant condemning the finite forms of understanding in their turn, because they do not conform to the "type of perfect in the mind." Criticism which plays off each of two things against 56 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM the other is clever but baseless; and Kant is here guilty of playing off Ideas against categories and categories against Ideas. Hegel tries in the Philosophy of Nature to show- that we can explain the necessity for thinking existence under forms of time and space. That problem, formally at least, is discussed nowhere else in Hegel's works. On the other hand, to show that the categories and the Ideas are part of one great system of thought, is a task undertaken in the Logic. Its third part — the Notion — may be said to be obtained by treating Kant's (illusory, subjective) Ideas as another type of category, and the highest of all — not illusory but true; not merely subjective but profoundly objective. Reality is not to be defined simply as a mechanism, but as a self-contained Harmony or Whole. And Hegel's bent is to show that sense is not the exclusion but the fulfilment (or, the raw material) of thought; that mechanism is merely a stage in conceiving, a means towards realising, reality as organic and rational. Where Plato and Aristotle say Idea and Phenomenon, Kant says Thought and Sense. Hegel has the same solution for both alleged " dualisms." Kant's other works do not contribute in equal measure to Hegel's stock-in-trade ; but they introduce us to results which make it harder for Kant to main- tain his delicately poised assertion of the necessity, usefulness, and unreality of the highest conceptions of human thought. In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant breaks through the magical web of scepticism with which he had surrounded himself, for now he makes the as- PROXIMATE ANTECEDENTS 57 sumption that in the moral consciousness we know objective reality. This assertion exposed him to attack by one of the older English Kantians, that strange defender of Christianity, Dean Mansel, who was so zealous in proving religious doubt incompetent that he failed to perceive the danger of representing religious assertions as meaningless. Mansel holds that all human consciousness, even the consciousness of duty, is rela- tive, subjective, unreal, and therefore that what is bad in man — e.g., exterminating enemies in cold blood, or punishing the guiltless in order that the guilty should go free — may be good in God. Others may let it stand to Kant's credit that here at least, in its gravest moods, he trusted the human mind. Kant tried to justify this change of attitude by his analysis of the " Categorical Imperative of Duty." While he held that abstractly self -consistent thought could never generate knowledge of an object, he held that (knowledge, feelings, and conscience being given) abstractly self-consistent con- duct was a test which led to real knowledge of duty. In the consciousness of duty (thus vindicated or ex- plained) Kant found a Postulate of Freedom : " I can because I ought." Here, however, dualism returns upon us raised to the pitch of self-contradiction, when Kant asserts that man's conduct is phenomenally determined but noumenally free. This indeed is a new dualism. It is not sense versus thought, but sense knowledge {i.e. sense with thought) versus a higher form of thought. To do justice to his moral postulate, Kant must have treated the phenomenal determinateness of conduct as mere human seeming, freedom on the contrary as Divine and objective truth. But it is hard to maintain an attitude of distrust towards an orderly 58 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM fabric of knowledge which is a necessary result of human faculties ; and thus Kant once more plays off the lower against the higher, and makes his moral " postu- late " idle. The phenomenal determinateness proves to be the predominant partner. It makes the stronger impression on our thoughts and feelings. For pheno- mena are always with us, while noumena are mysterious and half-forgotten absentees. The second moral postulate — Immortality — shows us this dualism in a more familiar shape. The law of reason in the conscience exacts obedience from man's lower nature. This latter is so alien to the law of reason that it never can perfectly be subject to it, but in infinite time it may indefinitely approximate to the unattainable goal. Hence man must be immortal. If the law is to be obeyed at all, it can only be obeyed when endless ages have run their course. We cannot wonder that Hegel poured contempt upon this way of proving immortality — not by what is actually or potentially good in man, but by alleged limits which eternally separate him from goodness. The third postulate is God. God is not to help man to be good ; from Kant's narrowly moralistic point of view, Divine grace would sully the purity of moral motives. Eight must be done without help and with- out hope of reward. Nevertheless on a larger view it is a moral postulate that goodness should lead to happi- ness, and this cannot be a certainty unless God is over all, while if that be true virtue is unfailingly safe. The metaphysical result of these postulates may be stated as follows — two Ideas (God and the Soul) out of three, which were all regarded formerly as simply helping to constitute experience in a useful way, are PROXIMATE ANTECEDENTS 59 now defined as being by moral necessity actual facts. We have listened patiently to Kant's paradoxes. We have learned that what we know, or necessarily think of, cannot exist, and that what exists cannot be known. Now we learn that what we necessarily think of necessarily (from moral considerations) exists, though its unknowableness is still asserted. Scepticism is wearing pretty thin when the soul, whose existence we might not affirm, turns out to be certainly immortal, and when the God who was to be a mere ideal is defined as a personal ruler. One should perhaps add that Kant does not formally identify the free and immortal moral soul with that soul-substance which he drove away with cries of contempt from the intellectual world. But what else can it be ? The definition may be vastly improved, but the reference surely must be identical ? There is more ground perhaps for question- ing the identity of the God of the Pure Eeason with Him of the Practical Reason. One is an ideal totality pantheistically conceived ; the other is a personal and almost a limited Being, harmonising discrepancies ab extra. It is doubtful, therefore, whether Kant's postu- lates yield as much as they seem to promise. But, in some better form than Kant's, moral postulates may teach us lessons for which we shall search in vain throughout Hegel's great system. As they stand, they show us at least that Kant has directed many shrewd knocks against his own scepticism regarding knowledge. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant deals primarily with Beauty. And here the dualism of sense and spirit disappears altogether. The beautiful is not the ideal apart from sense or in spite of sense, but in 60 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM sense. More than this must be said. Kant, who finds teleology or "final cause" in beauty, finds the same category or conception embodied in organic life. All processes of life are for the sake of the organism or the species ; they cannot be otherwise described. This is the last of the shocks which Kant's scepticism has to encounter from the development of the Kantian philo- sophy. The "type of perfect," no longer imprisoned in the " mind," takes to itself bodily form in material " nature." This is true as to beauty ; and here accordingly light falls upon Hegel's highly respectful treatment of art as a phase in religion. But the actualisation of the "type of perfect" is also true of organic life. We may call life the Achilles' heel in a thoroughly naturalistic view of the universe. Life and thought are things which materialism has no room for. It does its best to ignore them, or ridiculously ascribes their origin to accident. But they are splendid realities; and therefore Philosophies of Nature, like Schelling's or Hegel's, when they trace out a rising scale of manifestations of the ideal in nature, have here at least a stronghold from which they will scarcely be dislodged. And if Schelling and Hegel are too fine spun for us, we may catch a glimpse of the same truth by an intelligent study of evolution. It is gratuitous to assume, with the naturalistic school, that the starting-point and the lowest stages in evolution are boundlessly significant, while its ideal goal and its higher stages have no significance at all for the ultimate definition of reality. The opposite is true. A different use of Kant's material is made by Lotze —with influences from Leibniz — when he contrasts mechanism with teleology, the world of forms with the PROXIMATE ANTECEDENTS 61 world of values (according to Hegel, mechanism is teleology less completely defined). Lotze holds that mechanism is only seeming, while the values of Truth and Beauty make known to us the inner meaning of that Divine or objective reality conceived by us as the world-mechanism. Along a similar line of thought Ritschl's theology arrives at its perplexing doctrine of "judgments of value." That doctrine looks back to other elements in the Critique of Judgment, where we have certainly a more pleasing conception of the personal God than in the Critique of Practical Reason — not as the giver of blessedness to merit, but as the Being who overrules nature for moral ends, and makes the world of things subservient to persons, and who so far at least is thus the helper or even the fountainhead of human goodness. Kant's scepticism is equal to all the attacks which his own thought makes upon it. Organisms, not being necessary parts of a world of definite-objects-under- definite - laws, are not " transcendentally " verified ; therefore they are by one remove further still from reality than is the world of ordinary phenomena. The conception of an organism, like the Ideas of reason, is a guide to man's study, but not a revelation of the nature of reality. For the third time, therefore, in the third Critique, lower conceptions are played off against the higher. But let there be no mistake. The subject of the Critique of Judgment — final cause (in contrast to mechanism) — is the Ideal of Reason, or the philo- sophical definition of God, under another name. 1 1 Hegel's fourth or, as he numbers it, third attitude of thought can only be regarded as a parenthesis in the development under review. It is the doctrine of Immediate Knowledge or Intuition, as represented by 62 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM The additions which Kant's later books made to the Critique of Pure Reason had their chief interest — at least to Hegel — in showing how hard it was for Kant to preserve the sceptical interpretation of his system. And the work of a distinguished link between Kant and Hegel — the work of Fichte — may be similarly regarded. Kant's analysis of the human mind left off with a plurality of elements, whose mutual connexion was unexplained — data of sense a 'posteriori, forms of sense a priori, categories a priori, and — at a further remove — Ideas a priori. This duality or plurality becomes in Kant's interpretation an actual dualism. The maximum Kant has proved or tried to prove is that within experience we have elements %vhich we cannot reduce to one or intelligibly connect together. Or, more precisely, we experience under forms of time and space, and it is impossible to say why we do so. But what Kant asserts is the composition of experience out of several alien elements. Fichte accordingly tries to connect with each other by rational necessity those elements of mind which Kant had at best merely catalogued side by side — which at worst he had anta- gonised to each other. Fichte's undertaking is the next step in a rational or dogmatic reply to scepticism. Kant may have shown that we necessarily or uniformly develop certain beliefs in the process of knowledge. But this vindication does not carry us beyond sub- Jacobi. We find a rough but sufficient analogy in the Scottish philo- sophy, i.e. in Eeid's answer to Hume as contrasted with Kant's. Hegel is comparatively lenient to Jacobi — probably in order to make his con- demnation of Kant more emphatic. Assertions even of immediate know- ledge [all knowledge is mediation, and ultimately says Idealism, self- mediation] are a kind of counterpoise to sceptical denials of the power of thought. PROXIMATE ANTECEDENTS 63 jective necessity — the cloak in which every hallucina- tion masquerades as a truth. It is only a statement of fact — if of fact on a very wide scale. If we can fill up the gaps — if we can detect necessary law in the facts of human consciousness — if we can show that what is, must be, the necessity becomes objective or rational, and scepticism is finally routed. An important consequence depends on this change. Henceforth we are dealing — or are thought to be deal- ing — not with mind as individual and human, but with mind as objective. If it be said that mind which is not individual is an unknown quantity and un- intelligible, we may define the objective mind pro- visionally as all mind. Wherever mind is, it will operate thus — let us be done with asserting "the relativity of human knowledge " when we simply mean that knowledge is a relation. It is desirable that we should clearly mark Fichte's real position, since ordinary opinion, and even the dictionary makers, who are at the mercy of the popular compends and histories of philosophy, attribute to Fichte the paradox of solipsism. Nothing could be more false. When his fellow-philosophers — led, I pre- sume, by Schelling and his school 1 — branded Fichte as a " subjective idealist," they meant nothing more than that Fichte describes reality too much in terms of mind, too little in terms of objective nature. Hence Schelling's contribution to philosophy takes the form of a philosophy of nature parallel to Fichte's philo- sophy of mind. The two need reconciling or unifying ; and Schelling offers an ultimate metaphysic which tells of an " indifferent " mind-cum-natural existence to be 1 Compare footnote 2 on p. 32. 64 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM known by "intellectual intuition." It is quite open, however, for an admiring monographist like Professor Adamson to contend that Fichte was on the right lines, and (at least in regard to nature, says Professor Adam- son) occupied a safer position than either Schelling or Hegel. Other peculiarities of Fichte concern us little, unless we ought to mention his triple rhythm of Thesis, Anti- thesis, Synthesis, which — following up Kant's triads of categories and of Ideas of Reason — helped at least externally to pioneer the way for Hegel. We cannot dwell upon those points in which Fichte is the successor of Kant rather than the precursor of Hegel or Schelling. Nor need we dwell on his way of expounding the unity of mind. Hegel's way is different. The place of Hegel may be roughly indicated by comparing him with Schelling and Fichte. All three interpret Kant's work constructively, as a body of positive truth regarding mind or thought as such. Fichte offers a kind of philosophy of Mind or Spirit. Schelling places alongside of that — Hegel would say prefixes to it — a philosophy of Nature. The roots of both philosophies are found by Hegel (when he reaches maturity), not in a region of feeling or half-conscious thought as Schelling supposed, but in a region of clear thought, — in a Logic. 1 1 Dr. Baillie (HegeVs Logic) leads evidence to show that the direct influence of Fichte and Schelling upon Hegel was not great. CHAPTER V Hegel's Life and Writings Literature. — German. — " The main authorities for the life of Hegel are the biographies of Eosenkranz arid Haym — the former a pupil and devoted disciple of Hegel, the latter a critic whose opposition to Hegel's philosophical principles has passed into a kind of personal bitterness, which misconstrues his simplest actions. Some additional details may be derived from Hotho (' Vorstudien f iir Leben und Kunst '), from Huge (' Aus f riiherer Zeit'), and from Klaiber (' Holderlin, Hegel, und Schelling')." — Dr. E. Caird, Hegel, 1883. There is also a recent HegeVs Leben und Werke by a distinguished Hegelian, Dr. Kuno Fischer. English. — Practically the English reader will find all he needs in Dr. Caird's sketch. A few biographical gleanings of later date are given in the fifth introductory Essay to Dr. William Wallace's translation of the Philosophy of Mind, 1894, and in the earlier chapters of Dr. Baillie's HegeVs Logic, 1901. "The history of a philosopher is the history of his thought — the history of the origination of his system." These words of Rosenkranz's may remind us once more that we must not look for dramatic interest in the life of Hegel. In this chapter, however, we are concerned with external circumstances rather than with internal development; and, recluse as he was, Hegel lived through one of the most striking periods in history. George William Frederick Hegel was born at Stutt- gart on the 27th of August 1770. In that old world, 5 66 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM before the cataclysm of the French Revolution, Wiirt- temburg, of which Stuttgart is the capital city, was not yet a kingdom but a grand duchy. Hegel's family had settled in the little State during the seventeenth century, fleeing from Austrian persecution of the Pro- testants in Carinthia — that remote region of which Goldsmith's Traveller brought up so evil a report. 1 Practically the Hegels were now Swabians by genera- tions of residence and by numerous marriages. Like other geographical expressions which run back into the Middle Ages, the name Swabia is an uncertain magnitude; but we may roughly define it as equivalent to South- Western Germany, along with what are now the German cantons of Switzerland. It is mainly Protestant in confession ; and there is a certain Swabian national or racial consciousness which may be com- pared with the singular national unity of Scotsmen, with whom, indeed, as Dr. Caird tells us, Seeley has compared the Swabians in respect to the contents of their character. Schiller the poet, Schelling the philo- sophical precursor of Hegel, Schwegler the theologian, his disciple in philosophy, were all Swabians, and indeed all Wurttemburgers. The father, of Hegel, like many of his ancestors, served in the humbler ranks of government employ- ment. His mother died when he was only twelve, but he held her in tender recollection, and, like not a few great men, seems to have inherited his higher qualities rather from the mother than the father. 1 "Onward where the rude Carinthian boor Against the houseless stranger shuts the door." Quoted repeatedly in Gilbert and Churchill's classical book on The Dolomite Mountains. HEGEL'S LIFE AND WRITINGS 67 He had one brother and one sister. Hegel's was a mind of slow development. At school he enjoyed a reputation for diligence rather than for brilliancy, though he was already drawn as few boys are to Greek poetry. He worked hard, extracting and epitomising all he read, and even translating twice over the Antigone. If genius is not " a faculty for taking pains," genius is very generally associated with that faculty, and the great writer like Carlyle, or the great thinker like Hegel, lays the foundation for his future career by patiently acquiring knowledge. Afterwards, if he is really great, he shows that he can wield and master the knowledge he has gained. When he was eighteen years old, Hegel went to the beautiful quaint little town of Tubingen, the seat of the university of his State. It lies among hills clothed with vineyards and hop gardens ; above these rise the upland pastures and woods of the Rauhe Alp ; while the Neckar flows swiftly past to Stuttgart, only some twenty miles off by direct road. Hegel was destined for the Christian ministry, and entered the " Stift," then as now lodged in an old Augustinian monastery, 1 and then characterised by " a certain show of monastic discipline," including " a somewhat petty system of punishments, generally by deprivation of the portion of wine at dinner." It is on record that the young Hegel preached on Isa. lxi. 6, 7 ; on Matt. v. 1-16 ; and on the virtue of Placability ; always " very rational - isticaily." In the old days of Lutheran orthodoxy, Tubingen and Giessen had fought the battle of Krupsis 1 The arrangement by which the university includes a Roman Catholic as well as a Protestant Faculty of Theology is more recent than Hegel's time. 6S HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM or Kenosis (as then understood) in the Person of Christ. The theology and polemics of Tubingen were to become more widely known within a few decades, when disciples of Hegel carried their master's thought to unexpected issues, or gave more unreserved utter- ance to its suggestions. It was as a Tubingen lec- turer that Strauss published his first Life of Jesus; while the leaders of the Tubingen School in N. T. criticism — Baur, Schwegler, Zeller — were all disciples of the Hegelian philosophy. The Lemfreiheit of a German student was of little service to Hegel. He made all his university studies at Tubingen. Probably his poverty compelled him thankfully to accept a sizar-like existence, with all its inconveniences, in order to make sure of a liberal education. He really owed more to his own exertions than to the lecturers, who were scarcely touched by the letter of Kant, the great revolutionary of the hour in thought, and not at all moved by his deeper spirit. It is amusing to be told that, on Hegel's departure in 1793, the authorities of the Stift certified him as moderately well equipped in theology and philology, but practically unacquainted with philosophy. In reality he had been a diligent student of Kant and Rousseau. We are further told that Hegel was among the most violently revolutionary of the students in his political sympathies. Schelling, younger but more precocious than Hegel, belonged to the same group, and showed the same spirit. The date reminds us that revolution was then not simply in the air, but reigning or raging in "its sacred seat of" Paris. Several of Hegel's writings seem to betray the indelible impression produced by the Terror upon its young contemporary. HEGEL'S LIFE AND WRITINGS 6g The next six years were spent by Hegel as a private tutor, first at Berne, and later at Frankfort-on-the- Main. He continued to work upon his own lines. Extracts from the papers he wrote for himself in the Berne years are printed in Rosenkranz's Life, and summarised by Dr. Caircl. To a certain extent these reveal to us a Hegel who is still at the point of view of that eighteenth century rationalism with which he had been indoctrinated during boyhood and youth. He is occupied with the problem of Christianity; but he contrasts the Jewish world very unfavourably with Greece, and is disposed to write down even Jesus Christ as a " beautiful soul," who evaded rather than solved the problems of life. Not a little of this same attitude seems to survive in the views of the mature Hegel, as given in the Philosophy of Right. For, while the State is almost deified as the highest work of reason, organised in living detail, the Church is dismissed with a species of contempt, as an agency which teaches men to value the unity of all things, but cannot show them how to embody the principle of unity or apply it to facts. But, during the Berne days, even the Greek idea of Fate seemed to Hegel to stand higher than Judaism, with its hard and external law, or even than Christianity with its tragic brokenness. He was already, however, working his way to the positions which were characteristic of his after-teaching. This aims at being a synthesis of lessons learned, on the one hand, from Greek literature and philosophy; on the other hand, from the Gospels. Christianity comes to be placed higher than the somewhat superficial beauty and short-lived reasonableness of Greek life. But Christianity is re- garded as the same in kind. The Reason which flashed 70 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM upon mankind from Athens shines upon them more steadily out of Galilee. It has learned a deeper truth. It makes room for j^yw " each rebuff, That stings earth's smoothness rough, Each j^>y that bids nor sit nor stand but go " ; and thus it attains to a fuller and richer unity. Thus it reaches a position which is believed to be invulner- able to the assaults of doubt. The intellectual essence of Christianity is believed to contain an advance upon Greek philosophy, needing only to be extricated and stated in terms of thought. Or, as Dr. Caird alter- natively expresses it, Hegel's maturer system unifies the ideas of Freedom and of Organic System. It sees them to be, on a close enough analysis, mutually involved, if we might not even say that it finds them to be phases of one truth. Thus, without yielding himself to re- action, or to a simple-minded orthodoxy, Hegel believes he has discovered a Reason broader and more profound than that of eighteenth century rationalism — a Reason ' rising above the one-sidedness of Rousseau or even of Kant — vindicating the individual, with the aspirations of his conscience, but subordinating him to the great Reason of humanity, and to those moral institutions in which goodness is a realised and living fact. It was not as a religious teacher but as a philosopher that Hegel ultimately felt himself called to serve his age. He had now completed his studies. He had waited in silence — unlike Schelling — until he had ripened. Henceforth he could speak boldly and show himself a hard fighter, confident of his thoughts. Hereafter he does not materially change ; perhaps we may say that hereafter his thought does not grow. A HEGEL'S LIFE AND WRITINGS 71 sketch of a system which dates from his Frankfort period includes three parts : 1st, a Logic and a Meta- physic ("not yet, however, completely identified by Hegel as they were at a later period ") ; 2nd, a Philo- sophy of Nature ; 3rd (" not worked out in the Frank- fort sketch "), a Philosophy of Spirit. One was hardly prepared to find the Philosophy of Nature so firmly outlined at this early time. Judging from Hegel's first great book, the Phenomenology of Spirit — whose thoughts, phrases, bon-mots x turn up again and again in later writings — we should have thought he did not continuously believe in the Philosophy of Nature. The Phenomenology states a twofold division of philosophy : 1st, Phenomenology, by way of introduction ; 2nd, Logic, as a systematic exposition; and it adopts a bantering not to say jeering tone towards the weak- nesses of Philosophy of Nature as found in Schelling. But this was at most a passing recoil. Hegel's first appearance in philosophy had been as a comrade and fellow-worker of Schelling, whose great achievement was to supplement Fichte's quasi Philosophy of Spirit with a view of the presence of reason in objective nature. Schelling, an old fellow-student and cor- respondent, was the man to whom Hegel turned in 1799, when, on his father's death, he found himself set free for a time from the drudgery of tutorial work by a legacy of £300. Schelling was now at Jena, and Hegel thought that, after a short probationary resi- dence in a Roman Catholic city like Bamberg, where he could study Roman Catholicism and plan out his future, he might join his friend, fight his battles, and 1 E.g. Hero and valet; "the fear of the Lord the beginning" ; "the feet of them which . . . shall carry thee out," etc. 72 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM share his career. He was induced to waive the curious condition of a preliminary stay elsewhere, and in January 1801 came to Jena, revealing himself at once in several minor publications as a colleague and ally of Schelling. In 1802 they began jointly the issue of a " Critical Journal " of Philosophy, and in 1803 Schelling left Jena. This made it easier for the " little rift " which separated the thoughts of the two friends to widen into a visible breach. While Hegel agreed with Schelling as to the importance of asserting unity in all things, and of asserting the presence of reason in nature no less than in mind, he was opposed to any reliance on feeling, such as was more and more emphasised in Schelling's later thought upon abstruse themes. Already Hegel was prepared with his appeal to the " logical " principle of "the Notion." Schelling had never formulated his view of Reason in any such abstract or definite terms. Jena is the university town of the little State of Saxe- Weimar. Successive Electors of Saxony, men of noble character, were the foremost of all the cham- pions and protectors of the Protestant Reformation; and the University of Jena is a Protestant foundation, planned originally in the interests of a peculiarly rigorous Lutheran orthodoxy. One might have ex- pected that the territory of such rulers would grow into a great Protestant State. But the family custom of dividing and subdividing the dominions among different heirs was fatal to any such hope. Prussia, not Saxony, holds that proud position. There is indeed a kingdom of Saxony which dates its royal rank from the Napoleonic period. But it stands third, not first, among the States of the new German empire ; and the Dresden royal family have for generations HEGEL'S LIFE AND WRITINGS 73 been Roman Catholics, though they have continued to prove themselves acceptable rulers to their Protestant subjects. Elsewhere Saxony survives in fragmentary little States, like Saxe- Weimar or the neighbouring State, interesting to all good Britons, of Saxe-Coburg- Gotha. Jena lies in a picturesque valley, faced with sharp- cut hills, which sink beyond into tableland in every direction. It is about fourteen miles from Weimar, the little capital, radiant in Hegel's time with the glories of Goethe and Schiller — with whom the philo- sopher enjoyed a somewhat distant intimacy — and interesting more recently as the home of Liszt's later years. Jena, indeed, is a beautiful place on the out- skirts of a still more beautiful region. If Wiirttemburg and neighbouring lands belong to mediaeval Swabia, Jena lies either within or close to the borders of mediaeval Thuringia, and memories of Luther and Goethe succeed each other curiously throughout the whole region. Jena itself is best known in history by its disastrous battle. The townspeople to-day are rather proud than ashamed of it, though Saxony and Saxe- Weimar shared with Prussia that calamitous shipwreck. After all, since 1871, German sensitiveness has had no reason to shrink from any of " the glories of France." Apparently the aim of the day's movements was to obtain a dominating position on the high ground. The Prussian commanders had allowed the highest points of all to be surprised and captured ; the armies, French and Prussian, struggled up in detachments by different lateral valleys to the tableland, and Napoleon hurled his enemies down again in confused ruin. Thereafter Prussia lay at his feet. 74 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM Hegel's position had improved in the intervening years. 1803 saw him a Privat docent, 1805 a Professor extraordinarius in the university ; and in the year of Jena, 1807, Hegel was occupied in giving to the world the first of his major works, the Phenomenology. Even at the present day there is little centralisation and much Particularismus in the publication of Ger- man books. It need not much surprise us, therefore, to find that in 1807 the Phenomenology was issued to the world by a publisher doing business at Bamberg and Wurzburg. Hegel was South German born, and these Bavarian towns, besides being nearer his native regions, were farther off from the disturbances of the campaign against Prussia. The book has been de- scribed as a philosophical Pilgrim's Progress. Hegel himself called it his voyage of discovery. Its appear- ance must have been a painful event to Schelling, who, in spite of old friendship and personal services, is treated with about as much respect as the showman's Punch manifests to his victims. Henceforth the friends of Jena days were in a state of open enmity. L/The Phenomenology tries to prove that, by a necessary progress, thought or consciousness, regarded as the activity of a thinker [this in contrast to the starting- point of the Logic], undergoes successive transforma- tions until it reaches the level of absolute thought, where thought and the object of thought are adequate to each other in lucid identity or equivalence. On the way to this goal every possible phase of human thought is reviewed in turn, and put upon record. 1 Thus the Phenomenology contains all of Hegel's think- ing on philosophical subjects, and expresses it with a 1 See farther on, note A, at end of Chapter XI. HEGEL'S LIFE AND WRITINGS 75 certain amount of youthful vivacity, though with a tantalising amou nt of n obscu rity. Dr. Hutchison Stir- ling~speaks truly when he describes it as uniquely difficult even among Hegel's writings. Once — at the end of the Jena period — it was delivered as class lectures. Hegel felt no special grief at the defeat of Jena. Wurttemburg, his native land in the narrower sense, had fought on Napoleon's side at Austerlitz ; Bavaria also, where he settled for a time, had enlarged its borders and sprung into the rank of royalties by the favour of the conqueror, who followed with success the traditional French policy of playing off the minor German States against Austria and Prussia. Even Electoral Saxony soon made peace with Napoleon, passed into his Rhenish confederacy, and secured the royal title by its subservience. 1 Nor had Prussia as yet done anything to attract to itself the hopes of German patriots. She had weakly lent herself for a time to Napoleon's plans, then at an ill-chosen moment had rushed upon her fate. Actuated partly by his early enthusiasm for the cause of liberty in France, partly by his lifelong attachment to tlie teaching of facts, Hegel like Goethe was disposed to acclaim rather tEarf to 'denounce the tyrant, who now wielded all the extraordinary powers which the French Revolu- tion had summoned into life. A letter tells of the emotion with which he saw Napoleon at Jena (which was occupied by the French before the battle) ; the world's master, that little figure on horseback ! But 1 The smaller Saxon State of Weimar had perforce to comply equally with Napoleon's wishes. There were many Germans in the Grand Army which Napoleon led to destruction in Russia. 76 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM facts proved themselves too strong for Hegel's comfort. He had to withdraw from Jena, his career suspended if not destroyed, and was thankful to find work temporarily as newspaper editor and bookseller at Bamberg. The task was not a very lofty one ; Napoleon permitted no leading articles. In a year's time Hegel obtained a somewhat better position, when he was appointed headmaster of the Gymnasium at Nuremberg. Formerly a Free City of the Empire and a centre of Reformation zeal in the days of Albrecht Diirer and Hans Sachs, Nuremberg had joined the Rhenish confederation in 1802, and was annexed a few years later to Bavaria. Hegel's ideal at this period was the revival of the Empire; but in the issue that task fell in a different form and very much later to Prussia, not to Austria ; while the Holy Roman Empire, having become "neither holy nor Roman nor an Empire," was dissolved, the Hapsburg dynasty annex- ing the Imperial title as a family possession, and so constituting the first " empire " of the modern upstart variety, while Bavaria and other of the minor German States were aggrandised by some fragmentary spoils. Bavaria above all had long traditions of selfish profit by alliance with France against other German powers ; but it made a more honourable choice in 1870. Even in a school, Hegel, though he did his work faithfully, was out of place. His superiors in a spirit of reform insisted on the teaching of philosophy by the Rector ; and Dr. Caird confesses that his school-book on the subject "must have greatly puzzled the clever boys of Nuremberg." In 1811 he married a lady of family belonging to the city ; the distinction between bourgeoisie and noble blood is of course more marked HEGEL'S LIFE AND WRITINGS 77 in Germany than in Great Britain. Twice at least in his courtship Hegel broke into verses. Two sons were born of the marriage; one became well known as a Professor of History, the other as a politician. And at Nuremberg in 1812-16 Hegel produced his most elaborate and finished work, the [greater] " Logic," described by Dr. Caird as " with all its defects, the one work which the modern world has to put beside the Metaphysics of Aristotle." In 1816, as the third and last volume of the Logic passed through the press, Hegel received three offers of philosophical chairs — from Erlangen, from Heidelberg, and — with a certain degree of hesitation — from Berlin, the scene of his later labours. For the present he accepted the call to Heidelberg, another beautiful and romantic city, perhaps the fairest that Germany can boast. Its steep hills are clothed with forests ; the Neckar, with wood rafts from Tubingen and Stuttgart, flowing past to join the neighbouring Rhine. Heidelberg was the home of an unhappy English or rather Scottish princess, mother of the Prince Rupert of our Civil Wars. Her husband, an unsuccessful champion of Protestantism on the field of battle, lost his own dominions while seeking to make good his election to the crown of Bohemia ; and most of the Palatinate then passed to the Roman Catholic power of Baden. It might seem irrelevant to dwell on the beauty of several of Hegel's homes. When he was looking for a Roman Catholic city to spend a short time in, we are told that he stipulated for pleasant society and ein gutes Bier ; but we hear nothing about scenery. In his ^Esthetics, art is pre- dominant and natural beauty is described as inferior. The " starry heavens above " offended him from their 78 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM lack of pattern ; and the Swiss Alps left him unmoved, though he rejoiced in waterfalls — could it be as a material parable of the " fluidity " of the Notion, with their changlessness in constant change ? But Heidel- berg overcame the stolidity even of Hegel. He was delighted with it, and told his wife that she would learn at Heidelberg for the first time what the pleasures of walking were. It had other attractions from the presence of friends or fellow-workers. Even in the Jena period, Hegel had cast wistful glances at Heidel- berg. His well-known phrase, according to which he desired to make philosophy " speak German," was employed at that time in a letter bringing his claims under the notice of a high official in the State of Baden — an application which at least in the first instance produced no effect. Restored to the more congenial work of a philo- sophical professorship, Hegel rose steadily in esteem' during his short stay at Heidelberg. Here for the first time he lectured on ^Esthetics; and here the first and shortest but in some respects the best sketch of his Encyclopcedia took shape (the [lesser] " Logic " — the Philosophy of Nature — the Philosophy of Spirit). This was contributed to a collection of encyclopaedias ; whimsically enough, since it is scarcely possible that any one philosophical system should be of such general acceptance as to merit a place among the positive sciences. Henceforward Hegel frequently made use of his Encyclopaedia as a basis for lectures — either (one presumes) dictating it, or referring to it in lieu of dictated paragraphs. Two other publications of this short but fertile period are mentioned by Dr. Caird. They were both contributed to the Heidelberg HEGEI Jahrbucher. extreme cr assailed fern" f NISM -^ic and social hy political 'on, and "the HEGEL'S LIFE AND WRITINGS 81 precedent ?]. So limited were the sympathies of Hegel as a politician during later life. As a teacher, however, he rose and rose. It was believed that the problem of ages had been finally solved ; men were afraid to differ from the great master, who dealt such heavy blows ; and his influence was very great. His birthday nearly coincid- ing with that of Goethe — whose theory of colour, by the way, Hegel obstinately championed against Newton's — the two great men were celebrated together on several occasions. With Schleiermacher, a colleague at Berlin, he was on the stiffest terms. On one occasion they openly quarrelled at de Wette's table. Rosenkranz rather needlessly defends Hegel from the imputation of merely personal jealousy of Schleiermacher. The whole cast of his thinking made it inevitable that he should regard Schleiermacher's reliance upon feeling with extreme aversion ; and whatever we think of the delicacy or courtesy of the expression, he was only true to his own position when he launched the sneer that, according to Schleiermacher's view of religion, the dog must be the pattern of devoutness. The chief literary work of this period is the Philo- sophy of Bight There are also, besides Review articles, two more editions of the Encyclopcedia, the last " with considerable alterations," and a new edition of the [greater] Logic, which Hegel did not live to complete. In later years he visited on holiday journeys the Netherlands, Vienna, Bohemia, and Paris. Victor Cousin, who afterwards criticised him and compared him unfavourably with Schelling, was in some mea- sure his host at Paris, and was supposed to be popu- larising his views in France. Hegel, however, never crossed the Channel or the Alps. His death came 6 82 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM suddenly by cholera on November 14th, 1831 — the anniversary of the death of Leibniz. His writings, embodied in a monumental edition by admiring friends after his death, are of different classes. First of all there are finished books — the Pheno- menology and the greater Logic. The former has not been published in any English version, nor is likely to be ; portions of the latter are rendered and commented upon in Dr. H. Stirling's very strong and very strange book, the Secret of Hegel. To a second class may be assigned the books published in outline by Hegel — the Encyclopaedia, the Philosophy of Right. These, when incorporated in the definitive edition, were ex- panded by the help of additions partly taken from the Professor's " Hefts " of various years, and partly from students' notes. Translators have hesitated how to deal with these additions. Dr. William Wallace, in translating the lesser Logic, gave everything, but in translating the Philosophy of Mind [he renders "Geist" by " mind," not " spirit "] he gave only the paragraphs. 1 We should add that the remaining and central third of the Encyclopaedia, the Philosophy of Nature, is even less likely than the Phenomenology to find an English translator. Its science is out of date, and its philosophy is deprecatingly defended to-day by Hegel's warmest admirers. Dr. Dyde's translation of the Philosophy of Right includes everything, but carefully distinguishes three different degrees of authority or importance in the material which he uses. Finally, as a third class we have the Lectures published after Hegel's death — Philosophy of Religion, ^Esthetics, Philosophy of History, History of Philosophy. All these have more 1 The translator's prolegomena to this volume are somewhat copious. HEGEL'S LIFE AND WRITINGS 83 or less found translators. It will be noticed that, according to Hegel's classification, they all belong to one part or another of the Philosophy of Spirit — the branch of philosophy for the sake of which Hegel did all his work. To a certain extent we must consider these remains as less authoritative, since Hegel had not prepared any part of them for a reader's eye ; yet substantially they are of equal value with those books in which, along with Hegel's very words, we have additions from students' notes. The remaining treatises are of less consequence. The death of Hegel did not imply the immediate loss of hegemony by his system, but the fall when it took place was decisive. First, the Hegelianism of the Left brought discredit on the whole, and the school was rent with fierce antagonisms. Idealism turned into Materialism ; and the Defender of the Faith (in his own sense) became known as the father or forefather of dogmatic atheisms. And secondly, within a few years Hegelianism became as completely unfashionable in Germany as it had formerly been the vogue. A com- petent if somewhat exoteric reporter, the late Professor Max Mtiller, has recently told us in his Autobiography of the startling change. Hegel might seem to have prepared us for some such overthrow. In the Pheno- menology he tells us that the break up of a victorious party is a proof of the completeness of its triumph. It occupies the whole field ; both the alternative views, with which the future has to deal, proceed from within itself. This surely is one more proof of the invincible optimism of the school. What Hegel says may be true in some cases; but in other cases, much less 84 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM flattering reasons may cause a party to fall to pieces. It may not be undue strength that divides it, but weakness. It may not be young life we are witnessing, as it sends out new swarms to occupy fresh territory, but break-down, failure, disease. Dr. Caird, true to Hegel's optimism, quotes the words of Hegel as pro- phetic of the history of his school. That is correct, if Hegel has taught the modern world all that he had to teach, and if philosophical thought since his time has built upon his foundation, or advanced from the basis he established to new issues and further triumphs. Who will dare to say that this has been the case ? If most of the philosophy of modern Germany belongs to a stadium antecedent to Kant and Hegel, great part of the responsibility for the relapse must be attributed to the omniscient airs of the younger master. "The Notion" did not long hold the field. Men had sup- posed that Hegel grasped in his hands the solution to every problem — they came to believe that he had done nothing, and threw themselves once again into the arms of empiricism. Speculative thought, banished from Germany, found a home — as Professor Ormond has pointed out — in Great Britain or in America. A large body of our thinkers have tried to "do over again " what Hegel's immediate pupils believed to have been done once for all. A substitute for " the Notion " has been offered us in a new reading of the significance of Kant's thought. Our historical survey is not complete till we have chronicled the leading stages in this revived Hegelianism, trying to mark its modifications and to estimate their value. ! CHAPTER VI British Hegelianism — Earlier Phases Literature. — " To English readers Hegel was first introduced in the powerful statement of his principles by Dr. Hutchison Stirling. Mr. Wallace, in the introduction to his translation of the lesser Logic, and Mr. Harris, the editor of the American "Speculative Journal," have since done much to illustrate various aspects of the Hegelian philosophy. Other English writers, such as the late Professor Green, Mr. Bradley, Professor Watson, and Professor Adamson, who have not directly treated of Hegel, have been greatly influenced by him. Mr. [Andrew] Seth [Professor Pringle-Pattison] has recently written an interesting account of the movement from Kant to Hegel." — Dr. E. Caird, Hegel, Pref., p. vi (1883). In speaking of a Hegelian revival in our country, 1 we may seem to be disregarding protests, made by several of those named above, against expressions which identify them with any one great name in the past. The frankest admission of discipleship is probably that contained in the preface to Dr. John Caird's Intro- duction to the Philosophy of Religion : " The author desires to express his obligations to the following books . . . above all, Hegel's Philosophie der Religion, 1 The author regrets that limits both of space and knowledge keep him from giving any account of the interesting work done in America in connexion with the Hegelian movement. 85 86 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM a work to which he has been more largely indebted than to any other book." Dr. E. Caird tells us, on the other hand {Hegel, 1883), that " the day of discipleship is over " ; and, more plainly, that Hegel failed to speak openly enough regarding the modifications in the theology of the Christian Church which his philosophy involves. Beyond that difference, however — and, as Dr. Caird himself conceives it, it is far from being a difference in principle — it does not appear w T hat, if anything, in Hegel Dr. E. Caird will permit us to regard as obsolete. How then can we describe a move- ment inspired with reverence and enthusiasm for Hegel, unless we call it after the writer who is its fountainhead ? A well-chosen class name is the first step to knowledge. It is not the whole of knowledge : and we fall into a too common error if we allow our- selves to treat mere knowledge of names as a knowledge of things. The right name is only a beginning, but it places us on the track which leads to further insight. And, while we disclaim the idea of imputing to Hegel's British advocates full technical discipleship, we feel that any other phraseology would mislead our readers more seriously than the usual terminology can do. We therefore continue to make use of the expression British Hegelianism. An alternative name is offered for our acceptance, when we are asked to speak of a British Neo-Kantian movement. 1 That epithet, as we shall see, points to a fact of great importance — the close connexion which English and Scottish thought has instituted between 1 So in Dr. E. Caird's preface to Essays in Philosophical Criticism (see below, p. 114), in Professor A. Seth's Hegelianism and Personality, and in Mr. Fairbrother's Philosophy of T. H. Green. BRITISH HEGELIANISM 87 " Hegelian " conclusions and the Kantian premises or point of view. But if we may propose so humble a test as the nature of beliefs or conclusions reached, the British " Neo-Kantians " — with the very doubtful ex- ception of T. H. Green — agree with Hegel much more than they do with Kant. Moreover, in Germany, Neo- Kantianism is the name of a movement back from Hegel to the older master. Theologians who take their stand upon Neo-Kantian grounds — the school of Ritschl contribute most but by no means all of these — exhibit even an exaggerated distrust of Hegel, while the philo- sophical wing have reduced Kant to a species of empiri- cist agnosticism. However unfair we may think such a way of handling Kant, the German Neo-Kantians have acquired by pre-emption a right to explain their own name in their own sense, and it will create much confusion if we attach the same label to a very differ- ent movement of thought in our country. 1 Never- theless, it is most true and noteworthy that British Hegelianism is, in a sense of its own, Neo-Kantian. The only other preliminary remark we need make is, that British Hegelianism is not a statical thing, but a living movement of thought, and that several of its representatives exhibit a transformation, almost a dis- solution, of their original Hegelian doctrines. This is particularly the case with one of the strongest, Mr. F. H. Bradley. Mr. Bradley has long protested against the assertion that a Hegelian " school " exists among us. In the sense now explained, it does exist, and Mr. Bradley used to be one of its champions ; 2 but he is ceasing, if he 1 There is also a Neo-Kantian movement in France, of which we may at least affirm that it is not Hegelian. 2 Ethical Studies expounds ideas learned from "two or three" great 88 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM has not entirely ceased, to stand within its limits ; while he is of great interest as exhibiting a further development of thought on the fundamental questions of metaphysics. In early days, when our insular philosophy was much more inclined to denounce Hegel than to study him, Professor Ferrier (as Dr. Hutchison Stirling points out) learned to sympathise at least in part with the sphinx of Berlin. Ferrier's own philosophy may be regarded as a sort of portal to a system of con- structive idealism. Upon epistemology , the theory of knowledge, and agnoiology, the theory of ignorance, is reared the fabric of ontology. The most idealist portion is the agnoiology, which argues that we can only be termed ignorant of what it would be possible for us to know, — hence, that the fundamental assump- tion of idealism is justified, and that we must take for granted, in all our thinking, the trustworthiness of thought and the rationality of the real. Ferrier's ontology leaves us with subject plus object as the ultimate or minimum definition of reality. This sounds like an absolutely paradoxical dualism — as if one were to say, " The simplest conceivable element of articular sound, to be reached by analysis, is of the type C D " — where the very form of statement cries out for the simpler elements C and D. Yet Professor Andrew Seth 1 [Professor Pringle Pattison] appeals to the reasonableness of Ferrier from the alleged unreason- German writers. There are quotations from Kant, Hegel, Vatke (a Hegelian theologian), and to a much less degree from Trendelenburg. In Ethical Studies, therefore, Mr. Bradley exhibited the very central characteristics of British Hegelianism. 1 In Hegelianism and Personality, pp. 33, 34. BRITISH HEGELIANISM 89 ableness of Hegel. To Ferrier also we owe the first dis- cussion of epistemology in English, and apparently the framing of the word. 1 Word and conception play a great part in the more recent thinking of Professor Seth. Another British thinker, of much practical import- ance, upon whom Hegel left his mark, was the late Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, Oxford. When Jowett's statements regarding Hegel first appeared — in his introduction to the translation of the Sophist, 2nd edit., 1875 — the work of writers of the British Hegelian school had already done something towards familiarising English readers with the subject. Chronologically, however, Jowett's studies antedated most of the British movement towards Hegel, if not the whole of that movement as conducted by professed philosophers. Jowett is therefore one of the pioneers in a dark and intricate region of knowledge. His biography has made still plainer how deep an im- pression was produced by Hegel's thoughts upon this very shrewd and reality-loving mind. Owing to his studies in Plato, Jowett sympathises with that element in Hegel which is forbidding to many readers, and especially to those whose bent is towards practical wisdom. "The unity of Being and Nothing" might have been expected to repel Jowett ; it did at least as much to attract him. When one first read his stric- tures, not very long after they had been made public, one was inclined — in one's hot young enthusiasm for the Hegelian philosophy — to regard Jowett as an outsider, That judgment is hardly confirmed on a reperusal of Jowett's remarks. Perhaps only one of his statements may be called distinctly erroneous — the statement that 1 The great Oxford Dictionary quotes Ferrier for epistemology. go HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM the categories of the second division of the Logic, those of Essence, describe " the essence of things for thought." All categories do that. It is no distinctive peculiarity of the categories of Essence. They may be said to do that work of thought which Jowett speaks of more fully than the categories of Being ; but, on the other hand, " the Notion " in its varied forms outvies the cate- gories of Essence as a description of " the essence of things for thought." Categories are progressive de- finitions of the real, and every one in its turn goes deeper than its predecessors. Except for a certain inaccuracy on this point, it is difficult to complain of anything in Jowett's remarks on Hegel. He puts forward mainly such objections as one might have expected from a practical mind which had relapsed into its most doggedly practical mood. He is half- ashamed of having coquetted with shadowy ideas. He has retreated into his castle of common sense. His objections are not to be described as unimportant, but we may perhaps fairly call them the difficulties of the practical mind and not of the speculative thinker. All Jowett's difficulties and objections, taken in their full sum, are less significant than the fact that he had offered a tribute, however temporary and partial, at the shrine of Hegel. On matters of religion, it is true, his moral realism and sober devoutness, coupled with his rationalistic jealousy of a historical faith, would find a good deal to sympathise with in the German idealist. It is in regard to Greek thought, however, that he bears the most splendid testimony to Hegel. " He has done more to explain Greek thought than all other writers put together." 1 1 Introduction to his translation of the Sophist, sub finem. BRITISH HEGELIANISM 91 The great starting-point in our national study of Hegel is found in a memorable book by a Scottish writer, Dr. Hutchison Stirling, who in 1865 published the first edition of the Secret of Hegel. The book is not easy reading; indeed, a popular pleasantry made complaint that the secret, whatever it was, had been only too faithfully kept. Dr. Stirling thought it best to print the record of his own first tentative approaches to an understanding of the Master — a sort of " rise and progress of philosophy in the soul"; but the reader has to be on his guard against taking provisional state- ments as if they were definitive. Some of the earlier sections of Hegel's larger Logic are translated; the same portions are re-written in Dr. Stirling's own words, and expounded or commented on; and the views of other interpreters are examined. Throughout, as has been well said, we have " the thought of Hegel in the style of Carlyle." 1 The first noticeable feature in Dr. Stirling's hand- ling of Hegel is the strongly positive or conservative attitude. He points to a Hegel not so much (in Fichte's phraseology) of " synthesis " or higher unity, as of reaction against the falsity of "antithesis." If one may say so, Hegel is read from the point of view of conservative reaction. He is made to stand for a principle like that of St. Simon's or Comte's " organic " periods of history, in contrast with those " critical " periods when Dr. Stirling's hated Awfklarung flourishes. Hegel is regarded as a big and brave brother, by whose help Faith and Duty may turn to flight all the armies of the aliens. Of course this in a sense is Hegel's own position and the position of every Hegelian. But 1 Prof. Sorley, in noticing the second edition of the Secret (1897). 92 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM there is another side to the question. Christianity and morality are to be justified from a philosophical point of view; certain modifications, perhaps even trans- formations, are implied. Dr. Stirling has never told us plainly how much alteration he conceives to be necessary. To be interested in the positive moral uses of philosophy is indeed creditable and more than creditable. To push that interest even into partisan- ship is a course of action to which Hegel himself has given some encouragement, for in later life he was willing to be regarded as the champion of all the orthodoxies. But if his system has any distinctive feature, we must not look for it on this side nor yet on that, but upon all sides. Hegel is all-inclusive. He is catholic to a fault ; and he might have considered his Edinburgh advocate and interpreter rather too " edifying." The real Hegel seems rather to " sit as God, holding no form of creed, But contemplating all " ; or, as one sometimes feels inclined to recast the quotation, " holding all forms of creed, and abrogating all." The formulae which lend themselves so readily to Ultramontanism sit awkwardly upon Hegel's de- tached and elusive wisdom. God, Freedom, Im- mortality — in technical language, the postulates of natural theology — are the truths for which Dr. Stirling pleads, and which — with some hesitation — he finds to be supported by Hegel. In a sense, too, he endorses Hegel's philosophical vindication of Christianity, or what Hegel offers as such. No other British Hegelian is so fully identified with the Hegelianism of the Right. 1 One more characteristic : 1 Dr. Sterrett, an American writer on the Philosophy of Religion (see "literature" before Chap. XV.), goes at least as far in this direction. BRITISH HEGELIANISM 93 Dr. Stirling has never absolutely affirmed that Hegel was successful in carrying out his grand scheme. 1 Dr. Stirling has followed up his first book by many others. He is always forcible and suggestive, if he has never again reached quite so high a level. Logically (unless in critical comment ; see, e.g., his masterly little book on part of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy, or see again his attack on Darwinianism 2 ) his later writings have been even less closely knit than the Secret. But Dr. Stirling had very high claims upon all who could appreciate philosophical eminence, and we must regret that the father of British Hegelianism was never called to occupy one of the philosophical chairs in the Scottish universities. Apart from this, Dr. Stirling has received all the honours which Scotland can give ; and he has been a powerful agent in educating several generations of stu- dents of philosophy. Best of all, he has set the example of a life disinterestedly devoted to speculative thought. A second and still more important feature noticeable in Dr. Stirling in his affiliation of Hegel to Kant. The very table of contents prescribes the " elimination of Fichte and Schelling " ; and the " Secret of Hegel " par excellence consists of the following words — Quality — Time and Space — Empirical Realities, While repudiating the kind of jus divinum claimed by other members of his communion, he finds a full guarantee for the Historic Episcopate in its historic actuality. The real is the rational, and whatever is is right. Precisely because it has been evolved, episcopacy is marked out as divinely planned. Dr. W. T. Harris also stands for the Hegelianism of the Right (see below). 1 See especially Dr. Stirling's notes to his translation of Schwegler's History of Philosophy. 2 Perhaps the Text-Book to Kant should also be named as a particularly solid and well-finished work. 94 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM to which the author acids the very apposite comment, 1 " This of coarse requires explanation " — going on to refer the reader to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. In the light of Dr. E. Caird's studies of Kant, we might fill out Dr. Stirling's scheme as follows : — " If it is credible that pure self -identical thought, under what- ever impulse, can give rise to so ' concrete ' a conception as that of quantity, there is no reason for attributing to any other source than pure thought the further so- called subjective conceptions or 'forms' of Time and Space, nor yet the existence of those Quanta in time and space of which we have experience, and which we regard as realities." Perhaps this statement goes be- yond what is contained in the Secret. To follow his own lines, we might interpret Dr. Stirling's hints more simply, as follows : — " Kant himself suggests to us that Time and Space, and even those realities of which we have experience in time and space, are simply modes of Quantity, which is a pure a priori human thought. The same thing will therefore be true of other thoughts. They also will crave embodiment. Nature or reality in general, if we look at it hard enough, will turn out to be nothing else than thought. And the great correc- tion which Hegel teaches us to make in Kant is that, instead of regarding this truth as one relating to human knowledge of phenomena, we ought to drop the illogical qualification, and affirm our position of [absolute] knowledge of reality." 2 In whichever way we take it, the passage plainly shows that Dr. Stirling 1 I. pp. 125, 126. 2 In the notes to SchwegUr, Dr. Stirling names as "the Secret of Hegel" the discovery of a "Triple Nexus" in thought, and the inter- pretation of all things by this threefold rhythm (p. 231). BRITISH HEGELIANISM 95 formulated the programme for a great mass of the best British HegeliaD work — Hegel as the extricator and vindicator of deeper truths suggested by Kant, to which Kant's own insight was inadequate — Kant's list of categories the true historical introduction to the boldly soaring speculation of Hegel. Soon after the publication of the Secret of Hegel, another deep student and powerful teacher of Idealism appeared in Scotland, when the chair of Moral Philo- sophy in Glasgow University was filled (in 1866) by the appointment of Mr. Edward Caird, Fellow of Mer- ton College, Oxford. Best known at that time as the younger brother of Professor (afterwards Principal) John Caird, Dr. Edward Caird has lived to influence thought, and to enjoy public fame and personal grati- tude, quite as largely as his distinguished brother. Although strikingly reserved as a man, and as a teacher always conversational, never oratorical, he yet fascinated the most unwilling minds in his class-room, compelling them to practice and gradually teaching them to love the unwonted labour of thinking. In most cases he was so irresistible, that his pupils accepted all his con- clusions with scarcely a modification. He has done much by authorship as well as by academic teaching. His first considerable book, A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant, was published in 1877. It dealt with the Critique of Pure Reason, and was meant to be followed by a second volume ; but though it was very well received, the author's severe self-criticism led him to re- write it. A good deal of the original draft survives, amid important changes, in The Critical Philosophy of Kant, The two volumes of this work 96 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM were published simultaneously in 1889, and give a very careful survey, from the "Hegelian" standpoint of constructive and positive idealism, over the whole field of Kant's writings. In his sketch of Hegel (1883 ; Philosophical Classics for English Readers) and in his Evolution of Religion (2 vols., 1893 ; Gifford Lectures in St. Andrew's University), Dr. Caird has spoken out more frankly regarding his personal beliefs in religion and theology. 1 By his appointment, on the death of Jowett, to the Mastership of Balliol College, a remark- able career reached a remarkable climax. Dr. Caird — whether he owed the hint to Dr. Stirling, or was working independently on parallel lines — may be said to have carried out with greater elaboration in detail, and with a greater degree of literary finish, the programme announced by Dr. Stirling — Kant the true foundation of Hegel, Hegel the true interpreter of Kant. If to that programme we add as additional materials Hegel's rapid sketch (in the introduction to the Encyclopaedia Logic) of Kant's successive treatises, it might seem that Dr. Caird had little more to do than fill in an outline drawn by others. But we must re- member that he had to transform Hegel's coldly hostile examination of Kant into a sympathetic eliciting of the hints of constructive idealism from behind the prejudices or hostile principles with which Kant was hampered. How well this work was done, every student knows. While we read, we are " under the spell of the magician." Difficulties vanish, and the demonstration seems com- plete. It is only when we close the book that difficulties begin to return. Perhaps the most distinctive feature in Dr. Caird's 1 Gifford Lectures at Glasgow may shortly be expected in book form. BRITISH HEGELIANISM 97 interpretation of Kant is his identification of Kant's " synthetic " with Hegel's " concrete." There is reason to believe that Hegel himself was not aware of the possibility of this identification ; for, when he uses the word synthetic, he uses it in a deprecatory or contemp- tuous sense, applying it to a sort of connexion which holds thoughts together with an external clamp — not fusing them, and not grafting one into the other. 1 It cannot be denied that Kant's usage offers some justi- fication for Hegel's ; yet at least we may consider it characteristic that here again Hegel takes the lower view of Kant's work — and takes it with a perfect natural unconsciousness, scarcely favourable to Dr. Stirling's accusation that Hegel intentionally hid the amount of his debt to Kant. In Kant, synthetic thought is an artificial or morbid though useful phase of mind ; to Hegel, as elucidated by Dr. Caird, analytic thought is worthless [or ; is a mere subordinate aspect of the detailed process of thought, and unreal in itself], while thought everywhere in its own nature is "concrete" [or many-sided; yet always also unified]. This possible line of connexion between Kant and Hegel is, we believe, Dr. Caird's peculiar discovery. But Dr. Caird's work is still more important to the British student as a way into Hegel's system. Hegel himself has no skill in making easy approaches to his thought. Both the Phenomenology and the later sub- stitute for it, the introduction to the Encyclopaedia Logic, bewilder rather than help the learner. If "a 1 Perhaps the reader ought to be warned that neither of these material images [" Vorstellungen "] answers to the subtlety of Hegel's doctrine of thought. He requires a fuller unity and a more vital difference. 7 98 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM ladder has been let down to us," 1 we are not trained for such giddy ascents. Kant, on the contrary, stands squarely on experience, and we know where we are, or think we do, when we study Kant. Unfortunately, as we proceed under Dr. Caird's guidance from Kant's starting-point to Hegel's goal, we lose touch with the familiar world. Kant, Dr. Caird explains, shows that our thought constitutes reality ; there is no reason for saying, with Kant, phenomenal reality ; but an in- dividual thought could not constitute objective reality ; therefore we must take Kant to mean that thought as such constitutes absolute reality. The starting-point is therefore transformed or is knocked to pieces in the course of our further movements. That is quite in order, upon the principles of Hegelianism. But the appeal to Kant for a new way into Hegel was designed to help British minds too deeply immersed in common sense to be capable of receiving Hegel's Hegelianism. It is to be feared that the difficulties of the new road are almost as great as those of the old. Much of Dr. Caird's success in argument — perhaps of Hegel's too — is due to the skill with which he states his case and introduces his assumptions. He always takes for granted the idealist claim, that some form of abstract metaphysical statement may be relied on with unbounded confidence. He then argues that Hegel's manysidedness shines forth in manifest superiority over all onesidedness — Hegel's intense faith in unity over all dualism. If we are to criticise such arguments, or perhaps any skilfully constructed arguments, with success, we must criticise, not what is argued for, but rather what is taken for granted. Is a formula drawn 1 Phenomenology, p. 20. BRITISH HEGELIANISM 99 from logic or metaphysics adequate to determine the contents of morality and religion ? Are we always dealing with the relations of the universal to the particular, and of the Ego to the Non Ego ? Assuming that we are, Dr. Caird shows with great skill that the subtle manysidedness of the Hegelian scheme out- matches all its rivals. Slightly younger than Edward Caird, Thomas Hill Green was earlier on the field of letters with his very able and very difficult "Introduction" to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1874). At Oxford, where he spent his brief working life as tutor and pro- fessor, Green developed an influence which, while deeply intellectual, was still more profoundly personal and moral. He is the least Hegelian in tone or in character of all Hegelians, German or British. There was no shadow or suspicion of levity about Green's optimism. Whether from his peculiar development of the common thought, or from subtler qualities of nature and character — the choice between those alternatives is less a question of evidence than of interpretation — Green occupies a place by himself. We might say of him what Goethe said of the young Carlyle, that he was " an unusual moral force." If Hegel was a greater philosopher, Green was greater as a man. He served the Idea not merely in scholarly abstraction, but in the routine of the Oxford City Council and in the despised paths of temperance reform. " His heart the lowliest duties on itself did lay." His principal book was posthumous, bearing a title chosen by Green, Prolego- mena to Ethics. We shall rely mainly upon it, while referring also to republished articles and lectures, and LofC. ioo HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM to Mr. Fair-brother's useful, if sometimes disputable, summary. 1 In Green the synthesis of Kant and Hegel almost becomes a return from Hegel upon Kant. Dr. E. Caird has told us that Green considered 2 Hegel's work must " all be done over again " ; and the late Professor Sidg- wick quotes similar remarks addressed in that (philo- sophically) less friendly quarter. 3 On the other hand, it is noticeable how little Green troubles himself with the opinions of the historical Kant. " Kant " and " Kantianism " on Green's pages do not stand for what Kant believed and held, but for what he ought to have believed. They stand for a " Hegelianised " Kant — a Kant of constructive idealism. Moreover, the Prolego- mena to Ethics constitutes the first and as yet the only systematic enunciation of the idealism of the English revival. We cannot tell how far Green's positions are to be imputed in detail to others ; but they are signi- ficant as the results reached by a great mind placed in the full stream of the movement. The Prolegomena to Ethics begins with a "Meta- physics of Knowledge " ; and this recalls us at once to Hegelian first principles. The systematic unity of all things, grasped in thought, was placed first in our own preliminary analysis of Hegel ; an intellectual issue like Hegel's suggests itself even in Green, when appeal is made for a basis of ethics to a metaphysics of know- 1 A popular sketch of Green's religious position, along with a striking picture of the grief caused by "Mr. Gray's" death, is found in Mrs. H. Ward's novel, Robert Elsmere. 2 Preface to Essays in Philosophical Criticism, p. v. 3 He had said (in talk), " I looked into Hegel the other day, and found it a strange Wirrwarr"—Mind for 1900, p. 19. BRITISH HEGELIANISM 101 ledge. The guarantee, however, is not Hegel's. Green does not quote the " logical " Notion, but appeals to Kant's analysis of self-consciousness in the Critique of Pure Reason, interpreting the Kantian analysis of course not sceptically, but positively and constructively. Experience would not be possible except the unity of consciousness held together the manifold. The world would be no world to us if we could not grasp it in synthesis by a principle of reason within, which is kindred to the rational order without. How then does Green deal with the ambiguity which we noted as stepping in between Dr. E. Caird's starting-point and his conclusions ? Green boldly postulates an absolute reason in the objective order — God, demonstrated by the analysis of consciousness, — and regards progressive human experience of the Good and the True as the pro- gressive self-imparting of this absolute consciousness to us. Here already one doubts whether Green's meta- physical foundations are adequate. Perhaps it is his devout soul rather than his industrious intellect which leads him so confidently to accept the positive or con- structive type of Kantian transcendentalism as a demonstration of personality both human and Divine. The principle, "thought constitutes reality," is now interpreted as follows: — (1) Because the world of human experience is a thought-construction, it follows that (2) Divine thought constitutes the world, and that (3) human experience is not so much knowledge of the world as a finite transcript of Divine thought. The development appears singular. When we pass to more strictly ethical ground, are we enlarging our foundations ? Or are we only inter- preting anew the results already reached ? Mr. Fair- 102 HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM brother affirms the first view. The present writer's impression is that the second would be a truer inter- pretation of Green's purpose. This self-centred unity in all things is the master-key in his philosophy. It is Hegel's key, but the guarantee is different. The guarantee in the case of Green, as in the case of other British Hegelians, is furnished by a positive reading of Kant. And the Logic of Hegel (or Logic with its appli- cations) has attained in Green to a richer or a better certified ontological meaning. At each end it is hypos- tatised, and we find ourselves in the presence of a living God and a real soul; while the middle term [middle ontologically if hardly epistemologically ; an objective — shall we say an independent ? — world seems to function in knowledge as little with Green as with Berkeley], the world as a real existence, is necessarily or at least is actually bound up with God. When we proceed to study conduct, we learn that man is free in so far as man is identical with God. — ^ .Oo N '. .0 J r S - x ^. ,v ^o W §2: * ° o N ° .0 x 0o 4 -/. ,UO & 35^1 ^ ^ % A x ** *^ \S *.* * ° f >